• Autumn essays Nature writers on the season of change
AUTUMN IS A TIME WHEN TRANSIENCE IS CELEBRATED AND DECAY BECOMES BEAUTIFUL. FIVE WRITERS DESCRIBE THE SEASON IN MAGICAL PROSE FOR US TO SAVOUR
Garden BY DAN PEARSON
In his columns for The Observer Dan Pearson explores the rhythms and pleasures of a year in his London garden, and the rolling hills of Somerset. Here he sings the praises of autumn riches, before plants and humans hunker down for winter.
There is part of me that wants to put everything on hold at the moment, to leave the remaining bulbs I have yet to get in the ground and risk not bringing in the tender perennials in their pots. I want to leave the gutters to fill with leaves, the runner beans on their tripods to topple, the compost heap unturned and the veggie patch to moulder. I want to ignore all the tasks that stop me looking up and to put gardening aside to enjoy the magnitude of autumn.
I’d find it impossible to live without seasons. Each year I fall in love again with the scale of the change we are in the midst of just now. Whole landscapes shifting as if growth is in reverse, foliage drawn back to earth, and that yeasty smell that comes with the damp and decay. Skylines change from green to brown or russet, red and gold in a good year, and then suddenly to transparency if we get a storm to rattle the branches bare. The countryside is the place to be – to feel it, to smell it and to kick through foliage.
Without an autumn walk or a forage for nuts, mushrooms or blackberries, I feel we have failed to
“Each year I fall in love again with the scale of the change we are in the midst of just now”
“Here was a whole bank of colour burning away. It was beautiful, fiery, unapologetic”
prepare properly for the winter. I want to invite the season into the garden, too – vividly and in layers. I use asters, autumn crocuses and gentians at ground level, and shrubs that perform for this season to take the eye up and away, to straighten the back. Sambucus turns a buttery yellow, which might be brief, but kicks off the season early and with the addition of contrasting berries hanging jet-black by the bunch. I weave berrying trees and shrubs into the garden as much for their jewel-like fruit as for the birds which flock down to gorge when the fruit is ready for feasting upon.
Berry hedges (they also have their moment like the blossom hedges in the spring) are a good way of doing this, and I weave them into gardens up and down the country whenever possible.
Rebecca in my studio calls them ‘crumble hedges’ – they’re comprised of sloes (for gin) and dog roses (for rosehip syrup), and always have room for the odd bramble. There are many other fruits, and in some cases droops and berries, to steer clear of. You may find bryony and belladonna have woven their way into the mix, deposited there by birds flocking from one feeding ground to the next. They are poison to us and worth telling apart. There’s honeysuckle, too, with crimson berries, hawthorn for its darker-red clusters of fruit, and viburnum for its bloody-red droops. These are first to go, but many fruits last till long after the leaves are down. In alkaline areas, add the spindle Euonymus
europaeus to the mix – its pink capsules rupture to reveal tangerine seed – or Cornus sanguinea and
Rhamnus for almost black fruits. If you live by the sea, plant sea buckthorn, whose orange clusters of berries completely clothe the black thorny branches.
Taken from Natural Selection by Dan Pearson (Guardian Faber).
Howl BY ALYS FOWLER
Alys Fowler took to the waterways and canals of Birmingham when her life tip-tilted in an unexpected way. Observing the rarely seen animals and plants on the bank side helped her to come to terms with the end of her marriage, and the start of a new and unexpected relationship.
I’d been deeply happy, content, and it had brought me to where I was in many ways. It is my history. But I also felt trapped by the unsettled nature of my life. The steady, long-term relationship had afforded me great freedom. Now, perversely, that freedom, one of honesty, was so vast that at times it was overwhelming. I knew which path I wanted to be on, and I would wake surprised that I felt no regret at coming out. I never thought “I must take this back”. But I was scared of the unknown. I missed the security of my hidden nature.
I noticed mushrooms growing on the side of the canal. I wanted to be more interested in them or in the weeds or the damselfly that whizzed past. I want to peer at the waterside weeds and name all the liverworts and moss that covered the edges. Instead I was trapped inside me.
I lay back in the boat and allowed the grey sky to descend like a blanket. Then I noticed fireweed, or
“The scattered flocks were so vast they might take several minutes to pass overhead”
rosebay willowherb. It gained the first name because it likes to colonise burnt-out spaces, and famously turned post-war Britain into a blaze of pink. Its common name refers to the soft grey leaves that look like those of the willow. In late summer it is crowned with bright pink flowers, but in autumn it does something marvellous: it burnishes its fire-loving nature so that it looks like an autumn bonfire as those grey leaves turn red from the outer edge in, like burning embers, a brilliant orangered, the seed heads wisping up like smoke. Here was a whole uninterrupted bank of colour, burning away. It was beautiful, fiery, unapologetic about its final call. It singed my retinas against all the grey gloom. Like a touch-paper, it lit up the bit of me that lives outside, and I remembered who I was and why I was there.
