Scent and colour of Autumn

A period of soft  after glow of autumn  seeds, fruits, nuts and transforming leaves. The scent of damp earth,  wet trees and ......leaves.  If only it could be bottled,  but then I suppose it would not be so special.

 Inspite of the long drought  this years crop of seeds, nuts and berries does not seem to be overly diminished.  Maybe in size but certainly not in quantity. Tall Beech trees are alive with the excited voices of  Tits and Finches feeding on their favourite beech mast.  Ash and Sycamore are leaning with the weight of winged seeds.  Barely had I finished the above sentence and the arctic  blew in and everything changed to dreary days and chill winds.

Despite the cold wind the trees are still holding onto their leaves   and now the sun has returned there is still a glow.  Loosing leaves reveals the true shape of a tree from the perfectly formed domed oak to the erratic expression of the hawthorn.

Brambling

Many birds start to collect in large flocks of multiple families to search for food during the winter months. Many of them look like little brown jobs unless you are lucky enough to catch a blurred photo of one.

I also witnessed my first ever if small, murmuration  of Starlings over fields in Irby.  Many of the birds will be youngsters but the formation was perfect in its oscillation.

Waxing lyrical over autumnal colours leads me on to the exciting experiments I have been conducting over the past two weeks,  dyeing  and staining paper and cloth with rust.  The random quality of the image is what appeals the most in the process.  They  slowly emerge  over a 3 day period in a similar contemplative way that an idea might. The chemical processes  involved are quite complex and depend totally on the interaction of substrate and metal.  The more natural the more impact the result.

Combined with eco-printing it will be very interesting to see how things come together in a serendipitous way.