Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the blog, someone posts more fall leaves from the bog.
I’m as surprised as you are. I’d thought that the last post would be, you know, the last post of fall leaves for this year. But a short walk last week at Mer Bleue turned up new images. Mer Bleue is a peat bog that is about 7,700 years old (I think they check the peat’s teeth or growth rings or something like that to determine its age) and about 20 minutes from our house by car.
I had been advised by my photographer-neighbour that the larches were starting to turn and wouldn’t last long, so on one of the last truly fine days this fall we went out to take a look. Indeed my neighbour was right: the larch trees were turning colour. I got the Government of Ontario to agree to call larches tamaracks, but I’m still working on the broader community: tamaracks also go by eastern larch, American larch, black larch, red larch, and hackmatack. (Is that last one a kid’s mangling of tamarack? Dunno.) Anyway, the tamarack (et al.) is a deciduous conifer: it has needles but is not evergreen. Here’s what it looks like when it’s about to drop its needles, with some tamaracky friends in the background.
Nice, eh? And here’s what a non-coniferous deciduous tree (a maple of some kind, I think) looks like when it apparently isn’t quite ready to drop its leaves. Also nice.
To all of them — needle-dropping conifers and not-yet-leaf-dropping deciduands — I say, You do you. I think the voting is not yet closed on whether diversity is always our greatest strength, but it’s almost always beautiful.
