The Passing of Winter

The winter solstice bonfire wouldn’t light, at first. fire1

Days of heavy rain had soaked the pile, even though it had been cut months ago and the wood was dry enough inside. And much of it was elder, cut back from the hedge and reluctant to catch.

It smouldered, there was smoke, a few sparks, a sad crackle. More paper, more matches, noises of discontent and futility: “it’s too wet, it’s the wrong wood, there’s too much air, there’s not enough air, it’s too late, it’s too dark….”

Three fire witches emerge, with a lighter and boards of something rigid and corrugated. After a judicious dissection and re-formation of a corner of the giant smoky tepee of lank vegetation, and the application of a lighter, the fire-witches address the heap with repeated sweeping bowing gestures, wielding the boards to fan the fire.

The fire catches. It spreads through the pile. Over the tracery of sycamore against the night sky, the smoke billows white and tenuous into the dank, chilly air of midwinter. Brilliant flames shoot skyward. The year, this year which promised and gave so much loss and so much gain, turns slowly, creaking out its bewildering, blistering, beguiling existence through the night, as the fire burns steadily, in spite of the wet, unsuitable fuel.

fire3 It burned on through the following day as well. I tended its last hour as dusk fell, turning in the straggling twigs and prodding the embers buried in the ash back to life. I watched the light fade, and soft rain start to fall, suppressing anxiety as I waited for children to arrive for Christmas, heart aching. And though no returning light is yet discernable in these misty, damp days and nights, for sure the year has turned.

Yule, Christmas, Solstice, New Year…….here’s wishing you all the best. May all beings be happy and at peace.

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Last Flight

I said I chose not to fly again , except in an emergency. This race to see and speak seems to be emergency enough. I look for the quickest way south. I choose to fly. As the little propellor-plane taxis along, I suppress thoughts of Indiana Jones films and think, this may be my last flight.

It turns out to be a flight like none I’ve had before, a child’s magical birds-eye flight, skimming over a clear, unusually cloud-free landscape at a height where details can readily be identified, and anything not visible is imaginable. I note the snow on the Stirlingshire hills as they retreat behind me. Snow puffs and scrapes across the highest hills of Galloway, and streaks the mountains of England’s lakeland.

I watch the strange, human patterns of fields and settlements. It all looks so much older from the air, like something that has grown organically; haphazard, unplanned. It is the random cracked glaze made by fire on an ancient cauldron, imprinted on glacial landscapes by millenia of human occupation.

I see how nearly bare native trees and unplanned woods snake along river valleys, and cluster beside routes that connect only in a roundabout way; wandering paths and roads that go round things. By contrast, the dark plantation forests of Sitka spruce are bald and angular and the reparations of modern forestry design have done little to alleviate their awkwardness. They still do not fit.

When I next look out, we are passing over Wales. Snowdon and its consort peaks are proud, triumphal, dazzling white and icy, but dark hills lie all around. An extinct Welsh volcano, crimped with snow, broods over a green plain of farms and fields. Its crater hides a cache of snow from all bar those who fly over it. On the Black Mountains, the snow seems to trace the contour lines. It’s like looking at a giant 3D map or one of these models you find in landscape interpretation centres.

Here is an Iron Age landscape, a Celtic domain. Hillforts rise above farmland, the timeless strongholds of Arthur, Merlyn, Caractacus and those who went before. This one has six ditches and ramparts, etched in snow. Its neighbour has only three. And there, quarries and open-cast mines with their working terraces create an optical illusion of hillforts turned inside out.

How green are the valleys, with their wandering rivers and the streams of towns and villages that run along them, made silver by the sun shining on roofs and streets, their buildings, estates and conurbations making swirling patterns of dots and squares. Way off, Swansea nestles in hard among its cockles and laverbread and all its lovely words, and below lies the black, coal-rippled sand of the South Wales coast.

Crossing the Severn Estuary, the bird’s-eye landscape fades. Features become shadows, obscured, hazy. Cloud lies over Devon and Somerset, a ponderous, doubtful fog. But beyond the unknown, to the west, another landscape beckons. I cannot tell if it is sea or sky, dark streams of cloud or a distant land; lost Lyonesse or the islands of the blest.

aircraft airplane aviation dawn — Photo by Christine Renard on Pexels.com

(I didn’t take any photos on the flight. Even if I had, they’d not be of any use, since I’ve left my phone on a bus!)

