Chilly November

Today is bright and sunny although it’s cold outside, it doesn’t have yesterday’s biting wind which coupled with no sun, made yesterday weather-wise a very unpleasant day, when Mike picked up Rick at 3:20pm the temperature gauge outside Tesco showed 5 degrees.

The trees are almost bare now, but the lawn is dressed very prettily in reds, yellows, browns, oranges and golds – and the blackbirds are very busy overturning the lawn’s leafy covering looking for fat worms and insects.

There are still many beautiful flowers out in the garden: a dark black/red clematis and a beautiful pale pink one with a deep pink stripe down the center of each petal, pink white and maroon chrysanthemums, sweetly scented clusters of mid-pink viburnum bodnantense and pink white and red roses, of course there are still many bushes laden with brilliant shiny berries red orange and yellow and the malus tree branches are heavily weighted with fruit, the berries and the malus fruit will keep the birds fed for a while.

Here and there, the last leaves dance on the bare branches twirling and spinning merrily, soon a southern gust of wind will catch them unawares and they too will be part of the lawn’s rich carpet.

Yesterday, returning home from the hospital we turned our back on the motorway and instead traveled home the ‘old way’. The roads were narrower, slower, prettier, and often tree-lined. We passed many parks and commons with lakes full of wild fowl and numerous gardens some already tidied and put to bed for the winter, others like ours, rather wild and unkempt, but havens for wildlife with birds in them from morning to night.

Best of all we journeyed through High Beach, a well-known, naturally beautiful area, acres and acres of beech trees most of the leaves had fallen; the roads were narrow with no footpaths. And the crisp autumn leaves littered the roadside and swept away into an orange carpet on the forest floor. It was breathtakingly beautiful, the sun’s rays shining through the bare branches gave the leafy carpet a red glow. (High Beach is part of Epping Forest, an ancient forest where Queen Elizabeth I (154x-1603) used to hunt for boar and venison, a cruel and outmoded sport now thankfully becoming more and more frowned upon. Queen Elizabeth I’s hunting lodge is still standing in Epping Forest.)