the garden inside the split willow tree

The trouble with the middle of winter is that pretty much every time you walk past something kind of cool it's too dark to photograph. The split willow on the tow-path with hart's tongue fern growing in it, for example; see how leaf litter and sawdust and broken bark (lots of dead bits, gnawed by insects, in this tree) has made a tiny garden, and now it's growing ferns?



Well no, not really, because it's so dark I can hardly see anything. And look what's growing, under the ferns, lost in a tangle of spider webs and beetle frass:



I need to get some of this stuff back to my garden. I quite fancy a bit of a stumpery.