A few weeks ago I thought our fall color was going to be disappointing. It has turned out better than I expected, but perhaps not quite as good as in some years.

These pictures are from one morning about two weeks ago when I walked the dogs down Fouche Gap Road into Texas Valley. A morning walk down that side of the mountain puts us into shade for a lot of the way down so the color we do have is muted.

This part of the road had some nice color.

Fouche Gap Road in the shade

Most of the color is from our maples. The maples tend to be smaller trees scattered in the forest, except beside the road, where they can stick their heads out into the sunlight. Here is one of the brighter red maples.

Maple tree on Fouche Gap Road

The maples had not finished turning color by this weekend. Even maples right beside each other varied from nearly summertime green through yellow, orange, red and brown.

Most of the large oaks and poplars are brown or maybe slightly yellowish brown. The hickories have been mainly yellow, but their color is not bright and saturated. Here is what I think was a hickory with oaks above it. I don’t remember for sure, but this might have been a tree that I don’t recognize. Hickories have paired leaves on opposite side of the stalk, while the trees I haven’t identified have leaves that alternate. (Oddly, one Web site I went to said that hickory leaves are alternate, but I am 99 percent sure that I have specifically noticed that they are paired on the stem on the trees in our yard that I have identified as pignut hickories; they certainly produce nuts that look like hickory nuts. Could I be mistaken?) The leaves of our unknown-to-me trees are significantly larger than our pignut hickories (I am pretty sure they are pignut; I don’t remember the characteristics I used for that ID, but it took me long enough to come up with it, and I was pretty sure at the time.) Anyway, the leaves in this shot are paired, so they must be hickories according to my identification. The point I was trying to make is that they are yellow, but not bright yellow.

Hickory leaves with oaks above

Part of our problem is that in our mixed pine and hardwood forest, a large fraction of the taller hardwoods are oaks. The other large trees are poplars (much less common, not much color) and hickories (also less common, some color but not great). From a distance the mountain looks pretty brown. Most of the color seems to be in the understory, where the maples tend to share space with the deep red dogwoods. If you look carefully here and there, our very common muscadine vines provide yellow in some trees that would otherwise be pretty dull.

Even the lowly poison ivy contributes color close to the ground.

Some small maples behind with poison ivy trying to blend in

I haven’t been able to get pictures from the most beautiful places along Fouche Gap Road in late afternoons on the other side of the mountain. That’s when the sunlight streams through the understory and the leaves are illuminated from behind. They seem to glow, and it’s hard to keep my eyes on the road. Maybe that’s an image that’s best built up mentally from fleeting glimpses dominated by the brightest and most colorful leaves.

Kudzu is one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time. It was introduced in the United States from Asia at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition’s Japanese Pavilion in 1876, and in the South at the New Orleans Exposition in 1884-86. It seemed like a miracle plant. It was hardy and fast-growing, it tolerated poor soil, livestock liked to eat it, and it had a wonderfully fragrant flower. What could possibly go wrong? By the 1930’s, it was promoted as a livestock food for farmers to grow. By 1935 it was promoted as an erosion-control plant, and Soil Conservation Service nurseries began producing seedlings. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, between 1935 and 1942, Soil Conservation Service nurseries produced a hundred million seedlings. They were  spreading this stuff everywhere.

By the 1950s, people were having second thoughts. Today it has been reported as an invasive species in states from the Deep South, as far up the Atlantic coast as Connecticut, and in Oregon and North Dakota.

And right here just down the street from us.

I, for one, do not welcome our kudzu overlords

Kudzu has a kind of mythic and yet comical status in the South. One of the Atlanta television stations had a news helicopter that used to routinely report on the various objects that kudzu was covering, from abandoned houses to old school buses. I suspect that it’s not so funny if it’s your property that the kudzu is invading.

Look out Zeke!

This is on Lavender Trail across Fouche Gap Road, where kudzu has covered several boulders that mark the edge of the road at the dead-end turnaround.

One of my uncles, since deceased, liked to tell tales. He had a small farm and was pretty familiar with farming. He said that kudzu was great food for cattle, but if you planted it in a field, although the cattle would eat it, it would eventually spread beyond the fence. He said the only way to safely plant kudzu was to put a fenced area within a cattle pasture and plant kudzu within that interior pen. The cattle would then eat any kudzu that tried to spread outside the pen. It was hard to know whether to take him seriously or not.

This is what can happen if kudzu is not controlled. I found this image online, but it’s not an uncommon sight around here.

Online image of kudzu covering trees

The kudzu on the mountain was blooming this week. Kudzu blooms have a deep, strong, sweet odor. Sometimes you can smell the blooms from quite a distance. In this case, I had to pull a bloom close to my nose to smell it last weekend. By this weekend, although the blooms were still visible, I couldn’t detect any odor at all.

Kudzu flowers

There is a patch of kudzu growing across the street from one of our neighbors down on Fouche Gap Road. Now it has spread to the ditch in front of their house. I’m afraid it’s a mistake to allow that to happen.

I am keeping an eye on the kudzu growing on the property next to our neighbors on the other side of Wildlife Trail. It has covered and killed several large trees, and it’s trying to send tendrils across Lavender Trail. That would put it in the yard of our neighbor on the other side of Lavender Trail. Our neighbor’s yard and Wildlife Trail serve as a firebreak, but I don’t entirely trust it.