Bay Area Beauty

Mountain View is peaking. Along its streets, vibrant displays of buttery Gingko biloba, ruby maple, chartreuse sycamore and burnt-orange Liquidambar have lit the town. MV began as an agricultural community, but today is best known as the headquarters for  Google, which Vishal Mishra used to deliver these images of his hometown.

Mountain View is where William Shockley established the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, which was the genesis for Silicon Valley. Included among its tech giants are the NASA Ames Research Center, Intuit, LinkedIn, Samsung, Microsoft, 23andMe, Alphabet Inc., Unicode Consortium, Symantec and Synopsys.

The town has a mild climate with an average high in the 60s and 70s and only 64 rainy days each year. With such a clement environment, just about anything can grow there.

Its native deciduous foliage includes blue and valley oak, bigleaf maple, box elder, white alder, blue and black elderberry, red osier and brown dogwood, California buckeye and various willow, though landscaped trees provide the dominant fall color.