garnet-hued jade

The south wall of my place has ten feet of windows, letting dramatic sunlight fall into the living room from dawn until dusk.  Plants love it and I love it -- with that much sun, the room is also the warmest spot in an extremely chilly apartment.  

This jade seedling was recently displaced from its side table to make room for a chocolate mint plant.  It landed on the ample windowsill and has seemed to be enjoying life -- though I can never be too certain about it, given that it looked like this in our first, happy year of coexistence:

(That little twig growing in the lower left of the terracotta pot was the sole survivor of the inexplicable leaf-dropping plague that hit Jade Mountain in 2009.  Evidently in the state of plague emergency I forgot to remove the purple retainer case from an otherwise flattering portrait of the plant in its last days . . . )

In its new windowsill home, the much-reduced jade is growing at a noticeable pace for the first time ever.  And as it's growing, it has started showing a red-violet tinge on the underside of its uppermost leaves.  The tinge has now become much darker than in the first photo above, taken only a few days ago.

At first I thought the plant was tricking me again, putting on a show of verdancy while sending out flares of warning from below.  From what I've gathered, however, this is how jades respond to lots of sunlight.  In its striking contrast of color, it looks as though the plant were reflecting the saturated tint of its red container, and communing with the fall leaves outdoors.

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autumn red & green

Outside one of my local bookstores.

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poppy & prothonotary

One of my favorite small books: Das kleine Blumenbuch - In vielen Farben.  The little flower book - In many colors.  Fifty-eight plates of offset prints reproduced from botanical images drawn by Rudolf Koch and cut in wood by Fritz Kredel.  Published in 1933 by the Insel-Bücherei, Leipzig.

The Insel-Bücherei was founded prior to the first world war, and from its inception sought to sell, at affordable prices, short works such as novellas, poetry collections, essays, and groups of illustrations.  The series has been hugely successful in its 98 years of existence -- this Little flower book has been reprinted at least 27 times.

The early paperboard covers featured geometrical designs, primarily bicolor, as far as I can tell. On the Kleine Blumenbuch's cover, I find the handmade look of the green stripes and the little red stars wonderfully appealing.  (The stars are more easily visible if you click on the image to enlarge.)  Nowadays, the covers have become more complex in both design and color schematics.  The image of the poppy shown above is one of two flowers in a pattern now adorning the latest edition of the Kleine Blumenbuch:

Koch and Kredel are interesting figures, with a collaborative history that began years before the publication of this little book.  Koch was in his last year of life when the Kleine Blumenbuch was printed; his student Kredel soon emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the Cooper Union and where his illustrations found wide recognition.

It turns out that yellow has infiltrated all but my very first post so far, though I've set out to focus on red-green phenomena.  Because this post is about wildlife in books, I thought I might conclude with a photo of this bright yellow migratory phenomenon -- a photo of wildlife near books -- too bright and handsome to exclude: the prothonotary warbler who till this weekend was making a temporary home outside the New York Public Library.

Photograph by Ardith Bondi, The New York Times.

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