Unlike Japan's traditionally tranquil onsen, which overlook serene scenes of cherry blossoms or scarlet maples, Jigoku-Dani's baths have rugged primordial backdrops of bubbling geysers and steamy caves.
Imagine a fall without scarlet sugar maples.
Scarlet sugar maples and sweet gums will flank the orange waters of the most acidic pond, followed by yellow aspens and tulip poplars as the pH rises and finally by blue-green sycamores as the water clears.
I wondered how soon I could return, first in autumn to see big-toothed maples flashing scarlet, and again in spring when the tiny lavender and white Zion shooting star awakens and rockets from secret wet places.
The ice contrasted sharply with the deep alpine-blue sky, the scarlet and gold of maples, beech and birches, and the greens of spruce and fir that carpeted the base of the peaks.
But we were no longer in that world; we were in a golden forest of field maples, oaks and scarlet sumac near the village of Sainte-Agnès Sainte-Agnèsmiles north of Monaco, close to the Italian border.
Red maple - these leaves turn scarlet.
With the chill of the morning gone, I paused to strip off an outer layer of fleece and found myself standing in a scarlet cathedral formed by a thick stand of maple.
My brother and I would clamber around the rock garden, collect exotic maple leaves and gaze at the scarlet fish in the pond in front of Inverleith House before going in to look at paintings by Miró, Picasso and Matisse or to gawp at Duane Hanson's hyper-real figures of tourists, who also seemed to be admiring the view.
Among the popular smaller maples the hedge, or field, maple (A. campestre) and Amur, or ginnala, maple (A. ginnala) are useful in screens or hedges; both have spectacular foliage in fall, the former yellow and the latter pink to scarlet.