Observed from an Exeter bus

music black money entertainment — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

In the cacophony of the high street precinct, there’s a busker. But the appellation doesn’t quite fit. More like a troubadour, a wandering minstrel, shouting out songs, quite badly it seems from inside a bus, to the twang of an inaudible guitar. Notes and words are screened and distorted by the glass and metal of vehicles, the kaleidoscope movement of body-swerving passers by, few of whom give him as much as a glance. Sound waves get corrupted, diffracted, curve away.

He is dressed in quiet brown; muddy, understated. Tweed and corduroy, flat cap and curly brown hair. Behind his pitch a pony cart, jumbled with boxes and sacks, by which presumably he traveled here. Harnessed and patient, the grey dappled pony waits, blinkered, still, at ease. On the back of the cart, a scruffy lurcher rises and turns, to fall back resignedly onto a blanket of indeterminate colour and fabric.

Just as I am being pixie-led into the Wessex of Hardy or the allures of Widdecombe Fair, the troubadour whips his phone from a corduroy pocket, ditches the guitar and embarks on an animated conversation, striding up and down.

While he is thus distracted, people pause, children approach to pat the horse, photos are taken of the photogenic lurcher on the cart.

No-one places coins in the inviting guitar case.

Among the Caledonian Pines

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These are free-range pine trees, the Scots Pine, Pinus sylvatica. Not the heavy, lowering plantation evergreens erroneously referred to as pine forest, but which are more likely to be spruce, fir or sometimes the non-native black pine, Pinus nigra nigra. Recognise the Scots Pine by the gingery red of the bark on the upper trunk. Black pines stay grey.

These pines do not grow in battery-cage rows. They give themselves space to expand, to stretch out to unseen horizons; they live with dignity and grandeur; they are splendid and heroic in their dying. The Caledonian Pine Forest is multi-aged, thanks to decades of careful management to reduce deer predation and facilitate natural regeneration – seed from local trees giving rise to progeny that fits the landscape that made it like a glove. Because of age diversity in the trees, there’s also diversity in height, spread, form and density. That means greater biodiversity. And beauty.

The forests made by the spreading Caledonian pine are light and airy. The ground is soft with layers of needles, kind to the dog’s arthritic paws, so he bounces puppy like full-tilt along meandering paths and up and down banks and ridges, grinning like a mad thing to encourage his slow, plodding humans.

Look up.

The overground network of branches, which look too heavy for the boles to support, whispers with the quicksilver flow of red squirrels. Titmice flicker from bough to bough – coaltits in pairs, long-tailed ones in squeaky flocks. There may be crested tits in pursuit of pine nuts, for the Caledonian pinewoods are home to species rarely seen elsewhere. Shy and secretive, many of them, like the Pine Marten; or striking like the Scottish Crossbill -possibly the closest we have to a native parrot. Or the Horse of the Woods, the iconic, pied Capercaillie, whose shyness vanishes embarrassingly during the mating season, when you really, really don’t want to bump into a male bird.

Look down.

Roots lie just below the surface; barely visible but easy to trip over. Mosses cover them; the translucent yellows, greens and pinks of sphagnum are almost luminous in the wetter areas. The smell of peaty soil mingles with the soft fragrance of resin and bark. Fringing the shallow bogs are ling and heaths, the former still in flower, blaeberries and ferns. Throughout, fallen twigs and branches, last year’s needles and crackling debris of fern make a thousand homes for maybe a thousand life forms; plant, animal, invertebrate, bird, fungus and bacterium.

Onto these worlds within worlds, light rain emerges; rain so light, so like to air the raindrops are quantum particles which move and spin, randomly, beyond the realms of gravity. This is light-rain, on a world shrunk to infinitesimally small or seen from afar, from where the Scots pine woods become mere fractal patterns on the margins of time.

Once the Caledonian Pine Forest was the dominant vegetation type of much of Highland Scotland. It lightly brushed the sides of tall mountains; it thrived on islands in linear lochs, it swept through the glens. Farmers and crofters cleared some of it, but also made homes among the trees, for shelter and because it was a lovely land. Then came the changes, borne of greed, fear and hatred, that nearly pushed the Caledonian Forest and all it nurtured to extinction. Both sheep and the deer on the “sporting” estates which displaced poor or powerless people ate the succulent young trees, preventing regeneration – the story’s well known. Then there was the snatching of the big trees for the war effort. They were cut down to make boxes to store ammunition. Doubtless someone made a lot of money from that.

Now, thanks to hard work, vision and the dedication of many unsung heroes and heroines, the all-embracing arms of old Caledonian Pines are spread wide, young trees erupt vertically, baby trees get underfoot and choose odd places to grow. The trees are back on the mountainsides. Long may they flourish and grow.