At the end of this blaze was the M5, its huge concrete bastions holding up a distant roar. Those cylinders were so vast I could paddle between them. The din of the motorway and the train line beside it made the place so deafening that it became almost peaceful. You could do things there you couldn’t do elsewhere.
So: I howled and howled and howled. I sobbed so loudly and so uncontrollably that I floated my boat along with nothing but a heaving chest. I clawed at the boat and at myself.
I cried in a manner far more unhinged than I can remember doing before. I outstripped the version of me that had howled on a station platform when I had first left Charlotte. I sobbed more violently than I had at the weekend or when I had left my marriage bed.
It sounds farcical now, but in all the time I had been wandering around asking people to accept the new me, I hadn’t asked the old me to do the same. I let go in all that howling. I have no idea if anyone heard me or saw the strange sight I must have made. But I let go, and once I had, I felt gloriously free.
Taken from Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler (Hodder & Stoughton).
Song BY NEIL ANSELL
Neil Ansell loves solitary walking, a passion that has become more precious as his gradual loss of hearing affects his relationship with nature, especially the calls of the birds, which are gradually becoming silent to him.
Though it was only a month since I had last been here, things had changed vastly. The woods of birch and oak were in their full autumn leaf; all yellows and oranges but not yet ready to fall. They looked exquisite, painterly. The purple heather of the hills was gone now, but the moor-grass had faded from the lush green of my last visit to a whole palette of earth colours; yellow ochre at the tips, burnt sienna at the base, and umber at the root, so that the hills looked scorched by the fires of summer. The first snows had already fallen on Ben Nevis but the sun was shining. Great flocks of redwings and fieldfares had arrived from Scandinavia, drawn by the glut of rowan berries. The scattered flocks were so vast that they might take several minutes to pass overhead, and then they would suddenly tumble from the sky as they came to another
“When all else has given up it just keeps right on singing. I am still here. No surrender”
rowan. I could hear the chatter of the fieldfares, but the redwings were gone to me. These birds were ravenous, plundering the land like Viking marauders.
Every time I came to another rowan tree, unseen birds would fall from the branches one by one at my approach, dropping out of it before rising.
It seemed astounding that one little tree could hold so many birds that were invisible to me. Every time I thought that must be it, they must all be gone now, another group would pour out of the tree’s hidden recesses, and the ground beneath the rowans would be slick with their spillage.
Deep in the woods, I was surprised by a sudden peal of birdsong; the autumn song of the robin, one of the few birds other than the wren that sings almost the whole year round. I sat and watched it singing to the world, and wondered if I was hearing its whole song or just a sample of its lower notes, or if perhaps it was just that this song is like an echo of its full spring song, with less variety, less range, than the full-throated melodies I had listened to from all the robins singing on the shores of Loch Morar back in March. Either way it was enough to delight me, out of season, in a year which had held so little song for me.
The robin is one of the few birds that hold a territory throughout the winter, for it cannot bear the company of others. Its call is the auditory equivalent of a ‘keep out’ sign, or challenge to all comers. It sings because it wants to be alone. And yet our subjective response to the natural world has a kind of validity of its own even when it bears little relationship to reality. There is certainly something very moving about a solitary bird singing into silence at year’s end. After the vitality and exuberance of spring, this is a bird that will not let go. It sings on amidst the falling leaves, it sings on as the nights draw in, it sings on as all about it falls quiet.
This bird’s song may not have the sheer brio that it had when the year was young, but it has subtlety and a seemingly elegiac, thoughtful quality. It sounds like the voice of experience, and I cannot fault it for its tenacity. When all else has given up, it just keeps right on singing; I am still here. No surrender.
Extract from The Last Wilderness by Neil Ansell (The Tinder Press). Seed BY TIM DEE Nature writer Tim Dee’s happiness comes from being outside, where the fields and fens have worked their way into his heart. It’s a complicated relationship, full of joy for the wonders of nature and tinged with melancholy for the beleaguered wildness.
Iwas on the fen when summer turned to autumn. Each incoming season is made out of the ruins of the last. Summer’s drying gives way to autumn’s fall. A quiet and still day had come and passed. In the autumn the sun itself can look dead in the sky, as if the light has already been switched off somewhere, and all we get is the colour of the bulb. This was such a day. But then, in the late afternoon, a little local breeze cooked up close to the ground of the fen at Burwell. There is more thistle than grass in these acres, and I watched the dry lick of warm air begin to lift the thistledown. Every
thistle-head had seeded and there was so many that the whole fen was draped on a long loose scarf of dirty snow. The tiny seeds on each head are dark and the plumes of down sandy pale and almost transparent. As the plant grows, both seed and plume crowd tight together but the whole head loosens as it dries and sets so the seeds are pushed up and out while the down froths around them.
