Chris Avery | Wednesday, 18 October 2023
The sun’s passage, now lowered, barely raising above the wood pigeon laden coppice of Hazel, Ash, and Maple, where deep, the chuck-clucking Pheasants shelter from the beaters and the guns, beneath tangles of Brambles. Sat on the rise on Mr Martins farm. Here from our bough looking down we can see along the fertile bustling track of the little Willowbrook as its waters journey through the flat fields now stripped of Wheat, Beans, and Rape, of the fattening Bullock Calves now gone to market and on to the slaughterhouse.
Off it meanders under the unseasonably warm surface of the stone blocks making up the ancient packhorse bridge and tilting oneastwards through one tree-lined bank and the other a meadow lined, dog walker footpath by the crop field. Downstream and onwards, to the old arch-spanned road bridge, always deep in shade, where cars pass tight one at a time, barely a minute or so east by the wings of a darting Kingfisher busy on the forage with a nest of chattering mouths to feed, and yet a few evenings wander away in the frame of a wading fisherman whose progress in those gentle waters is governed by the quantity and the quality of the insects in the evening rise and of the Trouts' eagerness and hunger.
Time is never universal, it's never a constant for life along these banks, it flows and eddies, and rushes and tumbles, pauses and waits. it stretches out and rushes in, it grabs and evades as it flows past with the waters of the Brook.
By now the dried old harvest stubble turned in, ploughed under, and the fresh rich dark soil, now neatly drilled with robust green shoots of winter barley, toughened to withstand the coming winters, relentless rains; slate cracking frosts; and the too brief blankets of snow.
Soil that now dry, warm, dusty, will be a soggy quagmire, a boot sucking, Labrador and spaniel caking cold hell, should be, could be, will be, any time soon.
This season, here, now. By the date, by the calendar, by the coming Harvest and Hunters moons, and by the sudden silence of the absent birds of summer, is the middle of Autum, in this, the middle of England.
It should be cold, it's 20 degrees on the Celsius scale.
Yet, despite the Calander date, along the banksides of this little brook the rich green swards. A floral body politic. Native grasses and wildflowers that pronounce and illustrate the waters progression. Dividing barren farmed landscape through the summer months, these same plants now conspiring to resist dying back. Maintaining green growth, urged on to life by the unseasonable warmth, making fresh growing tips and shoots and buds. Resistance, fighting against the dying of the autumnal light.
It shouldn’t be this way. It never was.
Along the Brooks length there sometimes emerge a layered canopy of trees that gift gravitas to this curvaceous trace of insect busying floral loveliness. Sculpting height, integrity and permanence from the barren, industrialised farming wasting lands, strewn selfishly upon either bankside.
As those waters wander on downstream; stumbling over stones; gliding over silt beds; shimmying over the precious gravels; tripping over fallen boughs and rocks, onwards.
Yet ever onwards, downwards, eastwards, seawards. ………. Through swaying fronds of weeds, riding swirling eddies that prise and gouge new hollows, then onwards again gently plunging into deep cool pools; or gliding silently along, neath the mysterious shaded shelfs of the creeping green banks that narrows the surface waters as summer progresses, a haven for the life below, A secret from the life above, then blasted back and folded over by the racing, razing, brown winter floodwaters that scour the gentle valley and open up the Brook again.
Some waters are gently lapping at the small sandy, silty shores in the spacious hollow deeps under the ancient willows roots where the Otters hide Unlikely bedfellows of the big warry patient old Trout in the dark pools nearby. Safely here awaiting the fat caddis hatches of the dark, while the younger fish risk life and capture nearby, out in the sparkling crystal shallows, stealing morsels from the olive hatches in the daylight.
Some will survive and learn, a precious few.
Above the trunks, aspiring boughs providing deep delicious shade to these waters of the brook on the increasingly hazy, never lazy, hot summer days, preserving the precious oxygen in its cooled waters.
On these boughs and all along this wandering canopy and up upon this coppice on the rise, these leaves are also held hostage to the green, no hints of shutting shop and readying for bleak, dismal, mid-winter, then onwards to the grand renewal when the shadows shorten again as the warmth gentle ebbs and flows across these lands and lanes.
By now, usually, the first bitter cold airs have slid and sunk, concentrated into hollows, deep in the night.
