Along Piney Woods Church Road earlier today, I noticed that many of the Chinese wisteria pods had already opened, releasing their round, dime-sized seeds. One of the pods I saw still held one seed, waiting for the right moment to be released. I photographed it in color; in black and white, the image becomes an intriguing, abstract form.
Along the verge of Piney Woods Church Road, a water oak sapling, illuminated by the morning light, displays leaves of vibrant green, yellow, orange, and brown.
As winter nears, many of the remaining leaves on the trees and shrubs along Piney Woods Church take on an increasingly weather-beaten appearance. I am intrigued by the ones that carry so many scars — marks where they were chomped on, methodically chewed, shredded, and otherwise diminished. The leaves that remain carry a rich array of stories inscribed in their uneven, discolored edges.
As winter approaches and the Piney Woods Church Road landscape becomes more sere and barren, I begin to notice the naked branches of the trees and bare tendrils of the vines so much more. Today I found yet another enticing tendril image, a flourish of woody muscadine on a cold and cloudy mid-December afternoon.
Every so often on my daily rambles, I encounter shapes in nature — usually leaves — that evoke some other image, such as an animal or human figure. This happened many months ago, when I photographed a dark image that I titled, at my wife Valerie’s recommendation, “Strange Leaf”. And today, as the seasons have swung back around into the months of shriveled, brown leaves, it has happened again. Today I offer two such images, which I am calling “Leaf Puppets”. The first is a pair of dried wisteria leaves evocative of human figures, both suspended by their stems along the road bank. The second is a nearby sweetgum leaf, conjuring in my mind an image of a swan in flight. If you do not imagine the same, that is OK, too. The folds of the leaves and the patterns of light and dark, focus and blur, are inviting by themselves.
This time of year, the green leaves stand out along Piney Woods Church Road, when most every plant has withered to some shade of buff brown. In this case, the plant is likely Japanese honeysuckle — a truly nasty invasive that is slowly choking my (former) flower garden and shrubs. Still, I find this single leaf, illuminated by afternoon sunlight, entrancing. I nearly overlooked it completely — I took just two photos of it, one of which was out of focus. I had every intention of choosing to highlight something else from my walk. But reviewing the images at home now, this is the one that most captivates me from my daily journey.
On my early afternoon walk down Piney Woods Church Road today, my attention was drawn to a fascinating relationship between a shrub of some kind and an adjacent muscadine. A woody tendril of the vine cradled a single leaf from the shrub, holding it in place. How did this happen? Did the tendrils turn first, to wrap around some long-gone form, and then the leaf just happened to be blown into a vine’s embrace? Or did the tendrils somehow develop around the leaf, pinning it motionless? Equally mysterious is how I managed to walk past it for weeks, or even months, never noticing it before today.
A lone brown and shriveled leaf of a sweetgum stands proudly against a backdrop of trees and sky on a late autumn early afternoon somewhere along Piney Woods Church Road.
Whenever I am in need of new inspiration, I seek out the muscadine vines along Piney Woods Church Road. The leaves and tendrils offer endless possibilities. Here are two images from this afternoon’s walk.
On my afternoon ramble down Piney Woods Church Road today, I paused to photograph the very last leaf on a roadside pin cherry. After taking several shots of it, I reached up and touched it gently with my fingertips. It fell away from the branch tip, onto the waiting road edge.
