Autumn Colour Watch: a fruitful week
Autumn is a spectacular time of year at Westonbirt. This photo-packed blog will take you through the weekly highlights of what's looking good and where. Visit the Forestry Commission website for more information about what’s happening at Westonbirt during autumn.
Last week, we told you about our famous maples, which were coming into their own in a blaze of gorgeous red colour. This week, we'll be taking a look at the fruits that are such an important part of autumn. When it comes to autumn berries, Westonbirt's collection of trees and shrubs, drawn from around the temperate areas of the globe, yields some interesting examples.
Sorbus provide an array of berries in a range of sizes and colours. Amongst the most striking to be found in the Old Arboretum are some of the Chinese species, for example, the white berries of Sorbus koehneana, which you can find just off Holford Ride. By contrast, the berries of Sorbus microphylla are bright pink - you can find this tree on Main Drive. The most unusual I've found of all the Sorbus this week is Sorbus megalocarpa, which has mottled burgundy and cream berries the size of marbles! Trickier to find this one, you'll locate our single specimen in square F23 of the seasonal trail map you'll get on admission or from the Great Oak Hall.
From around the rest of the world, there are more Sorbus than it is possible to mention here in a single blog. The familiar Mountain Ash (Sorbus aucuparia) is a native European tree which many will recognise from gardens in the UK and, along with the Sorbus meinichii from Norway, has the bright red berries that many of us might expect of this family of plants. These two trees are currently in relatively green leaf, but for a real hit of autumnal leaf colour amongst Sorbus, the Japanese Rowan (Sorbus commixta) that you'll find on Pool Avenue combines its bright red berries with burnished red leaves and stem colour.
Loop Walk is the place to find all manner of Crataegus or hawthorn at the moment. There are several specimens, including Creataegus halliana, Crataegus coccinea or 'Scarlet Haw', and Crataegus punctata which are all pictured above.
Many of the stunning fruits on display at the moment are not as unusual as they might first appear. A walk up Holford Ride reveals beautiful, small, droplet-like fruits on an apple tree, and a pear so golden it could be from a nursery rhyme. The intriguing willow leaved pear does exactly what the title suggests and combines a silvery leaf and weeping habit with a mass of green fruit.
Of course, we can't mention berries without touching on the yew that can be found throughout Westonbirt as a dense dark background 'screen' to many of the specimen trees that give us bright autumn colour at this time of year. The yew berries have a soft texture and looked to be lit up like tiny lanterns in the sunshine earlier this week. Holly too is in full fruit, from the familiar native varieties in The Link leading up the hill in Silk Wood to more unusual varieties in the Old Arboretum.
There is so much to look out for at the moment that a there are a few berried plants that I haven't been able to go into in depth that are worth searching out - my final berry miscellany is the sapphire berry bush on Circular Drive, the stunning sea buckthorn on Waste Drive and the Berberis Jamesiana which can be found alongside the same Sorbus megalocarpa that I mentioned earlier. All are pictured above.
Other things to look out for this week are the bright alien-looking seed pods of magnolias, the fruits of the dove tree and eucryphia merrily blooming in amongst all the autumn colour, fruits and berries.
We’ll be back with another autumn colour watch blog next week. In the meantime we’d love to hear about your experiences of autumn at Westonbirt on our Facebook page, or see your images in the Gallery.
Useful links:
Directions to Westonbirt Arboretum (our postcode is GL8 8QS)
