A lovely fall day and me without my camera.....oh my.

I forgot to take my camera to work today. That's a good thing and a bad thing. Good because it's nice to not mentally frame everything you see through a viewfinder. Bad because just after sunrise a thin layer of mist hovering over the Fern Valley Meadow glowed with a fiery orange color stolen from the eastern sky. Hey, I wouldn't have been able to capture it and then I'd have felt inadequate as a photographer so maybe it's just as well...

 Sunrise must have been a good omen because the whole day has been wonderful: sunny and warm with a good bit of rich foliage color still hanging on. The ginkgo along Hickey Hill Road in the Asian Collections is a rich deep yellow, just as colorful as it was two weeks ago. Japanese maples are holding much of their foliage. The Chinese sumacs and the Asian sassafrass are still showing some shreds of tattered glamor. It may be late November but there are flowers here and there seeming oddly incongruous in an undeniably autumnal landscape. 

Anomalies always intrigue me. There's a Lilium longiflorum flowering across the road from the weeping Katsura who has lost all her leaves which we've raked under the tree. That curious smell of sugar is recognizable as far away as the lily. The lily is, I expect, a seedling of a bigger clump nearby that flowers in late spring.