The glory of trees and the turning season

Autumn’s colours have passed like a fleeting festival. As my colleague Max so beautifully put it, “as the weather turned colder, the colours grew warmer.”

This year, I’ve been captivated by how different trees embrace the season’s change.

The sycamores near Oxford Station, for instance, shed their enormous golden leaves, which gather in heaps around my bicycle in the colder mornings. There is a tunnel of beech trees I ran through last Saturday – vivid, fiery oranges glowing despite the downpour. And then there was a solitary mountain ash by a brook in the Brecon Beacons, its leaves long gone, but its bright red berries gleaming after the rain.

And winter, waiting in the wings, will bring its own beauty. I find myself longing for a hoar frost, outlining every branch and twig in brilliant white against a deep blue sky. Rowan Williams once described this in his poem Advent Calendar, where he spoke of being “arrested in the net of alien, sword-set beauty.” It’s a feeling many of us share – a deep, personal connection to the natural world and to the landscapes around us.

So the seasons turn. And while the nights draw in across Europe, I also think of the different seasons in East Africa that move to very different cycles. There, communities we work with live in deep relationship with the land, their lives intertwined with the trees and the landscape. For them, trees are not only a spectacle but a source of livelihoods and resilience.

Fruit trees bringing food, income, security and celebration in Kitui, Kenya

I believe those of us who experience the glory of trees—who witness their quiet splendour – are uniquely positioned to understand their power, to inspire, and to sustain.

Donate today

Join a movement to plant, protect and promote trees in the UK and East Africa