(Field Shapes, Cowslip)

At the foot of the common I met Margaret, as arranged. Margaret is a great enthusiast for fields, and can hardly pass one by on a country walk without saying “Look at that field!” In some ways, we complement each other perfectly: I, with my fascination for detail close at hand, she with her interest in the larger picture. But today Margaret had something different in mind. I was bending down to look at the dry husks, like bells of papyrus, of a decayed cowslip among the tough grasses, when Margaret said: “Would you look at that field?” I duly looked across the valley. “What shape do you think it is?” she continued. “It’s got five sides of different lengths, and then there’s that little bit added to the corner. It’s an irregular polygon, I suppose, but what sort of polygon?” I said I wasn’t sure. Margaret wasn’t to be deterred. “We should learn some geometry, then we could name all the field shapes too.” I opened my bag and pointed out that there might not be room in it for a primer on geometry as well as the wild flower guide, tree guide, bird guide and notebook, and sandwiches (and novel for any quiet moments) that I was already carrying. “But it could be useful,” Margaret said in her persuasive way, and of course I had to agree.

(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 ...

(Reading)

I have of late been reading the novelistic work of John Clutterbuck Porius. After my enjoyment of his first novel, in which a man walks around the Yeovil area with a large stick, I was eager to read everything he had written. I was not disappointed by his second novel, A Westonbirt Romance, in which a man walks around Gloucestershire with a large stick, nor by his third and fourth in which the author wisely does not diverge from this winning formula, (but cunningly moves the action to the county of Dorset)*. Indeed, how many novels could be improved by getting rid of all that extraneous plot, and simply featuring a man walking around – the Kent marshes, say -- with a large stick!

But, oh! how disappointed I was when I came to read his novel of the Middle Ages, The Brazen Herd, to find that our author had discarded what heretofore had served him well. Certainly we meet within the first few pages a man with a lovingly-described mace

“surmounted by a round ball which was as big as any ordinary man’s head entirely covered by iron spikes”

and which, in my innocence, I imagined Clutterbuck Porius had substituted for a large stick in honour of the medieval setting – but all too soon this character was lost sight of amidst a host of others, forming a colourful tapestry full of intrigue and historical detail. I put the book down in disgust, and if any of my readers happens to have finished it, could they please inform me of what happens in the end, and whether the man uses his mace at any point, perhaps to swish some vegetable growth out of the way, or at least to lean on while admiring a view ....
____________

(* Cunningly, I say, because several reviewers have seen this peculiarity of Clutterbuck Porius' novels as a conscious homage to Thomas Hardy, every single one of whose books begins with some variation on the line “A man was walking along a lane in Dorset”.)

(Brambles, hedge bindweed)

Today I saw a bramble bush crouching in bright sunlight at the gate of a field. And suddenly I thought: what a marvellous contraption a bramble bush is! Almost the kind of thing dear old Professor Stonehouse would have made if he was still with us!

Out of the bramble’s plated body arced strong arms for grappling, hooked with thorns; arms that, once they struck land, would sprout searching knobbly toes to wriggle and get a purchase in the soil as the great bramble machine continued its progress across the country. But like those robots designed by children it had other kinder functions: I imagined the blackberries marked by childish arrows “food for birds and passers-by”. Meanwhile the leaves in the midday sunlight looked as hard and flat as tin, the older stems purpled, vinous, rendered square as if by the tautened tendons in a human arm.

The bramble seems a mathematical beast. Its leaves insist on 3s and 5s. As the bush throws out new arms, up sprout the leaves in a hard insignia of 3. The stems of the leaflets lengthen (putting out a few hair-like thorns for good luck) and make space for another two to grow, to make the complement of 5. No even numbers for the bramble (except by accident), just spiky odds.

A different sight greeted me across the road. An elder tree was shrouded in hedge bindweed. The bindweed had climbed over the top of it, covered it in a thick green cowl, and hung down at the edges like fillets of moss on a dripping green riverbank. Questing tendrils curved up into the air, swaying with insect inquisitiveness. What a picture the elder and the bindweed made together! The thick clusters of elderberries hung down, dark purple, shadowed in black among the elder’s narrow leaves, which were already starting to curl round like paper left in the sun. Next to them were the hundreds of heart-shaped shields, large and small, of the bindweed. What victories were those shields hung up to celebrate? What conquests? Here and there on the great mat of green the white convolvulus flowers floated, a cross between gramophone trumpets and the proclaimed innocence of lilies. Clad in white dresses, they were like Arthurian maids who traipsed among the spoils of some great conflict, and seemed all unwitting of the part they had played in causing it.

On each side of me was a plant intent on conquest, but, oh! by what different means! The bramble seems to live in a world of pickets and escarpments, spades and trenches; while the bindweed – like some sinuous and utterly not-to-be-trusted pre-Raphaelite lady – aims at its goal by wrapping its body close to another, its tender insinuations soon growing tenser. Good luck to both of them, I say!

(Beech trees, woodruff)

Up to the beech woods on the hill. What a different aspect the woods presented from inside than from without! From outside, on this grey day, all had seemed in a motion of leaves and the hissing of the wind. But inside all was still; and as I wandered among the unadorned trunks of the old beech pollards, I was struck by a curious fancy. I fancied I walked in a great bare space like Gloucester cathedral, and these broad trees were its clutter of monuments to the dead.

Of course all was not still, the hiss of the leaves had continued, but was unheard in its constancy. It stayed unnoticed, that is, until a change in quickness and intent announced that rain had started to fall in the world outside. The hand of the rain grew stronger and pressed down on the wood; from the green storey above large drops of water fell to the wood’s dry floor, with its carpet of old leaves and fragments. These falling drops, transparent and flitting through the shadowed air, would have gone unseen had it not been for a peculiar effect ...

A drop of water, landing, struck a dry leaf.

Which twitched.

At first I mistook the motion for the impatient action of a concealed insect. But soon I noticed that the few square feet in front of me had become a kind of twitching animation, made by the drops of rain. Each drop seemed to mark the careful footfall of an invisible creature, (a man of perhaps twelve inches high), who stretched out a leg in a great stride to land his foot where the next drop had landed, and the next, and the next, and thus paced around on his small patch of ground.

To my surprise and wonder, I spotted my good friend Bisley walking at a short distance under the trees. I halloo-ed him and we continued on our way together. Bisley’s mind was full of some volumes of sixteenth century speculative philosophy he had been studying. Suddenly he bent down at the path’s edge and pointed out a delicate congregation of woodruff.

“How like an Elizabethan gentleman’s ruff that collar of green leaves is!” he exclaimed.

From the centre of the topmost ruff grew a narrow stem, like a thin wire, which divided horizontally at its terminus. Each branch then divided again into a cluster that held out the tiny round seeds. (It put me rather in mind of a mechanical model of the planetary system.)

“And how fitting a memorial this plant would make for an Elizabethan philosopher!” Bisley continued. “These seed stems could represent the revolving ideas of his philosophical system, growing, as it were, from out of his neck in the ruff.”

“And far larger,” I said, “than the head that thought them up, which is always the way with ideas.”

And happily agreed on this thought, we left the wood and walked out into the blustery weather.