The Old Rowan

After doing a bit of garden tidying today (not that you'd notice!), I walked up the garden with my camera to try and capture the deep blue of the loch and the autumn hillsides on the other side before the sun sank behind the hill at the back of us. There were a couple of windsurfers zipping about in the choppiness.

You can just see the two sails

Best I could do from the distance. He was out of the picture in no time.

Then I tramped further up the garden and turned around to look at the last of the sunshine on the larches at the bottom of the field. This is all at about 1300GMT. Shortly after that we lose the direct sunlight on this side of the loch in winter.

Love that deep blue and the white wavelet caps

Part of the tallest larch here came down in a storm a couple of winters ago; that's why it's a funny shape.

Rummaging about under the old cypress tree, I enjoyed the colours when I looked up. The wind was strong enough to sway the whole of this multi-trunked tree, as I realised when I felt an odd sensation of swaying when I'd braced myself against of them to take the photograph!

And then I noticed all the fungi on the old rowan. When we moved here there was an old step ladder leaning against this rowan and evidence of a treehouse from long ago. Where the trunk had been cut was clearly dying but the tree was making valiant efforts to keep growing. It has been successful so far and produces a good crop of berries most years even in the shadow of the cypress and with the fungi now really taking hold.

You can see a couple of the huge rusty nails left over from treehouse days

Old and new layers of this bracket fungus, by the looks of it

And here are views of more of the tree

One of the big old dying branches

The main trunk with the young valiant growth to the left.
The blue plastic is covering a wood pile

Fungus and iron in an old tree,
and the colour of the cypress twig caught my eye

As I finish this at a quarter to four, the hills across the loch are turning russet in the last of the sunshine. The lower part of the slopes are already in the shadow of the boggy brae. Short, sharp and blustery this day has been but full of life.