A celebration of trees: October: Autumn

I think it was Dr Seuss’s Lorax who said “I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.” Well, this month I don’t need to speak for the trees – their profound autumn beauty speaks very eloquently for itself, no words required.

This has been autumn in Cardiff.

Do you love trees? Then you might like to look over my previous months’ celebrations of trees by clicking on the following links: January (one particular favourite), February (about lime avenues), March (on the subject of forests), April (about the greening of the trees in the British springtime), May (on the New Zealand pohutukawa), June (about some of Auckland’s most notable trees), July (honouring ten wondrous trees from my international travels), August (following pathways through forests and woodlands), and September (about dead trees that have been given new life)  .

10 things I love about autumn

Autumn and spring are my favourite seasons. I think it’s because of the changes we see during those months, changes in the colours of our world, in the life all around us.

So, what are my ten reasons for loving autumn so much?

1) Colour

The colours in the landscape, and I don’t just mean the trees. The diversity of colour in the berries is astonishing and they provide such a welcome burst of brightness on grey cloudy days.

2) Leaves

There’s nothing more fun than kicking your way through a great drift of crunchy autumn leaves and there’s nothing more peaceful than sitting quietly beneath a tree, watching and listening to the leaves fall.

3) Homemade soup

As the days get shorter and the temperatures cooler, my mind turns to comfort food, and there’s nothing better than a big bowl of homemade soup and a chunky piece of bread. And it’s healthy and nutritious!

4) Knitting

My hands get too warm to knit in the summer months but come the cooler evenings and I’m reaching for my knitting. Yes, I did get my stash of wool freighted all the way from New Zealand when I moved to Wales. Yes, I have knitting in progress: finishing off the sleeves of this jumper I started last winter, and the rib started for a fairisle vest.

5) Scarves

Of course, I wear scarves all year round but, in winter, they’re more of a cosy necessity than an optional extra. At current count I have 21 – and these come from such diverse countries as India, Cambodia (several), Peru, Morocco, Scotland (family tartan, of course!), Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand – but I need more!

6) Nutty squirrels

The grey squirrels in the parks and woodlands here are going crazy at the moment, madly scrabbling about trying to find and secrete away as many nuts as possible to tide them over the coming winter months. Their antics are laugh-out-loud funny!

7) Slippers

When you have slippers as delightful as these, how can you not like the cooler evenings when they come out of the wardrobe and on to the tootsies? I think they’re hedgehogs, but that’s open to interpretation.

8) Fungi forays

Though I’ve always loved to eat mushrooms, my appreciation for non-edible fungi has only really sprouted in the last few years. Like the berries and the leaves, they add wonderful colour to the autumn landscape. Their huge range of size, shape and colour is astonishing … and they can be frustratingly difficult to identify!

Waterbirds like this Shoveler are among the most common migrants

9) Migrating birds

With the changing seasons, Britain sees an outpouring of some species and a huge influx of others, so the skies and the fields and the estuaries and the wetlands are suddenly home to many different types of birds. As an added bonus, this is also the time the starlings perform their wondrous murmurations, those aerial dances where thousands of birds fly in incredible synchronised formations.

10) Robins

And finishing with another bird because this little cutie deserves a mention all of its own. They’re friendly, they’re cheerful, they’re cute, they herald Christmas – which may or may not be a good thing. As the leaves fall from the trees, they seem to reappear in great numbers – were they hiding there all along or are they returning from their summer holidays?

That’s my list – what’s yours?

Cheshire: The changing seasons

‘Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.’ Poet Stanley Horowitz wrote that 18-word poem more than 30 years ago and, since it was published in the November 1983 Reader’s Digest, his words have apparently been quoted more than 1,630,001 times on websites around the world (and that count was back in November 2011). Well, Mr Horowitz, I’m adding one more website to your list because I truly appreciate the wisdom of those 18 words.

One of the things I noticed most during my recent return to Cheshire was the late summer lushness everywhere I walked. And the differences, when I compared what I was photographing in early September 2015 with the images I had taken during my previous visit, the six months from late autumn November 2014 to early spring in April 2015, were quite simply phenomenal.

The moat around Holford Hall, in winter, spring and summer

Now, some of you might think, ‘So what? It’s the seasons. It happens every year.’ Well, let me tell you that, when you come from a more temperate climate like that in Auckland, New Zealand, where the seasonal changes are much less noticeable, the variations in the seasons in Britain are nothing short of sensational.

Those of you who live in harsh climates, where the seasonal changes are very pronounced, probably take all this for granted. Well, you shouldn’t! You really need to open your eyes and appreciate the beauty that each passing season brings. Admire the etching of a single winter-bare tree in a snow-touched landscape. Cherish the miraculous watercolour of wildflowers emerging in springtime. Applaud summer’s brash and brazen oils painted in bold strokes upon the earth. And marvel at the miraculous mosaic of autumn trees.

As Spanish philosopher, novelist and poet George Santayana famously wrote, ‘To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.’

I hope my photos give a taste of what I’m talking about …

Autumn, winter and summer in a cultivated woodland near Pickmere

Spectacular autmn colours, winter (with partly frozen lake) and summer at Tatton Park, Knutsford

Winter, spring growth, then summer lushness on a track leading up to a railway bridge near Holford Hall

My favourite: winter snows, spring daffodils, then summer leafiness at the lime avenue at Great Budworth

Autumn in Cheshire

I was hoping to arrive in time to see the last of the autumn colour here in Cheshire before the winter wind and rain blows it all away, and I’ve been lucky. In just a week, here’s what I’ve been privileged to see, accompanied by the thoughts of others who’ve appreciated autumn in their turn.

Dunham Massey

‘No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.’ John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose

Tatton Park

‘I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks

Delamere Forest

‘There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.’ Joe L. Wheeler

Dunham Massey

‘Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.’ Jim Bishop

Neumann's Flash, Northwich Community Woodlands

‘The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.’ Henry Beston

 

Tatton Park

‘Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.’ Samuel Butler

Northwich Community Woodlands

‘The tints of autumn...a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.’ John Greenleaf Whittier

Tatton Park

‘And I rose / In rainy autumn / And walked abroad in a shower of all my days...’ Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems

Dunham Massey

‘Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies.’ Sharon Kay Penman, Time and Chance

Dunham Massey

‘Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt.’ William Allingham

Delamere Forest

‘Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.’ George Eliot

Dunham Massey

‘For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.’ Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America.