Sunday, November 13, 2011

A Bit of Fall Color





Our trees finally have some fall color.  It seems like they were late to change this year.  This is what I see out of my window.  We have a Silver Maple in our front yard.


The insets on the right are from the Liquidamber tree in our front side yard.  I can't see that one from my window but its leaves get some nice yellow color.  Usually, mom turns off the yard sprinklers as our weather cools down,  and the leaves on the Silver Maple just turn brown and drop.  This year, she left the water on for a bit longer and we also got some early rain, so we get to see a bit of color from that tree this year.  As you can see, mom has a bit of raking to do...

This is a kitty-eye view of our back yard from our big screen patio window.

In the foreground is our Bradford Pear.  Out of all of our trees, this one holds its leaves the longest and gets some nice red and purple color.

It also produces little pears that the birds like!

So our mom likes trees and maybe went a bit crazy in our back yard...
This is our Chinese Hackberry:
The picture isn't very good but it's beginning to turn yellow.  There is a certain aphid pest of Hackberries, the Hackberry Wooly Aphid (go figure...) and our tree gets them every year.  Often it will drop its leaves early on account of the aphids.  Mom doesn't like to spray harsh chemicals; sometimes she'll hose the tree off or spray with soaps and oils.  A healthy tree can withstand a certain amount of pest pressure and then natural enemies can keep the pest population under control.  Our tree stayed strong this year!  Oh, check out all of the Pyracantha berries in the background!  The Mockingbird has staked out our yard for those, and sometimes we see Robins and Cedar Waxwings!

We also have a Chinese Pistache and a Chinese Tallow Tree in our back yard.  The pistache hangs on to its leaves too.  Then we'll get a few days with a strong north wind and all of the leaves will drop :). 

Whew!  I don't know about you, but I'm a bit tree'ed out!
Thanks for visiting our yard with me!

5 comments:

  1. Pip, we have Evil Mockerburds in our yard too! They eat the berries off our lantana.
    You have lovely trees in your yard, when we moved to the desert Mommy made sure to have some trees planted.

    btw, did you know you're sitting on a PTU? ACK!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You sure have lots of pretty trees! Must be some darn good Bird-TV at your place!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice fall colors!! All of our trees are naked now...and our grass is covered in leaves!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. That is more color than we get out here in SoCal! We get two colors: Green and Brown.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Those are pretty tree colors!!!
    Luv,
    Dave

    ReplyDelete