Horse-chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum. aka Conker tree.
This morning felt like Autumn. Even though there's another week before the season officially turns, the air has the scent of Autumn, the trees are starting to wear russet shades, the sky darkens to pewter noticably earlier each evening, shadows are getting longer and rosehips swell like fat red jewels in the hedgerows. All these things act as Zeitgeber to my biological temporal rhythms and I can feel myself becoming attuned to the approaching season.
The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness always brings a sense of free-floating wistfulness for me. It's a sepia-tinted and haunted time of year. And yet I also find it strangely comforting and warm. it's the season when I feel most attuned to the earth and nature and the living things around me. While I might sometimes be melancholy and reflect on a year ending and how little was achieved therein, there is also much I love and look forward to about this turn of the great Cosmic Wheel.
♥ The mist lying curled in the valley like a huge white cat
♥ The scent of woodsmoke
♥ Dancing through eddies of autumn leaves and kicking them in the air
♥ Roasted pumpkin, pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread....
♥ Silver birches with golden leaves
♥ Picking frosted sloes to make sloe gin
♥ Harvest festivals
♥ Bringing seed-heads and acorns and conkers home fom my walks
♥ Toasted crumpets piled with home-made cider apple butter
♥ Snuggly woollen sweaters and scarves
♥ The low deep golden light of late afternoons-early evenings
I half expected this to bite my leg as I stepped over it...
photo © myself 2011
When a mighty and ancient tree falls in the Wildwood, its death brings forth and sustains new life.
In the past, fallen branches and branches were removed from managed woodland, but modern methods of management recognise that dead and decaying wood is extremely important to the health of the forest. It is valuable for nutrient cycling and carbon storage, and provides a complex and ever-changing series of microhabitats for hundreds of different species of fungi, lichens, mosses, birds, small mammals, beetles and other often rare invertebrates. Ironically, there is more life in a dead tree than a living one.
I feel there's an analogy here with my life at the moment, but I'm not going to labour the point.
Breeze-blown thistledown
fleet-foot hares skim field furrows
mocking the plough's teeth
fleet-foot hares skim field furrows
mocking the plough's teeth
The collective noun for hares is a husk. A husk of hares. Though I've also heard of a drove, a down, a leash, a mute, a trace, and a trip of hares. This morning, I've been sitting at my computer gazing over the field the other side of the road, entranced by the antics of a pair of hares.
After being blanketed with snow for several weeks, the temperatures have risen and the days been relatively warm and mild. With the rise in temperature, Nature suddenly started to Think Spring. Snowdrops are blooming, daffodils are peeking through, catkins are in the trees, and the hares have started their boxing matches a few weeks before they normally start their breeding season.
Hares are wonderful little creatures. They're chasing and leaping about the field, then racing up to each and rearing on their hind legs to box at each other rapidly with their front paws. This is the behaviour that gives Mad March Hares their name. It used to be thought the boxing was a aggressive/competitive thing between males. Turns out many of the 'matches' are between unreceptive females and persistent males - you go, girl!
It's hard to imagine our fields and moorlands without them, but brown hares aren't native to Britain. It's thought that they were introduced in Roman times, probably from Asia. Our true native is the mountain or white hare, but I've never seen one in the wild. They headed north with the retreat of the Ice Age and nowdays are really confined to the Scottish Highlands where they're still more common than brown hares at higher altitudes. There's just one colony of mountain hares in England, that was reintroduced to the Peak District in the 1860s. But even though they're foreign interlopers and not as glamorous as their white cousins, I still love my brown hares.
That reminds me, I once wrote a series of little pieces about hare lore for another project; I should find them and post them in The Cock, the Scythe, and the Cat mythology and folklore lounge at the Panerotica community site.
After being blanketed with snow for several weeks, the temperatures have risen and the days been relatively warm and mild. With the rise in temperature, Nature suddenly started to Think Spring. Snowdrops are blooming, daffodils are peeking through, catkins are in the trees, and the hares have started their boxing matches a few weeks before they normally start their breeding season.
