A WALK BY THE SEA IN AUTUMN

If you are looking for the Tree Following

 Link Box for October, click here.

Usually I show you plants. I'm going to show you plants now.

Usually the pictures are silent. You don't know what I hear. What you may not realise is that in one of my favourite spots for plants, if I pop up below hedge level the sea is what I see. Often it's silent because this bit of sea is contained within a massive harbour. But today it was noisy. So were the birds. But the birds were boring. They were taking it in turns to sing or croak or caw. There were Dunnocks. (Pretty.) I think there were Robins. (The best singers of all.) There were magpies squabbling and crows shouting randomly in what they may have thought was a chorus. So I decided that in terms of a sound-scape the sea was best of all. After a couple of minutes of magpies I want to ask in an irritated way if that's all they have to say. Click, click, shriek, click. But I never tire of the sea.

Here, then is a sound track to go with the pictures. I'll not say much about the plants in thm. They're the kind you are familiar with on Loose and Leafy. So I'll leave you to listen to the sea while you scroll down the page. If you don't have the kind of computer which can cope with video clips I apologise. You'll have to imagine a gentle but persistent hum rising and falling with the wind interfering every now and then.

This is one of those plants one forgets what they are once the flowers have gone. At least I do. I find white umbeliferous plants hard to identify even in the summer.

(To see what this seed head looked like in September, click here. You'll see some seeds are still hanging on.)

Haws are falling.

Quite a lot of them are still on the trees. They are crinkling up and going brown and waggling around on their branches because they are camera shy and the wind is rising.

The round things are ivy flowers. Another mystery.

Lichen which is orange (I'd say yellow but it's called Common Orange Lichen - Xanthoria parietina) is changing to green as it gets wet in the rain and general autumn dampness. When the weather is dry, it reverts to yellow. If you look carefully you'll see the lichen on the upper part of the branch is greener than the lower part. In the summer all of this was a mixture of bright orange and yellow. (Here's a picture I took of the same lichen on a nearby branch on a dry day in January last year.)

Do I understand what lichen is? No. To me it's a science fiction creature (I say this every time because I don't get much further forward it's sort of unbelievable - a combination of algae and fungus. When it's damp the algae element (green) shows through the fungal element which contains a chemical (xanthorin) which protects it against the UV rays in sunshine. 

This is what flowers come to!

Blackberries are falling, leaving brown whirls behind. They look rubbish from a distance but are beautiful close to. (You might want to click the picture to enlarge it.)

And on the way home, out of the way of the sea, the sycamore in a drain we've been following for the last couple of years. It looks a bit tatty but autumn hasn't reached underground just yet.

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Xantharia parietina on Nature Spot

Xanthoria parietina on Wikipedia (if you're in the mood for really, really concentrating).

I DON'T LIKE FLOWERS

I don't like flowers. They have their place, of course. They look good in vases and there wouldn't be seeds without them. But when I think about what I like to have around me - it's bark and leaves. Between them, it's hard to choose. My first instinct was to plump for leaves. Then I thought about trees in winter. They look just as good as their summer selves so maybe my final, finely tuned decision is in favour of bark. Though I feel uncomfortable with it because leaves and stems are what I like to take photos of and I'm always moved by the little hairs that show up in pictures but which we rarely notice otherwise - and the veins and wrinkles and shapes that we may examine from time to time, or be startled by when the sun shines through them but which, most days, we ignore. (Of course we do. We none of us have time to work through a forest, leaf by leaf.)

It's a funny time of year for flowers round where I live. The burst of spring yellows and blues is over. Alexanders are tipping, as is the Hawthorn (May). Sloes and apples are clearly in place. Indeed, sloes are already their full size - though green. Thus, we have autumn embedded in summer.

Locally, tall, white, umbrels are what catch my eye most. Some are lovely. On others, the individual flowerlets are so densely packed they resemble nothing more than sickly cow pats on sticks; or perhaps white picnic plates.

Rape plants gone wild stand out splendidly from the dull, decaying mess and then there are buttercups - I like buttercups.

And the problem, for me, is exacerbated because I find yellow and white hard to photograph.

White flowers lose definition and yellow glares back so glaringly, images of petals get splodged with horrid white patches.

There are masses of garden bloggers who show white and yellow flowers, apparently without difficulty, but for me it's a labour. And for someone who doesn't even like flowers much, who prefers leaves and stems - it isn't even a labour of love.

So . . . in this post . . . I'm getting it over with. A flower post of white and yellow flowers which took hours to construct because I kept having to go and try again until any showed up at all.

I hope you enjoy it.

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And you might like to tell me (and each other) - are you a flower person or someone who would you prefer to kneel in long grass and peer up at its seed heads against a blue, blue sky?