| Issue #31, October 27, 2006 |
The Fall Leaves
While the rest of us duck inside for the warmth, landscape artists head out into the chilly autumn air to capture the breathtaking displays of fall foliage. Such is the draw of the vivid colors that artists seek to recreate them in oils, watercolors, ink, and even on film. Yet, instead of painting nature, why not paint with nature? You need not have gone to art school to use Mother Nature as your palette. Like an artist selecting his brush, you can choose from a wide array of trees and shrubs, dictating which colors you would like splashed against the canvas of your backyard.
Let’s first look at some common trees, ones that you may already have in your yard. Living in the northeast, your property probably has at least one maple or oak tree. Common as they are, they are a great start for foliage painting; like a base coat over which you can add focal points of other colors. In some cases, types of these trees may pop from the background to take center stage. For example, while maples tend to stay in the yellow range, certain varieties can turn a dazzling red or purplish color.
For instance, the Red Maple (or Swamp Maple) does not have particularly red foliage. The trees usually turn greenish yellow, yellow, or a somewhat dull red. Yet, the Sunset Red Maple (Acer rubrum) lives up to its name, popping against the other trees with brighter red leaves. The Amur Maple (Acerginnala “Flame”) is another maple that lives up to its name. The “Flame” in its title shows up as a brilliant red, assuming the tree gets lots of sun during the summer. In contrast, the Crimson King Maple fails to deliver the striking red leaves its name leads you to expect, offering only a reddish-brown color.
The Plane Tree Maple, too, can be kind of plain with dingy brown to yellow leaves. The rest of the maples pick up on the yellow shades. The Silver Maple is green-yellow and the Sugar Maple, from which maple syrup comes, is orange-yellow.
The Fernleaf Fullmoon Maple offers more of an array of colors with a tie-died looking pattern of red, yellow, and orange. The Japanese Maple, too, has a broad color palette. Leaves can be yellow-bronze, red, or even purple.
Oaks, while they do not blaze their way into the realm of purples, can reach deep reds, as with the Pin Oak. The Northern Red Oak can also produce dark red leaves, but only under ideal conditions, which, for this tree, are full sun and fairly dry, acidic soil.
Though called the White Oak, this type of tree also has reddish leaves. Young White Oaks tend to run more reddish-brown while Eastern White Oak can be truer, but cloudier, red. Scarlet Oaks are very much scarlet; their leaves the color of a shiny lipstick. Red Oaks are slightly more misleading, their leaves ranging from a yellow-brown to a russet-red.
No matter the color, oaks still do not live up to the intensity of the maples. Yet, they complement the maples very well, for after the maples drop their leaves, the oaks are still at the height of their foliage, thus extending the color season of your yard.
Unlike the color variety within the maples and oaks, the Birch family tends to stick with the same sunshine yellow color. Likewise, the American and European Beeches are both golden-bronze. However, the Tricolor Beech is, as the name suggests, an exception. This tree is capable of so many color patterns that no two leaves are alike. A leaf could be purple with light pink and rosy edging while is neighbor could be green and white in the center with a rosy border.
For other dramatically colored trees, try dogwoods. The Kousa or Japanese Dogwood is deep purplish red while the Flowering Dogwood ranges from a similar purple to reddish bronze. The Grey Dogwood is actually a shrub, but it is still big on color with its deep red leaves. A fellow high color intensity shrub is the Compact Winged Euonymus, better known, and described, by its common name, Burning Bush. This bush, with its bright ball of apple red leaves, will steal the show from even the mightiest trees you plant in your backyard masterpiece.
–Renée R. Donlon
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