November 2024 Backyard Bulletin

Cover photo by Jack McLeod

View the full edition at this link.

November is a tough month to distill. Truly, it's one of my favorite months of the year. Yet I feel some amount of logical dissonance in even writing that sentence. November is cold, dark, and defined in many ways by death or dormancy. The colors migrate from jubilant to muted; the sky changes from blue to gray. So why are some of my most favorite days of the year spent rambling in the low country in the last moments of fall? There are a number of possible reasons. One is that I love the catharsis brought on by a well-written sad song, and I think November serves up the landscape equivalent of your favorite sad song - that good kind of melancholy. Another is that there are fewer bright, eye-catching moments on the landscape, which begs your eye to instead appreciate the composition of the landscape as a whole and expand your observations to include textures, forms, and colors in relation to one another.

Bridger Layton, Education Programs Coordinator