Falling oak leaves and their accompanying smell are central to the show, but there are some prettier elements too; salt marsh gumplant, part of the sunflower family, is in full bloom. This plant looks a bit like a ratty old weed, but in fact it's quite important to marsh ecology. Highly salt-tolerant, it grows at the edges of marshes and provides food and shelter for various endangered marshbeasts, like clapper rails and salt-marsh-harvest-mice and creatures-from-the-black-lagoons. Also it apparently smells like Juicy Fruit.
Buckeyes are turning their candy-scented flowers into big chunky brown eyeball fruits which will drop to the ground just in time to catch the winter rains.
Naked ladies (Amaryllis belladonna) are blooming and dying. These are South African natives, but they titillate us all over the Bay Area too. They're "naked" because the leaves and flowers appear at completely different times; the pink flowers sprout from a pile of dried up dead stuff, generating their other nickname, surprise lily.
Morning glory has many species, some of which are native to CA and some not so much. The way to tell them apart is long and tortured and involves the word "glabrous," so you will have to enjoy this patch I found without knowing more than the family.
Autumn leaves might drift past Johnny Mercer's window, but here in Oakland it's more likely to be goose feathers. They're pretty much done shedding now; but can you believe they didn't reduce, re-use OR recycle their feathers? They just left them all over the beach. Litterbugs.
This makes me so nostalgic for mushroom weather!! :)
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