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In the cosy half dark of a mid-October evening, as the last of the crickets crick, the old ash decides in haste that it is time to let go. At night’s first hoot of owl, the tree’s first leaf sets sail, like a beacon signalling the other trees that time has come to begin their Autumnal undress and run naked into the face of the brisk. By the light of morn, the old ash was leafless.

In these moments, long lost in observation, I become consumed in the life of the leaf, imagining their departure accompanied by a prolonged and difficult goodbye. Here, time is gone, and the tiniest fleeting moments, such as the short journey of a single leaf from branch to ground, extend into prolonged adventures that verge on the epic.

Ash is one the first of our native trees to begin their Autumn. In many cases we can find trees already bare by this time. The native ash trees, Fraxinus excelsior, in most cases, barely change colour before throwing off their gowns – some of the hedgerow specimens completely lose their cover of foliage over the course of a day or two, leaving a smudge of pale green-yellow in the gutter beneath them. In other cases, when adequately sheltered from the wind, excelsior manages to glow a bright sunshine yellow. In the case of the white ash, (Fraxinus Americana) a North American species, pictured here, all the colours of Autumn appear in a spectacular show of bright pinks, reds, oranges, and yellows.

These white ash trees on the Redlands estate were probably planted in the 70s, at the time of or shortly after the site was fiirst developed. They stand upon a mound at the top of the Redlands estate before the Rural life museum and frame a view to the tower of St Michael, much like the trees upon the mound at the Windmill hill estate, where I currently reside.

Opposite my house stand a group of planted trees twelve in number. I see them everyday as I open my curtains and I enjoy nothing more than watching the light dance in their crowns through the mist of my morning coffee. There are no ash trees here, but a collection of maples, limes and a single horse chestnut. When I arrived to live upon Windmill hill in March, the trees had not yet started to leaf and I could still see the tower of St Michael protruding over the mound. As Spring progressed the trees slowly covered the horizon and became the focal point of the view from my front windows.

At present, not much pleases me more than Sun’s rise in the East as it casts its light through the Edmund hill trees, and the trees in turn cast their elongated shadows across the green. The scene becomes saturated in light, drowning one’s sense of sight in a torrent of colour and creating spectacular architectural patterns of vertical trunks and stretched diagonal shadows against golden green grasses, and a golden blue sky.

With the added interest of developing Autumnal leaf colour, this view sings like a gothic stained glass window illuminating the church of Edmunds hill in a dreamlike radiance. In the evening, the inverse occurs, as the sun sets in the West the tree’s shadows are cast in the opposite direction, Eastward across the mound. On rare occasions, when the sunset bursts through the narrow gap between the horizon and a low lying band of cloud, its light hangs in the tree’s canopy, and the whole place glows like heaven opened its gates.

A jaunt across the green presently forms the beginning of most of my leisurely walks toward Stone down. As we speak, the Autumn leaves from this odd collection of silver maple, sycamore, horse chestnut, field maple and lime, lay across the green creating a cracked mosaic under foot. Much of the maple foliage is swept into the road at the front of our house, creeping into our front garden and creating a beautiful path of pointed palmate leaves upon which we depart from and arrive back to our front door.

Recent high winds and strong downpours have encouraged the trees upon the mound to disperse their leaves earlier than they otherwise might have. They decorate the green swathe around the mound with random colourful pieces of tree, scattered like a dismantled jigsaw waiting to be deciphered.

Proceeding across the green, one can observe the patterns gradually changing colour and form. Passing around and beneath each tree we can safely discern the species which currently provides shelter from the density of its discarded pieces upon the ground. As I walk with eyes to the floor, I notice at first the bright pointed patterns of silver maple, they give way to the rusty fingers of horse chestnut, which halfway across the green become peppered with the lemon yellow hearts of lime. The more numerous fallen leaves of the sycamores, create a less attractive brown carpet over most of the ground, they serve to enhance the pop of the lime’s and maple’s colouring, but do not otherwise serve much aesthetic benefit.

