Oak and other friends in the scrub

Alban Elfed

Between last year’s post and my experiences while out walking last week, I may be ready to declare the autumn equinox my favorite time of year. The sun is bright and warm and casts long shadows. Everything seems to hang in balance. In high school and college I loved autumn because of marching band, which was so much fun and so much hard work, out in the cold and rain, but warmed by physical activity. Now this time of year brings about feelings of joy and sadness, comfort and pain, growth and decay, the physical world and the inner world. In combination these ideas create so much beauty, as if the divine spark hangs between them, comforting and blinding, like a campfire blowing smoke into my eyes as I lean in to a deep conversation with a friend.

A walk in the scrub

Here are some photos from the stroll that inspired this post.

Winged sumac (Rhus copallinum) bears its fruit while its leaves begin to turn a festive red.

Another plant that I see all over but am failing to identify at the moment, its leaves turned beautiful by disease.

Meanwhile, scrub olive (Osmanthus megacarpus) is young, green, and full of vitality.

A large beetle walks down the trail with an air of importance and urgency.

Meanwhile, leafy galls on sand live oak (Quercus geminata) look positively silly.

(The galls contain wasp larvae!)

And beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is living up to its name.

I thought everybody hated sand spurs (Cenchrus spinifex) but I guess if you’re little enough they’re not so bad.

And finally, it is time for acorns. At the summer solstice, the time of greatest light, oak really is king, with yellow-green shoots rapidly pushing upward and outward. But it is not until now, at this time of mysterious balance, that oak presents these treasures for the local wildlife. Florida scrub jays live out here, and I wish they could share with me their knowledge and opinions of the different oak species or even the different oak trees in their territory.

Acorns on Chapman’s oak (Quercus chapmanii)

Back in my own backyard

Here’s how my grove looks at this time of year.

The land was cleared a year or two before we bought the house, so of course we are letting things grow back. A lot of scrubby oak has popped up from buried roots, some of it with ambitions of turning back into trees. The biggest one I have started calling the Guardian Oak because she has made herself known to me and certainly has some feelings about what happened here. She’s the first out of all of them to start bearing acorns again. Quercus geminata can grow as a scrubby bush or a big, gnarled, oak; if she used to be the latter it certainly explains a lot.

Sand live oak (Quercus geminata) acorns