Four Years Of Foliage

In October 2007 in New York it seemed one couldn’t have a conversation without someone mentioning the warm weather. Not in a smalltalk way—more like the Ancient Mariner, or someone who fears she or he has seen a ghost. The year before I’d been in Central Park shooting video at peak color, and I decided to revisit the same spots. In places, trees that had been leafless by that time in 2006 hadn’t even begun to turn. Peak color came a full two weeks late.

In 2008 I was between blogs and though I went running in the park two years to the day from my 2006 video shoot—election day—I didn’t plan to continue the sequence. Fortunately I did take pictures along the same route; so pretend that you were looking off to one side that year.

This year, since I’ve decamped for Massachusetts, my friend Ann shot the photos (thank you, Ann!!) Both this year and last, peak color never really came; some trees turned a little late, some very late; I suppose as different species adjusted differently to changing conditions and cues of light and temperature no longer accompanied one another.

These are, of course, literally snapshots. They may reflect but can’t include this year’s cool, wet summer, or the biggest storm of the fall that had swept up the east coast a few days before, taking with it balmy temperatures and some of the leaves.

I’d love to see thousands of locations sequenced like this. Crowd-sourcing, after all, is how the Cornell Ornithology Lab does its Great Backyard Bird Count. Everyone could choose a few spots to photograph each week or two through the spring and fall. The spots don’t need to be scenic. They just need to have leaves.

Full-size images follow. I used Photoshop only to crop and scale (the lighting in 2006 shot of the Sherry-Netherland hotel was done in-camera by fiddling with the exposure).

West Park Drive near Sixty-Eighth Street

04 November 2006: