Month: November 2020

The Changing Seasons ~ November 2020

I could swear it was only yesterday I was compiling October’s Changing Seasons post. Fascinating how time flies under lockdown and loss of civil liberties. Still, here on the Edge things are peaceable if rain-sodden, though we have been blessed with some perfect-sun interludes.

On rain-free days my gardening mind has mostly been on leaf collecting. This year the field maple and oak have been delivering double servings on the lane beside the allotment so I don’t have far to go to fetch them. I have created various ad hoc silos out of wire to store them, and this method does seem to speed up decomposition. Though adding some comfrey leaves and grass cuttings also helps. Anyway, already by September last autumn’s leaf stores had yielded sufficient quantities of chocolatey compost to give the summer raspberries a good, deep mulching.

There is also much tidying to be done on the allotment plots – taking down the bean poles, turning compost heaps, netting winter greens against pigeon attack. There’s still been lots to pick on the outside beds – beetroot, carrots, leeks, some chard and perennial spinach. The polytunnel goes on producing too. I took out the last of the tomato plants this week. As each plant finished I’ve been using the space for spinach, lettuce, kohl rabi, Russian kale and cauliflower seedlings. At the moment they are still growing, and I even had to remove some highly unseasonal caterpillars. I also have a very impressive bed of coriander, and some Chinese mustard greens. How they will all over-winter is a matter of waiting and seeing, but at the moment there’s plenty to make a good green salad. Lots to be happy about.

The Changing Seasons: November 2020

Please visit Su to see her New Zealand November gallery.

Iced!

The other morning I found the frost had left this ice skin on the very top of the garden water butt. We’ve had days of rain and it was filled to the brim with downpourings from the old privy roof. Most curious, I thought. It looks like a pile of actual leaves, some reedy plant, say. Or else in some mysterious way the water’s surface had replicated, as it froze, the flattened leaves of the Crocosmia that grows a few feet away over the fence. So does this mean that a common or garden water butt can make art; or create, when the elements conspire, its own version of monochrome digital images? It would seem so. I herewith proffer the evidence.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: close-ups

This week Cee gives up lots of close-up inspiration. Please pay her a visit.

Apple Tumble?

My allotment chum Phoebe had pushed this pile of windfalls under the field hedge so the wildlife could tuck in and be sheltered. I spotted them other day, spilling through the undergrowth into the field, and instantly thought of the Andrew Wyeth water colour ‘Frosted Apples’. I didn’t have a camera with me that day, and anyway the light was poor, but I caught them instead a couple of days ago, the afternoon sunshine tumbling after them.

Crab Apple Heaven

Today, the 26th of November, we woke to the first autumn frost, though by the time I was dressed and out in the garden, it was melting fast. Not a cloud to be seen. There was a moment, too, when the sky was a perfect shade of lavender. Who knew it could do that in Much Wenlock! The last time I saw such as sky I was at Hunter’s Lodge in Makindu, Kenya. Nor was it only the atmosphere making earth magic. Over the fence in the guerrilla garden the crab apple tree was also emitting its own extraordinary radiance: each miniature apple aglow, if slightly tearful. In fact before posting the first photo I had to desaturate it a touch. Even so, it’s still a glow worth popping in your heart or head space to light up gloomy days.

Windfalls

I took these photos on Sunday afternoon in a fit of late-day sunshine. These are the allotment apple trees, their produce free for anyone to pick. The only problem this year was the crops were so plentiful, and the October winds so fierce, that most of the apples were blown off their stems and into bruising piles. And then there are only so many apple crumbles and pies you can eat if you do not wish to expand to fill one’s particular lockdown premises and so be inextricable by the time we, along with our personal resident viral-bacterial populations, are liberated to the wide world. In the meantime the wildlife of the creeping, pecking sort has a plentiful store to graze on, which in turn serves as a timely reminder that there usually is a positive side to most situations; someone benefits.

Passing thought: the chair in real life is a weathered sage green plastic effort, one of a pair that sat outside my polytunnel for years before I donated them to the communal apple-tree-tea-break-zone. It’s strange it looks so white and also unfocused in these photos; something oddly reflective going on here.

The Monochrome Garden In November

Of course November in the northlands comes up with its own monochromal schemes. But yesterday and this morning there was and is bright sunshine, and since this week’s black and white theme at Cee’s is things we sit on, I thought I’d take a few photos (using the monochrome setting on my camera) of the back garden seat, which if not beautiful, has its moments in certain lights and with the sage growing through it. It is also of great utility on warmer days and we have indeed sat on it a fair amount during lockdown lunacy, and then arisen all be-saged, and hopefully the wiser for the herbal infusion.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge

Also linking to Jude at Travel Words and her excellent 2020 Photo Challenge, which this month is featuring black and white photography. Please pay her a visit.

In A Winter’s Light ~ Ynys Mon

Winter light over the sea can make for some mysterious monochrome images. The first photo was taken early one morning, above the small town Beaumaris on the island of Anglesey (Ynys Mon). In the foreground is Menai Strait; beyond it the mountains of Snowdonia in mainland Wales.

For several years Anglesey has been a favourite place for family Christmases. There have been times of hair-raising gales, but also days of brilliant sun and unexpected warmth. This searchlight-sun effect over the Strait is a particular local phenomenon, and you quickly understand why the Celtic Druids, and later the early Welsh Christian saints were so drawn to the place. Landscape as transcendental meditation.

