28th September 2022
It’s a great morning for walking – fresh but sunny. In the last few weeks green has returned to the land, apart from the open fields which are ploughed and brown, or else pale with stubble. Up at Rickneys, it could almost still be summer, with swallows skimming across the blue sky and pink waterlilies blooming in a pond.
Although I have read that leaf-fall could come early this autumn, trees having suffered in the summer heatwave, there is little sign of that at Rickneys, where oak and ash trees are showing strongly green, even though this former gravel quarry is an inherently dry environment. Perhaps the mature trees here have already adapted to challenging conditions.
But autumn colours are also shining through, especially in glossy scarlet rosehips and bramble leaves starting to turn.
‘In all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul,’ Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in December 1882. I’ve been reading an article about Van Gogh and an artist named Etel Adnan (who died a year ago aged 96). Adnan used intense colours in her paintings and had a great affinity with Van Gogh. ‘Colour is a sign of the existence of life,’ she said, while Van Gogh wrote, ‘One can speak poetry just by arranging colours well.’ It seems to me that Van Gogh used colour in his paintings to express the soul of nature that he perceived and tried to convey to the world.
I think about this while faced with these glowing reds and greens. Nature arranges its own colours, to create its own poetry. Technically, the red of the bramble leaf is an indication that the leaf has lost chlorophyll and is dying, but what these colours add to the landscape is life – the life of autumn.
It is proving to be an exceptionally fruitful autumn. Blackberries are over now but a few weeks ago we picked kilos of them. Apples are everywhere – people are leaving boxes of them outside their house, with a sign ‘help yourself’. We spot gorgeous purple plums, dusted with blue bloom, on a tree beside the path and I try one, expecting it to be sour. It is deliciously sweet.
On Waterford Heath we come across a tree even more heavily laden with fruit.
I think these are little yellow crab apples and am foolhardy enough to taste one, (to demonstrate to R. that they are inedible!) but in fact it has the texture of an eating apple and is almost edible… but not quite. It makes my mouth pucker and I can only manage one bite. We wonder if the birds might find the fruit more palatable.
Right now a feast of wild and semi-wild fruits has been laid on for any creature that wants to eat it. I’ve read a suggestion by an environmentalist that this abundance is a bad sign: plants stressed by the extreme summer heat have burst into fruit in an effort to reproduce and ensure the survival of the species. This notion makes me feel the kind of confusion and anxiety I wrote about in my last post – faced with the idea that something that seems good (sunshine, plentiful apples) is really a sign of the climate crisis.
So maybe the abundance of rosehips and plums is nature saying, ‘Help!’ Or maybe it is nature saying, ‘Here – this is what I produce. It’s good.’
Either way, we should be listening.
Underfoot 