Spring is here!

Two nights ago my friend Edda and I came together to say good-bye to the winter. We made mulled wine at my place, filled it into a thermos and walked down towards the dark river. It was a cold and rainy night. The river was still partly frozen but with a good few inches of water on top. It was half-winter, half not, just as the weather had been that day: a little snow here, a few rays of sunshine there, and lots of rain later on.

The next morning I cycled to work at 7 a.m. I haven’t had to be up early like that for a few weeks now, and last time I was it was still dark at that time. Yesterday it wasn’t, the sun was out – and the birds were singing! Spring birds were singing! It had also stopped raining and the air was fresh and warm. (By ‘warm’ I mean that night temperatures had been above freezing.) Straight away I had that hopeful feeling again that characterises spring for me: hope first of all for many wonderful hours spent in the outdoors, preferably on a bicycle; hope for a lovely summer, for laughing and eating ice-cream…and for a wonderfully fresh and young spring of course! Which is already on my doorstep!

Winter is over, spring is here!

Summer is Over

This week, I helped my friend who really needed a break and said that I would look after her dog while she was cycling in the hillier regions of Saxony and Thuringia. After many walks with the dog through the forest and around the lake I can tell you: summer is definitely coming to an end. The leaves are starting to turn, not only on the trees but also on the water lilies. The big plate-like leaves that swam so green and happily on the lake are now wilting and showing that sickly yellow colour (which will be perceived as golden and beautiful if it shows up at the right time, i.e. weeks later) and they are preparing to sink to the bottom of the lake just as they always do when autumn comes. And it is here already, in August, yes. Autumn has sneaked in stealthily. Unbelievable but true, and many people around here know it.

I normally welcome the change of the seasons but mid-August and the leaves are turning…that’s just way too early! I hope all you guys had a much better summer or are actually still in the midst of it as it should be. I know parts of Canada are in the same dismal situation we in the Northern party of Germany are in; as I heard autumn was approaching fast in Alberta at the beginning of August already.

All this is very sad. I’m not going to stick my head in the sand now; it’s still warm, even if the amounts of rain pouring down on us are of biblical proportions. All the same, here are my best summer pics. It was pretty and maybe we’ll have a few more nice days. But summer proper is over and a very short one it was, too.

This last one is a favourite. The area is a nature reserve near my house. It’s been raining so much this summer that the entire area is now impassable as you can see here:

And last but not least, below is the kind of view that I love most about summer in the Northern Plains and that I will miss very much. See the fat clouds and the equally round and fat trees? Mirror images of one another, great friends and embittered foes, lovers and partners in crime, companions of especially Flemish landscape painters throughout the centuries and signature lanscape items where I am from:

Changing colours II

I had meant to write a bit about the beautiful month of May which, according to this wonderful magazine, is the month of bliss and joy for garden lovers. It’s a bit late now, May has come and gone, but not without leaving behind a few precious impressions which I want to share with you.

In late April, the fields were full of rapeseed and wonderfully lemon yellow and the trees were tender spring green; at the end of May and in early June there are all sorts of colours. I love the white of the common yarrow and its many siblings, and of assorted chamomiles. And the red poppies and blue cornflower…I simply love to see how the seasons change from spring to summer!

And now my absolute favourites:

Life is beautiful!

In between

(One can’t be upset about the ways of academia all the time. I love working in academia, I love the freedom and the flexibility it gives you. Working at home, you can pretty much up and go whenever you please, and I like that. This post is about the products of those up-and-go moments.)

‘It’s running season’, I said to myself a couple of weeks back, checked my running gear, put on my heart rate monitor and those shoes and off I went. Every other day in between or after working in the home office, sometimes even two or three days in a row. Running is simply the bestest and those were really great times! I really enjoyed it. One drawback to running though was that I couldn’t take pictures any more the way I used to. It had been a habit of mine for many years to always carry a camera with me and it was strange at first to be running, let’s say, through gorgeous sunsets and not be able to capture the gorgeousness.

