a dark mood

sumac is so pretty and the red of its leaves is usually so cheerily candy red,  that the urge becomes almost irresistible to photograph it in a smiling, innocent mood. which i have done, as many of you know, quite a bit over the six year life span of STILL blog. but this year my background is black, not white, and i have already fully explored the happy possibilities of sumac’s joyful scarlet. red, as it happens, is also the color of blood, and passion, and dying suns, and velvet church pews. so i give you some sumac to brood on.

staghorn sumac

arden hills, minnesota

invasive?

this velvetleaf is supposedly an damaging weed from southern asia, and is now considered a significant threat to corn and soybean productivity. i’m sorry, i’m sure this should bother me, but i just had some really good pho for dinner, and my attitude at the moment is that the more visitors from asia who decide to come to my part of the world and stay, the better. welcome all.

velvetleaf seedpods

rice creek trail, saint paul, minnesota

clear the decks

this is the result of sweeping my deck on an october day in minnesota. we think of fall colors as all brilliant reds, oranges and yellows. but these are the real colors of fall. muted, incremental, with a little summer and a little winter mixed in.

fall leaves swept up from my deck

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

bees and clover, bees and clover
this i tell you brother
you can’t have one without the other

clover blossoms

along hwy 96, saint paul, minnesota

random

during a recent visit to philadelphia, i spent an awestruck hour or so in a cy twombly exhibit, but then i wandered into the gallery next door, where there were a roomful of ellsworth kelly collages and paintings, several of which made use of radomizing elements, and i was equally smitten. one piece, for instance, was a scattering of black and white squares that, i swear, looked just like the shimmering light reflecting off of a river. it was titled seine, and he had pulled numbers from a box to determine which squares should be black and which white. today’s still blog photo is not an ellsworth kelly, but i do like the effect of an occasional randomizing gesture, like bumping a carefully arranged pattern, or, in this case, letting crumbled grape leaves fall as they wished. apparently they wished to be beautiful and slightly melancholy.

red grape vine leaves (vitis riparia)