True Colours

How quickly the time passes when the trees demand to be noticed, when they get to flaunt the inner leaf colours they might always be if they didn't need the green of chorophyll to photosynthesise the sunlight. Here the countryside specialises in golds, yellows and tans as beech, birch, hawthorn and oak predominate.

 

Still an uplifting sight even with the absence of  the flame red of garden grown maples and soumac. But time was not standing still. A few days ago the poplars at the across the field were a sentinel row of pheasant-coloured plumes and now they are  scarcely visible smudges through which to view the fields beyond.

With a forecast of wind and rain I set out to capture some of the best I could find with my camera. I found that up on the downs I was already too late. Many of the trees had already stripped down to their ivy green

underwear.

 

But finally I found the silver birches much closer to home. So much about them exudes elegance just now - the silver bark, the gold, diamond shaped leaves, the regal purple of the sweeping twigs already bare. Truly, as Coleridge called it, The Lady of the Woods.