On the first autumn day on the fen, the wind sometimes took a whole thistle-head and sometimes just a hank of down. The loosest heads were the first to be prised from their prickly anchor but even these lift-offs involved countless local struggles, the breeze picking at the ties that held them down to its plant, the down committed to its fight but still not going willingly. Once these negotiations were over the cottony seed heads were lifted, raised, and then encouraged along above the thistles and the rest of the field of grass, sorrel, loosestrife, wild carrots and dock.
As they blew, the strands snagged on one another, riding the air like soft chain-shot, wool-gathering as they went. Everything was floating towards the south-east in a silent, spreading, milky broadcast. I stepped off the bank and followed. Like snow pushed away from the earth, the down sometimes rose in the wind and climbed upwards.
There was more. Thistle is a goldfinch food and there were dozens of them, at least 200 hundred all together, feeding in loose jingling flocks on the burst heads. Their expert beaks made repeated delvings into the thistle hearts, until the birds surfaced and superbly husked the tiny seeds they had picked, turning it as required in their beaks like magicians shifting cards.
But the breeze and the blow distracted them and made them flighty. Group after group lifted as one from among the thistles, each pulled by the bird ahead of them and pulling those behind.
Their departures and their landings released still more down and fanned the drift yet further. The golden bars along their wings caught the light like the slub of silk, and twinkling their toy piano music they moved off through the floating down like itinerant weavers flying their precious thread through the homespun, until the whole fen became a field of the cloth of gold.
Extract from Four Fields by Tim Dee (Jonathan Cape).
Still BY ALEXI FRANCIS
Alexi Francis is an artist and illustrator, who studied zoology at university and now lives in East Sussex. Here she describes how silence and stillness can bring you closer to nocturnal nature in the most magical of ways.
Dusk, when the edges of all things blur. A time of mauve and moonlight, of shapeshiftings and stirrings, of magic. It’s my favourite time of day. Nocturnal wildlife has a special fascination; it usually lives out of sight beneath the radar of our everyday, human lives. We pull on our fleeces, let the camp-fire die down and steal into the woods. I hear the moan of
“Everything was floating towards the south-east in a silent, milky broadcast”
“It has rained in the last few days and badgers will be out foraging for earthworms”
the pump house and the faint laughter of children in the camping field. We make our way quietly down the woodland path, old beechmast crunching underfoot, midges fussing about our faces. The moon rises up in the east, spilling light over a few steely clouds. The sky deepens to a twilight blue. Below us the woodland floor falls away in a confusion of ferns, red campion, bramble and ivy. Somewhere down below is the badger sett we discovered earlier in the day, inconspicuous unless you are close by. The smooth hummocks, discarded bedding and well-worn paths meandering off through the trees are tell-tale signs. It’s intriguing to think that a badger family might be slumbering beneath our feet.
We wait. The ground is damp; it has rained in the last few days and the badgers will be out foraging for earthworms. They emerge earlier in the evenings in autumn for food and bedding. We listen. I crouch in the spiky twigs of a hawthorn bush in a pocket of darkness, fingers in the earth to steady myself. The close smell of earth and leaf litter. My partner stands motionless a few metres away, back against a beech. We wait and listen, wait and listen. Anticipation. Darkness creeps into all spaces, rich animal darkness wraps around us.
Japanese folklore has it that badgers can shapeshift into humans and sing songs. Or they may change themselves into trees, stones, comets, drum on their bellies as pranksters, lure unsuspecting observers into ditches and swamps. This evening we have been lured into the woods at dusk by our own curiosity. The shadows rustle. The sound becomes a movement in the corner of my eye. There is a movement to my left along the path I am sure.
A little piece of grey-garbed night is trundling towards us, quite unaware of our presence. It is a little unsettling to think he could run into me on this path. He – I call it he for convenience – snuffles the earth, hesitates but seems unbothered; badgers rule these woods. And he is so, so quiet. Now I can see the white stripes on his face, his open gaze, as curious as I am.
There is something humorous, almost comical about him. He bows and lifts his head, sniffing the air; badgers have reasonable night vision but a great sense of smell.
He seems unfazed and comes closer. So close is he now that I could reach out and touch him from my place in the shadows. I stay as still as I can in the hawthorn. I make a slight noise and give myself away. The badger stands stock still for a second and then, with a blur of grey, he hurries off into the night. I sigh, but I’m smiling. Smiling to myself in the darkness.