I'm not eligible to win the pie, but I thought I'd share some of my favourite trees with you. So I went out for a walk yesterday and took my camera with me.
This is the holm oak which grows just outside our gate. In the summer we park under it as it gives us welcome shade. In the autumn it gives us some amazing edible acorns, which I have promised to send a sample of to Paul when he gets his land.
This is the road to the village font, and there are some very beautiful olive trees here.
Here's a close-up of one of them.
The stone wall is kind of pretty, too.
This is the old font, complete with olive tree and a rather nice evergreen which is in full flower.
Anyone know what it is?
This is the remains of an ancient cork oak. They are protected in Portugal, so they tend to be left to lie where they fall.
Here's the stump of another cork oak.
This cork oak isn'l looking too healthy, either.
This one's not so bad, and is rather elegant in its way.
This row of trees welcomes me to my zone 5, which includes my olive trees and a little walled olive grove.
New pine cones are already forming in mid March.
We've had some unusually strong winds and there have been a few wind-falls. The spring flowers are bursting up around the fallen trunks.
Lichen is growing very noticeably on only one side of this tree. Anyone want to take a guess what direction I was facing when I took this photo? And what time it was?
We let this bit of land run pretty wild, and there are always young trees bursting up in all kinds of places, no matter how rocky.
And this is the tree I wanted to show you all, growing majestically from a rather fascinating rock. Only it's fallen over. Oh well...
There are rather a lot of fallen trees this year. I think donkey is going to have to be pressed into service to pull the timber out.
Along the bottom of the valley is a seasonal stream, now in full spate flowing between the rocks, and a strip of olive trees.
This is a very special place for my son and I. We used to walk down here to sit on those rocks next to the flowing water and read The Young Gaia Atlas of Earthcare. I'd never heard the word 'permaculture' then, but it helped sow the seeds of wanting to live in harmony with nature, and this bit of land symbolises how we want to live.
And finally, the walled olive grove, complete with our long-eared timber hauler. I hope she's feeling strong, there's a lot of timber to be pulled out...
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