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Yesterday we went to check on the seedlings we marked with string. Only
two had died. Some others looked like they had been munched on the ends of
their leaves. They must be tasty when young - I don't see any other
seedlings getting eaten like these. Weird, because they've got
pyrrolizidine alkaloids in their leaves which is why they're poison to
horses. The alkaloids must not show up until later or something. Some of
the herbivory is obviously bugs and maybe they don't care, but in other
leaves the whole tip of the leaf is gone. Maybe small mammals. Rodents
eat leaves in winter! (I learned that a few months ago and was amazed. I
don't know why I was so amazed. Rabbits are known to eat leaves...) We
planted extra seeds in the plots to make sure we'd have plenty of plants in
the spring.
Everything looked frilly out in the field. The dead skeletons of the
summer's grasses are starting to curl from the damp, their leaves in
ringlets. The new stuff that's coming up is all curly and lacy - the
feathery leaves of yarrow, sage and erodium, the sturdier-looking
larkspur... even plants that have somewhat boring leaves as adults can have
really special cotyledons when they first come up through the ground.
The landscape still looks tawny, but the green understory is starting to
show in places, particularly under the oak trees. The light yesterday was
amazing - the clouds were pretty dark, but there was a dry breeze and
everything was bathed in this slightly blue light. Even ugly old crows
looked sleek and glossy. Huge bunches of mistletoe are becoming visible in
the upper branches of the oaks whose leaves are falling. The hills are
dotted with silver buckeye, orange-rust oak and dark green oak. There's
one valley that has a lot of buckeye and after the leaves all fell off the
trees it was a silver landscape that looked post-icestorm. Yesterday we
even saw reds as we drove back to the office past the wineries, where the
vines sported yellow leaves with a scatter of arresting red pigment. I've
seen fall color in Ontario and this certainly is not it. The trees in the
east create their own light in the fall. But the interior of California
has more complex change over the season than brown to green and I've never
really appreciated it before. Perhaps it is the contrast between the coast
(which changes very little in terms of color) and inland that is bringing
it home this year.
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