Seasons
The sense of ‘September’ is tangible. It is here in the quiet winds and the quiet hedgerows and the sense of summer fading now into something else. It is in the contrasts of the path-edges, as I walk through fields to the next village. Stiff golden- brown ranks of hogweed dominate verges of the dead and dying. Downy wisps of willowherb seed drift softly away on air currents, the vibrant pinks of their flowers gone. All I can see still in bloom, beyond one recently-mown strip, are the silky white trumpets of bindweed – beautiful though parasitic – weaving their vine-like stems through the supporting vegetation. Further back, there were blue scatterings of chicory through a couple of headlands. But in the hedges, various harvests of ripe and ripening fruits provide alternative, new-season highlights. Since July, much of the spring’s birdsong has stopped – as many birds began to moult their breeding feathers and gradually replace them with ‘autumn’ plumages - but here now is the solitary, wistful tune of a robin. A couple of crows cawing away in the next field add a wintry tone. Recently, I’ve begun to hear chaffinches singing again, the ramblings of a song-thrush, and the goldfinches and woodpigeons and starlings hardly seem to have been silent. But the skylarks, whose summer presence I’ve become used to again as singers of sweet, intense, soprano warblings high in the air over ripening arable fields, surprise me now with a different guise. As I walk the barely discernable path through the middle of one arid ploughland, a flock of skylarks rise up from their hidden positions on the ground, emitting a mass of stridulous alarm calls. I hadn’t even known they were they were.
And whilst many of the wild flowers have now gone to seed – if not encouraged towards some extension of their flowering period by cutting - it’s now that fountains of orange rosehips hang generously off the hedges. The rich blue and red-based shades formed of anthocyanins and carotenoids make me look beyond the all-consuming idea of ‘flowers’ to something a little more substantial – these developing fruits of the late-summer to autumn. Along the lanes and field-edges my glance is drawn by the punchy reds of hawthorn haws, juicy, blackening blackberries and the slender vein-like stems of elder suspending pendulous bunches of ripe, shining berries. There’s the dusty blue-black berries of Prunus Spinosa – the blackthorn sloe - a rose-family relative of plums and damsons. Brighter, and very poisonous, there are woody night-shade berries, which look like tiny red plum tomatoes. In my garden hedge now there are dozens of white misshapen globes - snowberries - whose fruit when cut open apparently resembles ‘fine, sparkling granular snow’. Ripening now from green to black are the small hard-looking berries of privet, loved by thrushes, and later on, the green pin-cushion flowerheads of the ivy with their long, yellow-anthered stamina, will be followed by the dark fruits. All parts of the ivy plant, which plays such an important role for wildlife, are toxic to people.
What Keats famously called autumn’s ‘mellow fruitfulness’ also happens to be a feast for animals, especially birds, and can help them through to the later part of the winter, when the supplies of wild food dwindle and survival grows harder. In between, many birds that are still quiet now will begin to sing again a subtler form of song – though not all – and not to attract a mate or guard a nest but to defend instead a feeding territory. I will not hear the sound of a blackbird singing it’s jaunty song again until next spring.
Recently, when it was still August, I swear I saw a flock of fieldfares flying over. These are autumn migrants, thrushes, mostly from Scandinavia and Russia, whom I’m more used to seeing in these parts from sometime in October. Then, they will spend the autumn, winter and early part of the spring feeding from our hedgerows and fields, on fruits and invertebrates. It seemed incongruous to see them so early in the year, and so far inland – even though their quiet, orderly flight high above me suggested that they were only passing through. I checked my ‘sighting’ on the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) website.. Apparently, it’s not unusual to see them as early as this – ‘the very first fieldfares often arrive in mid-august but the big arrivals generally begin around the end of September’. Perhaps those birds I saw had reached the coast earlier in the month and were now passing through central England on the way to their final destination. Each autumn, I look and listen hopefully for the spectacle of fieldfares. Their bold, ebullient presence as they roam the hedgerows in loud, sociable flocks ‘chak’-ing to each other and feeding on their favoured food- hawthorn hips - is a heart-warming thing to encounter in the mutedness of autumn, when the summer’s swifts and swallows and martins have returned to African skies and left our own feeling almost bare, like a house emptied of it’s furniture.
A few weeks ago, when we were on the Thames at Benson, it was as though we inhabited another season entirely. As I drew my first paddle strokes through these smooth broad waters, the feeling of connection with the river was electric. I couldn’t help emitting a whoop of delight – more than one – as I played my part in propelling our 3 person canoe along the water with its wooded edges from which birds sang in a spring-like mesh of song. I could hardly tell the species from species. It was almost as if the riverside vegetation – still lush and green - the particularly clarifying acoustic of woods and water together, and the river’s peaceful calm seclusion was encouraging the numerous bird-song - not necessarily something you’d expect in late August. Dragonflies whizzed past our heads regular as London buses, sand martins hawked over the marina, and turquoise and emerald banded demoiselles wove snappily between the stems of the rushes. Between bouts of paddling, my daughter and I trailed lazy hands in the river’s chilled, placid-seeming depth, cut by ducks or swans or boats into herringbone and chevron-wakes. Sunlight created entrancing glitter-patterns on breeze-prickled waters. Flowers, which in the ‘outside world’ were now mostly skeletal, seedy brown corpses garnishing the sides of the rushing roads, were ‘in here’ still richly coloured palaces of nectar. Purple loosestrife, pink himalyan balsam (oft-quoted as an ‘invasive species’, but bees love it), and bistort, yellow water-lilies on a quiet side-channel, and a couple of other species I noted with interest but couldn’t identify at the time (obviously, I will have to make a return trip to check - what an inconvenience!) We paddled upriver, passing the Shillingford Bridge hotel where people lounged on towels or sunbeds or wandered about barefoot on a sloping grass lawn, whilst some swam in a blue oval pool, and waved to us as we went by. Gradually, our individual paddlings began to flow together into one linked rhythm. We smoothed out it’s rough edges and got faster. We made it back to the jetty at the marina where we had hired out the canoe at relative speed (for us) (though by ‘us’ I really mean me and my daughter – my husband is much more adept, having had previous experience of canoe-ing. Two hours after we set off, I still felt elated. The tanned Mediterranean man from the boat-hire yard guided me back onto the wooden boardwalk where I stood up slightly wobbily as if I had been aboard a ship for a while. We had watched a mysterious pink-toned creature trawling through the water toward us a couple of hundred yards away on the other side of the river. It soon evolved into the form of a woman who climbed out onto a low bank stretching into fields beyond, where a girl who I presumed was her daughter left her sunbathing to also slip into the water for a swim. I have not yet had the courage to try a ‘wild swim’ myself – though I hope to. But it still felt exhilarating, even without the less immersive contact of boat-on rather than body-in – water. Occasional drops of spray from the ‘back-flick’ of my paddling splashed my face and accidentally leapt sometimes into my half-open mouth (it tasted salty, like sea-water). I’ve loved rivers almost as long as I’ve enjoyed the sea. Here we are about eighty miles from the nearest drop of sea-water, so it’s just as well. I can’t wait to return to the river. To paddle a canoe again, I hope, down a sunlit length. To smell the tangy drift of river-air and watch the water’s subtle waves. Perhaps, one day, to swim.
