The hawthorn stands on the edge of the marsh by the Yare as a five-metre-tall dome of foliage and fruit. Its green is bulked further at the rear by a big elder and although both bushes sag now with dense crops, it is easy to overlook their burden.
The red of the hawthorn is actually no brighter than the roan cattle in a far pasture, while the bundles of dark elder currants are massed but present no more colour than the bolts of lilac that top the creeping thistles or the willowherb all around the bushes’ periphery.
Nor does their shared thicket of green seem more luxuriant or noteworthy than the wider matrix of vegetation – the reedbed, nettles stands, teasels and sow thistles. They are all blended to the one place as parts of the late-summer scene.
Yet already I can see how the bushes are a hub of more intense activity in this becalmed landscape. Wood pigeons may be unseen as they forage the tops, but you can hear them clattering around the elder’s interior, showing now and then as swatches of grey-blue among the green. There are whitethroats and sedge warblers “tukking” and sallying out occasionally in their attack on both fruit and flies. Blue tits pass through, hang upside down, take a minute at those black sweet bags, then loop away.
Even the insects are more numerous. There are noon flies and wasps drunk on juice. I notice that there are also orb-web spiders centred in their wider spirals of silk and around this basal sphere orbit migrant hawker and common darter dragonflies. These three hunters are drawn by the fruit-fuelled chance of prey.
Right now it all goes largely unnoticed, but I know this bush. In 100 days it will be stripped of leaf. The skeletal elder boughs, wrapped in bright-yellow Xanthoria lichen will catch the low-angled evening light. The haws will dazzle the cold air, scarlet if still fresh and blood-red when dry, and for all the weeks that they continue to hang, until the fieldfares and redwings finish the feast, this big hawthorn will be the glory of our winter marsh.
