On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Good morning, everybody, I hope this finds you well.
Sorry about last week, each time I logged in, I had issues and often couldn’t even login, and with limited time, I focused on family and all the good stuff.
Looks like things are more stable, good!
Just a handful of pics from La Canada 10/9. Believe it or not we do get a kind of fall color even here in Los Angeles. But it’s usually in the beginning of December. For anyone interested, these pics are mostly from Viro Street (across from LCHigh School) by JPL. But there’s a decent amount of color throughout the San Gabriel Valley.
Fall Colors In SoCal
Baud
Pretty.
Rob
Beautiful!
JPL
I love these posts.
Amir Khalid
The one time I saw autumn foliage was from a distance, while on a bus ride upstate from New York City to Ithaca. It looked gorgeous then. Up close, where you can see individual trees, this looks even gorgeouser.
JeanneT
Those are beautiful colors – sweet gum and maple trees, I’m guessing? Anyway, it’s good to see those sunlit photos on this dark December morning.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Nice pics. There’s also some nice color in the trees in the LA river.
UncleEbeneezer
@JeanneT: Actually they are Sycamore, Liquidambar and Chinese Pistache, according to the guy at Californiafallcolor.com
UncleEbeneezer
@?BillinGlendaleCA: We usually go up to Mammoth or someplace else in the Sierra for fall color every year (I’m from New England so I love that little feeling of home) but this year we went a little late and the leaves all fell the week just before we went up :(
But yes, there’s a surprising amount of fall color that we get in December in and around LA.
ThresherK
What kind of tree is the first photo?
I tried searching “prickly nuts” and now I’m not allowed to use the library’s computer.
HinTN
@UncleEbeneezer:
That Sycamore looks like Sweet Gum. Around these parts, those are usually a deep coppery red. All of those trees are beautiful. Thanks for sharing.
Welcome back Alain.
barbequebob
@ThresherK: first photo is a sweetgum, scientific name Liquidambar styraciflua.
debbie
I love autumn for its colors!
sab
@ThresherK: Look up sweet gum.
Rob
Sycamore is Platanus and sweetgum is Liquidambar. The first photo, the one with the ‘fruits’/’nuts’, looks like a sweetgum to me.
satby
Love fall with all its colors, so thanks for a wonderful start to my morning, Uncle Ebenezer!
Ohio Mom
Every winter, I look at the bare trees and can’t picture what they look like with leaves. Thanks for the reminder photos.
ThresherK
@sab: Ahh. I’ve spent my whole life on the opposite coast, so…
Elizabelle
Love these. Thank you. That blue California sky.
sab
@Elizabelle: I like sweet gums a lot anywhere, but they do look a lot better under the blue sky than they do under our usual gray skies.
sab
@ThresherK: They aren’t native to Ohio, but they can survive this far north, so we plant them. I think they are native to the southeast as far north as Kentucky and Delawar, and west into Texas and Missouri.
Mo MacArbie
@sab: I dunno, bright sunshine often seems to wash out the fall colors for me, while on gray days the trees can seem to glow from within.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Elizabelle: The Southern California sky is kinda grey this morning, passing storm.
chopper
@sab:
they’re pretty to look at but the pollen drives me up the wall. that and stepping on the goddamn balls. (stepping on the goddamn balls!)
Achrachno
@UncleEbeneezer: No sycamores or Pistachia chinensis among the things in your photos. You were given a generic answer listing 3 of the most conspicuous fall color trees in S CA, but yours are all Liquidambar.
WaterGirl
Alain
Hey Alain, sorry to hear that. If you ever have trouble logging in, or trouble commenting on the site when not logged in, or with anything else, please let me know.
I can’t fix what I don’t know about.
A couple of other font pagers had trouble, and there was a specific reason for each that was easily resolved.
debbie
@Mo MacArbie:
On a sunny, cloudless day when walking under a tree full of red or yellow leaves, I look up through the leaves, and it’s like seeing stained glass. It’s beautiful.
Martin
Liquidambar trees are quite common here. They are relatively fast growing hardwood trees. (it’s a nice craft wood, btw – woodworkers: get to know your local tree clearing company) Their seed pods are a real pain in the ass though. They drop a million of them and they’re just hard enough round spiky balls to be a bit of a menace.
A lot of SoCal cities were built so rapidly that they went with a strategy of planting the fastest growing trees they could and then would replace them over time with slower-growing or more indigenous trees. You can spot the old farming regions by the miles long strip of old oak trees that separated farms or marked a road that cities incorporated. But the trees that were planted were various pines, liquidambar, eucalyptus. The pines and eucalyptus present a pair of problems now that they’re fully grown out – one, they catch on fire really fucking easily, and two, without sufficient water they get fragile and their limbs break, which now weigh a few hundred pounds and are 40′ in the air and likely overhang your fence, your car, the road, etc. Every storm sends a decent number of them crashing to the ground. Cities like mine which planted them in the tens of thousands are struggling to keep up with the maintenance and replacement now that we’re in a semi-perpetual drought, and it was a future expense that they never really budgeted for. Something they could ignore for decades, and now that everyone is old and rich they don’t want to have to suddenly pay for.
UncleEbeneezer
@Achrachno: I probably made a mistake in copy/pasting, since I wrote the comment super-early this am, before coffee etc. You can see CAFallColor post with more pics here. Their guy id’d the plants, and he seems to know his stuff.
sab
@ThresherK: I was walking my dog today at about 11 am and I finally got your joke that you posted at 7:30. Sorry.
Wallis Lane
I have two liquidambars in front of my house, grew from striplings, and now towering. They are beautiful in the fall, but a major pain in the butt, when my front lawn is ankle deep in prickly balls. Nothing you can do but rake and pick them up with gloved hands and throw them in the bin, handful by handful.