Fall scenes at the National Arboretum

It was beautiful; the Asian Collections parking lot was full all day. I started out to blow leaves off the trails after lunch but quickly gave up rather than subject the visitors to the sound and smell of the blower. I'm thinking it's all right to have leaves on the paths one weekend a year. Hey, it wouldn't be fall without leaves!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING1

A wonderfully funny poem by Dean Young on Poetry Daily.

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.

Camellia sasanqua 'Irene May'

Fall continues....Acer palmatum 'Tsukusane'

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This is yet another wonderful upright Japanese Maple.  Every year it calls attention to itself at the top of the Camellia Collection. The yellow grass in the foreground is a green, non-variegated that is,  Hakonechloa. If you look through the maple, use your imagination, you can see Camellia sasanqua 'Jean May'.

The Camellia Collections is alive with sasanquas and oleifiera hybrids in bloom. If I had small children, I'd bring them. You can wander amongst thousands of flowers....pretty nice.