The Rainy CitySeattle, one neighborhood at a time

Green Lake

Posted Aug 19, 2026

The One Red Tree

One tree on the far bank refusing to go quietly, a week or two before the light shuts down for the winter.

Green Lake in November seen through hanging birch branches in gold and orange, a single brilliant red tree on the far bank among dark conifers, the water flat and grey under a white overcast sky

Everything in this frame is on its way out. The birch is more branch than leaf, the sky has gone the flat white it stays until March, and the lake has stopped reflecting anything worth reflecting. Then there is that one tree on the far bank, holding a red you could find from the other side of the park.

I did not compose this so much as find a gap and shoot through it. The birch in the foreground is not framing the subject; it is most of the picture, and the red only works because you are looking past a hundred half bare branches to reach it. Move six feet either way and the gap closes.

November is when Seattle stops negotiating. The clear evenings that gave me the sun break off Shilshole and the low gold at Gas Works are finished by now, and what replaces them is five months of even, sourceless grey that is genuinely difficult to photograph and genuinely accurate to live in. A single saturated colour in that light does a lot of work.

Every Green Lake frame on this site so far comes from 2010: the swimming raft and a rowing eight in August, the float in October, this in November. I did not set out to document one lake across one autumn. Looking at the archive now, that is plainly what I was doing.