Beech leaves

click photo to enlarge
Beauty is all around us, there to be seen if we care to look. Elsewhere in this blog I've quoted the first two lines from William Henry Davies' poem, "Leisure" - "What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare." In this post I add the next two lines, "No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows." A few days ago we sat beneath the boughs of a tree and ate our lunch during a break in a woodland walk. The sun was shining, the oak leaves and the silver birch seeds were falling, and around us on the ground were small pieces of prickly gorse that the wind have removed from a nearby bush. It was pleasurable to simply sit,eat and watch as autumn progressed all around us.

After we had eaten we set off and I soon stopped again beneath some boughs of beech and studied the colours in the leaves of the tree's shoots at the base of its trunk. The green leaves of summer were fast passing to be replaced by green-veined yellow and more sombre yellow-veined, brown, and the shiny twigs were reflecting the blue of the sky. I can't guarantee that I stopped as long as a sheep or a cow, but it was long enough to enjoy the colours and patterns and collect a memento of the moment in the form of this photograph.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Autumn Beech Leaves
Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 28.5mm (77mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/80
ISO: 320
Exposure Compensation:  -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A Dales lane

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Lanes, like footpaths, B roads, A roads and motorways etc fulfil a simple purpose - they connect places. However, a distinguishing feature of lanes is that they rarely do so in the most efficient manner. This is because they are often of great age, and some of the places that the lane originally linked no longer exist. Or, the farming carried out in the area through which the lane passes is no longer the same.

The lane in today's photograph is a small affair that links two bigger lanes. This lane rises across a hillside where pasture gives way to scattered trees, rock outcrops, rough grazing and woods. It passes close by an isolated cottage that must once have been the home of a gamekeeper. And perhaps therein lies one of the main reasons for its existence. I'm sure that once it was well marked and maintained. Today it is part footpath, part lane, in some places without an edge, elsewhere with millstone grit drystone walls and trees marking its course. The photograph shows a section with a wall on the right and the remains of a hawthorn hedge on the left. A large beech tree is also a feature, and the lane appears to be wide enough to accommodate a horse-drawn cart.

I took the photograph to record the line of hawthorn, but also for the yellow of the early morning light. The beech had lost some of its leaves, but the hawthorn were still clinging on to theirs, the unseasonally warm weather perhaps making them think that summer was still here.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 29mm (58mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3
Image Stabilisation: On

The ones that got away

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Photographers are like fishermen: they dwell upon the ones that got away. I can still see the shot I missed when an enormous sheet of agricultural plastic, more than 100 feet long, blew past me and floated over a bungalow, twisting and turning in the air, a surrealistic sight that I came upon when I was without a camera. And the photographs that I've missed when driving along roads where stopping was dangerous or forbidden are too numerous to mention. However, the failure to get photographs on these occasions can be be easily forgiven; you simply feel that fate, circumstance - call it what you will - were against you. What's harder to deal with is when you see a shot, consider how to secure the best that it offers, and still don't end up with the photograph you wanted. Today's two images are examples of this phenomenon.

We were walking through some trees at Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, when the tip of a beech tree branch hanging low against a background of foliage caught my eye. There was no light coming through the trees behind, so I knew there would be no circular highlights to detract from the serpentine line of the twig or the delicacy and fine colours of the leaves. I opened the aperture to f4.5 to blur the background and mounted the 70-300mm lens to provide a longer focal length to further increase the blur, then took the main shot at 141mm. The composition and the light through the leaves is just what I wanted. However, I could see from the LCD that the background could do with more blur. So, I took a second shot. For this one I increased the focal length to 300mm. Then, knowing that the depth of field would be very shallow, opened the aperture to f5.6 (hardly worth the change). I took my shot looking carefully at the background, and was very satisfied with it. However, when I came to look at both shots on the computer I realised that I'd missed my composition on the second shot even though I'd got my background as I wanted. If I'd been paying better attention I'd have got the composition of the main photograph with the background of the smaller one. My next chance of that particular confluence of details is probably next autumn!

photographs and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 141mm
F No: f4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 1000
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Beech woods

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Beech is a woodland tree. It is less frequently found as a single specimen in a hedgerow or growing alone somewhere. However, in some places it can be seen as a landmark tree signalling a crossroads or a boundary. On the Lincolnshire Wolds it was used to line some of the old drove roads, and in Yorkshire it is often planted around hill farms. When beech grows in a close-canopy wood it is tall, up to 140 feet, with trunks that are relatively free from branches. Where single specimen trees do grow, however, they are shorter with very large crowns - the so-called "deer park beech."

The examples in today's photograph near Stackhouse, North Yorkshire, are part of a small wooded area on steeply sloping pasture with outcropping limestone. The trees' canopy has kept the ground damp allowing moss to grow over the grey stone, something that doesn't happen higher up the slope where the only shade comes from bracken and the occasional rowan. This woodland must have been planted here to make use of an otherwise quite unproductive area. Beech can manage quite well on thin, rocky soil, as this photograph that I took in Lancashire shows. The hamlet of Stackhouse would find these trees a good source of fuel, but also useful for furniture, tool handles and other strong wooden articles. In medieval times oak and beech were the main trees involved in the system known as pannage. This was the right to pasture mainly pigs in woodland so that they could eat the acorns and beech mast. In a thinly wooded area such as this there would be slim pickings for any foraging swine, but in the bigger, denser woods of, say, the Weald, it would be very worthwhile.

