November 16, 2011---Japanese maple

November belongs to Japanese maples. Everybody has already finished their fall foliage trips to the mountains when the Japanese maples say--yoo hoo, don't forget about me! My husband, painting on the roof today, had the most extraordinary view of the one I harvested this branch from today. This is just one small branchlet I brought into the  house to enjoy. Imagine the whole tree!!  The challenge in "arranging" it was to keep the branch horizontal, the way it appears on the tree outdoors. Oh where, or where, is an Ikebana container when you need one?  You can sort of see here how I solved the problem. I positioned a pin holder (the type that holds water) on a cant in another horizontal container; then I cut the Japanese maple stem on a sharp angle;  then I jammed it into the pinholder and pressed downward. (Easier to demonstrate than describe.) It's a jerry-rigged solution to an age-old problem--how to get water to a horizontal stem--but it works. As the light changes outdoors, so does the color and luminescence of the leaves on the windowsill.