welsh hills again

Encouraged by Lucy from Loose and Leafy I am joining in with a group of people following a tree for a year. Now I have to be honest and admit that I started this last year but somehow lost interest quite quickly. Shameful I know.  Last year's tree was a horse chestnut and while it excited me mightily in spring, it then spent a lot of time in the summer looking pretty much the same.  I suspect this assessment is more to do with my failing to look closely enough at what was going on than with any lack on the part of the tree. This year I wandered about looking at trees and waiting for one to choose me.  I love the really big trees by the house. I considered both of these, the sycamore by the drive and the yew by the house.  Somehow they were just too big.  I felt I was not up to the challenge of doing them justice and also they are so damn high.  There would be worlds of life up there that I wouldn't know anything about, however carefully I photograph...

It was winter when we came here seven years ago.  There are a lot of trees on our land and along our boundary, in the hedges, standing on corners, and I couldn't believe that in winter I did not know what they were.  I have got better now at identifying trees without their leaves so I thought I would take you a walk around the edges of our property and have a look at the trees, in their winter beauty. Let's start up behind the house where three big beech trees grow on the top of the great curve of rock beneath which the house sits, tucked out of the wind.  Welsh nouns, as in French and other languages, are either masculine or feminine.  All trees are feminine words in Welsh and the Welsh for beech is ffawydden. Beech is generally a lowland tree and there are not many around here.  These three mark the boundary between us and our neighbours at the farm.  I love the smoothness of their bark and the vividness of the new leaves in spring.  Occasion...

A few days down with my daughter and son in law and the new baby.  Sometimes time folds in on itself.  It feels simultaneously a long time since I was in a house with a very new baby and no time at all since that baby was mine.  This must be why mothers and mothers in law are famed for interfering and telling new parents how to do it.  It feels so fresh and recent.  You pick the baby up and he settles into your shoulder just like his mother did but this time you feel calm and confident, not desperate and all at sea as I did the first time round. But these new parents really don't need any telling what to do.  The house has become sleepy and milky and running to baby time, his feeds setting the pace and the shape of the day.  They look very at home shushing and settling him and changing his nappy, very unfazed when he is temporarily cranky, carefully noting down when he feeds and sleeps but in a matter of fact way, without panic or obsesssiveness....