This month Jude at Travel Words asks us to explore the colour green. So I thought I’d start with our home landscapes. Here in the English countryside we perhaps take greenness for granted. Even our over-wintering fields are bright with sprouting wheat and pasture grass. The header shot is a December view, looking across Shropshire from Wenlock Edge.
Closer to home is the long-shot view I see whenever I go to the allotment: Callaughton Ash on the southerly edge of Much Wenlock. It’s one I never tire of – those sky-line ash trees with their ivy cladding.
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Then behind our house is Townsend Meadow. Wheat has been grown along the flanks of Wenlock Edge for centuries, and as proof has left its name ‘The Wheatlands’ in part of it. These days the crop is sown in October-November and is usually well sprouted by Christmas. I like the corduroy effect.
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By summer, after serial dosing, the field looks like this:
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And on our side of the fence, thanks to home-made compost:
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Meanwhile my summer route across the field to the allotment used to look like this – before the farmer cut the ‘wildlife’ reserve back to the ‘path’:
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And when things go well on the plot:
… we get other ‘greens’:
Tish Farrell 
Lovely photos, Tish.
Thanks, Trev. You have some pretty good green vistas on your side of the border 🙂 🙂
You’re right Tish, we do.
It will be so exciting when we can cross the border again – let out from stalag lockdown.
Lovely, I always enjoy your rustic and horticultural photographs.
Thank you. Rustic, that probably does sum things up 🙂
Beautiful place to call home. My Dad was a private pilot so I grew up flying in small airplanes looking at the “patchwork” landscape below. Good memories.
That’s quite a way to see the world – from a small plane. It was my first aerial view of Shropshire too in a little Cessna.
Still golden here right now. Green is springing up all over though. Soon, soon
It’s flipping freezing here though – rain and gales today. Spring has gone into hiding.
Beautiful green landscapes – you live in a lovely part of the country! But I also love the close-up of the wheat and the little ladybird 😀
We are very lucky with all our green surroundings.
Tish this is really beautiful. The play between large landscape and detail makes it one of your best compositions. I love it
Thanks very much, Mak. You’re seeing how my mind works: big picture versus little details 🙂
Trish, you have so many of my favourite things so beautifully portrayed in this post – I am green with envy! The stunning English countryside, flower gardens with all the different textures and smells, cowparsley – the very loveliest of flowers, ladybirds and that wheat – we so rarely see it in it’s green form; wonderful!
Thanks, Emma. Btw it’s Tish without the R 🙂
Apologies Tish – I am afraid as I have an old friend who is a Trish, my fingers just do the typing – so sorry; I will make sure they get it right in future!! x
That’s quite alright, Emma. I answer to all manner of variations 🙂
Rustic indeed
🙂
Love the garden shed! And what fabulous beets and broad beans 🤗💕
Those sheds used be the privies for our cottage and next door’s, plus a man who inhabited a lean-to behind and between the two cottages. Good Old Wenlockian stuff 🙂
I must admit that these photos (and many of your others) have the dual effect of making me happy because of their beauty but envious of the verdant nature of where you live. The desert has its own beauty but it’s a spare beauty not an abundant one like this.
When I saw the “Home Front”, my first thought was that it was somehow related to one of the world wars. 🙂 Too much reading of historical fiction and non, I guess.
janet
I appreciate your sense of dislocation, Janet. I would like a bit of desert now and then, and for the reasons you describe. As to Home Front, well there were subliminal siege thoughts going through my head due to our current lockdown rule 😉
So now I can read your innermost thoughts! Be afraid. Be very afraid! 🙂
Ooo-eee!
Lovely, lovely images Tish. We spent our English years living in small towns and I do miss the “green and pleasant land” — especially as ours is rather cracked and brown.
I remember when we used to come on home leave from Kenya – usually in June; the lush vegetation everywhere was positively shocking.
😀 Auckland I
Used to feel very green, but we’ve lost so much bush and farm land to housing developments, shopping centres and motorways, the whole region looks and feels different
Urban sprawl does tend to suck the life out of the land, which no amount of on-street planting can make up for. It’s interesting though, even in a place like Much Wenlock, (this observed after years on our Civic Soc committee) more people than you’d imagine really do hate trees, and want to be rid of them, often for wholly unreasonable reasons.
Having watched my neighbourhood being slowly de-tree’d by people who prefer to build fences, patios and swimming pools, I am not at all surprised.