Then cloaked in silence as a ghostly mist on the breeze, they have gathered as one and brushed along this landscape where any adventurous bough that’s dared stood tall or proud of the tight canopy, ambitiously stretched out to far, or dipped too low in the hollow have been smitten, kissed by her chilled air as she swirls on past.
The leaf’s precious petiole, its umbilical link to the mother tree, now corked over with this icy peck and/or lacking light, choking, blocking the life creating green chlorophyll, leaving the last stranded pigments trapped in the foliage.
These three muses of autumn; cold yellow Xanthophylls; orange Carotenoids; and the beguiling deep red Anthocyanins. Promised time at last to parade and delight the last glorious brilliance in the final act, in the shortening, fading misty days before this world sinks into a land of dull, of greys and browns and waiting...
These Colours when uncloaked from the green on isolated boughs are our first hint, our nudge of autumns passage and this year’s life’s demise. They are Nature's warning message of her grim intent, Broadcast to all that that have fur or feather, feet or wings, to see and to hear...
” Those who cannot fly south or hibernate deep and safe in some sheltered hollow snuggled in sweet-smelling dry leaves, mosses and rusty fern fronds.Should soon seek the comfort and warmth of the fireside, in the parlour under the roofs of slate and thatch. Await, a while with darning or seed catalogue in hand, and hope…wait for the new dawn of the first buds and blossoms of spring……again!.”
But these world-weary leaves on our boughand all around are still a tired dusty green, decrepit, just merely functioning.
No hint of autumns final fling just yet along the Willowbrook.
Long gone the fresh clean perfection. The zingy, verdant spring green unfurling shoots.
Long gone luxurious, rich, mid-summer green, when the chloroplasts deep in tissues, floral industrial cogs ramped up,conveying up, driving on, distributing to the network full energy and oxygen production, compelled on, fuelled by the strong rays of seemingly endless summer days and the reservoirs of the fresh clean spring rains of April spring showers , held deep within the rich soils, beyond the roots of the lesser plants and shrubs that scavenge the spilt morsels around these lordly trunks.
This old foliage should be retired. Its dulland dusty, aphid and leaf sucker distorted. Some leaves crispy edged with scars from early summer drought. Some species Black speckled from disease, Some genus’s white buffed and downy from mildew.
Old ‘Aesculus’ by the farmer's gate, the ancient Horse Chestnut who throws shade on that old stone road bridge. Its foliage along its spreading boughs, all crispy brown now, filagree laced, pock ridden, and barely green., Not from the seasonal change, but by summers heavy infestation of gorging moth grubs, far from their Balkan ancestors, now an established resident of twenty some years, creating an ugly rusty stain running through Old Blighty’s yearly gloriously green parade the country long. No Chestnut in all these lands is spared the ignominy.
This leaf mining grublet, destined with the Dutch Elm Beetles; Sudden Oak death; and Ash Die back disease, to become yet another visitor to these shores that will irrevocably and profoundly transform the very nature and appearance of Britain’s vistas and sullied landscapes.
Old, demented weather worn leaves, stumbling confused in the shorter hours of dim and faded daylight. Reluctant yet compelled to struggle on, one more day, one more dawn, one more week, yet one more warm night. How long, how long to remain?
Waiting for the icy crystal kiss or gathering gloom that peels and tolls to the faithful, the final call to change into something bright, the Sunday best, Autumn's glory, for one last fling of the year!
A call to close down; to colour up: to fall down; wet down; break down; rot down; and..
And then, …(wait) and then, (slow), and then, gently in time, a gradual, beautiful, transformation into a rich-deep, fertile, crumbly, sweet earth-smelling, life-packed, nutrient-rich, water-holding, glorious, gorgeous, Humus!
Returning at last to enrich the gritty spent soil. Plants provender. Nature's golden recipe to create foliage and roots, to enable passageways of worms and neworks of whispering fungus in the soil, creating leaves, fruits, seeds, and the very life-givingair, as the loop continues along the path onwards, unfurling over millennia, by the side of the constantly engraving waters of the little willow Brook always heading eastwards for the North Sea.
Delayed this year it seems, there is a tale ora tail in this loop, still unfurling along times line, in this confusing, unsettling age.
I hope life’s sweet where this finds you.
Whinging pom