Dawn, for the picking and kindly service.

1. I wake in my sleeping bag just before dawn and crawl out into the cool dry air to admire the eastern sky, where the clouds are gilded on their undersides and all hung about with birdsong.

2. There is on our right an abandoned apple orchard, dark, unpruned and heavy with red-green eaters. We take one each for the continuing journey.

3. Every year, at the tired tail end of summer, I am so pleased to see cyclamen -- clean dolly mixture pink and white -- doing a kindly service  by brightening the dusty leaf litter under hedges. Cyclamen aren't natives, but they often pop up far from gardens, as if someone on a mission has tucked corms into banks and woodlands where they might be needed.