Just for fun, since April 2021 I have been photographing the deciduous tree that I can see from the window in my home office.  It stands in the middle of a rather untidy fence, completely dwarfing it, but finds itself in arboreal isolation, between two fields that belong to the Churton Hall / Barnston Estate dairy farm.  On the far, eastern side of the hedge, the field was eventually ploughed.

On the western side, cows grazed all summer during the day, vanishing at speed from time to time, presumably for milking and feeding.  Most of the time the cows ignored the tree, but on hot sunny days often gravitated towards it, even though it is not very large, and never offers much shade.

The cows have surprised me.  Not dull, static, plodding things but always on the move, pushing one another out of the way for that special patch of grass, often cantering around together, and frequently departing back to their barn at a serious gallop, presumably for food.  The fresh air certainly seemed to agree with them.  The cattle vanished at some point during the late summer or autumn and the field remained empty of livestock, but reappeared in early April, making me smile when I saw them first exploring their fresh environment, rushing around and bumping into each other in something resembling excitement.

 

The tree, the backdrop to all this bovine activity, was ever-changing.  The time between bare branches in April and richly new light green leaves in June, a complete metamorphosis, was a mere six weeks.  Extraordinary.

This post is simply a set of photos of bits of a year in the tree’s life.  One or two of the photographs look as though the colours have been messed with in Photoshop to make them more interesting, but there would have been no fun in that.

I am too far away to know for sure what specie it may be.  I suspect from the shape that it is an oak, but I need to see the leaves, and the longest lens on my camera cannot get me close enough.
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