Look for Fall Colors in Canyon Lake

Fall season means cooler days and nice cool evenings. A good time to enjoy the outdoors and the natural beauty of the area surrounding Canyon Lake. Flowering annuals and perennials in your gardens are in bloom and leaves are starting to turn colors and fall.

While our fall colors cannot match what is seen in the Northeast or the Rockies, if you know where to look and are quick about it you will be rewarded.

Our erratic weather patterns and high winds will determine how long the leaves stay attached before they dry out and blow away.

Fall Tree Colors

Under the right conditions, look for brilliant fall colors from our Canyon Lake native deciduous trees:

• Reds and oranges from red oaks, maples, sumacs and cypress.
• Yellows from cedar elms, escarpment black cherries, walnuts, maples, chinquapin oaks, ash, Carolina buckthorn and sycamores.

Fall Shrubs and Grasses Colors

While our native trees provide large individual masses of color against our evergreen escarpment live oaks and mountain cedar, focus your eyes and camera on smaller shrubs and grasses as well. If you know where to look you will see:

• Reds and oranges from rusty blackhaws, buttonbush, Virginia creeper and even poison ivy. Bushy bluestem and switch grasses also provide red/brown color. On WR our copper/brown/chartreuse multicolored star is little bluestem waving in our prairie grasslands. But no other grass can match the brilliance of the pink seed heads of gulf muhly backlit by sunlight.
• Yellows from inland sea oats and Indian grass.
• Whites and silvers from lindheimer muhly seed heads.