When is it all gonna go down?

In the lower Carolina Piedmont, the fall foliage color is seemingly painfully slow to manifest itself this year. Surprisingly, just a half-hour's drive north in the Catawba River valley, from southern Lake Wylie to the northern Lake Norman, there is much more understory and woodland-edge leaf color just 30 miles north.

Really the only color of note I've really noticed is the crusty gray-brown on begonias and mums from Monday morning's horribly-forecasted first hard frost. (Way to go, guys, you forecast 34 and EVERYONE gets down to 30 degrees).

So as I look forward to a fall leaf color peak in November, my floral interests in my rockery containers have sustained me thus far. This year I tried two fall-flowering crocus species. In the last week, they have