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When Leaves Fall

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New pictures are drawn on hillside and in hedgerow; the leaves
now start to drop away.

Trees emerge naked
– shy, hesitant, proud, unafraid, with dignity –
sculpt riots against steely skies.

Finely etched tracery of birch; yellow clouds of leaves
flutter, discarded, on winds grown icy.

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Brown-cloaked oaks, stubbornly clinging to summer
angular knees and elbows showing through threadbare fabric.

Sombre sycamores statuesque on the skyline,
Leaves already shed, yet fuzzy with progeny:
Seeds in clusters wait the November storms.

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Needles of larch whisper away on water
Lie silent and still on forest paths.

When leaves fall
Tiny buds of spring curl dormant in leaf axils, and wait.

Glacial Loch: a Tale of Horizons

Loch Leven in Kinross-shire, along with Clunie Loch and Loch of the Lowes (and the ospreys) in Perthshire, and Scotland’s only Lake, the Lake of Menteith in Stirlingshire, was scraped out by glaciers in the Ice Age, then filled with sand and gravel as the glacier retreated – and hence is shallow, broad, wreathed in strange mists, and horizontal in tone. Wide enough to be a honeypot for thousands of wildfowl in winter, secret enough for a Queen to be imprisoned on one of its islands, shape-shifting and elusive enough for ghosts and rare species.

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Walk around its margins; there will be places from which the opposite shore can barely be discerned. Go on a grey autumn day when the rain in the air seems suspended in horizontal bands, and upsurging clumps of grass and reeds appear discordant, almost angry in their violation of the horizontal.

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Here and there you’ll find beaches, sandy from the glacier’s retreat; the wind makes small glacial waves that smell of no sea but fool the dog – and then it becomes still. Bands of horizontal clouds are reflected in the mirror surface of the water; subtle stripes of cream and grey and black and white, settling on the horizontal tops of the surrounding hills.

grassofparnassus Pockets of peaty marshland, studded in autumn by vivid blue sheeps’ scabious and emphatically solitary flowers of the Grass of Parnassus, spiral around flat pools of oily water, reflecting snatches of sky. Larger raised bogs, pillaged in previous centuries for their peat, lie flat and sullen. When the peat was no longer wanted, they grew conifers on the “useless” land. lochleven5 Now the conifers are retreating after the long-forgotten glaciers; the water returns; dragonflies, amphibians and sphagnum once more fill the horizontal expanse between the forest. Heaths and ling guide the trespasser to the dryer paths, and felled branches bridge the bog where water maintains its horizontal sovereignty.

lochleven6 In fields by the loch, the damp rises in horizontal layers, coating logs and stumps and gate-posts with moist, green mosses and algae. In one field a whole tree fell, years ago. In this damp environment it has not died, but adapted to its horizontal status and continued to grow; a miniature forest of shoots, epiphytes and primitive plants along its horizontal trunk.

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The old river, the Leven, first to score a path through the glaciated landscape, tears out of the loch at the Sluice House, which straddles it, flat and low, and flows out to feed Fife, rural and industrial. Its lines are also straight and keenly defined; kingfishers dart horizontally beneath overhanging branches. Ripples march in military formation downriver.

Quiet, grey, the glacial loch behind you retreats into its bands of mist, its unseen wild occupants, its secrets and loveliness.

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The Unseen World beneath Troops and Rings

First off, let’s be clear. There is no such thing as “mushrooms and toadstools”. Really. They are all just different species of a particular group of fungi. The “mushrooms” you buy are developed from a species called Agaricus bisporus. There are lots of other “mushrooms” in the genus Agaricus, including the tasty Field Mushroom, Horse Mushroom and The Prince of the Woods. There’s at least one poisonous “mushroom” in the Agaricus group – the Yellow Staining Mushroom.

They could all just as easily have been labelled toadstools.

Resemblance, or relationship, to a nice safe shop mushroom is no guarantee of edibility. I’m going to call all of them mushrooms in this post. That doesn’t mean you should eat them if you find them. That’s the public health warning over.

Whichever species or type of fungus you have spotted and admired in woods and fields this autumn, you’ll have noticed that many of them appear to like being in a crowd. A nicely-rotting stump (that’s another fungus, by the way, assisting with the rotting process), may be festooned with troops of mushrooms, all of the same species. They can be mushroom-shaped:

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Or completely bizarre:

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But it is obvious they are “growing on” the stump.

