This has been one of the most vivid autumns I can remember. Days of clear skies and bright sunlight have been plenty this year, and apart from some fog there have yet to be many washouts or frosts. This warm, sunny, weather has been wonderful in the trees, and the furnace colours of oak, birch and beech, the buttery sycamores and field maples, lemony ash and golden syrup limes, have been spectacular. But surely this happens every year, more or less?
Every year the deciduous trees change colour before falling. Every year before winter there is a burst of transition that looks beautiful, and our feelings for it have something to do with an increase in wild food mammals need to bulk up for the winter. The absence of chlorophyll to mask leaf pigments before the tree jettisons them hardly captures the significance of autumn colour or that sense of wonder in seeing the woods shine brightly like a bedtime story before the long sleep.
What more can be said of autumn, even one as spectacular as this, that has not been worn out by repetition? In truth, every autumn is unique. Each autumn tells its own story, even though we say the same things every time; the narrative is inadequate. What does it smell, taste and feel like; what is the significance of autumn colour in the dark?
As I wander the lanes of Wenlock, as the poet Adrian Henri did in his Song For AE Housman, to “dream about the night, / where every leaf is shrivelled and every berry bright”, I listen for owls and smell the wet leaves that awaken some wordless feeling like a very misty memory. The clocks have gone back, dusk edges further into day and the old rebellions return.
Smell it in the rot: an autumn of trees sparks a spring of fungi turning fallen leaves and tree stumps into earth; an animate flowering of fleshy moons in the woods releasing a smoke of spores. This is a scent every bit as evocative as cordite and bonfires, every bit as subversive as gunpowder, treason and plot.
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