Monday 9 December 2013

the beautiful light

The light at this time of the year is astonishingly beautiful, when we get calm, sunlit days such as today.  It brings into relief the thick bunches of pink berries on the Sorbus hupehensis, not yet eaten by birds (perhaps pink is not their favourite), and the rich, deep red crabs of Malus x robusta 'Red Sentinel'.  The leafless twigs of Cotoneaster cornubia are weighed down with fruit.  We normally think of cotoneasters as shrubs, reliable candidates for tricky sites and supermarket car parks, but C. cornubia will form a fine small tree, if trained early to a single stem.  It may prove evergreen, but ours aren't.  Perhaps they find life in a pot a trifle stressful.

Sweeping up leaves, my barrow could almost have served as the basis for the design of a scarf, a rich yet repetitive mixture of browns, ochres and yellows, scattered through with splashes of red.  It would be fun to be a textile artist, and find inspiration in the natural world.  Alas, the only person I knew who studied textile design at college ended up working for Haringey council.

A few plants are defiantly hanging on to their foliage.  A vivid patch of yellow proved to belong to Physocarpus opulifolius, while Itea virginica 'Henry's Garnet' is still almost fully clothed, its neat oval leaves having turned wine red.  I see that its entry on the excellent Missouri Botanical Garden website mentions as one of its noteworthy characteristics that it may keep its leaves until December, but I hadn't clocked that feature when I planted one at home, and it came as a nice surprise.  It turns out to be willing to live in shade and in boggy conditions as well.

The light made the most of the coloured stems around the place, the soft mustard yellow of the willow and brilliant scarlet of the Cornus.  At home, I was admiring on Saturday how it caught the cinnamon brown bark of the Arbutus x andrachnoides, and the flaking cream and brown trunks of the river birch.  It isn't just that you see stems better once the leaves have fallen, after all, the Arbutus is an evergreen.  There is definitely something in the quality of winter light.  Though it makes life tricky for photographers.  The Systems Administrator struggled yesterday to get a decent picture of our friends posed in front of the aquatic Christmas tree, as the contrast between light and dark was so severe.

By the time I drove home the sun was setting, and the sky in the west had turned a luminous shell pink, streaked with blue grey, the leafless trees silhouetted against it in mute, motionless grace. Winter can be depressing in those weeks when it is endlessly grey, and cold, but on days like today it feels like a right part of the turning seasons.  Pity those people in offices who missed the entire day, because it was still  virtually dark when they arrived, and the sun was long down by the time they came out again.

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