Red Maple Garden
A Japanese maple at the peak of its color, a stepping-stone path, a stone lantern and a still pond holding the tree’s reflection. Touch the water and a leaf comes down to it. Brush through the branches and they give way.
A slow garden
The maple sways slowly, leaves drift down one at a time, and the pond shows a small ring where one lands. Nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Call a leaf down
- Touch the pond, or press Drop a leaf. A leaf lets go from the branches above and comes down rocking and tumbling, and where it meets the water there is one small ring and a soft sound. Then it floats, drifting slowly to the right with the pond’s current.
- Brush through the branches
- Move your pointer across the crown and the branches near it give way in the direction you moved, then swing back over a second or two. The trunk and the thick limbs stay where they are.
- Raise the breeze
- Breeze runs from still air to a steady wind. The tips of the branches move most, groups of leaves swing together on their own slow rhythm, and gusts cross the garden from the left. More leaves come down when the wind picks up.
- Watch the reflection
- The maple in the pond sways with the maple above it, upside down, and the rings from a landing leaf ripple it for a few seconds before the water settles.
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/red-maple-garden/#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 a maple turns red
Yellow and orange are in a leaf all summer, hidden under the green. Red is different: in fall, as the green breaks down, many maples start making a new red pigment, anthocyanin, from the sugar still in the leaf. Bright, sunny days and cool nights make more of it, which is why some autumns are much redder than others. Many Japanese maples, like this one, were bred for it.
Why the ring is small
A maple leaf weighs a gram or less and comes down slower than you walk, so it barely dents the water: the ring it leaves is a fraction of a millimeter high. Ripples that short are driven mostly by surface tension rather than gravity, and water waves have a speed limit at the low end too: none travel slower than about nine inches a second.
About the sounds
Three recordings: leaves and quiet water in the garden, which gets louder with the Breeze slider, a leaf touching the pond, and the open air of the garden underneath. The landing sound plays when a leaf meets the water, 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.
