red berries

My Walk this Week 125 – Berried in York Woodland

Returning to my weekly theme of walks, I have recently been in search of woodland inYork. While the city is full of beautiful, mature trees, there is a lack of woodland – something that I am used to having where I live. I know it is a city and I shouldn’t expect to find woodland in its centre, but even around its outskirts the land is flat and farmed.

black berries

Following a footpath through a strip of land behind the university I first found seed heads left over from the Summer and then the berries and fruit of Autumn. Huge conkers on horse chestnut trees, black and red berries poisonous to humans, rose hips and brambles – they were all abundant and added to the colour around me.Continue reading

Honeysuckle

Colour To Be Found and Hidden Reflections

It may be a wet late Autumn on my walk this week through this Dorset garden but there is still colour (other than greens) to be found as well as some hidden reflections. Red, purple, yellow, white – all natural colours compared to the bright plastics in my previous post.

hidden reflections

I love all the shades and tints of green as well, whether blurred in reflection or crisply in focus, the range is phenomenal. I have heard that we are more attuned, more perceptive of greens than any other colour – whether or not this is true, it is easy to believe.Continue reading

Fuchsia

Autumn Reds in the Garden

I am lucky enough to have a long garden down which to walk each morning and enjoy the changing colours, patterns and textures it presents along the way. I don’t know what I would do without this resource for my wellbeing. Being outside my door, it is the closest that nature could be to me and much as I enjoy my walks to local marshes, woods, hills and further afield, I don’t know how I would manage without our garden as well.

dogwood

The reds are really coming through now, but there is more to come as Autumn proceeds. For now we have the berries, rosehips, fuchsia and dogwood.

I’m not one for controlling nature but if we didn’t do some maintenance jobs, it wouldn’t be long before we couldn’t move in the place. And so the garden heap is still waiting for a convenient dry evening to be burnt before the cuttings from the pruning of our cherry tree can be moved into place to await their turn for a bonfire.

Bovine Greetings

Dorset cows

My walk from the past this week took me up one of the rolling hills of Dorset. At the top I was given a bovine greeting from a herd of very curious cows – not so curious to push up against the electric fence, I guess they had learned their lesson with that. Continue reading

Autumnal Growth

Leaving one woodland and entering the next on my walk this week, I noted something of the variety of trees and their Autumnal growth. From red hawthorn berries to acorns, apples and brambles (blackberries). The brambles appeared early this year but it wasn’t too late to enjoy some of those I found on my walk in the woods at Stainton in north east England – the best were beautifully sweet and juicy!

hawthorn

Twists and Turns Along The Way

Most walking routes have various twists and turns to them and my walk this week is no exception. Initially the twists in the footpath come as it follows the river Loughor across the marshes, but there are other twists and turns to be seen en route as well as those in the  grass or mud.

The twisted roots of the tree below can be seen in monochrome at Leanne Cole’s Photography blog post Monochrome Madness MM 2-32.

This photo is the only one throughout this week that is in portrait format. The reason for this is that I have been working on an experimental StillWalks video (which requires all images to be in 16:9 widescreen format). It was not my intention to do any production on this walk and so I only had my iPhone 6s with me. Therefore all the images you see are from my phone and the video I have been working on also uses video and sound recording from the same device.

I will post the finished video at the end of the week and you can judge for yourselves whether or not it was worth my while.

Autumn berries

twisted tree root

marsh reflections