Love your woods
Robins (not US type) tinkled their friendly bell-like sound as a I passed as only an English Robin can. I hadn’t realised how much I had missed these sounds when I lived away from Britain for two decades. Unless you take walks purposely it’s hard to step off the conveyor belt of car life and industry. My workshop gives me a sanity I can seldom find elsewhere and so too the walk.
It’s a time of change now. Life has its seasons, yet somehow they now drift in and out as if, unconsciously now, we feel the season’s change less and less and the rhythms of life once common to all no longer affect us, save for temperature changes, wet spells and such things as that. Splitting wood has been gone from British homes for over a century as people now rely on gas and electricity. So too the knowledge of the woods and woodland, the wood we work and the methods we use to work it.
I know yew to work it and to see its fruit as well as the leaves and the poisonous aspects of its substance. This wood is extreme, colourful, wild and untameable. Here I see inside the red case a ball of deepest purple. And the red, such vivid hue is scarce in nature.
The holly on the other hand shines quite brightly with its spikes and edges tinged with yellow and then again that pillar-box red, red berry that’s always so lovely to see.
Of elderberry I know quite little save that it makes wine and is deep purply-black in great clusters. My wife makes an elderflower drink that’s quite delicious.
Walking though the beech groves the squirrels scamper at my presence. Every so often the nut cluster drops nearby.