The Gallery: Trees

This week's The Gallery theme at Tara's Sticky Fingers blog is trees. It dawned on me yesterday, as I ambled around the farm looking at and photographing some of the hundreds of trees we have here, just how we rely on them as sentinels.

At the moment I'm studying them hard for signs of spring. The days are sunny but still chilly and only the hazels are showing signs of life with catkins hanging from their branches like little lambs tails. All of the other trees, including the mighty oaks and this ash, are still firmly closed up for winter, the branches like arms and fingers tracing shapes against the sky.

From time to time they fall down and provide a sudden burst of hard work and a lot of firewood, like last Easter Sunday. We moved our Easter egg hunt from the garden to the fields and spent the day hiding and finding chocolate eggs among the branches.