Chiaroscuro in Autumn

Seven a.m. on a Saturday morning. This is grass season.

At this time of year the low morning sun creates a rich chiaroscuro of lights and darks. The sunlight is starting to bleed through the forest trees, sending transient shafts of light into the garden. Showing this in a photographic image is next to impossible. The scale is hard to establish for a viewer, and the colors and detail can only be seen if you enlarge the photo. Would you think the view above is probably 250 feet wide in the middle distance and three to four hundred feet deep?

Something about this reminds me of the sun-haunted paintings of the Hudson River School - the light settling in the clearing at this moment of stillness, poise, as we approach the autumnal equinox. But this is stillness with a bit of fireworks...when you see the grasses close up, shooting out plumes of white and red. An apparent contradiction here of images of motion in stillness, over abundance, too much fullness turning this peaceful morning into a memory of turmoil.


And here a bright spot of grasses contrasted with dark trunks of dogwoods, the light turning up the color engine, preparing for...



bursts of colors - here Panicum 'Cloud Nine', golden bracken, a maple branch.


And from the other side, Rudbeckia maxima foliage against the most golden bracken around.


One more: a glimpse of the berryland I'm planting between the house and the garden - Ilex verticillata 'Winter Red', Itea virginica, Aster tartaricus 'Jin Dai'.