Autumn is such a lovely season – I know I say it each and every year 🙂

the comfort of warming soups and stews and layers of soft clothing – scarves and mittens, coats and blankets, all gathered out of summer storage and aired, ready to cosily envelope and warmly delight on chilly days

the beauty of the countryside as the trees transform their leaves to bronze, copper, scarlet and gold in preparation for a time of dormancy and rest through the harshness of winter

Falling leaves and fallen trees, four so far, dashed down and splintered by the heavy gusts of the first storms

Squally showers; torrential downpours; light mizzle, rain of every kind, and all very welcome because of the extreme lack of it throughout spring and summer of this year

Arrowheads of flocking Canada geese flying across the early morning sky, one of my favourite Autumnal sights. Although the UK population do not migrate Autumn does apparently trigger an ancestral instinct, and at this time of year they do gather and take flight. I always dash to the window when I hear them loudly honking in the distance,  they do this to both stay in contact and to coordinate position changes within their characteristic V-shaped flight formations.

The swans on the lake at Panshanger had 5 cygnets this year, 3 have survived to early adulthood and there is much flapping and splashing going on as they exercise their flight muscles.

Robin’s pincushions, the red spiky balls that can sometimes be seen on wild rose bushes during autumn. These are created by a female gall wasp when she injects a substance into a developing rosebud during the summer. This substance changes the plant tissues and causes the bud to instead develop into a mossy ball – a rose bedeguar gall, or Robin’s pincushion. Each one holds many larvae within it and they feed on the gall throughout the winter, emerging in spring as adults

Fungi hunting, I scan the ground on every woodland walk, looking for my autumn favourites. And just as November arrives, cloaked in mist and trailing a wake of drifting golden leaves, the very first few toadstools have emerged.

As usual there have been our regular wood walks with Toby, you can see from his smile how much he loves being out in the woods, and also how mild early October was as we were still able to walk in T shirts.

And there has of course been knitting going on here, but still only of the sock kind. I’ve knitted several pairs in a combination of smoky blues and chocolate browns, ‘woodsmoke’, ‘coffee bean’ and a few mini skeins – all shades of Ainsworth and Prin sock yarn from The Knitting Shed. But unfortunately pattern writing is still eluding me, my small pockets of Toby free time are just not enough to build up any momentum and with this fractured way of working I can’t seem to concentrate well enough to make much progress. For now I’m not panicking, I’m going to hope that things will fall into place in time and I’ll once again have a new pattern to share with those who would like one.

Well,  I hope to be back at the end of November with toadstool pictures, if I find any more. Wishing you a good few weeks where you are and hoping that you have plenty of small pleasures to enjoy as the month unfolds, J x

 

PS: In the pictures above there is one of a Hummingbird Hawkmoth chrysalis, I’ve found a few hidden away in the undergrowth, no doubt there are more as there were quite a few caterpillars, they wriggle when touched so are still alive and hopefully they will make it through the winter and emerge as adults in the spring. Also Katsue the fox is still visiting daily after dark (the wildlife hole is still blocked up by our neighbours so she cannot come and go at any time of day as she used to), it’s really hard now to get photos of her but it is a joy to still see her each day.

November has brought some proper English rain: days of constant, steady rainfall from deep grey clouds that form a dense blanket across the sky, reducing the daylight to a semi dark twilight. Murky, miserable, gloomy, overcast, dim are all words that we use for weather like this, and the Scots have their own wonderful word for this kind of weather: dreich

On days like this I marvel at the amount of water that is held aloft in clouds, it can rain non stop for days, causing flooding down here on the land, and yet the density of the cloud above seems to remain constant. It’s estimated that an average cumulus cloud weighs around 500,000 kg and at any one time there is six times more water held in clouds in the atmosphere around the globe than in all of the world’s rivers combined. As I cloud watch on our walks I often think about the constant cycle of water across the planet: from a vaporous state in clouds, to a liquid state in oceans and rivers, and a solid state in the frozen cold places of the world. Of all of the known elements, water is unique because it is the only natural substance that exists in all three states under normal Earth conditions. Isn’t that something marvelous to ponder on cold and wet November day?

Most of our walks take in some form of water, there are the narrow brooks that criss-cross the woodlands, the chalk streams and rivers that flow alongside Waterford Marsh and through Panshanger, the shallow pools left from second world war bombings at Balls Wood and the deep gravel pit extraction lakes at Panshanger, now home to such an amazing array of wildlife.

All summer long the pebbles that line the woodland brooks were baked dry, but now they are once again submerged under a few inches of languid water. The stream strength is not yet enough to wash away the fallen autumn leaves that float on the surface but now the ground is fully saturated one more winter storm will swell the gentle trickle to a rushing, babbling flow. And we no longer crunch our way through the fallen leaves, their dry crackle has been dulled by dampness and underfoot the squelch of mud has replaced the baked earth of summer.

Back home inside is warm and cosy and there is some quiet calm, some gentle-paced sock knitting, and a little tentative pattern writing. I hope to pop back very soon with an updated version of my free knitted holly pattern. It was first written and shared in November 2007 and I have learnt a lot more about knitting since then so have re-written it with different increases methods. I just have to knit a few more samples and photograph them so will share a free PDF file in my next post.

‘Til then I hope life is treating you kindly and you are finding enjoyable moments in your days, see you soon, J x