Pied Beauty

When I collected my breakfast fig [which has been a daily treat for the last couple of weeks] I removed some of the tree’s dying leaves – in brindled, spotted, dappled shades of green and gold and amber and brown. They were too gorgeous to discard – so I arranged them in my big china platter- and put the apples and oranges from the fruit bowl on top. The Coxes Orange Pippins were a riot of colour too – and I was reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins lovely poem…

GLORY be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

    And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                     Praise him.