There is little in this morning’s landscape that looks more lifeless than the withered heads of the old nettles. Yet one shouldn’t forget how even they, chaffing and creaking in the breeze, and when joined by the reed or sedge all around, create that typical soft woodwind accompaniment to winter. In his essay Nature, Emerson wrote “the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music”.
In that same spirit I try now not to overlook the visual pleasures of winter plants. On the track to the marsh the lesser burdock stems are hugely suggestive. The hook-tipped heads have an armoury that conjures something darkly medieval, or perhaps just spikes of light radiating from a source.
Yet even these dry husks are full of latent life purpose. Brush them with a woolly cuff or just the pleated wrist of a kagool and the seeds are instant migrants in search of new land.
A favourite winter bloom is common hogweed. It lacks the flourish of last year’s teasel or the height of dead hemlock, but there is something captivating about its surviving architecture. The main stem is entirely hollow and the side umbels all desiccated, but the overlapping star-shaped patterns have the same intricacies of the living plant, although its atmosphere is now of a valiant last stand rather than any future promise.
Real hope is left to the only gorse bush on the track. In truth it creates a sense of assurance mingled with mystery. Why on earth does it bloom now? Come April, it will be festooned with furrow-spider webs. Its immediate atmosphere will carry a dancing cloud of St Mark’s flies and the entire bush wreathed in linnet song or bombarded by the crazy tropical music of sedge warblers.
But now its little world is shriven of all other life and even that delicious scent of coconuts is purged by cold wind. All I can say is that those glorious papilionaceous flowers, burning yellow against that January blue, are warmer than the sun itself.
