Winter wings

It was under a darkling, grey sky that I followed Mrs T to the boundary of the field, through the kissing gate and down the steps through the hedge to the metalled road. I was far enough behind to see what she did not: the half-dozen redwings that she startled. They were startled again when they almost flew into me, but wheeled away to find another sheltered roost a little further up the lane.

These winter visitors enjoy the winter berries, holly, hawthorn, rowan, awaiting their attention in hedge and scrub, town and country. I am always glad to see them; it’s not really winter without them.

photograph by Andreas Trepte

Leaves

The leaves are almost all down around here. The Victorian poet Alice Meynell also took note of them, investing them with human emotions.

“O leaves, so quietly ending now,
   You have heard cuckoos sing.
And I will grow upon my bough
   If only for a Spring,
And fall when the rain is on my brow. O tell me, tell me ere you die,
   Is it worth the pain?
You bloomed so fair, you waved so high;
   Now that the sad days wane,
Are you repenting where you lie?”

From “Poems” by Alice Meynell.

Green grows the lettuce, oh!

I walk this way a couple of times a week. Stour Street runs parallel to the river. Its old houses have post-war buildings in between them where bombs and at least one fire removed others. The street is narrow here; the 19th Century house has a strip of flagstones and a low wall but no front garden – except for this 25 cm square with its specimen of a lettuce. It brightened up a grey day!