Golden Aspen Grove
A stand of quaking aspens at the height of fall color, with a mountain at the end of the trail. Their leaves never quite sit still. Shake the low branch, or run your pointer through the leaves and watch them turn.
Trembling leaves
Leaves turn quickly on their stems and catch the sun, each one small and on its own rhythm, and the branches sway a little. A leaf falls now and then. Nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Shake the low branch
- Tap the branch that reaches across the trail, or press Shake the branch. It dips and bounces at its own slow pace while its leaves flutter hard for a couple of seconds, and sometimes one lets go and falls to the trail. The rustle rests for six seconds after each shake, so it never turns into a racket.
- Stir the leaves
- Run your pointer through the leaves and the ones near it turn harder, as if you’d brushed past them. They settle again a second or so after you stop.
- Raise the breeze
- Breeze runs from almost still to a steady wind. Even near zero the leaves keep trembling a little, the way real aspens do. Higher up, gusts cross the grove from the left, the crowns sway, the leaves turn far enough to show their paler backs, and more of them come down.
- Watch one fall
- A falling leaf swings from side to side, quickest through the middle of each swing, and some tumble over as they go. One that falls further off passes behind the trunks nearer to you. When it lands it lies on the trail for a while before it’s lost among the others.
Use it as your wallpaper
Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.
Live link
https://whitescreen.tv/interactive-wallpapers/golden-aspen-grove/#wallpaper- On a computer desktop
- Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.
- On a TV or a spare screen
- Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.
- On a phone or tablet
- Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.
A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.
Why aspen leaves tremble
Most leaf stems are round. A quaking aspen’s is flat, and flattened side to side, so it bends easily one way and hardly at all the other. Air moving past the leaf twists it on that stem, and a breeze too light to stir the oak next to it sets a whole aspen trembling. The two sides of the leaf aren’t the same color, either: the back is paler, which is why a stand of aspens seems to flicker when the wind picks up.
One tree or many
A grove like this is often a single plant. Aspens spread by sending up new trunks from their roots, so a whole hillside can be one root system with thousands of trunks, all genetically the same and all turning the same shade in the same week. That’s why aspens tend to change color in patches. The dark eye shapes on the bark mark where lower branches died and dropped off as the tree grew.
About the sounds
Three recordings: aspen leaves fluttering, which gets louder with the Breeze slider, one close rustle of a branch for when you shake it, and the quiet open air of the valley underneath. The branch sound plays once per shake and then rests for six seconds.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
