Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

~Albert Camus

Autumn and winter are my favourite times of year.  I like the reassuring cosiness of warming myself from the inside with a cup of hot tea, and from the outside with a wide array of mittens, scarves and hats as I crunch my way through fallen autumn leaves on the way to the park just to stop and look. Sometimes I wonder if people have forgotten how to look.  All too much of the time we only walk to get somewhere (and that’s for those of us that do walk and haven’t had a car seat surgically grafted onto our backsides), and sometimes I feel we all just need to take time out to just see what mysterious dance nature is performing all around us.

I have recently somewhere new to make my acquaintance with October.  Virginia Water, part of Windsor Great Park.

Autumn at Virginia Water Lake

I’ve been invited out for walks around this amazing park a couple of times in the last few weeks, and even in such a short time I have noticed how drastically the season has changed the landscape.  New views come into focus as leaves fall from trees, allowing a sight line through increasingly skeletal branches.  Flowers and soft foliage die down, letting your eyes appreciate the larger scope of the land and geological forms.

I made sure to look down and search down into the woodlands that surround the lake.  I walked off of the beaten (and gravelled) path and searched the woodland floor, and it is there I found one of the most magical and fleeting vestiges of Autumn.

Fly Agaric - a handy place to sit in any fairy tale

I spent a number of hours kneeling on the moist earth with wet knees, enjoying the smells and views of the very small, where I could imagine myself as a small woodland creature or character from Scandinavian mythology (I had not been eating these mushrooms, no matter how I might now sound). With my face close to the musty earth, surrounded by leaf mould I tried to capture my Gnome’s Eye View to bring home and inspire me.

Nature gave me an umbrella when it started to rain

When I returned home from my second trip, having photographed all kinds of mushrooms and toadstools I sat down and sketched the ballooning shapes of mushrooms until they distorted into new forms, and imagined myself a gnomish creature amongst a forest of spongy mushrooms, and that’s how the Gnomish Hat was first conceived.  I have worn my Gnomish head gear on subsequent excursions to autumnal haunts, and I am taking great comfort from the feel and function of my own hand-knits on the transitional season that will lead to the bleak Winter – not that I mind the Winter, if anything I love it even more than Autumn.  For one it is the perfect opportunity for even more snuggling down into layers of knitwear and watching the landscape be stripped back, waiting to be born anew.

I have many more photos of my excursions to Virginia Water if anyone wishes to continue their Gnome’s Eye View tour of one of the most beautiful parks in England.