Winter Landscape
Winter Landscape
The clocks have gone back and our daylight hours are retracted. In the past I dreaded this time of year and mourned the end of the Summer, the loss of the long evenings spent outside, but I am learning to embrace the shorter days and welcome Autumn and the onset of Winter. There is much to celebrate. Forced inside I am trying to make the most of the extra hours now available to me and spend time enjoying domicilary activities by the fireside. The very best part of this time of year is walking my dogs at dusk, with the lengthening shadows, the satisfying scrunch of fallen leaves underfoot, the cacophony of noise from the Rookery above and the call of the crepuscular Barn Owl making its ghostly evening flight. What I really enjoy is witnessing the denuded skeletal forms of the decidious trees slowly reveal themselves as they shed their foliage. Each tree, stripped back to its cadaverous framework of branches, is an object of great beauty, to be studied and appreciated. The big Winter skies offer a low horizon peopled with the silhouettes of these arboreal skeletons, some almost architectural in form, others with a delicate tracery-like substructure. As the Winter Solstice approaches the hours of daylight will increase a little everyday and I will be outside more and more. Soon the trees’ branches will begin to bud, ready to reclothe themselves in their vernal greenery and I will be looking for the first signs of Spring.
