At home with the babies

We’ve been back at Comar Wood for six months as a family of four, after baby Ewan’s stay in hospital finally came to an end last April. As you might imagine, looking after two babies is quite time consuming, so there has not been much time for doing anything in the woodland, let alone writing about it – hence the lack of blog posts in recent months!

Luckily, though, we live in our woodland, surrounded by trees, so we’ve still been able to see plenty of wildlife and the changing woodland seasons whilst spending a lot of time in and around the house with the babies. There has still been time for walks in the wood, and foraging trips for brambles and mushrooms, with babies in the slings (tandem sling if it’s just me).

After five months in Glasgow it was a relief to get back to the woodland and to our house. Compared with the hospital and urban environment we had been existing in while we were in Glasgow, back home feels like a feast for the senses. There has been plenty written about the benefits of being able to see and be among trees and natural settings for human wellbeing¹. In my own experience being able to see, hear and smell a natural environment, especially one with trees, makes me feel generally more relaxed than being in a built environment. I think this has to do with the complexity of the natural environment compared with the man-made: the lack of straight lines, the infinite number of different shapes and forms, the scene constantly changing with the light, the weather and the seasons, and all the associated sounds and smells. Built environments, in contrast, tend to be static, unchanging and simple with flat surfaces and angled corners. For me, time spent in built environments generally feels more boring and/or stressful, especially when you can’t even see out of a window!

So, back in the wood, we enjoyed watching spring and summer unfolding with the annual sequence of flowers and greenery – white wood anemones followed by the white bird cherry blossom and the bluebells, the flush of green and then the prolific bracken growth. In early summer foxgloves were abundant, a result of our disturbances in the woodland over the last couple of years (track building and tree felling). The pink of the foxgloves was followed by the purple of the heathers, then blue harebells and scabious. After a chilly spring, with trees coming into leaf late, summer was warm and dry and we spent most of it outside.

Now the flowers of summer are long gone and instead we have the rich and beautiful hues of autumn. Orange-brown oaks, golden birch and larch and yellow hazel and willow glow against a backdrop of purple birch twigs, the rusty brown of the dead bracken, and dark green spruce. The colours look just as good illuminating a dull day as they do when lit up by the low-angled autumn sunshine.

The trees are fast becoming bare of leaves and their feathered inhabitants are now more conspicuous. Flocks of goldfinches have been visiting the alder trees to feast on the cones, while flocks of redwings can be seen on the rowans, which had prolific berries this year. Jays are still busy, and noisy, in the oak trees. Groups of tits can now be seen foraging in the trees, and I have seen a buzzard perching on a branch or swooping through the canopy on several occasions.

I love autumn for all these reasons and the sense of everything winding down for winter. The darkening days and the dying back of the summer’s growth signify a sort of natural lull in the cycle of the seasons, which I find quite relaxing. This year has been a memorable one for us. The stressful few months stuck in Glasgow have made me appreciate even more how lucky we are to live where we do. Work in the woods has been on the back burner while the twins need a lot of looking after, but the woodland is just fine ticking along and slowly growing until we are ready to start making progress with the management plan. Ewan and Megan will be a year old soon and it won’t be too long until I can start to think about this. In the meantime, we just enjoy having the woodland as the backdrop to our activities.

1. e.g. The Nature Fix by Florence Williams, Norton, 2017