It’s that time of year when the cherry blossom trees are blooming with silken petals, all over the city. My favourite spot to enjoy them is in the Meadows, the huge, popular park in the middle of the city, which boasts two avenues lined with cherry trees, creating a “tree tunnel” you can walk through.
While I was stuck for those eight, long, dragging days in hospital, dreaming of being able to go outside again, I found myself thinking that the sakura would bloom within a few weeks, and I wanted to be out of hospital and also to be recovered enough to walk through it. I do this every year, but this year, with the cancer surgery and ongoing treatment (chemo now awaits… sigh) it felt more precious than ever. I was dreaming of walking under those branches, heavy with blossoms, with my friend on my arm.
So, each day since I got out and moved back to the family home, dad and I would go for small walks to help me build myself back up slowly, then after a week I moved back to Edinburgh to my own flat, continuing my walks each day. On one such walk I saw the blossoms were almost full, so arranged to come back a few days later with my friend, and we promenaded arm in arm under those delicate blossoms. The Meadows was full of happy people enjoying the burst of fine, spring weather and the arrival of the blossoms, just a lovely atmosphere, and, as I said, this time with everything I have been enduring, it just felt so much more precious to do this annual ritual.
And I shot a couple of “walk through” videos to go with the photos:
The annual miracle of spring returns, and with a burst of beautiful, bright, golden, spring sunlight, my chum and I decided to enjoy a Sunday promenade below the lines of cherry trees, now in full blossom. While there are plenty of such blossoms around the city, in the Meadows there are two avenues of them, creating a “tree tunnel” that you can stroll under, and as you can see, it’s a popular thing for many of us to do as spring finally exerts its dominance over the departing winter.
This glorious little miracle happens every year, and every year I feel compelled to take some photos and share them again. After the dark, long, winter, it’s good for the soul to take in the light and the return of colours, those fabulous pinks against a clear, blue heaven above, just gorgeous.
Of course, I took a monochrome shot too, despite the colours it was also just begging for a B&W snap too.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one taking photos of it all!
As ever, click the pics to see the full size versions on my Flickr stream.
Autumn has been creeping in the last couple of weeks – truth be told, it wasn’t much of a summer here, even by Scottish standards! And we’re still getting more rainy days than nice, just as with the washed-out summer, but when that golden, autumn light does come out, the colours are rather lovely.
Autumn sunlight backlighting leaves still turning from green to brown and gold.
Fallen autumn leaf, stuck to a wet car window; always keep an eye open, you never know when an interesting photographic subject will offer itself up, if you notice it!
Of course, it isn’t just the trees and leaves, the autumn sun is so much lower in the sky that it now casts as much in the way of shadows as it does light, which creates scope for some interesting takes on an otherwise mundane subject, such as a chap sitting on a bench by the canal:
As April trundles on, we’ve had the usual mix of weather in Scotland, from beautiful, warm (ish), sunny spring days to howling wind, grey skies, rain and temeperatures suddenly dropping back to feel like February. We do get a variety here… Regardless, nature carries on to her own timetable, and there have been welcome signs that, despite bursts of colder weather, spring is settling in, and bringing with it a rebirth of colour.
I loved these white Daffies with the yellow centre, catching the evening light in the old boneyard of Dalry Cemetery
The cherry blossoms are coming out too – although it varies all over the city. Some have had petals blooming for a couple of weeks or more, others are barely starting to bud, others again are in almost full bloom. It’s remarkable how much it varies across the town.
I found this fallen bloom on the pavement, fallen from a vine running along a garden wall, covered in raindrops, the soft, silken petals in stark contrast to the hard, dark of the asphalt paving.
The Daffies, as ever, provide a wonderful burst of colour after the long, dark, winter months, like miniature, floral sunbursts
Autumn is really making itself felt as we move into late September; chillier in mornings and evenings now, although still quite pleasant temperatures in the main part of the day. Glorious, golden autumn sunlight quite often, and on those days it brings out the colours as the trees begin to turn, and it’s just utterly beautiful.
With such lovely autumn sunshine, people were making the most of it, enjoying pavement cafe culture in Bruntsfield, before the weather and temperatures slide further and it becomes too uncomfortable to sit outside the cafes and bars (at least not without a coat on!).
As always, you can click on the pics to see the far larger version on the Woolamaloo Flickr stream – now well north of 24, 000 photos!
EIFF 2022 – Le ChĂŞne / Heart of Oak,
Directed by Laurent Charbonnier, Michel Seydoux
A huge hit in France (the programmer introducing it at the 75th Edinburgh International Film Festival told the audience it had sold over half a million tickets at the box office), Le Chêne – titled Heart of Oak for the English-language market – the film made its UK debut at the EIFF this week. And while it is a French film, worry not if you are no good with subtitled films, as this is a “silent” documentary – there is no narrator or dialogue or talking heads experts. Instead the cinematography and the soundscape carry us through the entire film, essentially a year in the life of a huge, two hundred year old oak tree, and all the myriad varieties of life it supports on it, in it, below it and around it, from insects and fungi and wood mice in the roots to birds and squirrels in the branches, deer and boar around it, through the four seasons.
We open with a beautiful aerial shot over a forest, slowly descending through the canopy into a small clearing around a vast, gnarled old oak (the descent is so slow and gentle it gave me the impression of coming down gently in a hot air balloon). It’s spring/summer and the foliage is in full greenery, the huge, thick branches of this old tree covered in leaves, and there’s that marvellous sound of the breeze moving through the branches and leaves (isn’t that just one of the nicest sounds in the world?).
