Autumn is the season for tree-watching, they say – but I don’t. Colour is dazzling, sure. But for me the shapes of winter are absorbing and weird: angular, expressive, stark – the inner workings behind the leaves’ summer flamboyance. Last winter I wrote about this, the silhouette season. The black knots of corvid nests seemingly more present, or perhaps just more visible.
Recently I’ve paid more attention to the bigger shadows in the tallest trees near my home. I’ve noticed the intricacy of them for years, but for some reason today it stops my steps. It’s a December afternoon with a wind carrying cold that slices like a sword. The few people around are in head-down, hunker-up mode. Perhaps it’s the pitch of the sun, the brightness of the cloud beyond, but the dark shapes up in those branches are taking on an otherworldly look.
These trees are unusual in themselves. They are limes: incredibly tall. Out of winter, they have heart-shaped leaves. But, now, laid bare is that strange marriage with this dark passenger, itself a victim of the soppier kind of symbolism.
It’s mistletoe. Viscum album – as reads its rhythmic scientific name – is a semi-parasite, living off the root sap of its host but not hurting it as such. Maturing into a woody ball, this is how it comes to life, high in the canopies of the lower half of Britain. It’s not overly common here in Lincolnshire: there have been suggestions that it is spreading east because of the warming temperatures, and visiting continental blackcaps overwintering here and spreading the berries. If these canopies are anything to go by, it’s thriving to the point of invasion.
Those huge masses, branch-linked in hierarchical sizes, are like chaotic atomic models. They are far too high to get a good look at, so I need to imagine those slender leaves, those pale berries, that silhouette everyone knows. The plants can be male or female or dioecious, I later read, but only the females have berries. I wish I could get closer. But from a distance it’s still fascinating: those shapes, those characters, the trees no longer just skeletal scaffolds, but odd hieroglyphics against the winter sky.
