toned down

as much as i love fall in in minnesota, i am a devotee of muted colors and sometimes those maples and sumacs can get almost garish for my taste. these are not maple leaves, but plane tree leaves, related to sycamores, and they are the right kind of garish for me. just a little bit toned down.

mediterranean plane tree leaves in autumn

still learning

i am here to confirm that if you have lived in a northern climate for your whole life, it is embarrassingly easy to make ridiculously naive mistakes while identifying tropical and temperate plants for the first time. as an example, i picked this mimosa branch yesterday, with much excitement, only to find out that i had picked a pepper tree branch, not a mimosa.

false pepper tree leaves and berries (Schinus molle)

one more, while i travel

i am traveling today, so i am posting another take on these intriguing spiderwort tips . i rarely post multiple photos on the same subject…but these two compositions are different enough that i feel like they are essentially two different subjects. you agree?

spiderwort blossoms

that’s cool

Today I made a first random arrangement of this local spiderwort, and my family said “boring.” So I lined it up and said “Look, a bird of paradise,” and my family said “boring.” So I arranged it into a v-shaped flight of migrating geese and my family said, “OK that’s pretty cool.”

spiderwort in bloom

bitter or sweet?

there are two kinds of almonds here, sweet and bitter. a common joke that the locals play on newbies to the region is to offer a beautiful looking handful of almonds, and then watch as the unsuspecting and grateful tourist fills his or her mouth full of revoltingly bitter almonds, and tries both to be polite and to spit out their gift at the same time. we have been here just long enough both to have endured this prank as victims, and to enjoy watching it be played on newer arrivals than ourselves.

wild bitter almonds