A Saturday walk around the patch

Given that it's the first nice day in a while (though very windy, thanks to "Storm Brian"), we set out for a walk around town this afternoon. Aylsham is quite an old market town, already in existence by the time of the Doomsday Book (1086). The surrounding countryside is much changed though, even in the short time we've been living here, with whole swathes of fields and forests disappearing under hundreds of new houses.

The leaves are definitely starting to fall.

 Japanese Larch cones -- or so my botanist husband tells me!

 The old St. Michael's Hospital (and before that, the town's workhouse), now apartment buildings

 Plenty of Cotoneaster berries around this year. The Waxwings will be happy.

St. Michael's Church, which has stood in the center of Aylsham since the early 14th century.

 The lichens on the tombstones are amazing. You'll undoubtedly be seeing more of them!

A cluster of Lycoperdon (species undetermined) along Marriott's Way

Autumn colors

The leaves are starting to turn here now; I took these along Jewel's Lane, on our walk into town for a pub lunch. It's a soft change -- the greens drifting slowly to yellows, with here and there a maroon to provide some contrast. I miss the fiery oranges and scarlets of North America's maples.

 Field Maple

Japanese Maple

Fireworks

Heading for the airport again today, I was struck by how quickly buds are now breaking on some of the trees here. The maples are suddenly scarlet, already foreshadowing their fall splendor.

A walk in the woods

The oak forest above the Savegre valley in Costa Rica must surely be one of the most beautiful forests in the world. The trees are huge, hung with orchids and vines and bromeliads, and interspersed with the small, densely leaved native bamboos. The air smells clean, fresh, earthy. Soft mounds of green moss carpet the ground, liberally sprinkled with the scattered carcasses of fallen leaves. It's a habitat that's beginning to disappear, given the relentless pressure of development in the area. And for those of us who need the wild places, that loss will be a damned shame.

Stumped

When we first moved into our house, the stump of an old tree stood sentinel in the side yard. Our pest control company suggested we remove it, but we haven't, instead leaving it for the creatures we share our yard with. For years, a female Black Rat Snake climbed to the top every time she was ready to molt. She'd hook herself onto a jagged bit near the top of the stump and wriggle out of her old skin, leaving it draped like some diaphanous veil. Ants and spiders and beetles and woodlice and probably the occasional termite have lived here, and slowly the stump is disappearing, crumbling and decaying back into the earth.

Winter tree

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.” 
― Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam

Barking

We have a Silver Maple tree outside our kitchen window. I'd guess it was planted about the same time as the house was built (i.e. more than 80 years ago) and it's definitely beginning to show its age. It's dropping branches -- sometimes quite large branches -- with mildly alarming regularity now, and its canopy shows more and more balding patches among the leafy arms. But the trunk is still thick and strong and covered with a burgeoning blanket of lichens.

Forest primeval

[Sorry for the delay in posting my Guyana pictures/diary. Internet connections here are very slow and uploading even small picture files is problematic.]

The Iwokrama Forest is amazingly huge -- nearly a million acres in the green heart of Guyana. From the top of Turtle Mountain, a 984-foot mountain in the park, we gazed out across a sea of treetops which stretched to the horizon. The range of greens was phenomenal: hunter, olive, lime, chartreuse, kelly, emerald, malachite, teal and a thousand other subtle shades, with the pink and yellow splashes of scattered canopy flowers as highlights. Birds called, insects whirred and chirped and squeaked, the breeze whispered through the trees around us, but -- other than the sound of our voices -- there was not a single human-made sound to hear. How many places on earth can you say that about?

Sunset bird

Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter

The west was getting out of gold,

The breath of air had died of cold,

When shoeing home across the white,

I thought I saw a bird alight.

In summer when I passed the place

I had to stop and lift my face;
A bird with an angelic gift
Was singing in it sweet and swift.

No bird was singing in it now.
A single leaf was on a bough,
And that was all there was to see
In going twice around the tree.

From my advantage on a hill

I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
As gilt to gold that wouldn’t show.

A brush had left a crooked stroke

Of what was either cloud or smoke
From north to south across the blue;
A piercing little star was through.

Robert Frost

(with thanks to the Climbing Sky website)

Pining

Today, I was in one of my very favorite places in Mexico -- a lovely pine-oak forest high in the Sierra Aloapaneca mountains in Oaxaca. It's a rumpled mountain landscape, softened by vast stretches of geological time, so that the stony bits have been worn smooth and covered with vegetation. The trees are draped with bromeliads, epiphytes and orchids, lichens and mosses; at times the branches literally disappear under their load of "hangers on". Sometimes the clouds hang low, ghosting along the ridges and tangling among the trees, leaving glistening drops on every pine needle and leaf tip. On other days, like today, the azure skies above seem limitless. The air smells of pine, crisp and clean. Sometimes the grind of a logging truck or the buzz of a distant chainsaw intrudes, but mostly I'm struck by the lack of human generated noise. Other than birdsong, the buzz of passing insects and the sound of wind through the trees, the silence reigns supreme.

Late afternoon sunlight on pine needles turned them a glittering silver. An interesting factoid: Mexico has more species of pine than any other country on the planet.