Under a woodsmoke sky, the lime trees smell yellow, their leaves defy gravity, hanging on to summer stains, a few stray into the cool, breathless air and vanish. Those leaves that have fallen lose their leafiness to decay, as John Clare says, in the poem Decay, “To be, – and to have been, – and then be not.” This is anticyclonic gloom. High pressure, low cloud, roofed by warm air, poor visibility, misty and grey. Gloom. It’s interesting that the sullen and despondent mood, Gloom, has left its evil twin Doom, and lumbered into meteorology to be the official poster-spirit of dim light.
I like a bit of autumnal gloom, and so do the crows, it seems. In dreamy mood and a gothic disdain for showiness, they make some cursory flaps around the field to settle in old oaks and caw six times as if that has some oracular significance. Maybe it has. In the scrunch of acorns under one oak, with a thinning crown and stag-headed, are lots of knopper galls. When they first formed in August, these flanged extrusions from pedunculate oak acorns were green, then red and sticky, created by the larvae of the tiny gall wasp Andricus quercuscalicis feeding on the seed within and producing weird crown-like growths.
Now those wasps have hatched and are searching for the buds of turkey oak catkins to complete the wasp’s second generation next spring. What they’ve left behind are the brown, hardened knucklebones of a lost divination.
All this gloom and uncanniness is coalescing towards the end of October for Samhain and Halloween, especially in this Celtic landscape, where even the hills are shrouded by their dreams. The veil between worlds is thin. In the myopia of this misty sky, the familiar becomes less convincing; the great oaks themselves may be made by strange creatures like gall wasps inoculating trees with a distorting reality. A few pale flowers of yarrow, a few luminous caps of mushrooms, the overloaded freight of blood-red haws on the quickthorn, the scent of decaying colour – these are the signs of things to be that Clare says have been and are to be not.
In such a time and place, atmospheric conditions and autumnal change, melancholy is a creative flow.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
