Figure 1 – The common milkweed along Little Fresh Pond, Fresh Pond Reservation, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

In Massachusetts, we are well into the transition from late summer to early autumn. We have had glorious dry sunshine, cool nights, and medicinally warm days.  The colors are slowly changing, and you have only to look closely and see the subtle shades of color that define this season. Indeed, fall is fractal in nature. The range of color occurs on all levels. You have only to look.

I have been intrigued and watching the milkweed pods along the shore of Little Fresh Pond, in Cambridge. They have just started to pop.  They conjure up memories of the late summers of my childhood – strange alien plants. Yes, this sensation of the alien was driven by the scifi movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,1956, ” which in turn was driven by the mid-century communist scare. Wandering around the grassy areas of the Catskills you would find them – compact pods that would explode into little cotton balls of seed.

Milkweeds once were prolific in the American Midwest, but they were decimated by herbicides.  This in turn threatened the population of monarch butterflies whose larvae feed exclusively on them. Now in places like the Fresh Pond Reservation where there are projects to restore and save the monarchs, part of that is the repopulating of the milkweeds. The specimen of Figure 1 are in a little fenced in area by the dog beach on Little Fresh Pond. I like the color and the chiaroscuro lighting but am a bit disappointed by the sharpness. My camera is always set for birds and as a result the f-number was set at 4.5, which gives a rather shallow depth of focus.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 75 mm Aperture Priority AE Mode, ISO 1600, 1/4000th sec. at f/4.5 with no exposure compensation.