November 1, 2016 - The fall color has finally arrived!

          I’ve been waiting impatiently for the last several weeks for a glimpse of the little bit of vibrant fall that I have control over.  My first tipoff that fall was on the way was the Harvest moon on September 16^th, then the Fall Equinox on September 22nd, but only at a snail’s pace has the color been advancing here.  It has been six long weeks.

          Finally today, I drive in my yard at mid-day from an errand and all of my Sugar Maples have come into their annual golden fall glory.  What is exciting for me is that I planted the volunteer trees for all the sugar maples on this property from seeds that naturally grew in my West 6^th Street temporary “pot garden”.

          Between the 1^st house we owned in this county and this house, we had to “camp out” in a rental house on West 6^th Street in Rutherfordton waiting on a house to sell before we could buy another.

The rental house was in the old section of town among the big old houses with huge trees on a dead end street.   We could actually see the newly built jail from this rental house and we called it “the big house” as a tongue-in-cheek bit of humor.  The ‘big house’ name wasn’t lost on the landlord who was a nice guy and did an extensive amount of repair work around the time we moved in.

The house was big, old, and had its charm [and a ghost] as well as its quirks.  The small yard had 3 huge sugar maple trees, two at the front and one on the side.    In the fall they were spectacular – mostly bright yellow with a blush of peachy red around the edges of the leaves. 

As this was a temporary location, all my plant specimens were in pots which I had sunk into the temporary bed.  This included my beginning collection of hostas and liriope. 

We were there several seasons and the ‘whirligigs’ – the seeds of the sugar maples naturally spun down and wintered over in my moveable plants.  Many of those seeds naturally germinated, I didn’t have anything to do with it – God was in charge of all those little seedlings that became little trees.

Isn’t it so much fun to catch any whirligigs that are twirling down?  The kid in me still does this – it is a simple country delight that never gets old.

When we moved to this location some of those little trees were already reaching for the sky in my moveable pots.  As I planted out my liriope and my hostas I would disentangle the little maple trees and I planted them all out.  Of course the biggest ones got planted first, but then the volunteers just kept on coming – so I had a second wave and a third wave of little sugar maple saplings.

This afternoon I walked the property and counted 20 sugar maples that have survived from my planting on this property. [Few lost to drought in the first years and a couple lost to miscommunication with a handy man – Oh well.] The majority of the volunteer sugar maples are along the back property line.  But, the two biggest sugar maples are close to the corners of my northern boundary line.

They are fine trees – beautiful in spring and in the summer the-coming-rain-wind tosses the leaves a certain way showing their undersides and then rain comes.  A few of them have been struck by lightning or have been “thrashed” by storm winds and we’ve had to have a tree service out to attend to their breakages and carry off the huge downed limbs.  It is at those times I stand with my hands on my hips and haggle for the tree's well-being with the tree man.

So, when the gorgeous color finally comes, I find it has been well worth all the difficult digging in of the little saplings, the countless watering during the droughts, the trimming up of the lower limbs, and the yearly pulling off of the ravenous kudzu which wants to run up their trunks, during all these past years. 

I know they are not really mine, as they are merely on loan from God for me to tend and enjoy these years and hopefully many more to come.