Red Leaf

Picked up some leaves on a walk today, and also a twig with lichen, which I couldn’t scan as it bent too much, so I took some photographs, and will try and fit them together into an image. Liked the colours of the lichen against the black twig, am thinking of colours for my winter book. In the meantime, here is a leaf picked up on the same walk, did some work with magic wand and infill to get the background, maybe could have saved myself some time using a backing of black paper, but might have lost the radiance of the red.

Flyleaf

Wet Leaf on the Lawn

Leaf

Leaf Bud

Leaf and Thorns

Leaf-Fall

Colours of a Caravaggio painting in the leaf-fall under trees at The Hirsel on the first day of November.

The Green Leaf

 

 

Leaf Fall

This year’s bright leaves fall over the curled and colour-leeched leaves of former years, on the path that I take up above the river. Up here the rowans and the wild cherries will soon have their brilliant autumn colouring. The geese are still massed on the river, Canada geees and greylag, intermingled with the ducks and swans.  I don’t know what the salmon fishermen make of them, as they are very close to the rowing boats near the weir.

A Little Walk round the Lees

A Leaf by the Field Edge

Back in the Scottish Borders, I find that the acers in the garden have nearly all withered back, after their last minute burst of colour, so  I am glad I made an attempt to capture them before their delicate brilliance disppeared. I’m brewing up a cold, so decide to go for just a quick walk round the edge of the Lees, a great expanse of farmland without hedges, that is bordered on two sides by the Tweed. The river makes a great arc at this point, which is quite disorientating …

Much of the field area is ploughed now, the  barley has gone, as have the other crops laid round the edge; now the grass is springing up wherever it can manage to take root:

The sun to my right as I walk throws the shadows of trees far out over the field:

I look back towards Coldstream, with its clock towers rising up over the willows and other trees and shrubs that border the Leet, an offshoot of the Tweed:

And look up at the sky over the Lees:

At the corner, where I turn from the field edge up towards the Tweed itself, I take a photograph of the store of wood, in the patch of land where the guinea fowl ran round in the spring and summer:

This is a tree that I like so much:

Turning back towards Coldstream along the river, I kind of cheat, and point the camera through the apple trees on the bank straight towards the sun, and get these delicate murky tints that the camera sees but I don’t:

On past the fishing lodge, then try and get the swans into this picture of an autumnal waterside tree, but the swans are hiding:

So I take a picture of the tree itself instead, against the sky:

Time to go home, past the horse, then back along the Leet.  I pause to take one more picture of the water between the two bridges:

I hear a squawk behind me, wheel round, its that dratted heron: foiled again. Au revoir, heron, one day I’ll either get near enough to you, or have a lens strong enough to catch you properly, instead of just through obscuring reeds, or as a flitting silhouette.

Later, heron….. now it’s home for tea.