On the Clocks Going Back

The season is running away with me.  The courtyard is full of ash leaves and the grass is covered with the beaten bronze beech leaves.  I will try and add a picture of the tree - starting to lose most of the leaves into the garden - but the light has not been very good these last few days (soft, reluctant, easily lost) and I wonder if we will have direct light on the cottage now until March.   But despite these signs I only realised a day or so ago that in five weeks it will be December, and that the autumn is slipping away.

I have been reading a tourist's book on Vermont, mainly for the photographs of autumnal colour. It made me see the Lugg valley's trees in a new way, to see the huge patches of subtle October colour behind and between the evergreen plantations.  The valley is as transformed as anywhere in New England but the colours of course are not as startling.  

We think the landscape trees in Ludlow's Tesco car park are American oaks; I noticed them last year, deep fiery reds and maple-yellows as if lit internally.  The second Autumn Journal car park experience!  But if I were planting car parks I would go for strong blasts of seasonal colour, specimen trees that have a presence; these columns of young trees, bright in colour, stand out in the dull space; they add a perspective to distance and simply as trees add beauty to the industrial landscape.  

And tonight the clocks go back so we gain an hour in bed or something.  A turning point in the year, a man-made adjustment.  The house is dark in the mornings and the owls are often still calling as I get up.   They seem to prefer the dawn rather than the darkness before the dawn.