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all is subtle here.

In these flat lands by the sound, we don’t get the mountainsides of fiery red and gold. Our maples, by contrast, put on their show in the early spring, when they bud a pink-red; in the fall, they meekly go from green to yellow and then quickly, on the ground, to a metalic gray.

Still though, you can find color in the trees here. You just have to look a little more closely. And be patient, because the change comes later in the season.

Here is a collection of the ‘late molters’, photographed in the past week.

Before and after. Two bald cypress trees.

Bald cypess gone to rust.

A few, last hangers-on on a crape myrtle on Broad Street.

Most of its leaves gone, the lasting color of the crape myrtle is in its trunk.

Its own leaves gone, this crape myrtle on Hodges Street wears an extension of Virginia creeper.

Virginia Creeper traipses a trail of red on a window facing Main Street .

A sycamore at the corner of Main and Midyette Streets.

Most leaves of this sycamore lay on the side of the road on Midyette Street.

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While the leaves may go, the sycamore’s pattern remains for the winter.

Some fall changes involve an unfurling rather than a change of color.

On the side of Weaver Camp Road in Florence.

A last holdout of yellow leaves on a small tree in Florence.

Soybeans ready for picking in a field on Brown’s Creek Road, near Whortonsville..

In Oriental, one last bloom of a season past. A ginger lily holds on for a while longer as a bald cypress nearby provides a russet backdrop.

Underfoot on one Broad Street lawn, an unexpected fall color popped through in the warm autumn weather.

The color that will be with us all winter. Red-barked Crape Myrtle frames the Broad Street traffic heading up the bridge.

Posted Tuesday November 18, 2008 by Melinda Penkava