what the what?

these are peony seed seed pods! have you ever noticed them before? me neither. i am dumbfounded. look how beautiful! all that texture, and drama, right there in every midwestern suburban yard from minnesota down to texas. how in the world have i missed this autumn event. too blinded by colorful leaves i suppose. like scrolling through instagram while strolling right past a louise bourgeois sculpture. shame me for never noticing them. lesson learned: turn off the phone, and look past the leaves.

peony seed pods

green and gold

more weirdness. i want to move on from fall leaves. but everything is so odd this year. it’s like foreign travel. i am seeing with new eyes.

maple leaves in transition

a very strange year

autumn 2021 is undoubtedly the strangest autumn we’ve had since i began STILL ten years ago. while my neighbor’s maple tree changed two weeks ago with strange muted and pale leaves in shrimp and bisque, mine is just dropping its leaves now with these veined, and highly saturated, yellows and greens. they don’t even look like the same species. i imagine that in the gaussian curve of normal distribution of all the possible ways maple leaves can change color in the fall, what we have had this year are examples from the two tails of the curve. pardon the brief detour into engineer geek-speak, and mild environmental despair.

maple leaves in october

sometimes it helps to forget

remember a year ago when steve and i was slicing up every fruit and vegetable in my local grocery store to make very stylized STILL food photos? well, i tucked several of them into my leaf press after i photographed them to see what would happen. i lost most of them because they molded. i didn’t know, at the time, about switching out the paper every few days to  help get rid of excess moisture. today i could probably have saved most of them. oh well, lesson learned. only two survived: a weaving using sliced white asparagus which i posted a while back, and this one of sliced apples. i think this one survived because i actually placed it between paper and then under a wooden stump for weight, and then forgot about it for a year. i think the wood of the stump acted as a wick of sorts. anyway, i am now the proud owner of this lovely apple papyrus.

pressed apple slices 

on losing my virginity

many of you, perhaps most of you, are familiar to scabiosa. well, until today i have been a scabiosa virgin. this is my very first time with scabiosa. to be perfectly honest, it was not everything i imagined it would be. i have admired scabiosa from afar for a very long time. but by the time i got around to it, she had already lost interest. and some color, i might add. it was a little disappointing actually. but then again, the first time often is.

a little wiki search tells me this flower is native to my beloved mediterranean region. next time in southern france, i will now be on the look-out for a wild version in its true colors.

scabiosa stellata seed pod