By: Blonde Two
When I woke up on Friday morning I could smell autumn through the open bedroom windows. You know the combination of smells, the slightly sweet tinge of rotting apples, the round woody aroma of fungi and the almost imperceptible hint of decay. It is impossible to smell autumn without wanting to set off out to find it and I did discover it in the garden, but I had to wait until Sunday before I could go down to the woods and do some proper exploration and inhalation.
Mr B2 and I plumped for Yarner Woods on the Eastern fringes of Dartmoor, I had only been there once before back in my early days of navigation practice, I distinctly remember getting lost. We didn’t get lost this time and we really enjoyed our autumn detection mission.
The woodland landscape was at that beautiful point where the leaves are mostly still on the trees, just taking on a hint of brown but against a still-bright green.
Autumn seemed to be starting from the floor up where there was a carpet of fallen leaves and still green acorns, the bracken had advanced the furthest into the world of brown but was still upright and the tree canopy, as you looked up through it, maybe wasn’t at its mid-summer density, but definitely wasn’t yet sparse. The smell, however, was deeply autumnal and it was clear that soon greens would bow to browns, leafy trees to bare silhouettes and high daylight to longer harvest shadows.
Not autumn quite, but not summer either. A little bit of autumn you could say!
Yes. It seems to have changed here within one day, The ash tree at the top of my drive displays many leaves of a delicate light-green-to-yellow contrasting with the remaining darker foliage – I have a love hate relationship with that tree- It sheds horrid almost sticky seedy stuff onto my car in the spring and at other times drops dead branches all over my grass which have to be removed before mowing, and it interferes with my incoming telephone line, but it has grown to majestic proportions during my seventeen years sojourn here – it has shown no signs of ash-die-back.
Today starts Autumn but it seems daft that the season officially ends on 21st December, when we have the longest night of the whole year! Why do we go on adhering to educational terms when clearly the season of Autumn should start on September 1st and winter should begin on 1st December?