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Often a troop of mushrooms appears to be just coming from the soil, and you wonder, if that’s the case, why they have all congregated together in a wavy line, like an army on the march. If you were to dig them up (please don’t!), you’d probably find a buried root of a tree, living or dead. What appears to be lots of different mushrooms of the same type is actually all one organism. Inside the wood, fine, tangled threads called hyphae join to make the main “body” of the organism (the mycelium). And the mycelium naturally runs up or down the host – in many cases a root or buried stump, or dead branch. When the conditions are right for reproduction, the mycelium sends up the fruiting bodies (the mushrooms!), to form and shed spores. (Roots, flowers and seeds is the usual analogy).

Fungal mycelium can grow through all sorts of media, not just wood. Dead leaves and grasses, straw, manure of all kinds. Some are bizarre: ripening grain (Ergot of Rye), human skin (ringworm and athlete’s foot), bread (penicillin), caterpillars (long Latin name I’ve forgotten), potatoes (blight), other mushrooms (Boletus parasiticus, related to the gourmet delight Cep or Penny Bun). Toilet rolls and paperback books – oh you haven’t lived unless you’ve harvested your breakfast Oyster Mushrooms off a toilet roll! (unused, of course). In the course of its life, fungal mycelium also forms mutually beneficial associations with the roots of trees and other plants. Without fungi, it’s unlikely that our planet would support vegetation – and thus animal life – in the way that it does. You may have heard of these associations. They’re called Mycorrhizae (fungus-root), and gardeners can even buy them in bottles to get their favourite trees off to a good start.

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The other thing the mycelium does, or appears to do, is grow in rings. All fungi grow like this, I think. Well, most of them anyway. Why do you think ringworm got its name? Think of the lovely (well, to a mycologist) concentric rings of Brown Rot on apples or plums. There’s huge variation in size and scale of course, but they all start as some kind of joined up patch, and grow outward, making a bigger and bigger circle. The fruiting bodies appear on the edges of the circle. With mushrooms, this gives you a “fairy ring”. Where the mycelium is decomposing on the inside part of the ring, nitrogen is given off. Nitrogen is really good for green plants; and if we’re talking a lawn, you’ll find that the grass just inside the ring of mushrooms will be lush and dark green. Once the organism has grown out the way, the centre dies off. (Sometimes the grass does, too, which is why fairy ring mushrooms are not viewed with approval by greenkeepers and the likes of folk who treasure lawns of even and controlled green-ness and height.)

Fairy rings will just keep on growing outwards, unless something happens to kill off the entire organism, and push up mushrooms on an annual basis. Each year, they’ll be further apart. Some can stretch across the landscape for miles (though it gets harder to track the ring of mushrooms) – but it is still all one organism.

Always look – or think – below the surface!

Unforgiving Minutes and the Tyranny of Time

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My mother liked to recite aloud the poems she learned at elementary school in the 1920s. These poems were generally heroic, patriotic, moralistic, meant to be uplifting in a time of post-war depression. Rupert Brooke, then, not Wilfred Owen. And lots of Rudyard Kipling. His famous poem “If” was one of her favourites. The last lines begin:

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…..”

The Unforgiving Minute has dogged me like the grim reaper ever since. What if I don’t fill it? What if I waste a minute – an hour – days – years? What if Things Don’t Get Done? Over the years, I have felt guilty when I’ve been unwell. I’ve developed elaborate “multi-tasking” strategies like typing up party minutes while chatting on the phone AND watching an improving TV documentary; reading books on cosmology while watching less challenging stuff like Midsomer Murders; affecting to meditate while gardening AND working out what’s for dinner. Trying to bake bread while cleaning out the shed and answering emails is why my sourdough is such rubbish. I’ve had “holidays” where each day is planned and packed with minutes full enough to be righteously forgiven. I’ve created endless, bewilderingly enormous to-do lists, for a day, a week, a year. When I’ve finished everything on the list, I tell myself, I’ll have a rest and choose for myself. That never happens. I just start on the next list.

The fashion for having “bucket lists” doesn’t help. Ticking boxes, like bagging Munros, can be fun, but distracts from living and relishing an actual experience. Sure, there are things I’d like to do before I die (Ben Lawers, talking of Munros, to see the alpine flora, if I can find someone prepared to go at my glacial pace and not make me feel like a decrepit numpty for wanting to take all day about it). But I’ve had it with compulsive list-making.

Another much-loved poem at home was A.E.Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees”.

“Now of my four-score years and ten
Twenty will not come again
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.”

