the greens of spring
Binning Wood, 22 May
Writing this in mid-July, after weeks of hot days and sunshine, we can already see the colours shift. These vibrant greens of May have faded slightly. This struck me the other night while walking back through the woods at John Muir Country Park, where some of the lush green ferns are already fading, parched by the sunshine, offering a hint of the wider colour-shift that will follow all too soon.
It’s not that I’m dreading autumn: I’m already over summer’s heat and find myself longing for cool days and layers. Rather than wardrobes we have two hanging rails in our bedroom, a temporary storage fix that became permanent as a/ we don’t have many clothes so we don’t need much storage, and b/ we’d need to have custom storage built as the coombed ceilings in the bedroom mean that we can’t have a standard wardrobe, but we’ve never had the budget for this. So we have two hanging rails, and my long winter coat hangs on the end of my rail, like a promise of the colder days ahead. Every day I glance at this coat and think: soon.
But not too soon please. Summer’s long days are everything. Even though I’m over the heat, I love the light.
And also, as these July days hurtle past, I’ve very conscious of the things we hoped we’d have done this summer that we haven’t. We’ve been planning to move this year – to get closer to our walks, to escape the busy-ness of a town environment, and to escape from the long shadows of this place where I grew up – but, clearly, we’ve missed the spring market, and the summer market, and the autumn market is just round the corner, and we still have a list of things that need to be done in the house. Meanwhile, there’s a host of other life things going on.
So I’m looking back at these vibrant greens of late spring and wondering whether this year is going to escape us, and what we need to do to try and ensure that it doesn’t.
This has been a favourite walk over the years, and I’m barely scratching the surface of it with these photos as our route is just over 5km of winding woodland paths. It’s too muddy in places for low hounds over winter, but spring through into autumn offers beautiful walks here – and, crucially, quiet walks if you time it well. By late spring the tree canopy is already lush, creating shaded avenues (as below) where you’re simply surrounded by birdsong.
Binning Wood, East Lothian, 22 May 2026
