This particular winter had arrived during the old year - a December cold snap. First came sharp overnight frosts, decorating almost the whole environment with ice crystals. It marked the end of autumn by loosening the last of the year's deciduous tree leaves, depositing many on the footpath.
Then there were a few inches of snow, producing attractive winter scenes -
- without blocking the regular footpath route.
Some animals were better looked after than others. (And some were easier to photograph in focus than others!)
SPRING
Eager to spot signs of spring, the hawthorn shoot was noticeably exceptional on the 12th of February. But the wild plants began awakening by the 17th, with lesser celandines in several places, daisies in the horse pastures - and a new woodland fungus for good measure.
A SKELETON LEAF
All those leaves that were shed in the autumn have been undergoing the early stages of recycling. Fungi and bacteria are able to feed on all the tissues so the thinner parts get used up first, leaving the ribs and veins as temporary skeletons. All will have been used up, returning the minerals and carbon dioxide for re-use, well before the next autumn leaf-fall. Photographed in March.
WHITE SPRING
The first petals to decorate trees in the early spring are those of the white flowers of blackthorn. The only other white features at that time of year are last year's old man's beard - right-hand picture. Photographed in March.
PROMISES
Curiously non-green, the first spring shoots of a gone-wild rambler rose were just as colourful as their summer flowers will be.
At the same time the yellow iris plants had the dubious new year benefit of immersion in the winter flooding of the once-upon-a-time canal.
Photographed in March.
SUMMER
Meadows can provide winter food in the form of hay (dried herbage), or silage (fresh but sealed for self-pickling), or, as here, as the half-and-half haylage. Cut, left to wilt for a day or more, and collected into bigger rows (swaths) for the baler, another machine promptly wraps each bale in several layers of plastic sheeting. Still alive, the grasses and herbs generate enough carbon dioxide and organic acids to preserve all the goodness until opened up months later.
AUTUMN
It's a curious FACT that ON AVERAGE only ONE seed on each hawthorn bush (left picture) produces ONE successful replacement bush in its whole lifetime!
(If it were more, the world would be covered in hawthorns by this time.)
It's the same for dogwood (right picture) - and ash trees and cocksfoot grass and ... so on. But all this profusion is not surplus. Those berries provide food for birds and other creatures. Any that are 'wasted' will be used as food by invertebrates or fungi or bacteria - all parts of an infintely recycling ecosystem.
Is AUTUMN the most COLOURFUL season?
- even when when nature has just left the leaves to fall on the footpath?
A SKELETON LEAF
WHITE SPRING
PROMISES