Now that I did my hip in and can’t run any more (very sad that but I am trying to see the silver lining in this cloud) I can do landscape photography again, yay! Here are my favourite recent pics, starting from when the fresh green leaves weren’t quite out yet to right now.

Sunset Bohnenländer See

Havel River in Briest. I went there with my granny and we had drank coffee in the sunshine.

These little houseboats, here going upstream towards their home harbour in Plaue/Brandenburg, are for rent! I want one!

A small pond in a boggy landscape on the outskirts of town. I discovered it by taking a path that I have never gone before - and that I would have never been able to run on (it was more of a deer track really).

Alder leaves. Pretty little things.

Rambles through the Mark Brandenburg

‘What was good enough for Fontane shan’t be bad for me’, I say to myself about twice a week or so, and usually follow these words with gearing up for a longish walk in mid-afternoon. Boots, beanie, scarf, gloves and camera and off I go.

Where I live is flat and pretty uneventful. The fields are vast, sometimes even rolling a bit, which usually entices me to take lots of photos. Alas, most of them are ruined by the seemingly omnipresent power lines who traverse fields and even forests.

‘Events’ in this very man-made landscape consist of deer hopping about, birds of prey circling high above and the occasional rabbit scurriyng away between bushels of grass. I am mostly alone which gives me time to contemplate what I see or to formulate ideas that I can later hammer into my laptop.

For these two, contemplation and development of ideas, this landscape is simply brilliant. You don’t get blown away by amazing vistas unless you’re really looking very hard for them. – Which is a nice thing to do with one’s brain in between all the academic stuff, I must say.

It’s also great for feeling at home, for me anyway. Maybe the pictures can render that feeling a little bit. They say a picture can say more than a thousand words but I tend to think that if this is true it’s probably only because at least 500 words were given explaining the context of the picture. I have given way less than that so for so maybe the pictures in this case say less than 1.000 words. But I ramble…
I know walking isn’t for everyone; a few days ago I didn’t even make it as far as this into a small narrative about what I like about walking through the Mark Brandenburg because my friend (whom I was trying to recruit for a weekend tour – I think she saw it coming) put a stop to my emissions of praise by insisting that surely walking is the most boring thing ever. Hm, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. It’s soothing for the soul and it strengthens the body if you walk at a brisk pace, but of course I would say that. What I like about walking at a brisk pace especially is that you get to see so many things in a comparatively short period of time. In the winter time, for instance, you can set out at 2pm and walk right into a beautiful sunset two hours later if you’re lucky. I was lucky today, set out at 2.30pm, dawdled a bit in the forest and whenever I was something of interest and made it back by nightfall.

Setting out at 2.30 pm

In the forest

Tree-stand in the middle of the field

Grass

And then, just as I was approaching the car again at 4.30pm, a glorious sunset:

February sunset in the Mark Brandenburg

Night drowns the sun

I am back at my desk now but already can’t wait to get out again!

Visiting beaver land

The habitat of the beaver is the riparian zone, inclusive of stream bed. The actions of beavers for hundreds of thousands of years in the Northern Hemisphere have kept these watery systems healthy and in good repair, although a human observing all the downed trees might think that the beavers were doing just the opposite.

In the beaver habitat at Bays Mountain, Kingsport, Tennessee: dead trees to the left

The beaver works as a keystone species in an ecosystem by creating wetlands that are used by many other species. Next to humans, no other extant animal appears to do more to shape its landscape.

Beaver dams are created as a protection against predators, such as coyotes, wolves and bears, and to provide easy access to food during winter. Beavers always work at night and are prolific builders, carrying mud and stones with their fore-paws and timber between their teeth. Because of this, destroying a beaver dam without removing the beavers is difficult, especially if the dam is downstream of an active lodge. Beavers can rebuild such primary dams overnight, though they may not defend secondary dams as vigorously. (Beavers may create a series of dams along a river.)

The lowest dam in a series of beaver dams

 

Next dam up.

