A sign of what’s to come as the landscape unfolds with life
Early April, and around half the trees in Sowerby Bridge are in bloom. By the canal, pussy willow has flowered, prickly tufts of gold glittering in sunshine.
Outside Christ Church, the magnolia’s delicate deluge of creamy white and pink petals is an emblem of spring.
Through late March blossom trees emerged in parks and the station gardens like fountains of white fire.
Now, the one on Wharf Street is a dream of brilliant pink. Near Copley, one stands amid an otherwise barren clearing, another winds around a telegraph pole.
Above the wharf, a cascading arch of starry white blossom hangs in silken billows, a fragile canopy of spring time snow.
King Cross cemetery is carpeted by a blend of dead wood and greening grass. Jays flit the trees as I pass, one stops on a tomb fringed by dark green holly.
Weeping willows are a lusher green, reflecting on the Calder by Holmes Road, where jays also rustle and swoop about the budding branches of roadside trees.
One gleams by Bolton Brow; another by the wall of Royal Lofts, a jazzy splash of green against cold white.
Opposite, a leafless tree seems at one angle to swallow up the willow, wiry branches like the bars of a cage.
The wintry wickerwork of trees not yet in flower carries its own charm.
Observed close, the branches are labyrinths of gnarls and notches, chunks of tough old bark whose woody texture is what history feels like - run the palm of your hand against their proud, stiff limbs, and ponder how many years or centuries they have stood, how many billions of lives they have supported.
One cool evening by Copley reserve, the Heavens are crisscrossed by plaited branches, woven like a wooden ceiling through which darkening sky is seen in patches. Pinned against slate-blue, the moon hovers between branches.
There is something perfect in the way the trees obscure the view, framing the snowball moon, a reminder that there can be treasure also in the notyet fully formed, and it is hard to know whether this stark black beauty best represents an echo of winter, or a sign of what’s to come, as the landscape slowly unfolds with life.