You can hardly see the Strait in the next photo (below the tree silhouettes), and it was anyway just going dark. But even so there’s a luminous glow on the field slopes of the far shore – a reflection off the water? And then there are the snow slopes making their own light. I like seeing how much of an image can be gained from the least amount of light. At the time I was using my little Kodak EasyShare ‘point and shoot’ camera. It was interesting what it could come up with.

The morning we visited Plas Newydd it was broodingly gloomy – as if the sky gods had forgotten to switch the lights on.

But some sunnier days on the beach at Newborough:

2020 Photo Challenge #46 This week’s assignment from Jude: make sure you have contrasts in your image(s). Clear whites and strong blacks will add impact and create attention.

To And From The Allotment ~ The Monochrome Seasons

When I set off across the field to my allotment garden I often do have a camera tucked in my pants’ pocket. And yes I know very well this is no way to treat a camera. But then the inclination to take photos overtakes the scruples. There is so much to see and consider, both around the allotment plots and along the field path from our house – the different times of day (or night); the changing seasons; the shifts of light; the state of the land; what is growing; what is not.

This month Jude at Travel Words is featuring black and white photography in her 2020 Photo Challenge. And as I’m presently in monochrome mode and most days still going gardening, I thought I’d post a somewhat themed response to this week’s assignment, ‘a retrospective’ using archive shots.

This is what Jude says about the assignment:

‘Look for shadows and textures. Carefully choose your images so that you can angle the light to create a sense of depth with the shadows’.

Much Wenlock’s Southfield Road allotment plots back on to this field. It’s an adjunct to Townsend Meadow, the field behind our house. I’m guessing this photo was taken in October, though only because the ground looks newly ploughed, but not yet harrowed and re-sown, which is the farmer’s usual habit. I certainly don’t remember him missing a chance to put in some over-wintering crop, wheat or oilseed rape or field beans. On the other hand the ash trees are very bare and the hedgerows very spiky for early autumn. The light, too, and the dead grasses along the barbed wire fence also suggest winter. Even the glint of turned earth says ‘cold’.

Here’s that distant same spiky hedge, but a late afternoon view taken from the Townsend Meadow side:

This is the field path running up beside the allotment hedge, also a wintery view from a couple of years ago. Much of this grassy margin has been ploughed up now and is presently sprouting winter wheat. The next photo is the path closer to our house, in early summer with the Queen Ann’s Lace going full throttle.

English allotments tend towards the shambolic – lots of recycled greenhouses, makeshift sheds, cold frames, and windswept polytunnels. They can look very bleak in the winter months, or in the case of the next shot, disturbingly other worldly. It was taken at dusk when the greenhouses seemed to be capturing the last of the light in a distinctly sci-fi manner. The eerily lit straggle of dead tomato plants caught my eye.

This was the shed I inherited from several previous owners when I acquired my first allotment plot. That was back in 2007. (Goodness how time flies when you’re digging and composting.) Heaven knows how old it was, but never mind. Before I moved to another plot some years later, it served me well despite its tendency to lean to the east and harbour roosting snails.

There had of course been moments when he who builds new sheds from scratch and lives in my house was called in for emergency resuscitation measures i.e. when the leaning reached critical declivity and demanded a hauling back to as near vertical as was humanly possible; a manoeuvre that took our combined effort. One day I found a 1725 halfpenny just in front of the door. Astonishingly it was barely covered by soil, and in a spot I had walked over hundreds of times. I wondered who had dropped it there long ago. Had the old path from the Sytche across Townsend Meadow (now only visible on antique maps) passed under my shed? And who had dropped it and later sorely missed it? A lass on an errand to fetch a jug of ale? A ploughman dropping it from his pocket while reaching for his tobacco?

The shed was also picturesquely sheltered by a very old greengage tree, the light through its foliage making the sunspots you can see on the door. It was more of a copse of several trunks than a single tree. Fruit production was sporadic, but once it a while it produced the most delicious plums ever invented if only you could get to eat them before the wasps did.

These days the shed is no more. For several years it lay abandoned. Then last winter the new plot holder demolished it, along with most of the tree. By then the shed truly was on its last legs, but the same can’t be said of the tree. Now only one spindly trunk remains after fellow allotmenteers objected and stopped the final act of culling. I still think of the tree that was. The creamy spring blossom was spectacularly lovely, the scent so delicate.

But enough reminiscing. We have the tree’s offspring over the hedge at home. I dug up a seedling tree a few years ago and planted it there. It’s already four metres tall and grew four greengages this year, none of which we sampled as they were difficult to reach, though we were very happy to see them.

A home-from-the-allotment shot: the ash tree at the top of Townsend Meadow caught with the sun about to slip off the edge of Wenlock Edge.

ABOUT TISH FARRELL

2020 Photo Challenge

More From The November Hedgerow

Monochrome with a hint of green. (See previous post).

Through A Hedge Backlit

I took these photos yesterday, late afternoon, as I was going gardening. The hedge runs up beside the allotment, the south-westerly boundary to Townsend Meadow behind our house. As I reached the gap under the ash tree, the unofficial gateway to my garden plot, the sun burst through the hedge bottom. So I ditched the compost I was hauling, and fished out my camera. I was still thinking about the leaf photos in my last post, and decided monochrome could work here too, this time catching the plant-life silhouetted in the lowering sun. I added the sepia glow in the edit. In the northern hemisphere, sunshine in November always seems a specially precious gift, brimming with untapped possibility.

Lens-Artists: the sun will come out tomorrow Anvica’s Gallery has set the spirit-lifting theme this week. Go visit!

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge