We moved here in December 2004, the middle of the English winter. Here's a shot from our bedroom window on a frosty morning just before Christmas - it was so cold that I couldn't keep the window open for more than a few seconds at a time.

Even before Matilda was born I felt that I had a paternal responsibility to learn the names of our native fauna. But I've made little progress, and even if I'd thought about it, I wouldn't have know what to expect when the trees that dominate the green in front of our house came into leaf. It happens so quickly - we came back after a weekend away and the two bare trees of the same height and shape had been replaced by these:

They are beech trees, I now know. The one on the left is a common beech, the other is a copper beech. Even after a few weeks, the copper beech has lost a little of its purple lustre; even so, this photograph hasn't captured its intense dark glow. The camera also fails to record the slight difference in hue between the tree on the green and the one to its right, which is just within in the bounds of the manor house (whose topiary and walls you can just see through the glass of our window). I was thinking today that the best way to represent these trees would be with a five second loop of high definition video, to capture the way the colours shift in the breeze.

When you learn about something, you start noticing it everywhere: there was a story on the Today Programme last week that beeches in England are under threat from climate change. It's very affecting, the idea of these beautiful, ancient plants failing to adapt to our cheap flights and big cars.

P.S. The monument in these pictures is a peace memorial, built by the lady of the manor to celebrate the safe return of her two sons from the First World War.