Winter Light

Glade in the mist

As the seasons change, autumn brings not just a change in colour, but also a change in the quality of the light. Summer light is bright and harsh, and the golden hour is either very early in the day or very late. As winter approaches it changes completely – now the sun is low all the time, with long shadows and a wonderful pastel, watery quality. The golden hour is at a civilised hour. The weather is interesting too – storms, clouds racing across the sky, and by way of contrast, perfectly still mornings and evenings with frost on the grass and mist rising in the river valley.

Don’t get me wrong – I love all the seasons, including summer – but winter light is probably the most photogenic.

These are just a few shots of the woods in winter light – low light through the trees, mist, stormy skies and mist rising at sunset. Perfect!

Mist rising at sunset

Mist through the trees

Storm approaching

Ray of light with stormy sky behind

Mist through the trees

Mist and golden trees

Main path in the mist

In Praise of Restraint – Autumn in the Woods

Gentle yellows and greens of oak woodland in Autumn

Gentle yellows and greens of oak woodland in Autumn

Dew on the woodland floor on an autumn morning

I keep going on about Autumn, but I make no apology for it.  It is my favourite time of year.  The spring flowers are magical, and the Summer meadows glorious, but there is nothing quite like the fungal smell of autumn in the woods.  What I particularly like is how oak trees don’t “shout” about autumn like many other species.  Maple and cherry have been particularly loud this year – flaming orange and yellow, and stunning reds lighting up the trees along the roadside.  Almost all the trees in the ancient part of our woods are oak, which takes a more restrained approach.

Some are still quite green right now, others have a gentle yellow tinge, and others simply go brown at the edges and fall.  Against this restrained backdrop, the yellow of field maple, willow and hazel, and the shocking reds of spindle, cherry and some rowan leaves, as well as a gentle pinks and purples of elder can stand out.  Betty’s wood in particular with its greater variety of young saplings shines out in orange, red and yellow against the darkness of the old oak trees.  Oak provides a pastel and gentle canvas against which the other species can stand out.

Yellows in Betty’s Wood standing out against the green oak and ash

Cherry leaves turn orange red in Betty’s Wood

On the forest floor, things are changing too.  It hasn’t been very wet this year and the fungi are yet to get going, but we have seen some amazing hyphae on one of our fallen logs.

Fungal hyphae form a net on a fallen log.

The lichens are also coming into their own, forming a miniature forest with the various species of moss, topped off by the fallen leaves covered in dew in the early morning.  The grass also shines with dew, giving the woods an autumnal feel, and a softness that is missing at other times of the year.

Dew on a fallen oak leaf on a bed of lichen and moss

A tiny forest of moss and lichen

The leaves are gently falling now and autumn is in full swing.  There is no sadness – nature is beautiful all year round.  Winter is round the corner, and with it the milky low sunshine and stark beauty and form of our lovely trees.  The turn of the seasons is something I really treasure.  For now, I will enjoy the restrained beauty of an oak woodland in the fall.

 

Evening Light

Betty’s Wood in Evening light

There is something really special about evening light in the late autumn.  The trees are in their rich colours, but still have their leaves.  The light is warm, but is starting to have that watery quality that appears during the winter.  When the sky is clear and the weather is cold, there is something luminous and beautiful about the scenery that is not seen at any other time of year.

In Betty’s Wood, we have a lot of young trees starting to really grow up and strut their stuff.  Three years ago, they were just little 60cm whips.  Today some are over 2 metres tall, and as well as beautiful autumn colours, they are also producing fruit and berries for the birds, and catkins for spring pollen.  The lush pond vegetation is dying back, and the still cold air provides perfect reflections in the evening light.

Here are a few pictures of our beautiful woods in the autumn evening light, taken over the last couple of weeks.

Sunset over Betty’s Wood Ponds

Sunset over Betty’s Wood Ponds

 

Sunset over Betty’s Wood Ponds

Teasel at Sunset

Golden birch leaves

Betty’s Wood in Evening Light

Red berries and raindrops

Guellder rose berries and leaves

Guellder rose berries and leaves

Autumn Colours

Spindle Berries

Autumn has started in earnest at the woods, with spectacular colours mingled with green and yellow, a brown tinge on the oak leaves, and acorns clattering to the ground all over.  The colour of the spindle berries in the hedge in Betty’s Wood is unreal, with the clashing colours of bright pink and orange shining like a beacon in the gloomy and rainy weather.

Guelder rose leaves and berries

Another spectacular resident of our hedge is guelder rose.  The berries are now a shiny red, almost metallic in colour, and the leaves have turned the same red.  Red on red makes for another beam of light in the gloom of the autumn rains.

Field Maple

Field maple is also turning a wonderful mixture of colours in our hedge and in the few trees we have in the main wood.  Red, orange, brown, green and yellow in one leaf, autumn in miniature.  All the maples seem to turn the most amazing colours, and although we no longer have sycamore in our woods, the ornamental trees around the town are a beautiful rich golden yellow at the moment, waiting for the autumn gales to strip the leaves from the trees to form a golden carpet instead.

Spindle berries

Autumn is my favourite time of year for many reasons:  the colours, the outrageous surplus of frutifulness, the restless departure of one set of migratory birds and the arrival of another set of migratory birds – the fieldfares arriving as the swallows depart.  We love autumn, and I hope to post a lot more autumnal photos over the next few weeks.