As the camera moves circle the trees, top, bottom and in-between and around, the camera lingering over the fantastically gnarled, tough bark on this regal tree, and then as we get closer in we see the community of life it sustains. Tiny acorn weevils with their long proboscis giving them a distinctive look, a red squirrel darting around, seemingly defying gravity as it pauses on a vertical climb, face down, leaping and jinking, constantly on guard, looking around for opportunity and danger.
Tiny wood mice who have a colony in tunnels among the roots cautiously stick their heads out while a barn owl scans the area from a high branch, looking for just such an excursion, a mating pair of birds make their home in the oak’s branches, sharing them with the squirrel, the editing of the footage of each giving the distinct impression of an almost human neighbour feeling – not someone you know personally, but like someone whose face you recognise, know they live in your area, the sort you nod to at the bus stop or in the shop. The much larger animals of the forest such as the boars and deer forage around the trunk, the boars using its rough surface for a good scratch while they’re looking endlessly for food.
We move through each of the seasons, watching the animals fight for survival, a whole ecosphere based around this tree, from fungal connections in the earth among its deep roots to the tops of its branches; it is, essentially its own little world that we are visiting here. We see the excitement when the acorns start to drop, especially for the resident squirrel, leaping around to try and grab several then stash them – one it will bury and forget, and by the time the next spring rolls around we wee that acorn has started a small root system below the earth, and a tiny trunk – more like a small branch with a few leaves – above ground; the life cycle continuing.
We see the creature and the tree weather the worst of the winter, the preparation for spring, new births, screeching baby birds in a new nest demanding food, the acorn weevils, all died off at the end of the summer and autumn, have implanted embryos into some acorns, which finally wriggle out, burrowing into the ground below to mature into the next season’s group of insects. The whole natural cycle rolls past us in simply stunning footage – including some clever techniques to let us see below the ground, for instance into the mice nest – or to flip momentarily to give an animal’s perspective (as a hawk hunts one of our mating pair of birds from the tree we see the exhilarating rush of the chase from its point of view for a moment.
I think the only main issue I had with this was that the editors seem to have chosen to avoid showing much in the way of any creature being killed – we see a number of attacks and hunts from and on various creatures, but other than a kingfisher catching a small fish, none of the hunts we see are successful. While I know there’s a high failure rate for even the best predators in a hunt, after several of these on screen it felt more like this was a deliberate choice by the film-makers.
That’s a minor quibble though – in truth this is a film to cherish in our current world of endless worries and fears over environmental collapse, financial hardship, warfare. Here’s a reminder to take time out, listen to the sound of branches moving in the wind, remember that the whole natural world goes on regardless of how buried under stress and worry we are (Lockdown reminded me of that very much, walking in a deserted city and hearing the spring birds calling out so clearly with no traffic to drown them out, and it lifted my spirits). This is like taking a “forest bath”, a cleanser, a reminder of the sheer majesty of our natural world, the simple beauty of a tree, the entire network of life it sustains around and on it. It’s a movie to see on the big screen, and let the visual and sounds immerse you into this tribute to the majesty of our natural world.
Despite some sudden bursts of very fine weather, summer is most certainly giving ground to the approach of autumn here now. Even if we get a warm, sunny day, the shadows are longer, and the sun sets earlier each evening, and when it does the temperature drops a lot quicker than it did in the middle of summer, while the early mornings are noticably cooler. But the light, on a sunny day at least, is now moving towards that glorious golden quality, while the leaves are turning on the trees, right now at that beautiful mix of still some leafy green mixed with increasing golds, reds and browns, and every day there are more fallen leaves along the pavements (yes, I have indulged in my first kicking a pile of dry autumn leaves into the air of the year, it has to be done).
The chestnuts are now large on the old tree leaning over the wall of the nearby boneyard, the boughs heavy, the conkers about to fall to the ground below (sadly the days when schoolkids grabbed them to play conkers with seems to be long gone, but it’s still nice to see this annual sight).
Autumnal apples approaching full size, hanging over a garden wall on my route home from work, sparking a sudden childish desire to go scrumping. And yes, I did say that partly because I wanted an excuse to use the word “scrumping”. As ever, click on the pics to see the lager versions on my Flickr site.
Walking in the Hermitage of Braid today, near the foot of Morningside (Miss Jean Brodie country). The trees are still mostly resplendent in their verdant coat of summer greenery, but Autumn, Autumn is whispering in Summer’s ear “my turn is coming….”
Just outside the Hermitage, over a tall wall of an expensive house, the branches of its trees were laden with the autumn bounty of apples. And me there without my scrumping ladder to grab any…
Dad and I had a nice walk around the Colzium in Kilsyth – gorgeous autumn day, lovely golden light, and that light was showing off a cascade of seasonal colours. The photos don’t really do the light quality or the foliage colours justice…
The cherry blossoms have been late this spring, after the unseasonable bursts of late winter weather a few weeks ago, but finally it warmed up, the sun shone, they came out, and now they’ve mostly gone already – for a few days the branches hang low and heavy with the petals, then with each breeze they flutter down, a soft rain of silk, carpeting the pavement below, and then they are gone again for another year. Naturally I snapped a few photos before the vanished…
Walking home today after a frankly dispiriting and depressing birthday (you know it’s not going to be a special day when the post arrives with several bills and no cards, not inspiring and it was downhill from there – should have stayed in bed and waited for the day to go away), passing the trees in the playground of a nearby school and more examples of how the bizarre weather is affecting plants: blossom petals appearing on the trees.
These would normally be a March to April sight, but although we’ve been battered by gale-force storms repeatedly this month and lashing rain and floods, and despite those driving winds being bitingly cold, the actual ambient temperature has been way above what we would normally have in Scotland at this time of year. When I was home last week dad pointed out shoots of Daffodils pushing through the earth in the garden, this week I see spring blossoms in December. Strange weather, lately…
