Day 307 – The Wet

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November 2, 2016 – Most places in Canada have four seasons – Winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Here in Vancouver, late fall until late spring could really be more aptly called “The Wet Season”.

After a day in “The Wet” it feels nice to change into dry clothes, but then I realized I hadn’t taken a single photo while I was out in the field today, so a quick foray out onto the rainy back deck yielded a couple of interesting images of plants going dormant for the winter.

The maples are dropping their leaves at different rates, this lion’s mane maple not quite bare yet, the browning leaves providing a slide for rain drops.

Perhaps more interesting are the Physalis plants though. A few years ago I bought one of these Chinese Lantern plants at the end of the season, it was already browned off and dormant but I was looking forward to seeing it spring forward in the spring, except that it simply didn’t.

Sadly, it didn’t survive the winter and didn’t come back.

But it turns out that wasn’t a bad thing, because it wasn’t until the following year that I learned how invasive they can be.

So the next year I bought a new plant, but I planted it it a pot instead. And I’m glad, because the new one grew like gangbusters, and did make it through the winter, and grew like a weed (apparently it IS) again this summer.

I do love the way the fruit is caged inside the decaying lantern shell, the veins left like bars surrounding a prisoner. It’s an interesting plant and gives three seasons of show – full foliage in the spring, pretty white flowers in the summer, interesting orange lanterns in the early fall, that turn into these fascinating caged fruits in the late fall.

116 Photos in 2016 – 87. Browned Off