Burnt Gorse in Winter

Burnt Gorse in winter.  10 December 2011.

In the summer, this is a lush meadow, vibrant with flowers (including orchids), butterflies and bees. Late in the year, it is mown, so that until late spring it looks quite bare, though still green. You can see that this year even some of the large shrubs have been cut down.

If the meadow were not cut back in this way, it would very quickly fill with scrub and then become a wood like those which adjoin it.

This field is on the edge of High Elms Country Park. It is one of several that are managed as chalk grassland, in this way increasing the variety of plants and wildlife in the park.  I was told that the names of the parts of the park were taken from old tithe maps, and although their origin is not known for sure, Burnt Gorse seems pretty easy to work out.

This photo was taken with my iPhone 4s set to HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range. The phone takes two photos and combines the parts of each which contain the most detail. Without that technique, the clouds, the electricity cables and much of the skyline would not be visible. The drawback is that in parts of the picture there is a slight blurring effect; with a handheld device it is not possible for the two photos to be exactly identical. With moving subjects the motion is very obvious.  The iPhone also makes some adjustments to the photo (levelling and sharpening) which I prefer to do myself in Photoshop, perhaps to a different degree depending on the photo, but nevertheless it is a very handy thing to have if you want a quick shot of something.