Autumn: good enough to knit/crochet

Is it my imagination, or have the autumn colours been particularly rich and gorgeous this year? If I could capture them in yarn form, I would. And it’s such a good year for fruit/berries. Today I took the twinnage for a walk (translation: they sulked in the buggy, which I pushed and pushed up a long hill). We saw hips in abundance:-

And pyracantha with variegated berries. Can you tell how much I love variegation?

 

And I’ve mentioned before how this area was once the centre of the cherry growing universe, and how this village is surrounded by serried ranks of long-redundant windbreak trees, mostly poplars. Here’s some more from today:-

You can still see cherry trees dotted around, especially in hedges. They’re beautiful in spring and autumn, their dying leaves a lovely pinkish* shade of yellow-orange:-

 

*Yes I know I’ve written about how much I hate pink, but as in most things, nature gets it just right.

I often pass through the village where I used to live, too, and the autumn colours are even more magnificent when doubled by the glassy water of the river. This is the view from our old house, give or take fifty metres. I pass by on my way to work, and stopped to take a couple of snaps this week:-

I kind of miss it. We used to sit in the living room watching crowds of coots (the thugs of the avian water world) engage in mass brawls, whilst great-crested grebes drifted by, secure in their sense of vast superiority. Sometimes there’d be a heron, and very occasionally the flash of brilliant blue of a kingfisher. And we’d sit on the riverbank behind our house watching hundreds of tiny fish dart about in the shallows. I’d fantasize about somehow dredging the riverbed to find what treasures lay semi-submerged in its silt. I don’t mean treasures in monetary terms, I mean clues to the events and the lives that have passed here before. A civil war helmet was found in the water upstream from here – how many more things must be down in the depths?

And the conclusion to all this? I think that you should be able to commission yarn, based on the shades in a picture. You should be able to take a gorgeous photograph of heather-covered moorland or an autumn woodland and have it reproduced in wool. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?