Cllr Kevin Pressland: Let’s celebrate the winter, it has so many enjoyable aspects

December 23, 2023 Kathy Bailes Opinion 2

Green Councillor Kevin Pressland is a passionate campaigner for nature and the natural environment. His understanding of the threats faced by the natural world is based on expertise gained from a 40-year career in horticulture, garden design and sustainable land management.

The seasons are a changing and there appears increasing blurred delineation between seasons and when they change. However, we can still enjoy the variations that still occur and celebrate them:

Sensing Winter

See this:

Enjoy the delicate subdued colours and textures of winter’s mantle across the landscape

Smell this:

Take a winter walk in search of winter flowers, stopping to take the delicate honey like scent of Gorse and later Snowdrops

Hear this:

Listen for the ‘chack chack chack’ call of Fieldfares moving through the countryside

Feel this:

Go out in the rain. Look up and feel the joy of cold, wintery raindrops running down your face. Glide with the wind as it sweeps through your hair or hold onto your hats.

Music

Why not enjoy music inspired by nature like Jean Sibelius-a song of swans. The Finnish composer was inspired by the honking calls of Whooper Swans flying overhead and used his interpretation of their sounds as a recurring theme throughout the movement.

Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral Symphony.’ There’s a scene by the brook that has some very famous bird songs.

Messiaen called birds his teachers, and this was a moment in the 1950s when music was coming out of the second world war and there was this real kind of quest, certainly felt by Messiaen and many others, for new sources of creative, kind of, grounding and spiritual meaning for music.

Nature provides us with valuable services water, soil (a living ecosystem) for food and diverse plants, clean air, aquatic freshwater and marine beauty and more. It enables us to have an economy, lets nurture it, and nurture ourselves.