Apart from the screech of a jay, all is quiet. So quiet that the rustle of each falling leaf, adding to the bronze carpet of beech foliage that smothers the floor of this bluebell wood, is audible.
The woodland is settling into winter dormancy, but on the edge of the lane that runs through it there are flowers: pink and white shooting stars of sowbread, Cyclamen hederifolium, also known as ivy-leaved cyclamen, shouldering aside the detritus of autumn.
No one is certain how they came to be here, but they most likely arrived among autumn leaves that had been raked from garden flowerbeds and dumped on this verge. It’s heartening to see that they are surviving, an ankle-high floral firework display sprouting from dry corms, hidden all summer and now bursting into life just when everything shuts down for the winter. Providing the evergreen ground layer of ivy does not smother them, they should continue to spread slowly; the flowers don’t need pollinators and they force their curly stemmed seed capsules into the leaf mould, where their seeds are carried away by ants.
They have been flowering here every autumn for at least a decade, but hidden among more ivy, further along the lane, there are some autumn delights that were first noticed last year: collared earthstars, Geastrum triplex.
These strange, buff-coloured toadstools initially resemble puffballs, but have a thick outer skin that splits and peels backwards, like orange rind, until its segments radiate around the spore sac, which develops a pore at its tip.
Today I can see a constellation of about 20 earthstars, some almost hidden under ivy. They need to protrude above these sheltering leaves to fulfil their destiny effectively. Perhaps that’s where that stellar, peeling rind plays its part; in some it has curled backwards, levering the spore sac through the ivy and up into the airstream.
A shower of raindrops, shaken from bare ash branches overhead, splashes into the toadstools. There is a direct hit, which puffs out a dense cloud of brown spores, a will-o’-the-wisp that dissolves from sight in seconds as it drifts across the woodland floor.
Earthstar stardust, in the gathering gloom of a November afternoon.
