Move views of the colorful back yard

After months of being surrounded by greens of all shades, the fall blush of color lasts for such a brief time -- usually just a few days or a week at most. I've been paying more attention this year to these colors in my own yard than I usually do, taking a larger number of photographs than normal.

Today I'll show you not only some nice focal points of color in my back yard, but what the space looks like as a whole. I didn't do as much of that in this year's posts as I should have, possibly because it gets difficult to see everything when all of the plants are at their peaks. Now that some plants are gone, leaves have started dropping, and colors are changing, it's much easier to see. Does that make sense?

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So we'll start with the pond area. Looking at the photo above starting at the left and moving right you'll see an orange Big Bluestem grass in front of the darker bamboos in the background, the pond with the pvc tubing arched over it to hold the leaf-catching netting, the dark red leaves of a dogwood in front of the almost chartreuse foliage of an Eastern Redbud. The darker "filler" foliage behind the pond is provided by Euonymous and some smaller clumping bamboos (Fargesia 'Rufa'), the yellow-brown leaves overhead are courtesy of the Silver Maple, and the foreground green comes from two more bamboos: Indocalamus tessellatus with the big leaves right in front, and Sasaella bitchuensis behind it in the right corner of the frame.

At other times of the year this is all just a mass of green, so it's very difficult to see the different plants that cooperate to form this view.

Shifting our view a bit toward the right adds the bright yellow foliage of a volunteer tree that I have not yet identified, plus a couple of more bamboos: the dark foliage of Shibatea kumasaca and the variegated Hibanobambusa tranquillans 'Shiroshima'. Here's that unknown tree:

I haven't seen it produce any fruit, but it must -- it flowers and its seed got here somehow, right?

Here's the dogwood up close:

And here you can see not only the light green Redbud foliage, but a little bit of a Serviceberry -- its orange leaves are to the left (or is that just more of the dogwood?):

Moving even more to the right...

...a few more bamboos contribute their various shades of green, and a second Silver Maple adds some more yellow up above.

I couldn't see it from the vantage point of the previous photos, so moving forward and turning to the right you can get a glimpse of another Serviceberry, with Silver maple and/or Red Mulberry providing the yellow canopy:

I took all of these photos on Saturday -- if I walk out there today most of the tree leaves will have dropped, so the scene will essentially be bamboos and bare branches. That's not a bad view, but after four or five months of it I'll be ready for the green to reappear!

Want to see the entire space at once?

Click to enlarge or r-click and "open in new window"

This colorful ending to the growing season is a nice farewell present. I'm glad I was paying attention this year!

(All of these were taken with my phone camera. If I didn't have it in my pocket while I was working out here I may have not taken any photos at all -- the thought of going back into the house and de-booting to get the camera seemed like too much trouble at the time.)

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