4 spring woodlands

May 2016, thus far, has turned out to be a vintage one for photography in my local woods : the weather has contributed with low wind and rain to bring out the colours. Locations ground-truthed back in the winter have provided some photographic reward and also some old haunts revisited.

Starting with a rewarding trip to a by now familiar scowles woodland for dawn, as the sun rose into a strip of clear sky on the horizon with rainclouds covering the remaining 99% of the sky, the resulting light was good, but all too brief.

With sunrise over, I headed onto another woodland where wildflowers in some parts of the wood pick out the underlying geology and also archaeology, the better drained soil of mineral spoil from bell pits and anomalous earthworks form a preferential habitat for bluebells and wood anemones.  This particular wood is planted semi natural ancient woodland and deserving of a future post of its own, as there is a complex interaction of ground flora with underlying sandstones and limestones, past management and mineral workings.

Bluebells pick out a bell pit in beech and ash woodland

Making a photograph of ground flora corresponding to underlying geology and archaeology is challenging, happily there are also the are views of spring woodland. The primary colours of green and blue, I find visually appealing, especially when saplings and suckers add to the field layer and break up the tree trunks.

I have been photographing the local woodlands for over a decade and was finally rewarded with a forecast of fog, steady rain and light winds in spring. After some thought I decided on a wood that I have struggled to do justice to in the past, as the woodland grows on an escarpment. Escarpments generally denote more competent geology and there is a history of quarrying quartz conglomerate for grinding stones. The woodland is a mixture of singled coppice, derelict coppice and timber trees all broadleaf with the exception of a few yew and holly trees. The ground flora is slowly recovering, benefiting from a harvesting operation a few years ago and along with some windthrow has opened up the canopy. Woodlands dominated by mature beech can be sterile affairs for ground flora.

Some of the rocks littering the slopes result from quarrying activities, others I am not so sure and could well envisage an origin from periglacial mass movement.

The last wood to report on has an extensive carpet of ramsons growing over scowles and in another area large hazel coppice stools with a more diverse ground flora. The Forestry Commission spray paint was also prominent with a number of beech and ash trees marked for harvesting and thinning.

A few evening woodland visits have been unproductive due to harsh lighting and/or wind motion of the subject, nonetheless the four visits with favourable weather, helped mitigate against the poor weather that marred the photographic ambitions of spring of 2015.