Sycamore Grove Park

As seen in this and the previous post, California sycamore are at peak both in northern and southern California. I’d asked East Bay color spotter Salil Bhatt to visit Sycamore Grove Park in Livermore, and he reports the sycamore as slightly past peak, noting they were probably their best during Thanksgiving week or the week prior.

Southern California sycamore are trailing by a week, which is worth noting for future visits.

Note the distinctive multi-stemmed, weathered trucks of California sycamore. At perfection, they are sculptural in form. The leaves depicted in these images are uniformly golden, though other examples in the Santa Monica Mountains NRA have combined burnt sienna, gold, yellow and raw umber, wonderously.

Salil reports that, “Fall has progressed rather quickly over the Thanksgiving weekend in the East Bay. As late as Thanksgiving day, the colors were just cresting peak and when I got back from my weekend trip – many of the trees had already dropped their leaves. The remaining have leaves that have taken on a more muted brown. There is still color to be found, particularly in the native cottonwood and some oak species but the area as a whole is rapidly approaching past peak.