Whilst living close to the summer palace in St Petersburg, of an afternoon, I used to take the Elektrischka out to a place called Krasnoflosk, last station on the line where the Russians went to gather mushrooms etc and spent afternoons in the forests. The photograph does not even give a clue as to the enormous depths and height of the forests. Living in England for so many years, the enormity of the Russian Forests were a fascination to me. No carefully kept trees here. One thing I did notice from my travel up the Baltic coasts, the tall, dark pine trees were interspersed by trees which I considered decorative trees, with huge bunches of bright red, decorative berries on rather spindly branches, but not the eatable type. I can only think that birds ate the berries and the droppings with the seeds in produced these totally out of the ordinary for the Baltic Forests trees amongst the natural forest. Although you can see blue skies, let me assure you that these forests went on for miles and miles and miles. All day you could see people coming out with buckets of forest foods. I just had to get there, and dropped everything. On the day of my arrival, the Tsar's bones were brought back to St Petersburg, though I had not known this. It is in my book of poems.