Hares are wonderful little creatures. They're chasing and leaping about the field, then racing up to each and rearing on their hind legs to box at each other rapidly with their front paws. This is the behaviour that gives Mad March Hares their name. It used to be thought the boxing was a aggressive/competitive thing between males. Turns out many of the 'matches' are between unreceptive females and persistent males - you go, girl!
It's hard to imagine our fields and moorlands without them, but brown hares aren't native to Britain. It's thought that they were introduced in Roman times, probably from Asia. Our true native is the mountain or white hare, but I've never seen one in the wild. They headed north with the retreat of the Ice Age and nowdays are really confined to the Scottish Highlands where they're still more common than brown hares at higher altitudes. There's just one colony of mountain hares in England, that was reintroduced to the Peak District in the 1860s. But even though they're foreign interlopers and not as glamorous as their white cousins, I still love my brown hares.
That reminds me, I once wrote a series of little pieces about hare lore for another project; I should find them and post them in The Cock, the Scythe, and the Cat mythology and folklore lounge at the Panerotica community site.
Every yokel knows that if cows are lying down, rain is on its way. If they're standing with their backs to the wind, expect a storm. If they're racing round and round with their tails up, batten down for an earthquake. But when they're all lying down at the far end of the field under the trees, dreamily chewing the cud and staring at nothing, that means -- what? That they're not going to chase Jerry down and trample him, right?
Nope. It just means they're biding their time.
Lulled into a false sense of security, their intended victim cautiously hops over the gate and keeping a wary eye open for stray calves (you do NOT want a 600kg horned bulldozer thinking you're molesting its baby, trust me on that) nonchalantly heads off towards the opposite side of the field, manfully avoiding eye contact with the one or two cows that have stopped chewing and have started to look vaguely interested at this break in their routine.
"Don't run," my partner always tells me. "Longhorns are docile, but they'll follow you if you run. Just ignore them and keep walking."
Me, I thought it was supposed to be predators that have chase responses, not herbivorous bovines. However. I'm not arguing with him because in my experience he's right. Run and they run with you. Just call me Runs with Cows.
People who know me and my secret fear know where I'm going with this. I get half way across the bloody field and my bootlace mysteriously unties itself and I have the dilemma off keeping going and tripping face-down in a fresh cow-pat or stopping to re-tie and letting the cows that are now lumbering to their feet get me. Honestly, do I LOOK like a threat to their babies? Maybe they smell my fear. They break into a trot. My nerve holds until I feel the first hot, wet snuff on the back on my neck, but fortunately by then safety is within reach --- I nimbly vault the gate into the next field --- to find another two dozen or more English Longhorns all staring at me in round-eyed wonder.....
Incidentally, calves are kinda cute, with those long, long eyelashes like drag queens. It's just their bad-ass mamas that put the wind up me.
Nope. It just means they're biding their time.
Lulled into a false sense of security, their intended victim cautiously hops over the gate and keeping a wary eye open for stray calves (you do NOT want a 600kg horned bulldozer thinking you're molesting its baby, trust me on that) nonchalantly heads off towards the opposite side of the field, manfully avoiding eye contact with the one or two cows that have stopped chewing and have started to look vaguely interested at this break in their routine.
"Don't run," my partner always tells me. "Longhorns are docile, but they'll follow you if you run. Just ignore them and keep walking."
Me, I thought it was supposed to be predators that have chase responses, not herbivorous bovines. However. I'm not arguing with him because in my experience he's right. Run and they run with you. Just call me Runs with Cows.
People who know me and my secret fear know where I'm going with this. I get half way across the bloody field and my bootlace mysteriously unties itself and I have the dilemma off keeping going and tripping face-down in a fresh cow-pat or stopping to re-tie and letting the cows that are now lumbering to their feet get me. Honestly, do I LOOK like a threat to their babies? Maybe they smell my fear. They break into a trot. My nerve holds until I feel the first hot, wet snuff on the back on my neck, but fortunately by then safety is within reach --- I nimbly vault the gate into the next field --- to find another two dozen or more English Longhorns all staring at me in round-eyed wonder.....Incidentally, calves are kinda cute, with those long, long eyelashes like drag queens. It's just their bad-ass mamas that put the wind up me.
