The First Signs of Fall Around the Neighborhood

Summer seems to have gone by faster than ever this year. It was a strange one, filled with storms, tree damage, more cleanup than I care to remember, and what felt like a nearly endless supply of hot, humid days. I’m not quite ready to let summer go yet, though I will happily give back the humidity. We had more than enough of that.

Still, September is here, and whether I’m ready or not, the first little signs of fall have started showing up around the neighborhood.

This is the beginning of my fall photo series for the year. We don’t have much actual fall color yet here in the Fox Valley. According to Wisconsin’s current Fall Color Report, Appleton is still sitting at essentially 0% color, with peak color forecast for the third week of October. So we’ve got a while.

That doesn’t mean nothing is changing, though. You just have to look a little closer.

I went out around the neighborhood and found plenty of plants sitting right at that interesting point between summer and fall. Some are still blooming like it’s July, some are loaded with fruit, some are going to seed, and a few have reached the stage where their main contribution to the landscape is attaching themselves to whatever happens to brush past them.

Black-eyed Susans are still running the show

The black-eyed Susans are probably the hardest things to miss right now. There are big patches of them still glowing yellow against all the green, though quite a few flowers have already finished and turned into dark seed heads.

Depending on the species or cultivar, Rudbeckia can keep blooming well into fall, which explains why they still look so good in September. Those old seed heads aren’t necessarily something to clean up right away, either. They provide seeds for birds, including goldfinches, later in the season.

They’re one of those plants that seem almost built for this part of the year. They tolerate heat and some drought, and after a summer like this one, they’re still standing there looking pretty cheerful about the whole thing.

Purple holdouts: Russian sage and purpletop verbena

Nearby I found Russian sage, still holding onto quite a bit of purple-blue color. We initially had one of these photos labeled as lavender, and I can see why. From a distance there’s definitely a resemblance, especially with all that silvery foliage and purple color. Looking closely, though, this is Russian sage (Salvia yangii, formerly Perovskia atriplicifolia). It’s exactly the sort of plant you’d expect to still be putting on a show this late in the summer.

There was also purpletop verbena, with those little clusters of bright purple flowers sitting up above the surrounding foliage. Plants like this are easy to overlook when you’re driving past them, but once you stop and actually look, they add a surprising amount of color at a time when a lot of the earlier flowers are already finished.

Goldenrod, and the pollinators working it

The same thing is happening with the goldenrod. Its yellow flowers are beginning to take over in places, and goldenrod is one of our classic late-summer plants.

It also turns out to be a lot more useful than just filling roadsides and gardens with yellow. Goldenrods are valuable late-season nectar plants for pollinators, including bees, butterflies and wasps, right when many other sources of nectar are disappearing. UW-Madison specifically recommends goldenrods among the plants that feed pollinators late into the season.

I happened to catch a wasp working through one of the patches while I was taking pictures. Apparently I wasn’t the only one out inspecting the neighborhood flowers.

A few more summer holdouts

The garlic chives are largely past their prime now, with most of the white flower heads drying and turning toward seed.

One of them still had a skipper visiting it, though.

The little yellow flowers on the shrubby cinquefoil are still hanging around as well. Wisconsin horticulture references list bush cinquefoil among the shrubs that can keep flowering into early fall, so that one may have a little life left in it yet.

Then there are the crabapples

Those are probably one of the more obvious signs that the season really is moving along. The trees I found were covered in bright red fruit, and even with nearly everything around them still green, they already looked like fall.

There are hundreds of crabapple cultivars, with fruit ranging through red, orange, yellow, green and purple, and many varieties hold their fruit well into winter. The fruit also becomes food for birds and other wildlife as the season goes on.

And the burdock has given up on flowers entirely

The burdock has reached the point where it has abandoned flowers altogether and moved on to its more aggressive distribution strategy.

The dry seed heads are basically nature’s version of Velcro. They’re covered with hooked structures designed to catch onto fur, clothing and anything else that gets close enough, carrying the seeds somewhere new before they eventually fall off. It’s an extremely effective system, assuming you aren’t the person trying to pull them out of something later.

I found plenty of other plant debris stuck to a random Jeep, too. After driving through some tall vegetation, one tire and the inside of the wheel well came back decorated with an impressive collection of seeds, stems and spiderweb.

I’m not going to pretend I can identify everything that hitched a ride with them, but apparently the Jeep is participating in seed dispersal now.

So fall is starting, just not in the trees yet

Wisconsin’s fall color generally works its way south as the season progresses, and the timing can shift quite a bit depending on temperatures, rainfall and the individual tree species. Warm sunny days followed by cool, nonfreezing nights tend to produce some of the best red coloration. Right now the trees around here are still overwhelmingly green, and I expect it’ll be another few weeks before I start finding enough changing leaves to make the next stage of this series interesting.

I’m hoping we get a good year.

I’m still not entirely ready to give up summer, but I have to admit that the crabapples, goldenrod and those first little hints of change are starting to win me over. Give me some crisp mornings, lower humidity and a few really good maple trees, and I suspect I’ll come around pretty quickly.