Fall foliage is the marquee window for Hudson Valley, Catskills, Adirondacks, Finger Lakes
— the four-week window the maples set on fire.
Not only on a wall.
“The marquee window opens at the top of the state in late September, when the Adirondack sugar maples turn first, and runs south through the Catskills and the Finger Lakes into the Hudson Valley by late October. Four weeks, four ranges, the same trees doing the same thing on slightly different schedules. Cold nights pull the green out and let the red and gold underneath.
Fall foliage is the marquee window for Hudson Valley, Catskills, Adirondacks, Finger Lakes, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The fall foliage corridor across upstate New York covers four landscapes that turn color on overlapping schedules. The Adirondack Park, at six million acres the largest park in the contiguous United States, peaks first in late September and early October. The Catskill Forest Preserve, about 700,000 acres in the southern part of the state, peaks in the first two weeks of October. The Finger Lakes region peaks in mid-October, and the Hudson Valley closes the window in late October.
The color comes from sugar maple, red maple, American beech, and yellow and white birch responding to shorter days and cooler nights. When chlorophyll production slows, the underlying carotenoids and anthocyanins show through: yellow and orange from the carotenoids, red and purple from the anthocyanins, set off by the brown tannins in the oaks. A wet summer followed by clear cold nights and sunny days produces the most saturated displays. The window in any one location is short, usually ten to fourteen days from first turn to drop.
New York State publishes a weekly foliage report from mid-September through early November, with regional peak forecasts and percent-of-turn estimates. The Adirondack High Peaks region is best caught the last week of September. Route 28 through the Catskills and Route 89 along Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes carry the mid-October peak. The Hudson Valley between Cold Spring and Rhinebeck, including the Walkway Over the Hudson at Poughkeepsie, holds color into the last week of October most years.