DATE: Saturday, November 8, 1997            TAG: 9711080326

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell 

                                            LENGTH:   52 lines

FALL FOLIAGE IS MARCHING TO DIFFERENT DRUM MAJOR THIS SEASON

Thus far in Tidewater Virginia, the fall foliage has been spotty. In some places the show was gone before it got here.

In the side yard, the huge Norway maple should be ablaze by this time, a rotund glowing jack-o'-lantern. Instead, it has been putting on colors in leafy patches and then shedding them as if dissatisfied with a season's outfit.

She can't make up her mind exactly what to wear, flinging gear all over the floor. At no time this season has that maple been the usual great conflagration of flame-orange.

Flanking the brick walk out front, two towering ginkgo trees reach for the sky, trying to escape the shade of the grove, stretching to catch the sun. Only now are the slim twins beginning to turn lemony yellow here and there, downright dispirited about their costume.

Across the field, alone in the sun, is a ginkgo, a full, perfect triangle whose leaves ordinarily become overnight as bright as newly minted florins to surprise the eye of passers-by. And just as suddenly, she drops all the leaves at once, spilled gold in a circle at her feet.

But now, long past the proper hour, that ginkgo remains green as if she doesn't know it's time to dress for the ball, morose Cinderella with no godmother to transform her.

In the flat land are no hills that become palettes for a riot of colors. Only near Williamsburg does the land begin to get to its feet and show trees to their best advantage.

Coming down a long hill on I-64 that precedes the longer one that climbs to the exit into Williamsburg, a driver may look to the right across sprawling Queens Creek threading a riverbed of cattails and sedge. On the shore, crowding the waterline, is a bulwark of dark pines. Just behind is a band of brilliant hickories in full yellow regalia.

There ought to be a distinct deep-shining shade of paint termed yellow hickory. Seen across the wide creek they are massed, just tall enough to top the pines in front of them.

That broad heaving of hickories, a yellow tumult above the green pines, is a mob shouting and waving its fists, bent on pushing out the pines.

The contest between pines and hardwoods as to which shall dominate the forest continues, a pitched battle along the highway's banks, nearly to Richmond. Evergreens have the edge, but patches of deep-hued hardwoods keep breaking through in reds, purples, yellows, orange and Indian bronze.

Deep into the Piedmont beyond Richmond, pines fall back until only the long, silent, rich tapestries line the hills, fit for Joseph's coat of many colors.

One day - next fall, surely - I'll pull off the road and walk through the woods into the thick of that clangorous yellow clan of hickories.

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