A dear friend recently came home to find her neighbour had chopped down a very old and very beautiful pohutukawa tree on their shared boundary. It predated both their houses, and being pretty slow-growing hadn’t really affected the amount of sunlight either house received. Neighbour basically didn’t like the two or three weeks a year when the flowers fall and leave a red carpet around them.
Once upon a time, the tree would have been considered protected, but our council saw fit to remove such protection in the interests of speeding up development.
Grrrrrr.
That is SO sad. Such a miniscule annoyance in the scheme of things.
That is so sad about the pohutukawa tree, they are so beautiful, how can anyone be so mean!
Love all the greens in your neighbourhood Tish. Is that view from Wenlock towards the Stiperstones? It’s always green here too, and proper cold today!
I’m never quite sure what the distant hill is in that view. Not the Stiperstones – I don’t think. More towards the Welsh border.
I dismissed the Wrekin, but wasn’t sure what I was looking at.
Pontesbury and Pontesford hills? I keep peering at the map, trying to orientate myself from the view point (near the defunct Wenlock Edge Inn by the Easthope turn), but not getting very far. The hill has such a distinctive rift-gulley you’d think it would be easy.
I’ll ask the OH he might have an idea. He used to work at Wilderhope Manor years ago.
He was also puzzled, but concurs that it must be the Pontesford hills, though he knows them better from the other side. Perhaps you need to take a drive towards them and see what you bump into?
Now that would be interesting. An old land rover would definitely be called for. Or perhaps a horse would be better. Am now just thinking of the 50s ‘Gone to Earth’ Powell and Pressburger film that used Wilderhope Manor for some of the interior scenes, and also Pontesford hill for the wilder outdoor shots.
Such beautiful images around you and wonderful greens, Tish!
So happy you like these, Marina.
Very much! 🙂
I am green of envy, Tish…! You live and love in this lush country, and you do it so well. I could never become that good at gardening, I know. I am longing for green now, but the snowing is back today. I do love snow, but…now it is time for spring. Thank you for bringing some green love on WP and out to us waiting! I loved the corduroy thinking.
what a beautiful world! 🙂
Lovely green images …freshness feel
Thank you. Nothing like a bit of zesty green 🙂
Amazing pictures, Tish. I love your farm harvest, no GMO foolishness 🙂
Hello there, Celestine. Lovely to hear from you. And absolutely – my plot is a GMO-free space. Hope you are well 🙂
Simply wonderful … especially the first shot. No green like England – although, on our first road trip to Cape Town, coming out of the arid condition of the Karoo to be greeted by the green of the Cape wine- lands came close and was a sight for sore eyes!
Oh, and I am green with envy over your veggies.
Ha! Green over my greens! Not much happening in that quarter at the mo. Freezing blooming wind that the met office calls a breeze. Some salad stuff in the polytunnel and a few leeks left on the plot, and that’s about it. Too cold to plant even for the onion sets. Huff and double huff. On the other hand your snapshot of the Cape wine lands is deeply pleasing. Time to open a bottle methinks.
Nice green images. Your spring has spring and our autumn has fallen.
I think our spring has gone away again, Pete. V. frigid here. And wet.
Just as well lunch is imminent after those last photos. You’ve done texture beautifully as well as colour.
Many thanks, Meg. Happy to whet the appetite 🙂
“How green was (your) valley.” 😉
(I knew a Llewelyn once… weird. Hadn’t thought about him in 50 years… Not sure about this Mzee thing)
Tout va bien? Did you get vaccinated yet?)
That IS a blast from the past, Brian. And I know what you mean about the mzee thing. And no, to the last. I anyway think I had the virus this time last year.
I can imagine you know. 😉
You might have had it, I seem to remember. As the proud father of an MD, infectologist daughter, I do recommend vaccination. (We got our first shot on Sunday)
Kwaheri sassa.
I so enjoy your beautiful garden. Delicious harvest, Tish! I love this green post!
So pleased you enjoyed this, Amy.
Glorious 😀
Thank you, Becky 🙂
I was just wondering how your allotment was doing – and now I see: it is bursting with colour and life! You must be enjoying the fruits of your labour!
Your garden is looking very pretty as well. That lady bug is so cute.
Ah, Ju-Lyn. It’s not bursting quite yet. Those were fruits long ago eaten. I’m just preparing the raised beds for planting, but I do have lots of salad greens that have over-wintered in my polytunnel. It’s still pretty chilly in the UK.
Ah! Still too early in the season … Spring is still creeping in 🙂
One step forward, two back 🙂