Sycamore, Silver maple, Field maple

The collection of trees upon the mound is of a variety useful for the testing of one’s tree identification skills. The Silver maples, a North American tree introduced to the UK by Charles Wagner in 1725, are in the winter easily mistaken for sycamores, before they receive their odd flowers in Spring, ahead of their leaves, which are more pointed and indented than the neighbouring sycamores.

The presence of the additional Acers, sycamore (Acer psuedoplatanus) and field Maple (Acer campestre) make for a fun Maple ident challenge. Placing in a row the leaves from the three different maples helps us to discern the finer differences in their palmate foliage. Sycamore (left) has less indented lobes with notched edges, while the field maple (right) tends to sport smaller leaves with rounded lobes and more pronounced indents. The silver maples (top) sport leaves with smooth edges, but which have pointed lobes, with further points between each lobe, similar to the more commonly found Norway maple, but far smaller and daintier in appearance. Due to their long petiole the leaves readily flash their silvery undersides in the wind, giving the tree its common name and providing perhaps the most distinct indication of silver maple.All of the maples in this comparison sport a long petiole in comparison to their leaf size, this is a useful observation when it comes to inspecting other trees with palmate leaves – plane trees, for example, who grow with a far shorter petiole. Note: the crop on the above image has reduced the length of the petioles for field maple and sycamore.

Silver Maple

Like most maples, the silver maple can appear with a monoecious reproductive behaviour, with both male and female flowers on one tree, as well as dioecious, with male and female flowers on separate trees. Just like many of our common maples except for the red maple, the silver maple produces its winged seeds in Autumn. The four silver maples on the green show no sign of having produced fruit this year, and so we might be able to confirm that all are male trees, or else females that were not pollinated.

Silver maple

As far as an attempted estimate of age, the trees appear to be a collection of planted specimens arranged in a vague order around the edge of the green and the mound. It can be easily assumed that they were planted at the time of the first development upon Windmill hill in the 1940s, making them no more than 80-90 years old. The girth measurements of most of the trees support this, a field maple at 140cm, estimates a tree of approximately 80 years, and the limes at 150m are also estimated at approximately eight decades.

There are three trees with somewhat larger girth readings: a horse chestnut pictured above, a sycamore, and a silver Maple, all approaching three metres, which might suggest trees of 150 years or more. However, Silver maples are particularly notable for their quick growth and for their use in housing estates only after the second world war, supporting a younger estimate. It might also be within the realms of these trees to gain such a girth within 80 years especially if their base has over developed to provide stability.

So in this case, we might be inclined to ignore our girth readings and put the added circumference of these trees down to environmental factors, perhaps their exposed position on top of the second highest hill in Avalon. If any were a candidate for existence before the estate was built, it would be the horse chestnut; it’s species is anomalous amongst the others and in addition to its 3m girth measurement, it shows notable features such as exposed heartwood and developed fluting, that might suggest a greater age. That said, the size of the canopy does not support the estimate suggested by the girth reading, being less developed than one would expect of a tree over 100 years old, so I would hesitate to suggest it was older than its neighbours.

Windmill Hill – Mound

From my kitchen window, through the mist of my morning coffee, a frenzy of colour is appearing in celebration of end, a final flourish before the twiggy monotone months take hold. It is true to say that except for the show of cherry, the dusty pink of elder, and the maroon of dogwood, and the subtle reds of other hedgerow maples and hawthorns, few of our native trees give a show of red in the Autumn – the UK’s Autumnal show concentrates mainly on yellow, brown, orange, rust, and copper, and we rely a lot on the decorative cultivars and non-native planted trees to provide a dose of red in the landscape.

I wait now for Autumn’s show to roll fully into town, I wait for the leafy curtains to be fully drawn and for the twig cracked skies to be written. In the meantime, I plan a leaf peeping excursion to Stourhead, I prepare Autumn walks for October and November, plus a winter solstice tree walk and owl experience, all dates are below, and I start to settle in for my much needed hibernation.

Until next time, we walk to the trees.

UPCOMING TREE WALKS:

 

 

 

VISUAL DIARY

Oct 2024

 

Matt Witt

Author Matt Witt

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