The surprise of scarlet berries

After a few nights of hard frost the trees are almost bare. I feel unprepared for their stark beauty after the extraordinary summer when it felt like winter was impossible. I walked in the woods at lunchtime trying to see the little roe deer and although both Luna & I could sense that he'd been there, he must have been lying up somewhere out of sight.

On the way back I saw these stems of young rowan with some scarlet berries still attached. People would pay a fortune to have a tree as beautiful as this, and it would take a gardener of great skill to prune it so. But it is the power of the river Wear that thunders through here in every month of the year that keeps this tree in such perfection. I like that. Power and grace.