Step with me through the gates of autumn.
The shift from one season to another can happen slowly or quickly. That’s certainly true up here in the Nordic north. Here on Sweden’s west coast the shift from summer to autumn can come gradually, with warm days stretching through September and long into October; fractionally cooler, day by day, as the light fades and the nights grow longer. Or it can happen, as it did this year, startlingly fast. Overnight, almost, the temperature drops, the leaves turn and autumn arrives, ta-da!
It’s an excuse to share some photos from the archives of autumn colours from the past.
GBG365
Between September 2012 and the end of 2014, parallel with TheSupercargo, I maintained a separate photo blog. Called GBG365, I published a photo a day there for very nearly 850 days. All the photos were taken in and around Gothenburg, my adopted home city, and most of them I published within a week of taking them. I’d always intended to keep up the daily publishing for just one year. But one year became two, and might have stretched on further. However, in January 2015, Mrs SC and I moved to Brussels for three years, following her work. Regular photography in Gothenburg came to an end.
As time passed and I started to integrate all my various blogs within this one, I brought a number of GBG365 pictures along too, but I left the website up. I’ve not been maintaining it as I should though, and recently I realised it’s been subject to quite a bit of hacking. (Failed attempts, I think, rather than successful ones, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time.) It feels like it’s time to close the site down. I’ll redirect the address to my GBG365 archive here.
Before I do that, I thought I ought to check my own photo archives to make sure I still have all the photos in their original form. I do, but looking through the archives I found myself caught up in the compositions, the colours, the motifs. Today’s blog post is a little wander through the autumn colours of Gothenburg with pictures drawn from the photoblog. All of the pictures on this page appeared there. There are a couple or three that predate GBG365, dating from 2011 and 2009. I published them on the blog on days when I didn’t have a decent recent picture to share.
The Gates of Autumn
The Gates of Autumn are a case in point. I took this photo of a pair of rusted and misshapen barred gates near the Botanical Gardens in October 2009.
I must have been on a photo expedition to the Botanical Gardens. These next three were taken on the same day. I used the first two in the photo blog. The third, the feathered flowers (I don’t know what they are), I found in the same file in my archive. Its time stamp tells me it was taken between the red leaves and the floating leaf
In the parks
Away from the Botanical Gardens, a lot of my nature photos come from my local parks, Keillers park and Slättadamm. Here are some autumn photos I’m still pleased with. The first three are from Keillers park with the approach to the park up a wet and leaf-slippery slope coming first (photo from October 2013). The rain-wet engraved tablet at the top of Ramberget over Keillers park is earlier, from October 2008 apparently. The latter three are all from Slättadamm and all from the same photoshoot on 12th October 2012. What I call the sacrifice tree – the low tree that people have hung with babies dummies (pacifiers for my American visitors) – is no longer so burdened. The park attendants obviously decided to put an end to the practice while I was away in Brussels. Nowadays it’s just an unremarkable little bush.
Beyond the parks
Beyond the parks there is a good bit of countryside around Gothenburg worth exploring. North-east of the city is the valley of the Lärjeån (Lärjeåns dalgång), while to the south are the Delsjö lakes (Delsjöområdet). The Swedish names will guide you to the right place on this webpage about Hiking in Gothenburg. The pictures below are autumn images from 2012 (the leaf covered path along Lärjeån), and 2013 (golden birches by the side of Delsjö).
The sea, the sea!
North-west of the city there’s also the countryside and coast of Hisingen, Sweden’s fifth largest island. Here are a couple of photos from there. Taken from Hisingen looking towards Björkö in October 2011. Despite all the bare rock, the colours betray the season. The two-masted sailing vessel is the Muckle Flugga out of Gothenburg.
So there you have it. TheSupercargo has stepped through the gates of autumn for another year and it’s all downhill to winter.
🙂
