TREES STRIPPING Nov 11 BLOG #11
Meanwhile, back in the UK...
The trees are changing their foliage, disrobing slowly and seductively, from the top down, like so many burlesque dancers, revealing different layers of colours as they shed their leafy clothing.
There’s a tree at the end of our garden (the neighbour’s, actually, but it lives primarily over our fence), which has been astounding us for a week or more with its stunning colours. It looked as if it was lit from within, or had the sun shining on it, even when there were grey skies, prompting admirative exclamations from all of us each time we noticed it. Against the dark and shiny black-green of the holly bushes, this tree’s display of russets, yellows and golds were heartbreakingly beautiful. Just today, it has, after yesterday’s windswept rain, muted its colours, like a woman changing her hair dye, to a subtler palette of deep wine and earthen brown- reds.
The woodland is giving up secrets jealously guarded in the summer; as the leaves fall and the trees become less-shielding, soon to be stark silhouettes, there are now glimpses of previously hidden meadows, copses, cottages. The landscape changes. The trees sleep. Now the skies are more prominent – slate grey, or turquoise blue, with portentious black cloud piles, or grey and white slashes across the sky. The wind is capricious and unpredictable. Bent on denuding the trees, it gusts and squalls and whips the foliage up into leafbanks at the sides of the road. The rain comes in showers, suddenly torrential, or drizzling for hours.
This is the time I found out I have a faulty umbrella which turns inside out at the first strong gust of wind, baring me to the downpour! Forget about keeping a great hairstyle. Hats are what counts – against the rain, cold, wind. Flat hair is a way of life! Better to be warm and dry than fashionable, though.
Today white meringue piles of clouds are scudding across a pale blue sky, and the wild birds are eating more and more bird seed that I put out for them.
I was distracted from my walk with the dogs today by the insistent, angry caw-cawing of crows, and as I looked up in the direction of the brouhaha I saw 3 large black birds worrying a crane perched on top of a tall pine tree. The crows dive-bombed, noisily and repeatedly, and the crane flapped its broad wings and bobbed its long thin neck, open-beaked. Finally the crane flew off, its legs dangling.
