The News from Kenabeek

I have been remiss in posting but couldn’t let the approach of fall pass without comment. This is a lovely time of year!

As usual, the red maples started changing first – I think they respond to the shortening day rather than temperature, because they always begin to turn in late August, no matter how warm it is. In fact, it’s always the same branch of the same tree that begins it, with the others joining in over the next few weeks. So we now have some branches with leaves in lovely red-orange-pink shades. These are not the big trees you see further south, but more like huge shrubs – well over 20 feet tall, but with very slender trunks, only a few inches in diameter.

On the other side of the house, a moose maple is covered with hot pink “keys”, its seeds. This kind is truly a shrub, about 5 feet tall, with many slender stems from a central root.

Our other deciduous trees are mainly poplar and birch. They begin to turn in response to temperature, so we often lose the red maple leaves before they begin to turn, to a bright, buttery yellow. But this year we’ve had a couple cold snaps, with lows at night down close to freezing, so they are beginning to turn as well. So I am hoping for red and yellow at the same time this year! That does happen occasionally, but for the classic multicoloured fall foliage, you have to go a couple of hundred kilometres further south of here – it begins around North Bay.

In the flower garden, there are still a few poppies and cosmos blooming, the big sedums are in bloom, and the honeysuckle on the fence is still blooming, as it has all summer. But my vegetable garden was a disaster this year, thanks to that groundhog – it kept eating the blossoms off my peas and beans, so I got only a handful of each. Fortunately it doesn’t like carrots, and I still have a good crop in the ground, which can stay there until frost, harvested at leisure.

I have, as usual, a volunteer flower in the vegetable garden, with tiny flower in an intense purple-pink. I don’t know if it’s a wild flower, or one that was planted here in the past and became evident once I got here and kept the garden weeded. I have to gone through my books of tame and wild flowers without finding it — it looks rather like Maltese cross, a campion, but pink flowers rather than red, and the leaves are different.

Most of the wildflowers have gone to seed, although some are still decorative – the joe pye weed has faded from the flowers’ pink to a deep maroon as the seeds mature. There is still some goldenrod and yellow hawkweed along the roadsides, the fireweed still has its fluffy pale pink seed heads, and the little white and lilac wild asters have turned to tiny puffs of white. And there are a few orange hawkweed and daisies, a second bloom.

Blackbirds are gathering on the telephone wires. They usually start to do it in mid-August, but it seems to me they began a bit later this year. (Could this mean a late winter? But we’ve been often cooler than usual the past few weeks …) They gather in eventually huge flocks, maybe as many as a hundred, and hang out for weeks before they suddenly disappear, always on the lines on the north side of the road, facing south. Planning their itinerary, no doubt! The crows have been making a racket lately, probably also planning their journey, and in the past week we’ve seen several flocks of geese, heading south. I am hearing the chickadees again – they stay all summer, but keep to themselves while nesting; now that the kids are out of the nest, they’re obviously feeling chatty again, and repossessing their winter territory.

It is so nice to be able to just enjoy the season, without having to worry about winter roads! I am looking forward to fall and winter, and hoping for lots of snow so I can start snowshoeing as soon as possible!