Autumn in the Garden (with Birds)

This has been a particularly colorful autumn in the Northwest this year, due in part to a slightly cooler and wetter summer than we normally have. As a result, the Japanese maples in my garden—both tree and shrub—exploded with color:

Here is a closeup of the tree's foliage, just as it was beginning to turn:

The Japanese maples weren't the only colorful trees. I love how the Oxydendrum arboreum (Sourwood tree) displays yellow, green and even a bit of red foliage, while also hanging on to its summer flowers, even in November.

The cotoneaster that is right outside the dining room window also turned a bright and cheerful red, especially the berries, which made a robin very happy.

I love watching the robins, but my favorite garden visitor, by far, was this little female Anna's hummingbird, that perched for several minutes on a bare branch of the Japanese maple on a cold,  wet day last week.

Now the leaves are mostly gone, and the weather is getting colder. I'm turning more to inside pursuits, like knitting, and gearing up for the holiday season. I'll share some of those activities in my next post, which you can look for around the winter solstice.

Catching Up with Photos of the Week

Wow, it's been two weeks since my last post! And in addition to that, I am even farther behind on posting my photos of the week. Today you are in luck, though, because I am going to share several photos of the week all at once. Enjoy! I'll be back with another post, catching you up on my hiking, in a day or two.

The Fremont Troll, very appropriate for Friday the 13th!

My grandfather's dice cup, photographed on September 18th, which was his birthday.

It's the season of the spider; seen on a very foggy morning.

An Anna's hummingbird, seeking refuge from the downpour inside a rhododendron in my garden.

Infinite pumpkins. Halloween is just around the corner!

Photo of the Week: A Bit Early for Halloween

237/365: A Bit Early for Halloween, a photo by jchants on Flickr.

Anyone who knows me well knows that Autumn is my favorite season and Halloween is my favorite holiday. You can imagine how happy I was to see this ripening pumpkin in a garden in my neighborhood. Autumn and Halloween, all rolled into one photo! What could be better?

I Love New York!

Back in the late 1980s and early 90s, a whole other lifetime ago, I lived in Upstate New York, near Albany. There were several occasions when I had to go down to "The City" for my job, and I hated these trips with a passion. I found New York City scary (it was, then), big, dirty, and an altogether unpleasant place to be. Fast forward twenty years—now I look forward to the day after Thanksgiving almost every year, because Mr. D and I spend the it in New York City. We get up before any of the other in-laws and cousins, and catch the nine o'clock express New Jersey Transit train to New York, so we can arrive at Penn Station before ten. In most years we have tickets for a two o'clock matinee performance of a musical. This year we chose Stomp, playing off-Broadway, so that we would see something that the six year-old nephew would enjoy (he did), and we were given the gift of an extra hour, as the matinee didn't start until three.

We have a standard routine: first, walk over to Fifth Avenue and wander up to Rockefeller Center. We stop to watch the skaters on the ice rink and browse the branch of the Metropolitan Museum store located there. We travel further up Fifth Avenue, passing by the beautiful St. Patrick's Cathedral.

 In most years, we head to a museum. This year, our favorite, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, was closed for renovations, so instead, we headed to Tender Buttons, a place I've wanted to visit ever since I first read about it at least ten years ago.

Tender Buttons is, as you might have guessed, a button store. But it is also a small button museum, with antique buttons in glass display cases, just as you might see them in a museum. It's a totally fascinating place, and I could have spent a lot more time there than the half-hour or so that we did.

Next, we walked through Central Park. It was a gorgeous late November day, with the temperature in the high 50s, and Central Park provided many memorable scenes that were just waiting for me and my camera.  Here are just a few of them:

We reluctantly left Central Park, but the next destination was a good one, at least for me—Knitty City, located on the Upper West Side. I've heard about Knitty City on one of my favorite knitting podcasts, Knit, Knit Cafe, and it sounded like a very nice yarn store. It turns out that it was! The place was hopping, but the staff that we encountered were all pleasant and helpful, and the place was crammed with yarn. I ended up purchasing this:

It's Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock, in the colorway Saltwater. Funny—I had to go all the way to New York City to purchase a yarn that was hand-dyed 140 miles away from me, in Vancouver, BC. Oddly enough, I've never seen this yarn in any yarn store that I've been in on the West Coast.

