Celtic Trees: A Year of Celtic Trees - Month 1

I've just embarked on a new adventure - this time exploring the Celtic Calendar through trees and the lunar cycles for a full year.

We started in November, with Birch, the tree for new beginnings. Very appropriate in my case, as I've just quit my job, left my relationship, moved out of the flat I was sharing and come back to my home in Berkshire, having been in London for the past year.

So I spent a day in Exmoor with Ros Simons, her husband Jon and some fellow explorers where we learned about birch trees, did meditations and journeying, had a go at starting to carve some ogham staves and visited some trees :-)
I have never seen birch trees that were big enough to climb before - my impression of silver birch is that they are very slender trees, with trunks I could easily reach my arms around. A big surprise then, to be amongst many silver birches that were more reminiscent of oak trees in size. I clambered up into one (no mean feat in my wellies!) and was supported enough that I fell asleep laid out along one of the branches.

Individual branches thicker than I expect the trunks to be :-)

The branch where I went to sleep!

These trees look entwined but actually aren't!

Sunset

Since coming back from that weekend, I have found silver birch to talk to in London near the office where I was working (actually in an open space near More London at Tower Bridge!) and also just down the road from my house.

Protected enough from the wind to still have leaves in December!

How many silver birch at More London??

There were also silver birch forming a protective half-circle around the healing glade that I helped to plant on the Friday morning before heading down to Exmoor later that day :-)