...associates to time of year when plants die and turn brownish, but also an imaginary place of fading memories, and a nostalgic or even melancholic state of mind: www.ipernity.com/tag/serola/keyword/17985

As a color, sepia has an interesting history. I found out artists have used sepia ink way before photography was invented. The name of the color comes from a species of cuttlefish called Sepia (Sepiidae). Because synthetic chemical colors were also invented in 1800 century, as did the photography, I suppose Sepia cuttlefish ink were never used for toning photography prints. Instead there are used chemicals like Sodium sulfide, Thiourea or Polysulfide to tone photographs into sepia color. And this was not done just to give a nice warm color for prints, but to make the prints last longer in archives.

Today people often see sepia toned prints and images as something old and nostalgic. But I often wonder what people in 1880's thought about sepia toned images. Did they saw them as "old", or more likely as something new and fashionable? One has to remember color photography was not yet invented* at that time.. So, sepia prints were just toned black and white prints.

*EDIT: Or was, but not yet used by wide audience: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography#Early_experiments
The first remarkable achievement on color photography was made by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky