Southeastern Massachusetts is technically New England, but it is very different from the Vermont-style New England. This is especially true for foliage.
Much like how one doesn't go to Vermont to watch an ocean storm, one also tends to avoid Southeastern New England when planning foliage drives. God planned it that way. It's the Berkshire's revenge for not having beaches.
It's tough to blame someone for this. You would be much better served going to New Hampshire for their peak foliage season than you would be going to Plymouth on Halloween.
No offense to Cranberry County, but we have several factors working against us when it comes to foliage. With the Vermont/ocean storm comparison, it's fairly simple: Vermont doesn't have an ocean. With SE Massachusetts, it's more complex.
For starter's, we have the wrong kind of trees. While it gets worse the closer you get to the coast, the main problem is that our dominant tree is the Pine. Pine trees are cool, but they don't turn red like a Maple tree does.
Part of that problem is the sandy soil, part of it is the higher coastal winds. Pines grow in sandy soil, and pine needles catch less wind (and take down less tree branches) than trees which have broader leaves. Even in optimal conditions, we have difficulty providing a God Shot for a leaf-peeper.
We also have the wrong time of year for peak foliage. Vermont and Maine peak in September. Cape Cod peaks after Halloween. That is a month and change of October weather, which we're just about to get to.
We have the wrong weather for fall foliage. SE Massachusetts has almost no chance of making it to Halloween without a rain/wind event that blows the leaves (and especially the broad, colorful ones) off of the trees. Generally, by Devil's Night, you need to look to the ground if you want to see colorful leaves in Falmouth.
Don't believe me? Look!
However, all is not lost. You can get your peep on in Cranberry County. You just have to know where to look.
You're not going to get any sweeping mountain views. Our lakes tend to be surrounded by pine as well, at least the ones I visited. SE Massachusetts foliage viewing is best done more by marathon driving where you look for little bursts of color.
If foliage were football, New Hampshire would be a dynasty team like the 60s Packers or the 70s Steelers. Massachusetts, she's more like a Pop Warner team that tries really hard and makes a cool play now and then. This is especially true the further east one goes.
We apologize for that, and will try to make up for it with beach days and cranberry bogs. We want you happy when you're here.
We tried a few different Peep Drives. We tend to go Rural when we Peep, although we some some excellent but not-that-nature-looking red trees outside a Shaw's Supermarket. Here are the basic routes we took, always starting from Buzzards Bay:
- Route 195 to Fall River (Fall River isn't really known for their foliage, but we needed some Lizzie Borden House shots for the Halloween article), then Route 81 or something into Tiverton, RI (Cranberry County crosses state lines now and then, when it suits us), then Route 6 back to B-Bay.
- Route 495 to Route 105, which we followed into Halifax, then Route 106 to Kingston, followed by 53 and 3A to the North Hill Nature Reserve in Duxbury, followed by Rte 3A back to Bourne, and Rte 6 back to Buzzards Bay.
- Route 495 to Rte 58 in Hanson, then a sort of Route 27/36/14 mix where we were mostly scoping out numerous Pembroke lakes, then 3 South back to the Cape.
I should add that we are providing a valuable public service. There's a storm coming, and that storm will probably be All She Wrote for foliage in Massachusetts. We didn't have much foliage left after the last storm, and this storm looks to be equal or greater. The season will be over tonight, when the winds pick up.
We'll do a storm article after the storm starts, we're too new to be breaking news to anyone yet. Maybe after we get some followers...
Anyhow, we were out as late as Friday afternoon taking pics, so we got the grand finale for a leaf peeper in this part of the state.
If we were Maple Syrup County Magazine, you'd be much better off today. We aren't, however. We'll make up for it with ocean storm photos tonight, I promise. I'll head out to a north-facing beach at high tide, see what I can do with a phone-cam.
We're not really awesome writers, nor are we awesome photographers. Our chief skill is being centrally located, having free time, and our willingness to drive into the heart of the story. Leaf-peeping is an easy-if-lengthy process, but storm chasing has put me near death more than once.
It's that kind of mindset that eventually leads us to a Black Tree.
Note the high tech camera work visible in the rear view mirror. That tree was actually blacker IRL than it came out in the pic, but that's how the cookie crumbles, kids. The leaves will probably blow off of it tonight.
But enough talk of Storms and Black Trees. We are here to see color, not the absence of light.
Before I forget, the pics, in order from the top, are Duxbury, Hanson , Marion, Middleboro, Monponsett, Carver, and Monponsett one more time.
This pic below is, and I'm working from memory here, Plympton.
We'll be doing a whole article or three on the cranberry harvest, we only have that shot in there because i was playing with photo editing.
Plympton is one of my favorite towns. It has nothing at all to offer aside from peace and quiet. When I was teaching, I gave the kids a Mapquest assignment to find the most isolated house in what we are now calling Cranberry County. Several of the kids, independent of each other, drew their focus onto some farmer in Plympton who was a mile from his neighbors... who, I might add, were pretty isolated themselves.
Plympton has some cool farms, which I'd take my ghetto students to when I wanted them to see cows or corn growing. There are about 10 kids (adults now) from Cambridge and Roxbury who have disproportionate knowledge about an isolated cow town that they most likely will never visit or encounter again. It's probably for the best.
This is a tree from Bournedale, It's in front of a beautiful lake, but you'll never see it because the tree is on a treacherous corner and there is nowhere safe to stand near it... short of inviting ourselves into someone's yard. I shot this out of the window of a moving car.
Sometimes, a journalist has to work from a car. This is especially true when writing Fall Foliage articles. We'd rather give you a wide-ranging tour of the region, rather than one where we walk a lot in a single forest. We tried that in Duxbury, and saw not one color aside from green.
That's even more true for snow pictures, as we'd have to work a lot to cover 100 yards in a blizzard. We'd also kill the camera, which is what we did in that blizzard last year. That's why you see Jessica shooting a phone out the window in the Black Tree shot up above.
Our two upgrades will be a waterproof camera and an old-school Jeep Cherokee for the beach work. That's probably going to have to wait until Christmas, however.
Once we get better gear, we'll go further North for our leaf peeping. However, I love this corner of the state, you just have to work a little harder.
We did go crazy with the cam in Bourne. We're based in Bourne, and we're generally armed with a camera as we move around our daily business.
Bourne, and especially the village of Bournedale, are very good for foliage. We'll finish up there.
- SB
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