Three leaves

Erm… a leaf. Dead.

 

Leaf miner tracks on an arbutus leaf

 

Salal leaf

 

Dead leaf and ridged boards

I’ve tagged this “autumn leaves” because it is… although by now, having hung around for months, it’s more of a winter leaf. Not colourful, the way autumn leaves are thought of, because it’s from a kiwi vine, and they don’t do colour when dying. But on a January day with low sun and the ridged wood on the back deck bleached out, I think that very lack of bright colour becomes something kinda special.

A really big water drop

What can I say? It has been raining a lot recently.

Ginko and maple leaves

This ginko leaf fell onto the red Japanese maple leaves. I like the effect.

Leaf and hose

 

I really like the combination of shapes and colours in this photo; I was delighted when I downloaded the images and saw how it had turned out. It’s a ginko leaf, fallen onto a hose reel, photographed in between periods of rain.

Big.

Broadleaf maple leaves, that is. Just in case I hadn’t mentioned it.

Oh good, it’s that time of year again.

And I can resume taking pictures of water drops on leaves.

The most amazing leaves

We have (yet another) mystery plant in our yard. I thought it might be some kind of bergenia, but the leaves don’t seem to be right—they’re distinctly palmate, and the photos I’ve seen of bergenia leaves are distinctly not. In the spring it sends up tall stalks from its corms with sprays of lovely pinkish flowers—not a leaf in sight at that point— and then the flowers die back and eventually the leaves grow. It’s a big plant, the leaves are as big as those of the gunnera next to it (in fact, overall, the plant is bigger than the gunnera) and it stands three to four feet high.

And in the autumn, this is what the leaves do. 

Fern shadow

Every once in a while my camera gets notional and resets itself to defaults—I haven’t a clue why, it just whirs and suddenly the flash is turned on again the next time I take a picture in dim lighting. Which is what happened here, with the result that the flash blew out the shadow on one side of the leaf. But I kinda liked the effect this time.

Light and leaves, overlapping

I don’t know what kind of tree this is, but it has really big leaves and they look really pretty when the sun shines through them.

Backlit leaf

We’ve had a lot of rain lately—good for the lettuce and our cistern, but there’s something wrong about wanting to turn on the heat in July (we resisted). However, we have had some sun, and these photos are the result. They’re backlit gunnera leaves.

Leaf and sun

Vanilla leaf

Light! Light! Give us light!

Vanilla leaf is one of the first signs of spring, and it’s such a nice one, so bright and green and lush against the greys and browns left over from winter. So I’ve been taken lots of pictures of it—these are a few of the results.

That out of focus dot on the top of the left-hand leaf would be a wee spider.

This was from a patch that had turned reddish in places—not sure what that's about.