Wandering Wednesday - Portland Japanese Garden

It was a real treat to get to visit the Portland Japanese Garden once again, and this time during a different season--Autumn, and with friend Jaye who hadn't been there before.

It was truly marvelous to see how different the garden looked with all the changing colors of the leaves.

This one maple was the most vibrant glowing red, it really stood out against the dark rhododendrons behind it.

There was a lot more moss happening which was lovely to see.

I loved the colorful messiness of the fallen leaves on the orderly raked gravel designs.

I really enjoyed this gorgeous artwork, Cross Currents by Anne Crumpacker, which is made of cross-cut bamboo.

Even the bonsai trees had color-changing going on.

This little leaf is So Big in this picture. It was really about an inch and half wide.

Now we come to some of the many pattern and texture pictures that I took during this visit. Honestly, I took a lot of the same pictures during my last visit with DH in the summer of 2024. I find these all very intriguing and worth examining for possible quilt designs.

Some would obviously and easily make great quilt designs.

This would be interesting piecing.

This makes me think of framing of interior quilt borders, or very heavy quilting designs. With the gorgeous colors behind of course.

This picture reads as a quilt design to me.

That's probably enough for now.

Finally Fall

 It's not really fall around here until the Poison Oak turns color.

And all of a sudden: **Pow!** the brilliant red shining in the forest.

And the birds are apparently making dried figs out on our deck railing. Maybe they're storing them up for the winter??

On Mo's Street

This is what late fall/early winter looks like in the San Francisco Bay Area.  At least on Maureen's street.

I got out of my car, gasped at the beauty and had to grab my camera to try and capture the gorgeousness. There's just something about that red-orange against the blue blue sky.

As The Season Turns

And just like that. It is Spring with a capital S. Woohoo finally! And the gardening to-do list has started out very very long this year, since I was so slothful and unmotivated to garden much last year. My plan is to do a little every day instead of overdoing it all in one day. That way I can fit in the indoor quilting stuff I need to do also (see yesterday's memoir quilt).

I just love the way the horizontal bark on the cherry trees looks, so different than the other fruit trees. We don't ever get many cherries off of this tree, the birds get almost all of them. It mostly functions as a decorative tree. Plus it is really too tall to even harvest properly. It is the last one in our row of fruit trees, so it hardly ever ends up getting pruned, by the time we've done the plum and the apples.

The lilacs are bending down with the weight of the rain on all their blossoms. I haven't pruned them in years, I think this is the year, just as soon as they are done blooming for us. And the viney thing twining through them is the wisteria which is attempting to take over the world, that definitely needs to go. I truly do love wisteria, but boy is it ever a "garden thug". Give it an inch, it takes a mile, at a minimum. Western kudzu?

What's on your gardening to-do list this spring?