I would hesitate to say that the steamingly hot mug of tea and handful of biscuits that you get half way through your gardening session (here being dispensed by the lovely Ash in the Hill Garden) is the main attraction of working with Heath Hands – but it certainly puts a kick in your spade! …
Sandy Heath Hampstead
Sandy Heath and Bark time
For whatever reasons I have not been paying that much attention recently to the intricate bark patterns that so many of the trees on the heath create, so here are just a couple of the ones I passed yesterday on my way back from our walk on Sandy Heath – below. And some rather fine …
A walk down the Heath Extension
It has been grey and damp for the last couple of days but on Sunday the sun was shining brightly so I decided to walk down the the bottom of the Heath Extension – where I hadn’t been since early summer. This involves crossing the ‘north-south’ divide of Spaniards Road, then down through Sandy Heath …
Leaves – dry leaves, wet leaves, drowned leaves…..
Dun coloured London plane tree leaves lying thick on the slope above the Boating Pond. Large and distinctive, stencilled out – three gently triangular sections meeting at the stem – each with its own main artery and branched veins. They look tired – a long hot summer – ready to crumble into mould. But look …
Sandy Heath pond
Over the other side of the heath, on Sandy Heath, there is an amazing pond. (For more of the fascinating history of Sandy Heath see this post.) It is large, flat, shallow, surrounded by trees and inhabited by several colonies of ducks – both ‘ordinary’ ducks and the wonderful mandarin ducks. But it is also …
Sandy Heath
These days Sandy Heath seems a total misnomer for the precipitous, shadowy woodland, scattered with giant trees, that runs from Spaniards Road down to the Heath Extension. But this is the ridge of Bagshot Sands which runs east to west across the heath. ‘The Bagshot Sands’, says Helen Lawrence in How Hampstead Heath Was Saved, …