I have a fondness for beech trees, and as well as the Lancashire example noted above I've photographed this clump and this beech wood edge in autumn.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 24mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 250
Exposure Compensation:  -1.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Sunset copse

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Driving through the upper Ribble Valley in North Yorkshire one evening, just as the sun was going down, I came upon this copse on top of a low, rounded hill. The symmetrical silhouette of the trees against the sky and the sun-tinged clouds caused me to stop and take my photograph. This area of Yorkshire is underlaid by limestone, and the area in question has drumlins, so I'm guessing from the outlines and the aforementioned facts that these are beech trees on one of these low hills that were formed during the last glaciation. The regular, parallel undulations emphasised by the low sun suggest that the land was once cultivated by medieval ridge and furrow methods.

Beech is planted in the Pennines as shelter belts for farms and fields, and always seems to do best on limestone. Sometimes, as here, groups are planted as landmark clumps, helping people to orientate themselves, adding beauty to the landscape, and providing a regular supply of firewood from the overcrowded branches that the wind brings down. Looking at this copse one can almost imagine the trees have made a pact with each other. "Let's all grow big branches on the outside", they might have said, "but smaller ones inside. And you lot in the middle don't bother with too many side branches, just grow up taller than the rest of us." Of course the overcrowding of trunks, and the availability of light are responsible for the shape of each tree and for the overall symmetry of the group. However, its nice to think that these stately trees are co-operating on their hill-top site to extend the life of each other, and in so doing prolonging the pleasure that they provide for passing motorists with cameras!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 104mm (208mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Found poems and beech trees

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The idea of the "found" poem is intriguing. We are used to reading poetry where meaning has been forged over time, worked, re-worked, and built with tears, anguish and quiet desperation. So the idea that one can simply find a piece of writing, composed for a particular purpose, that unwittingly offers the poetic experience seems, at first glance, quite unlikely.

In his poetry workshops published in The Guardian newspaper earlier this year David Morley looks at the found poetry "lying asleep" in field guides and the prose of natural history. He discusses how it can be shaped so it "escapes its origin and finds a fresh tone." The examples he shows often don't depart at all from the words of the original, though in others the finder-poets add their own contributions. The example below is from the article quoted, and is offered to complement today's photograph of the beautiful autumn beech trees at the edge of Pedder's Wood, near Grize Dale, in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire.

Beech by Peter R White
Wilkinson, John and Mitchell, Alan (1978)
A Handguide to the Trees of Britain and Northern Europe
Treasure Press, London

Beech (Fagus sylvatica)
cannot make roots
in saturated soils but
drive them through
dry layers to
reach
moisture.
Hence although
a thirsty tree it is
not found in wet
hollows nor on clay soils.
Male flowers are little
balls of stamens
on slender stalks.
Female flowers are green
with white filaments and
are on
short stout stalks.

Beech
live for barely 250 years
then die
and
fall
to pieces
suddenly.

photograph & (some) text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 18mm (36mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f8.
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The beech tree

click photo to enlarge

In the south of England pollen from beech trees can be detected in remains dating back to 6000BC. No longer restricted to its southern fastness, the beech is now widespread in Britain, introduced in the midlands and north for its beauty and its unique qualities.

The sturdy, tall beech tree has long been used as a windbreak around exposed farms. In Yorkshire, on the chalk Wolds, and in the limestone Dales, lines, "L" shapes and squares of trees can be seen serving this purpose. They mark the location of farms in the valleys, on the hillsides, and standing against the sky. As well as giving shelter the beech trees provide kindling, and add a background sound to the day's toil and the night's rest, as the wind rustles the leaves and moans in the branches. Throughout the country beech trees can be seen planted in copses on hilltops, in small groups or single specimens at crossroads, in churchyards, or in woodlands. Lowland areas often have carefully manicured beech hedges, thick, green and impenetrable in summer, their brown leaves of autumn clinging on deep into the winter. Country houses frequently planted avenues of the tree along roads and tracks, and grew plantations to provide wood for estate joiners and carpenters.

The iron industry of the Weald used beech trees, as did the furniture makers of Buckinghamshire, turning the wood for the legs and spindles of Windsor chairs. The largest group of beech trees in the world is to be found in this county, at Burnham Beeches. Pollarded examples here are known to be five hundred years old. Wildlife thrives in beech woods. The "mast" that the trees produce is eaten by mice, squirrels, and a variety of birds, and the massive trunks and long, spreading branches provide homes for creeping and flying creatures. I photographed these beech trees in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, on a sunny January day. The shallow soil and outcropping rock had been no impediment to the growth of the trees on this hillside. But it had meant that the root system was, of neccessity, near the surface. It is said that the spread of a tree's roots matches the spread of its branches, and, looking at these beech trees you could almost believe it. I took my photograph with a wide zoom lens at 22mm (35mm equivalent), with the camera set to Aperture Priority (f6.3 at 1/200 second), ISO 100, and -1.0EV.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen