Darkling Thrush

Some things you can't capture in a photograph in a time of fall: the scent of woodsmoke, the perfume of a quince, the sound of the sea roaring in the darkness, a sky with bright constellations, the knowledge that once this was the time of the reed, now sere in the marshes, which was gathered to thatch the rooves of houses. A time of shelter from the storm and of waiting.

It was a windy week: our tent blew down, our garden haven, and so I knew late autumn had arrived. I put my hand on the glass roof at 2am and felt the coming of ice. We ran into the darkness and fetched all the tender plants into the house. It's the bletting time: a time you wait for the hips and sloes and medlars to begin their sweet collapse. It's a time you wait inside as dusk comes and are sometimes surprised by the sound of a bird singing.

I found this young thrush in the road. He was still warm, without a mark on him. Newminted from a spring nest in a summer hedgerow. I held him for a moment and laid him under a blackthorn full of sloes. Two long-tailed tits came and danced around us.

That's something else you can't photograph. The pain in your heart when something is gone. A beautiful singer who won't sing his mistle song, his great joyful sound in a time of elegy and loss in the woods. And Winter's dregs make desolate/The weakening eye of day. In a land where thrushes are fast disappearing. In a world that is fast losing its songbirds and its poets. On a day when you struggle to pick up the camera and go into the lane and picture the colours and shapes of those things you write . . . . and yet you go. Because something inside you won't stop loving the world, no matter what weather comes. It's a covenant we made with the earth when we came here, a long time ago.

Bird in the hand; rosehips in the lane; Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

Some difficulties of being 'In Transition'

This lovely picture is of the Blickling Estate, near Aylsham. A couple of weekends ago when my mum came to visit me we decided to go there for a day out. However, I had a grand plan of only driving to Wroxham then getting the Bure Valley railway to Aylsham and back, which would be more fun and lower carbon. Unfortunately as I had been too busy to check the times online we missed the first train by 10 minutes and the next one wasnt for another 2hrs. So that lovely plan was thwarted and we had to drive all the way, which admittedly was easier in some ways - our current public transport system is not particularly convenient. But that in itself is frustrating.

My other transport related irritation recently is that every book/ website/ leaflet written about cycling in Norfolk assumes that you are going to have a car to drive to the start of your cycle ride. Now I don't have a car and am quite happy cycling from Norwich, but I wouldn't mind a nice 'cycle rides from Norwich' leaflet...

Generally I think that pink and orange clash hideously, but nature has managed to create a very attractive pink and orange berry to confound me. Spindle is a wonderful plant and it's easy to spot the striking berries in the hedgerows at this time of year.

I have been meaning to gen up on edible mushrooms for sometime now and had great intentions of doing some foraging this year, but I turned out to be too busy starting new jobs. So as most of them only occur for a couple of months a year I will now have to wait 10 months before actually making a start on befriending fungi.

However after all of this ranting and moaning I would like to add that - as on my walk on the Norfolk coast on wednesday - there are rainbows everywhere in life! So don't give up on that pot of gold...

Photos: Blickling estate, the tour of Britain team cars on Grapes Hill, a spindle berry at Blickling, some fungi at Minsmere and a rainbow near Cromer.

My Armistice Day

Featuring photos from my walk along Mousehold Ave and Gilman Road on a very windy, rainy Armistice day and a poem that I wrote this week reflecting on the need for a transition in our territorial, competitive culture and on inter-personal communications generally - including my own...

Leaves in Autumn

A bonfire of colour in the trees

The heralding of a turning tide?

A bonfire of vanities is what we need

Otherwise, otherwise...

Are WE those trees?

Or are we branches?

Or are we leaves?

Are some of us nuts?

Or maybe seeds?

And who's to judge?

And who lets be?

Watch who wields an axe,

Careful more, an axe unseen,

The rasping of a saw,

Unkindness in asides,

Assumptions, judgements, more,

How to deal with "difficult people",

Whisperings of war...
Paint them into corners,
If they don't reach for the door,
Gather all your forces,
And bash them to the floor.

The bitterness on my own lips,

Do I swallow and ignore?

Are the sufferings of someone else

An irritation to endure?

Another person's weakness

A reason to abuse them more?

Another's gifts or fortunes

A reason to abhor?

How to deal with your nemesis

Without a bloody war?

I ask myself:

Whose work will I do for what and why?

And who lays down my law?

Pics: Head on collision - crashed cars on a transporter on Mousehold Avenue,
'Slow' before the corner on Gilman Road

Autumn - A rotting time of year

At this time of year, nature gives us a lesson in recycling. All those leaves falling to the ground are stores of nutrients being returned to the earth to be slowly released to feed the seedlings that will grow next year. The fungi that work unseen to break down dead wood, now send up their fruiting bodies.

Nothing is wasted and the cycle can continue for ever - evolving over time to become more sophisticated. We can learn a lot from trees!

Autumn is also a time of harvest and I'm still munching my way through a stock of apples and pears.

On cold nights I shall be thinking about the hedgehog that nested in my flower bed. This did not seem very secure or dry so I have made a cover for his nest and packed it with extra leaves. I look forward to seeing him in the spring!

Elegy in a City Graveyard

There's something indefinably elegaic about an English churchyard in the autumn.  The peaceful drift of falling leaves, like swirling flakes of burnished metal.  The gentle wind through naked branches, the distant call of birds.  The colours a mark of the end of the summer; the gravestones a solemn reminders of our own mortality.

Not that the girls give a monkeys about any of that.  What they want to do is jump in the fallen leaves and kick them all over the place!

Being out and about in the autumn is one of the great treats of living in England, and the seaside in autumn, to my mind, is far more beautiful than in the height of the summer. Wrapped up warm, you can't beat the bracing winds, gorgeous waves, fabulous cloud formations.  And lovely chips too!

(pics: Bowthorpe Cemetary, Norwich.  Southwold, Suffolk)

The Cosmos is Still Here

So far this Autumn there have been no frosts and some of the flowers we take for granted in the summer are still out as I write on this blustery, wet November day.

In the house: This passionflower (Passiflora gracilis) is the only annual in the genus. Normally the green fruit, which you can see forming here, turns a beautiful bright orange. It's late this year, so I'll have to wait and see.

In the garden: The Cosmos is still out. It's been flowering for months, alongside Mexican wild marigolds (Cempoalxochitl - flower of the dead).

In the field: Corn Marigold. Small November suns. Soon the farmer will put sheep in this field and the marigolds will disappear by the end of the day.

In the wild: Yarrow (in front) and Wild Carrot (behind). Daucus carota is the ancestor of our familiar vegetable. When the elegant flowers with their bloodred central spot turn to seed, they take on the appearance of birds' nests. A true beauty.

Coming home: Charlotte carrying a huge bunch of spinach from our neighbour David, who picked the leaves from his garden. "Those Cosmos will turn black when the first frosts come," he said. "Then you'll know what to do with them."

Pics: All taken 9 November 2010 by Mark Watson

Autumn splendour

Welcome to our Autumn Photoblog.

The first picture is of incandescent oak leaves in the low afternoon sun. The second is of my dear little Carnival Squash, grown in the garden I share with an elderly neighbour. It grew from a tiny seedling kindly given to me by Rose from Transition Bungay at our TN plant swap back in March. In the background are a self-seeded chrysanthemum, a geranium called Mexicana Tomcat which I bought purely for the name, an aubretia which I grow for the bees and a shamrock which grew originally in my Greatnan's garden.