transitions

while i savour the sultry heat, sun-filled days and long nights of summer, autumn is my favourite season. it is a season of transitions, preparations, harvests, layers, and pigments; of life, death, and decay. having lived in the city for nine years before moving to the country full-time this past June, i always found that autumn would come and go so quickly, almost without notice, at least not of all its nuances. trees are not in their natural habitat in the city and almost all urban trees are diseased, so i never got to experience the full splendour of fall's colours and subtle changes. this year, however, i was able to intimately track those changes over the course of five or six weeks every time i took glasgow for a walk in a nearby forested area we call "the cross," from first fall to first frost, from the only barely emerging yellows and oranges to the fiery and crimson reds at their peak, and finally to the fading of those colours into rusts, ochres, and browns. i watched the dark earth and lush greens of the forest floor first become peppered with sparsely fallen leaves, and then fully blanketed by a thick layer of still fresh scarlet maple leaves, which slowly faded into various shades of brown as they dried and decayed, becoming skeletons of their former full-bodied selves. only a handful of golden birch and poplar leaves remained, clinging to their branches, the limbs of oaks and maples reaching up toward the hallow sky like arteries. finally, early this week, the overnight's frost crystallized into tiny, intricate freckles of snow hugging patches of leaves, moss, rotting wood, and the ground around the bases of trees, starkly beautiful at the same time as they were a faint promise of what is to come. 

All photos taken from 01 October - 06 November 2012