Fall in Seattle

Fall in the Pacific Northwest is a curious beast.

There are maps that show the spread of fall color as it descends from northern states to more southerly regions. The Pacific Northwest has it’s own weird schedule for fall colors.

Some years, we get little to no color. This happens when there isn’t enough sun during the fall to allow the leaves to make their colors.

Some years, we get forests on fire—sometimes literally, like this year, when the rains were very late in coming. Sometimes, it’s just an amazing amount of sunshine at the right time to get the leaves’ chemical reactions churning.

This year, we had no cold nights to help the leaves get their color, and we had a late start on the rain. The result is a brown season, with leaves falling or not falling, fruit ripening or not ripening. It’s a kind of stasis I haven’t seen here, part of the strange weather patterns the last few years.

And many trees, especially, got hit really bad with fungus due to a cold, wet spring. It’s been a tough year to be a tree here.

But there are some plants that make reliable color no matter the weather, and I got photos of a few of them in our yard today. Maples are one such reliable; the silver and red maples especially went for the gold this year. This sweet gum tree also has some pretty enthusiastic color again this fall, despite everything.

I’m not sure what these ultra-red leaves belong to; the dogwood to the left of center is not only not developing any color, but the leaves are rolled from the draught this summer. Like many of our trees, it’s had a rough year.

We put in all-new grass in the late spring, and the grass has also had a rough year in places that get a lot of sun. The front yard, however, is well-shaded on the southern side, and only patches of that yard had severe trouble. You can see one such on the right of this photo. I turned the camera around to take a shot of the house and the apparently-clearing sky. (It clouded over again in minutes…) There’s a red maple to the right; it went out in a typical red-maple blaze of glory over the last few days.

I had hoped we’d have a colorful sunset, but the clouds came back so fast there was no chance of that. Photos shot with the Phase One IQ4 and a Schneider 35mm wide-angle lens.