Awash in a Colorful Landscape

California is a land of extremes, both temporally and spatially. And visually.
In much of low-elevation undeveloped California, the landscape is green from November to May. And green is an understatement. The grassy hills are so intensely green that your eyes get saturated with the color to the point where it doesn't seem real. The world is green if you look down and blue if you look up. It is an intense sensory experience. And in some places, you get the magical and majestic painted orange and blue and yellow colors of flowers added in the spring.

In much of high-elevation undeveloped California, the landscape is white from November to May. The world is blinding white if you look down, and brilliant blue if you look up. That is an equally intense sensory experience.



As the month of May turns to June, the white melts from the high elevations and the green dries out from the low elevations. The high elevations become varied colors for the summer, depending on where you are, but the low elevations turn blonde. I think blonde is the right color. Not quite golden, unless the late afternoon sun hits the grassy hills just right. Not yet brown, which happens later in the summer. And often the blonde is dappled with the dark green of oak woodlands, or bay groves, or conifers hugging the ravines and ridges.

It really is remarkable how incredible this transformation of the landscape is. Color transitions like these have huge impacts on the inhabitants of the land. This is one of the more obvious ways that the land becomes a part of us. Our brains are programmed with the map of where we live our lives, when we travel the same routes over and over again. The layout of the land becomes mental matter. But as the seasons change, the same thing happens to us. Our visual experience drenches our synapses, our brains awash in different colors as the seasons change, year after year, over and over again.

Green bottomlands below tawny hillsides.

This year, the low elevation landscape in the Bay Area didn't turn green until February. It was bright yellow-brown for so long, you forgot that it could get so green. Every time I went outside I was shocked, for about a month, until my brain adjusted to it. By early May, the south-facing slopes began to fade. Then around the weekend of May 24-25, many areas were no longer green--the 50% green, 50% blonde point seemed to be reached that weekend. Some north facing slopes were still as green as ever.

Then by early June, some lowlands managed to stay green while everything else was blonde. With almost five-foot high grasses in the lowlands. But on the hillsides, mules ear and other green plants made the blonde hills contain a lot more green than one would think.

Then, at the end of June, in an area burned three weeks before, here and there isolated green shoots and leaves persisted and sprouted among the blackened grasses.