Autumn Leaves

Thursday 31 October 2024

Keats’ ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ is now well upon us and, particularly on the days when the sun breaks through, the autumn colours in our woods are indeed quite a sight to behold! Since returning from our October ‘summer holiday’ Rachel and I have been enjoying the fall in the Chiltern beech-woods and today, seventy-odd miles west of home, we wandered amongst the awesome autumnal colours of Westonbirt Arboretum. Here are some of the seasonal highlights of our last few days.

We have not visited the Westonbirt National Arboretum before, which seems quite an oversight. Planted mainly in the mid-19th Century, and now managed by the Forestry Commission, the 600-acre estate is in south Gloucestershire about three miles south-west of the pleasant Cotswold town of Tetbury, and it is home to over 2,500 species of trees and shrubs, many quite rare, from all over the world. The woods are accessed from some 17 miles of marked paths, and whilst we certainly can’t claim to have covered all of these routes, Rachel and I spent several hours in these woods today amongst the rich blaze of autumn colour.

I will let the trees themselves, and the autumn leaves, tell the rest of the story.

Now that the clocks have gone back and the autumn colours continue to delight there is some invigorating walking in prospect. We have a week in Cornwall coming up and a couple of short breaks scheduled in Shropshire and South Wales, so I will keep the walking Blogs coming as the season changes and the shorter days of winter approach.

The Blog heading that I have adopted today, ‘Autumn Leaves’, is taken from a song of that title dating from 1945. The score for the number was written by Hungarian-born composer Joseph Cosma and put to words by his regular collaborator of the time, the French poet Jacques Prévert, under the title ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’ (meaning ‘the dead leaves’). The English translation was provided by American singer and Tin Pan Alley lyricist Johnny Mercer in 1950: the song soon became a jazz standard and was recorded many times in both languages (and indeed as a half-French, half-English version by Edith Piaf in 1951). However, and with a nod to Eva Cassidy’s wonderful rendition of the song, the interpretation that I have chosen on my playlist is that by Nat King Cole from his 1953 album ‘Nat King Cole Sings for Two in Love’, and one can certainly envisage the amber leaves a-fluttering down with the strings accompaniment on this version.