However, as I’ve watched the balance of my years passed to years conceivably still to come tip, and now that I’m well on the light side of time, I observe that each of my remaining springs affords more each year than a tick-box opportunity to enjoy the blossoming of the gean, and all the other flowers in the woods. Savouring the intensity of each moment more than compensates for lack of time.

And what is time anyway? Not what you think it is. At the speed of light, time freezes altogether. I’ve read enough Stephen Hawking to dimly grasp that if I could fire myself way up into space, my unforgiving minutes would get longer, become hours even, to someone watching me through a giant telescope from Earth. But not to me; up there they’d still be minutes, because time only operates from the point of view of the observer. (Or something like that.)

So, as time is not fixed, but wavers around according to the laws of relativity and probably does something completely different on the quantum level anyway, let’s not be tyrannised by it. Let’s have more minutes with no guilt attached when we don’t fill them. More watching the clouds, less time trying to re-create them on canvas. Less grubbing around in borders and beds that will never be weed-free, more lying in the hammock watching the dandelion clocks expand and blow. More love and laughter, less – or no – time spent trying to prove it exists in our lives by frenetically posting the evidence on facebook.

More randomness – more random writing, perhaps, without fretting to meet self imposed blogging deadlines?

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Kipling finishes:

“…yours is the Earth, and everything that’s in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a man my son.”

Really?? The Earth is not mine, or yours, or Kipling’s. It does not belong to the human species at all. I don’t want to own or master it and nor should any of us – we’re already proving we’re not much cop at that.

And let’s not even get started on Edwardian gender balance!

Winter Geese

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Breathing in, the air is clean and cold, that sharp tang
That preludes winter, edging around frost and ice
But not there yet.
Horizon endless, sky that translucent pale blue – a trail of smoke
Distant, wavering,
Moves towards the watcher in the field.

Earthbound, crows prod lugubriously at the stubble,
Clumsy pigeons clatter from tree to tree, voracious,
After each other. High above, the smoke separates,
Cries out exultant, forms streamers and ribbons,
Waves in and out of formation, as the winter geese pass.

In the marshes and seawalls of Essex, long ago,
I watched through binoculars the arrival of the little Brent geese,
Who stayed with us all winter, sweeping up and down the estuaries,
Squabbling and crying for joy in multitudes in reclaimed fields.
Here, Greylags and Pink-foots (I can never tell which) mark the season:
The harvest-home, the burning leaves, the smell of turned soil.

Once a Pink-foot landed, exhausted in my garden, left behind,
Confused maybe by the demands of Goose and Gander for their breakfast.
We fed and watered her, marveled
how small she was
Against our farmyard geese. The next day she was gone,
As the morning skeins’ urgent calls measured her pace and purpose.

Solid yet ephemeral; never to be held;
An instant of joy in an ever-changing and darkening sky;
Winter geese, this moment, here and now.

The Gorse Tenement Spiders of Perthshire

“When gorse is out of flowers, kissing’s out of season,” so the saying goes.

That’s one use for this for this furiously jaggy native shrub, also known as whin, or furze. Since flowers can be found on a gorse bush in every month of the year, it’s a license for affection. A light tea from the deliciously coconut-scented flowers is another purpose; the same flowers are an ingredient in natural dyes. Sounds highly unlikely, given that horses have sensitive mouths, but allegedly the dry branches of gorse, thorns and all, are a nutritious feed for these beasts. The plant’s tendency to seed, spread and steam all over any unsuspecting tract of slightly open ground might be off-putting to the gardener, but there’s little doubt it makes a good deterrent for invaders and intruders.

Do we reckon the value of a plant only in terms of its uses to humans? Too often! A hillside bright with gorse will not only gladden the human eye, but it will provide pollen and nectar for a range of bees and other insects. A gorse bush is an ecosystem owing nothing to our interference. gorsespiders2

One autumn morning – the kind where damp mists hang low and the sun is watery and out of sight, I came upon the Spider Tenements. I did not see a single arachnid – nor yet a gorse flower! – but the fog condensing on the gossamer revealed each web on these gorse bushes in elaborate detail. It also revealed the happiness of spiders to rub shoulders (knees?) with one another in close proximity. If one web equals one spider, there must be hundreds on every bush. They don’t mind the jagginess; obviously it gives them lots of points for attachment of their superficially haphazard cobwebs!

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I wonder how many small insects were caught on this bush today. How many webs do you think there are?

And does anyone know what kind of spider my gorse-loving, tenement-dwelling pals might be?