The love of leaf mould

The dog days of August; I love the autumn in Scotland - the skies stretch out and relax into the beginnings of the icy winter cloud formations, frost haunts the shadows in the mornings and the ground colour starts to shift from green to ochre. The horse chestnuts are my favourite indicator tree; always the first to really pop to green in their lovely limb-stretching way and the first to give up the ghost and start turning umber at the end of August. Conversely I always worry about the weeping ashes in Princes Street Gardens as they are always so late in coming into leaf; each year I am convinced that they have been frost bitten and no-one will notice until they are still bare in July. They always come through in the end and stay doggedly green long after the chestnuts have shrugged their leaves. For some reason ash trees fall into the bracket of things that I have only recently learned to love; maybe their beauty is less obvious than the gnarly oaks and strong shady chestnuts, but I have come around to their grace and kind of aloofness.
I have always had the urge to connect with plants, trees, the soil; it is just in us, I think. Maybe forgotten or dormant in many, but it must be a primeval, inherant thing in us to want to 'mess the soil' as the lovely line goes in a Kris Drever song. That says it perfectly for me; not to cultivate or control, but to mess; I was deliriously happy when we bought our first little house and realised that it came with my own little patch of land. My own soil to mess.
The urge to commune with nature often takes me and one of my favourite things is still to wake up under canvas; alas, my love is not shared by any close to me just now, so it was a real treat last year to go on a small solo camping trip to Weston-super-Mare when I had a show down there. Fell asleep like babe in the wood wrapped in my duvet on a yoga mat and woke to dewy grass and a flock of long-tailed tits in the (ash) tree above me; oh, and a perfect mackerel sky.
Doesn't get much better than that... In childhood I used to entertain myself on car journeys by picking out promising copses and hedges where I could nestle; make a little camp and hide away from the world. My chosen superpower at that point was to be able to transport myself at will to such a location, where I could while away the day in peace with my botanical chums.
Talking to the Whole Swede about a similar feeling she has for berry picking, which she maintains is an intrinsic Swedishism, an inbuilt feeling of the hunter gatherer; I am inclined to agree and this fits in with my foraging instincts as well. Only a few (literally) generations ago on my father's side 'his lot' were reindeer herders up in the north of Sweden; it makes sense that the echoes of their originally nomadic lifestyle should reverberate down the generations....gives me goose bumps thinking about it.

Now it is autumn -
But no shadow of return
Falls on The Island