(Bittersweet, black bryony)

It is mid-September, and how quietly the changes have taken place in the landscape. It sounds a curious thing to say, but many of the trees seem more like themselves than they have all summer. The ash tree’s leaves have thinned (mysteriously, as there is precious little evidence on the ground about it) and given back to the tree the graceful curves of its upward branches, and the downward plunge of its leaf-bearing twigs, dramatic like hands. The sycamore and beech trees’ leaves have thickened and rattle in the breeze like sistra (or bags of foil milk bottle tops). And yet for all these changes the whole world is still green.

In the hawthorn lane the scene has become muted. The nettles form a crowd still, but are huddled closer together, as if nervously expecting a change. Goosegrass is long gone, its grey nets rotting here and there, while the ghosts of cow parsley stand crooked and subsiding.

But I am mistaken to think that late summer’s show is over in the lane ....

In the hedge hang the bright berries of bittersweet, like ampoules of thin glass filled with coloured inks, melodramatically proclaiming their poison. (And as befits the melodrama, the berries are not as poisonous as some of their relatives.) The cut leaves have grown pale, as if putting the last of their energy into their vivid berries, and are riddled with holes. Suddenly the whole scene shifts for me. What are these berries but a phial of poison that some Jacobean stage-villain gazes on caressingly and whispers lovingly “Poison”? (What are these pale leaves but hands?) In the hedge opposite, through the branches of a field maple, black bryony grows. Its waxy green fruit is clustered close to its stem, its leaves are already yellow and dying. Others hang down withered and brown. It is as if the whole plant is saying, clutching the bright round balls of fruit – its legacy, its life’s work, its incomparable gift – in its enfeebled hands: “And thus! And thus to die!”

What a show these climbers, these Shakespeareans of the hedgerow, put on for the groundlings, the nettles and grasses! The tracings of their dying stems on the branches of the hedge reveal each step in their mad career, how they strutted and strode -- gestured and leapt -- from battlement and balcony! What theatre there was among the dark branches of hawthorn and field maple! Where, a month from now, there will only be a clutter of brittle stems ...