“Fall, Phase Two” Fall’s second phase hit hard this morning. The moonless sky was clear, sprinkled with bright stars and resonant with infinite silence. My footsteps crunched on the frozen path as I loaded the car with my tote bag of lunch and the work I’d optimistically brought home. I shivered as I scraped the windshield.
 
Foliage Season ended last week, and we’ve entered what we affectionately call Stick Season, the austere steel and rust of the forest’s architecture. The heavy rains over the weekend pulled down the remaining leaves of gold and garnet. The occasional pre-sunrise breeze crinkled the leaves on the forest floor. Chipmunks, birds, and neighbors all still slept.
 
The weekend’s soaking rain hydrated otherwise drying vegetation. It created puddles in our fields and raised the level of the stream. I could hear the stream’s volume pouring down the valley, a constant hum and gurgle in the distance. It is always reassuring to go into winter with a full aquifer.
 
We mow our fields in a three-year rotational cycle, allowing grasses, wildflowers, and trees to flourish. We mow hard a section each year, letting the other sections grow chest high. We do this to invite song birds, butterflies, insects, and critters of various sizes to have better habitat. It seems to have helped keep out invasive plants, too, as we have only had one purple loosestrife plant take hold. We dug that out as soon as we noticed it this summer.
 
While it looks a bit messy year-round, we think it’s a much healthier field, and one that constantly evolves. Nature walks often lead to some adventure, either finding a new wild apple tree or a mucky spot where we sink to our ankles, or the aroma of milkweed in flower, or our surprise at the pterodactyl-like squawk from a startled great blue heron.
 
At night we sometimes see the flashing eyes of coyote and fox, the flick of white tails on deer bounding from our headlights, and summer’s lightning flashes of fireflies. The grasses and goldenrod grow high in the summer, stretching toward the sun, swaying in the hard winds that hit the valley where we live. Some mornings in late summer, thousands of spiders’ webs hang heavy with dew and shimmer in the morning light. It seems like the space between each plant in those 20 or so acres is home to a fat and happy spider, waiting for its next meal.
 
In gentle breezes the grasses swoosh in waves making the field almost oceanic. The messiness provides a lot more value to us than would a tidy, green field. Plus it’s a lot less work. Why kill all this life to create a monoculture of grass? Someday we may change our minds and move the field back into production, but for now we think it’s producing just fine.
But it was still night-time dark at six in the morning, and I could see only that field in my imagination. As I drove down the hill, out of the sheltered woods, the headlights illuminated not just the gravel road, but also the encroaching grasses and wildflowers.
 
The surprise was profound and surreal. Crystalline, sparkly, sugar-coated. Shivering in the still-cold car, I had to stop and sit for a minute to fully absorb what I was seeing. It looked fake. The hard frost had turned all that dismal and bone-chilling rain into a most magical scene, a field of shimmering crystals. It was blinding and dreamlike and hypnotic.
 
Crystal upon crystal covered every bit of vegetation, turning soggy brown into crispy white. The textures and sounds of the field went from soft and muffled from decay to sharp and brittle in the cold. Goldenrod, milkweed pods, and lanky grasses seemed encased in glass, quietly clinking in the early dawn breeze.
 
Much is made of the glory of vibrant fall colors, and our tourist industry relies on those wows of beauty around every corner. This was an especially spectacular year. The cacophony of color is nature’s last hoorah, something to savor and photograph. Stick Season seems a let-down, an overnight metamorphosis into something stark and angular, from color to sepia photography.
 
But, as I saw this chilly morning, sometimes the more profound beauty is less publicized, fleeting, and startling. That crystallized field went through a shocking change last night, but it’s now ready for winter. That’s what Fall’s Phase Two is all about. Gone is summer; here comes winter.

By Laura Richardson, Master Gardener

Posted November 3, 2010