No other hedgerow plant discards its green anonymity with the same psychedelic fervour as the spindle (Euonymus europaeus). Its incandescent foliage looks surreal, like an autumn photograph intensified to maximum colour saturation. Even after the crimson leaves have fallen, cerise fruits bauble the branches, opening their sleepy lids to reveal four glistening orange orbs – the seed-containing arils – peeping out of the fruit capsule.
Spindle’s wayside brilliance must have caught the eye of William Turner as he travelled between London and Cambridge in the 16th century. The father of British botany recorded this deciduous shrub growing in the hedges between Ware and Barkway in his 1548 seminal book on British flora: The Names of Herbes. His was the first record of a wild plant in Hertfordshire and the earliest known reference to spindle anywhere in Britain.
Nearly five centuries after Turner noticed the “Spyndle tree” growing “in moste plenty” along this old coach route, we park by the side of the road (now the B1368) and hop out of the car to examine a promising gleam in the gloom. As we walk back along the pavement, I tick off most of the local hedgerow stalwarts, including ash, field maple, dogwood and wild clematis – a suite of calcicoles or “lime-dwelling” species that thrive on our chalky soils. Their soft yellow, ochre and gold leaves are festooned with puffs of clematis seedheads. Nothing here to set autumn aflame.
When we reach the bridge by the old Braughing station, I look along the Bunt (the Buntingford branch line), condemned to grassy silence by Dr Richard Beeching in the 1960s. There, on a bank above the defunct railway line, is my first red-hot spindle of the season. And I can see more firelighters in the hedgerow, their fruits dangling over the cutting, red-tinted leaves just on the turn.
Were these fiery shrubs here when the line opened in 1863? Perhaps this was the spot where Turner noted spindle growing. Does its ancestry in these hedges stretch further back still, to a time when this road led to an iron age settlement and then a Roman town? If only these burning bushes could talk, what extraordinary tales they might tell.
• 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