From Knitty City, we headed to the subway, which we took to the East Village. We had lunch and dessert and met up with the rest of the family for a delightful performance of Stomp. All in all, a wonderful day. I really do love New York!

Autumn Adventures: Edmonds to Perinville

I know, I know, it's been a while since my last post, but I have been away having adventures on the East Coast. (There will be more on that later.)

Before we left, Mr. D and I did a walk that we used to do on Veteran's Day: walking from Edmonds to Perinville, which is about a five miles round trip. This time we did the walk a few days before Veteran's Day, on a cool sunny-cloudy day. Most of the walk followed a fairly busy street, but toward the end, we followed a trail at Southwest County Park that paralleled the road, but took us into what was once old growth forest. Below are some of the scenes that I captured from our walk.

 Mysterious orange berries growing by the side of the road. (I later found out that this is an Arum Italicum plant, otherwise known as the Cuckoo Pint.)

A Japanese Maple in all of its autumn glory. 

The winding trail we followed.

A young tree growing out of the stump of one of the old growth trees that used to fill this forest.

Vestiges of an old love.

I will be back later this week with a post about more recent adventures, and maybe some knitting, too. See you then!

Autumn Adventures: Seattle's Magnuson Park

It's been cold and occasionally rainy, so mountain hiking is over for the year. On November 3, the forecast was for rain, but when we woke up, it was sunny, breezy and cold—a perfect day for a walk. Mr. D and I decided to head down to Magnuson Park in Seattle, about a 20-minute drive from our house. We parked near the shore of Lake Washington, so we started our walk by the lake.

The wind was blowing through the trees that lined our path. Their colors were glorious!

We headed through a meadow, where last summer's blooms were now turned to seed pods.

We headed up a hill and into the woods, where there were more autumn treasures to behold:

We finally headed down the hill and back to our car. Before we left, I took a final wander through The Fin Project, a sculpture installation by John Young, created from the fins of 1960s-era attack submarines. How appropriate that this unusual and peaceful art installation is located on what was once a U.S. Naval Air Station.

Sadly, our walk was over, and it was time to return to the world of errands and laundry, but I was energized by this wonderful start to my day.

Autumn Adventures: Wallace Falls State Park

October 25th was a very chilly, but sunny day, and Mr. D and I decided to head north, to Wallace Falls State Park in Goldbar. I've hiked here before, but the last time was at least three years ago. This time, we decided not to hike up to the middle and upper falls, but to explore a new spur off the main trail, and then to hike part of the way up the Wallace Lake trail (we didn't have enough time to do the eight-mile roundtrip to the lake on this day). So take a good look at the little picture in the photo above, because that's all you get to see of the falls in this post.

Just because we didn't go to the falls, does not mean that we didn't see some wonderful sights. This started before we even reached the start of the trail. Just beyond the parking lot, there is a wide vista where you can see the surrounding peaks in this part of the Cascades. There are also tall high voltage power lines, but on this sunny day, they looked like they were leading our eyes right up to Mount Baring on the horizon.

Once we were on the trail, we followed the Wallace River for quite a while, and we enjoyed looking down at the rushing water below us.

Mr. D mentioned that there was a short loop off of the main trail, the Small Falls Interpretive Trail, that had recently opened, and so we decided to explore it. The trail led us to Small Falls, a little tributary of the Wallace River:

We also came upon a tree stump covered with many tiny mushrooms:

We got back on the main trail, and then branched off on the Wallace Lake trail. We headed away from the river and into some of the most beautiful forest I've seen in a long time.  This is temperate rain forest, so there was moss hanging from the branches of almost every tree.

The angled autumn sunlight was magical:

Oh, and remember what I said about no views of the falls? Well, I didn't realize that the wonderful river cascade that is at the bridge is actually the Lower Falls. Our turnoff to the Wallace Lake trail was just above the bridge, so we walked down there and I shot a bit of video so you could hear the sounds of the water. Enjoy!

Autumn Colors

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.  Albert Camus