 

Wetland created by beavers

 

Beavers fell trees for several reasons. They fell large mature trees, usually in strategic locations, to form the basis of a dam, but European beavers tend to use small diameter (<10 cm) trees for this purpose. Beavers fell small trees, especially young second-growth trees, for food. Broadleaved trees re-grow as a coppice, providing easy-to-reach stems and leaves for food in subsequent years. Ponds created by beavers can also kill some tree species by drowning but this creates standing dead wood, which is very important for a wide range of animals and plants.

This is how the beaver bites

Source: Wikipedia

For my monochromatic friends

Winter landscapes are very simple things. When, in summer, you take a picture and upon inspection think ‘I don’t know, the colour takes the focus off the wonderful shapes, I think I have to convert the tonality into greyscale’ – well, then during the winter you certainly won’t have that problem. (You may never have it at all, in which case you’re eternally in the dark season. Sorry.) Everything is super-simple when there’s snow. Whatever you do, you get black-and-white stripey pictures. Simples. Only shape, no colour. Or hardly any colour. Here’s proof.

Railway line through winter forest

Snow clinging to tree

The lake: Monochrome, or just mono.

Mere hues of colour stand out very strongly against all this monochromatic homogeneity. Pinus sylvestris all of a sudden has a quite red bark:

Surprisingly red bark

Also always surprising because rarely to be spotted here in the plains when you live so close to the forest and trees therefore block out the horizon: a sweet, tentative winter sunset. Colour is secretly sneaking back into the landscpae just before night falls (at 4pm), it seems.

Where do dreams come from though?

Iris Sibirica, by Erich Arends, no date

Kein Fortschritt ohne Wagnis. Wer Träume verwirklichen will, muss wacher sein und tiefer träumen als andere. (Karl Foerster)

Gerhard Finckh und Solveig Maria Schuppler (2010) Natur wird Kunst. Georg Arends. Wuppertal: Von der Heydt-Museum. S. 33

My best photos

I decided to put my best photos on RedBubble so that they may go out into the world and bring joy to other geeky persons who also like pictures of transquility. I didn’t know that that’s what I am particularly interested in but looking through hundreds of photos I must say, yes, tranquility is my thing. Perhaps because I am such a volcano of passion myself – not, or in a super-reduced way (can you be volcanic whilst sitting at the desk quietly?).

Here are my best photos:

Blue, Blue, Blue

Reflection with Rock

The Wind in the Barley

Field of Gold

In the Greenhouse

Waiting for the Guests to Arrive

Play me

Lost & Found

Winter Sunset with Sheep

Coming Home

Longing for “rabbit-nibbled, sheep-cropped grass”

 

Vita Sackville-West's gardens at Sissinghurst Castle

Lady Ottoline Morrell's gardens at Garsington Manor

Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, both members of the Bloomsbury Group, lived in this 'small cottage'

Bloomsbury coexisted in Bloosmbury and in simple farmhouses on the Downs, where they had servant problems and problems with plumbing. They loved the earth, but they loved it for something irretrievably lost, as well as for its smells and scents and filth and bounce and clog and crumble. Those great masters of the description of the English earth, Richard Jeffries and later W.H. Hudson, who can describe the whole expanse of the clean air, and the currents in it, and the rabbit-nibbled, sheep-cropped grass on the Downs, the close trees in coppices, the solitary thorns shaped by the wind, the fish fanning against the current, the birds riding the thermal flow, so that we think they are our guide to the unspoiled green and pleasant land – both of these are in fact men of a Silver Age, elegiac. They spend pages listing the species of birds and mammals erased from their land by pheasant-rearing gamekeepers. The goshawk, the pole cat, the pine marten, gone, gone away. Pike decimated. Trees tidied out of their wild shapes and habits. The Golden Age was when no humans interfered with anything.

from A.S. Byatt (2009) The Children’s Book. London: Vintage. p. 392

Sentiments which are not reflected in their gardens. (More on the Bloomsbury Group here.) How does one reflect such sentiments in gardens? Isn’t the idea of a garden itself destructive of the Golden Age already? A Silver Age phenomenon?