Seasonal Observations: Winter Trees
Winter can be a challenging season for some, but I am quite the fan. With an early January birthday, the first month is full of joy, celebration, rest and reflection. Having introduced the concepts of ‘Birthday Eve’ and ‘Birthday Month’ into the family unit, I unapologetically revel in all 31 days.
There is the grey drabness of course, and the sodden earth. Muddy paw prints to be wiped off the floors. However, there are also bright brilliant frosts, sunlight that could cut glass, and much beauty to be found in nature, if you dare venture out and open your eyes.
Winter is when the trees truly reveal themselves. Their networks of branches making strong statements against the cold harsh sky. It is as if they have been upturned. The horizon is a mirror, reflecting back what is within the earth.
Gertrude Jekyll articulated it perfectly when she wrote:
“In summer-time one never really knows how beautiful are the forms of the deciduous trees. It is only in winter, when they are bare of leaves, that one can fully enjoy their splendid structure and design, their admirable qualities of duly apportioned strength and grace of poise, and the way the spread of the many-branched head has its equivalent in the wide-reaching ground-grasp of the root.”
Some trees I prefer in winter, when they are leafless but architectural. Silver Birch is one of them. In summer, I find their leaves quite flat and uninspiring, and a distraction from the complexity of the bark. In winter, the bark is illuminating in the low light. There is much texture and nuance to appreciate in those slender trunks.
“Has any a tree so graceful a way of throwing up its stems as the Birch? They seem to leap and spring into the air, often leaning and curving upward from the very root, sometimes in forms that would be almost grotesque where it not for the never-failing rightness of free-swinging poise and perfect balance.”
These observations noted by us now, and those before us, form the rhythm of the seasons. Time marked by the cycles of the trees. My late neighbour Dorothy would only accept spring had fully arrived once her favourite Copper Beech had burst into leaf. A ritual taken each morning - standing on her front step and looking out intently. Sadly, it became diseased and needed to be felled. Her announcement of spring for 60 years lost, and irreplaceable.
My gaze often lingers in the space left by its absence.
