Balding

 

10/12/21 Maple Leaf neighborhood

10/12/16 The caution sign was still standing tall then.
I bet that's the same pickup!

Although this maple is not always on my leaf-peeping tour, I like to watch it every year because it turns in an interesting way. The top half will go yellow and red far ahead of the bottom half, which takes much longer to turn. I went back through my sketches to find one of this same tree from a previous year. Wouldn’t you know it – I had sketched it exactly five years ago on Oct. 12, 2016. (Interestingly, the blog post showing the sketch is about how I was just discovering the use of a spritzer to activate water-soluble pencils in foliage – a technique I now use routinely.) I’ve included the 2016 sketch at right to show how different the color pattern is this year – a lot more green still shows, but the top is already balding.

Incidentally, the traffic circle is a bit worse for wear: The caution sign somehow got pushed sideways a long time ago, and it’s still that way. The blue rectangle in front is a local political sign.