Yesterday was brilliantly sunny and almost unnaturally warm—today is a return to reality... cool, cloudy, and somber. Not only does it feel like fall, but it's starting to look like the season, too. There's a little color starting to appear in the leaves, and that's especially true in the ground floor of the natural world. The Poison Ivy foliage is quite red, and the Swamp Maples at the lower parts of the millpond are beginning to turn soft crimson. There's certainly lots of yellow in the plant community, as the chlorophyll gets packed away into storage and the carotenoid accessory pigments—the helpers that have been in the background all along—get their turn on center stage. But it's a brief turn of stardom for the understudies, and soon enough, many of the leaves, the hostas among them, will curl up, die, and drop to the ground for recycling.