It was a blast exploring and celebrating this wonderful season one colour at a time on our facebook and instagram pages. Thank you to everyone who participated by commenting and sharing photos as we worked our way through the rainbow! 🌈 If you didn’t get a chance to catch the Fall Colour Challenge on facebook, scroll down to see the original posts and then head outside and see what colours you can find!
We hope the Fall Colour Challenge inspired you to get outside and connect with nature. Download our Fall Colours Activity book for more outdoor activities!
#FallColourChallenge Gallery of photos submitted by you!
Thank you to everyone who sent in a photo. If you don’t see your photo here or would like to add a photo – please email it to Shannon at museum@mindenhills.ca 🙂
#FallColourChallenge posts
These posts were originally shared on our facebook and instagram pages. The Fall Colour Challenge was inspired by collections at Nature’s Place. We hope it encourages you to spend some time outside connecting with and learning about the outdoors.
Red
A red maple is an iconic symbol of Canada. Why do they turn red? As the days grow shorter and the nights colder, it becomes harder for leaves to gather the energy they need from the sun to photosynthesize. 🌳☀️🍃 Trees let go of their leaves and go into a dormant state to survive the winter. ☃️ Before the leaves drop, trees extract chloroplast – little green cells that absorb sunlight – to save it up for next spring. The leaves change colour as chlorophyll is replaced by other pigments like anthocyanin, which gives maples their brilliant red colour.
Orange
This vibrant mushroom is called ‘orange peel fungus’ because it looks like an orange peel! 🍊 Fall is prime mushroom season. Keep an eye out for a spectacular show of shapes and textures growing on trees and the forest floor. Free apps like Shroomify will help you identify fungi on your nature walks. But remember – don’t munch on a hunch! 🍄
Yellow
Ragweed and goldenrod are often mistaken for one another. Can you tell which one this is? Both are pollinators – but ragweed relies on the wind to spread pollen, as anyone with seasonal allergies can tell you. Goldenrod, on the other hand, doesn’t cause allergies and its nectar attracts butterflies 🦋🐛
Green
Ferns, ferns, fabulous ferns! Victorians were obsessed with ferns. Novelist Charles Kingsley coined the term ‘pteridomania’ meaning ‘fern fever’. Difficult to grow from spores, Victorians travelled by train to harvest ferns from the forest. They brought the ferns back to elaborate outdoor rockeries they built to display their fern collections. Ferns came to symbolize a romantic ideal of ‘wilderness’ as urbanization cut people off from nature in Victorian England. The motif was used to decorate almost every imaginable surface, from plates and furniture to fabrics and jewelry. Have you got anything with fern patterns in your home?
Blue
We have to admit that blue is a bit of a tricky one. But what could be more blue than a blue jay! Unlike many birds, male and female blue jays both have colourful feathers and it can be hard to tell the difference! Another thing you can count on to be blue is the sky. 🌬️⛅ In the 1780s, meteorologists Horace de Saussure and Alexander von Humboldt invented a device to measure the blueness of the sky. They used their hand painted cyanometer, which looks like a series of paint chips arranged in a circle, to track scientific observations about the sky. Saussure concluded, correctly, that the colour of the sky was linked to the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. 🌧️🌧️🌧️
Indigo and Violet
We thought ‘thistle do nicely’ for the last day of the Fall Colour Challenge. Thistles are native to Europe but thrive here in Canada. Their purple crowns add a flare of colour to highways, parking lots and fields – sometimes to the chagrin of farmers and gardeners. While purple is the most well known colour, thistles also come in yellow and white. They are said to be able to predict the weather, because the petals close up tight before it rains. 🌧️
Minden Hills Cultural Centre
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Minden Hills, Ontario
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