Autumn Fungi and Lichens

Early in the morning, a tiny toadstool

An autumnal feel to the weather this week, with cold temperatures, fog in the morning and now strong winds and rain.  But there is always a plus-side to the changing of the seasons, and one of the best of all is the appearance of fruiting bodies on the fungi and lichens in the wood.  There are just a few fungi around in the summertime, but autumn is when they really get going.

I use the words fruiting bodies intentionally:  fungi are present as complex webs of threads known as mycelium all year round.  The mycelium of a fungus can be extraordinarily large in a woodland setting, sometimes spreading among a whole root system, or several root systems, or even a whole woodland.  The mycelium can be extremely important, part of a system that effectively extends the roots of the trees.  The fungi are organisms that feed on decaying organic matter, breaking it down and returning the nutrients to the soil.  This is a vital role in the forest ecosystem.  The decaying matter can be in the form of small particles in the soil, larger lumps of organic matter on the surface of the woodland floor, or even huge fallen trees and logs.  The mycelium of the fungus is tiny, microscopic even, but so important, and yet almost invisible.  These tiny hair-like webs perform their task underground, under the leaft litter, on the woodland floor and below, returning nutrients to the soil, and in many cases the fungi work in a very close and harmonious relationship with the tree roots, as mycorrhiza, so the tree can benefit rapidly from the nutrients released by the fungi, while the fungi benefit from sugars and starches produced by the trees.  A symbiosis.

Tiny toadsthool emerging from the grass

The fruiting bodies we see appear only when the fungus is reproducing.  They are the toadstools or mushrooms of the woodland, appearing in many different forms:  traditional toadstools, tiny fairy toadstools, bracket fungi of all sizes and shapes, little club-like fungi, large jelly-ear fungi on the surface of trees, clusters of toadstools emerging from rotting trees and logs.  Just bewildering.  There are fungi that last for week, and fungi that last for just a single day.  All shapes, colours and sizes.

Lichen fruiting bodies

As well as fungi, some of the lichens are fruiting at this time of year, some forming little cup-like structures bearing spores, others forming little club-like structures.  Lichens are amazing organisms – again, a symbiosis of a fungus with algae or cyanobacteria, the former providing a structure, water and nutrients, and the latter producing sugars by photosynthesis.  They are amazing things, growing on rotting logs, forming a tiny ecosystem in their own right with a variety of mosses and fungi.  One major reason why rotting wood should be left on the woodland floor and not tidied up.  They are vital in the rotting process, and in turn provide habitat for insects such as beetles, flatworms, roundworms and many other creatures at the base of a complex ecological web.

There will be many more fungi emerging over the next few weeks, and I hope to capture more of them,  but these are some photos taken at the weekend of the first ones.

Fungi on log

Detail on toadstool

Tallest toadstool only 30mm, in our path.

Lichen fruiting body

Lichen fruiting bodies

Lichen fruiting body and Moss

Lichen fruiting bodies

First Autumn Colour

Guelder rose in autumn colours

Tomorrow is the last day of summer, and it has been an unexpectedly long, dry and warm summer after the very long and late winter, and almost completely absent spring.  The first signs of autumn were evident in the wood the other night, with the leaves of the guelder rose changing colour, and the bright berries shining out at dusk.  The blackberries, wild blackcurrants, elderberries and rowan berries are also ripening, we have a good crop of apples and crab apples, and it is a mast year for acorns.  These are just a couple of shots of the coming autumn plenty – I hope there are plenty more to come.

Ripe bramley apples

Autumn in the Woods

At the risk of sounding repetitious, autumn is my favourite time of year.  Oak trees aren’t usually colourful in autumn.  Many years they simply go from green to brown to fallen in a very short space of time.  But this year, we have had some amazing colours, enhanced by the fact that the young trees in Betty’s Wood are now head high, and are also changing colour.  We have some stunning colour from our field maple, rowan, birch, sweet chestnut, cherry and other trees in Betty’s Wood, as well as our beautiful oaks, which this year are turning wonderful shades of yellow, orange and brown.

It isn’t just the trees that enhance this time of year:  we have had a wonderful display of fungi, too – on logs, on the woodland floor, on twigs, on wood-chippings – a display of colour, shapes and amazing delicacy.

The birds are also active, looking for seeds and berries.  No fieldfares yet, but our flock of linnets are back in Betty’s Wood, eating the seeds from our wildflowers, skimming along at head height, chittering their happy little song.  The buzzard chick is still asking its parents for food, although it is fully grown, ranging over the fields and over Betty’s Wood, perching at the woodland edge.

The squirrels are busy burying their caches of acorns and seeds, and the jays are screeching as they too cache food for the winter.  Mice and voles are everywhere, building little nests in our spare boots that we leave at the woods for emergencies, as well as under the bonnet of the tractor and in many other not-always-appropriate places.

Our wood-drying shed is now finished, so we can dry our firewood much more readily with the aim that we can sell bundles at our open days next year.  We are preparing to do a bit more coppicing, and to do some thinning in our plantation area to let more light into the woodland floor – our bit of harvesting, but harvesting that will renew the trees and stimulate growth next year.

I love autumn because it is time of hope – things are dying back, but we are storing things away for the winter to see us through the dark days.  Things are dying but in amongst all the death and decay are signs of renewal – seeds are sown, the leaf litter provides a habitat, a home, material for nests, nutrients for the trees and soil.  Nature is taking a breath after the frantic activity of spring and summer, taking stock, marshalling its resources to have another go next year.   Nature’s breath of beauty, wonder, colour, harvesting, storing, renewal and hope.  I love it!