Spring on the Southwell Trail - Part 12 (May 2018)

As this series is about the changing seasons on the Southwell Trail, I was keen to revisit a horse chestnut tree on the path to Kirklington which I last photographed at the end of February with snow on the ground.

On this occasion I was looking for the new leaves. I had noticed during the autumn series that the horse chestnuts leaves were some of the first to colour and die away, so I made the walk on the assumption that they would be the amongst the first to show in spring - which proved to be accurate.

The horse chestnut is a wonderful tree - as all trees are - but I particular like the extravagant flowers which appear in May and, of course, the prickly cased conker seeds which start to develop after pollination.

Conkers remind me of childhood and conker fights in the play ground, although I think these are banned nowadays. We had many theories about extending our champion conker's fighting life including baking them in the oven and soaking them in vinegar but I can't remember whether we actually did this or not.

With this in mind I think I will break with my normal date ordered posting and include some more recent images (1). This will allow me to show a sequence for the horse chestnut tree starting with the scene in March; then April, as the leaves start to show; into May when the leaves are more dense; a flower head in mid-May; and the early development of the fruit in June.

For the rest of the walk I recorded some of the other trees along the path. I noticed that the Ash tree leaves had start to develop but the oaks where still largely leafless. I particularly liked the range of different leaf tones from full greens, to more yellow greens and some olive-greens:

(1) The photographs are generally taken about six to eight weeks behind the actual date of posting. I normally signal this in the title. Ideally, I would like to close this gap to a week or two but I never seem to get there! I tend to write very rough notes about each walk which helps me to remember more accurately what I was thinking at the time but inevitably more recent events occasionally influence the content of a post.