[ Lost in the Landscape ]

inspired by nature: colors

I wrote ear­lier about how the euca­lyp­tus trees in my area had started to shed their bark and men­tioned how there were some inter­est­ing col­ors com­bi­na­tions that were hap­pen­ing as part of the process. The trees have con­tin­ued shed­ding bark all sum­mer and now into fall.

Not long ago I was talk­ing to Linda about col­ors, and she’d men­tioned being struck by some of the same col­ors her­self, and how some­day she thought it might be inter­est­ing to make a quilt using some of those unex­pected jux­ta­po­si­tions of color.

For fun, I’ve taken some pho­tos and made color palettes based on them using the tools at colourlovers.com. Most of the com­bos come from col­ors on the bark, but the last one below derives from the col­ors of new leaves against the berry-red shades of the new stems.

These are all on the lit­eral side. You could take any of these pic­tures and get a lot wilder–especially into the plum-grape-purple territory.

The titles for the palettes–“widomaker”–comes from the dark nick­name gum trees have in Aus­tralia because of their casual habit of drop­ping branches onto unsus­pect­ing folk below. It’s not hyper­bole. Twice, just this past year, I’ve come within less than fifty feet of hav­ing big branches dropped on my head.

Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers

September 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: color combinations • eucalyptus • exfoliating bark • inspired by nature | No Comments »

“eucalyptus autumn”">“eucalyptus autumn”

The Japan­ese lan­guage has many poetic names for the sea­sons. One phrase that I’ve found par­tic­u­larly beau­ti­ful is take no aki, or “bam­boo autumn.” It refers to the period in mid­dle– to late-spring when leaves of some bam­boos turn yel­low and fall from the plants. In addi­tion to the gor­geous built-in poetic anal­ogy, I like how the phrase grounds a spe­cific por­tion of the sea­son by invok­ing a nat­ural process that pre­sum­ably would have been under­stood by a good por­tion of the population.

When I take my lunch break dur­ing the week and head to the gym, I fol­low a path that takes me by a small clus­ter of euca­lyp­tus trees planted in a patch of lawn. Sev­eral of the trees have beau­ti­fully smooth trunks which are cov­ered with a del­i­cately mot­tled sil­very bark. Once a year, usu­ally late in spring or early in sum­mer, the bark exfo­li­ates, drop­ping off in small chunks that reveal the sur­prise: a bumpy, pale ocher layer of new bark under­neath.


Another of the trees drops larger, thin, brit­tle sheets of red-brown bark, reveal­ing a deli­ciously pale icy green below.

Many euca­lyp­tus species have bark that exfo­li­ates, as do many other trees, such as the sycamores that con­gre­gate in the moister areas of the local canyon bot­toms. So…why shouldn’t we have a name for when that hap­pens? Why shouldn’t we come up with ways to reat­tach lan­guage to nat­ural processes and the world around us? Why not refer to this awk­ward tran­si­tional spring-summer period we’re in as “euca­lyp­tus autumn?“


(Okay, okay, if you must quib­ble, not all of the 740-plus euca­lyp­tus species shed their bark. And those that do, don’t do it at exactly the same time. But I vote for any­thing that grounds us more securely in the cycles of the world. And lan­guage, being such a fun­da­men­tal com­po­nent of our exis­tence, seems like a great tool to use to accom­plish the goal.)

June 26 2008 | Categories: plant profiles • rambles | Tags: bamboo autumn • exfoliating bark • seasons | 2 Comments »