The sky this morning is glassy cold. Blue tits are drilling it with diamond-tipped tsee-tseep-tsees and the shards prickle the duvet-incubated fug in my lungs. But a few dozen paces into the wood, breaths come more easily as the path drops steeply and humidity rises. There’s a small timber footbridge at the bottom, and below it a miniature world where, somehow, it is no longer winter. I scramble down and crouch under the bridge, thinking myself smaller and less cold.
There’s a little canyon here, carved by a cascade whose peak flow is no more than a hosepipe’s worth. The bases of the surrounding trees are cloaked in a carpet of moss, and sprouting from the shagpile are tiny gardens of new herbaceous plants: a baby groundsel, I think, and what will, in a few weeks, be a primrose.
The edge of the gulch is lined with fronds of hart’s-tongue fern and beneath their wagging canopy is a grotto with walls clad in the extravagant amphibian decoupage of a thalloid liverwort – Conocephalum conicum. Each thallus is a flat, spreading body with margins rucked like those of a worn sticking plaster. The upper surfaces bear pimples, which a hand lens reveals to be pores marking the centres of tessellating polygons – you could believe they were the scales of a tiny dragon. The whole lobed, overlapping mass is a 450m-year-old idea of a plant: no roots, no shoots and none of the internal plumbing that gave vascular vegetation its vertical aspirations.
The green of these ancient forms isn’t exactly beautiful. There’s something goblinish and not quite of the light about it, but still, it makes this little microcosm the most intensely alive place in the wood. I crush a piece under my nose and it releases a startling, almost antiseptic aroma – budget bubble bath over something more earthy. It cues up a vivid 28-year-old memory of the huge enamel tubs, mouldering lino and thunderous Victorian plumbing of the bathrooms in my student halls of residence, where I’d wallow amid wraiths of scented steam condensing on cold tile. It’s a weird olfactory triangulation: three dots in time joined by the chemical signature of a primordial swamp, and a green dream of life on land.
