Keats' Country

A friend mentioned to me recently that one reason for not moving to Dubai and all its tax-free temptations, was the poor exchange rate on seasons, namely, having to swap our four for its tropical two, and even those only being distinguished from each other by a few degrees of high heat. 

For the past few weeks, we have been fortunate travellers in Keats' Country, that much-loved rural landscape of 'mists and mellow fruitfulness' which carries summer's warmth into a final gilding of the green before a gentle, rusting decline into colder, darker days.

On the common, the bracken has bronzed and dropped back, revealing a trove of fungi; brackets jutting out from the birch trunks, small splashes of 'witches' butter', or Yellow Brain, along rotting branches and autumn's signature scrawled in the small, red-and-white clusters of Fly Agaric. This is the iconic toadstool of fairy tales, its potentially poisonous, definitely hallucinogenic properties apparently linked to Viking berserkers as well as to use as an insecticide, so is perhaps best left untouched on the woodland floor. The path through the trees has become studded with an early fall of acorns, though some are still in place under the oak leaves. Jays are prominent now, announcing themselves loudly with their grating, histrionic calls and the flash of sky blue in their wings as they seize upon the nuts and bury them for a later return in harder weather. Often they forget the spot, new trees sprout, and so the cycle replenishes.

In the garden, there is a blaze of colour from the smoke bush and witch hazel as the chemistry of their leaves changes in the cooler, bright days and anthocyanin and carotenoids edge out the  chlorophyll. However, it is the light green flowers of the ivy, hanging like Jacks from a children's game, which summon the honey and ivy bees for late nectar. The hum of insect traffic is a sleepy score for the last lollopings of the few remaining red admirals which descend to the fermenting windfall apples and then float away on the light breeze.

Driving to Wells through the Creakes in morning sunlight, the field maples flare yellow in the hedges and the bumper crop of hawthorn berries bubble-wraps the upper sprays in readiness for the flocks of northern thrushes - the redwings and fieldfares - newly in from their North Sea crossing. The beech trees shimmer in red and gold and green like begowned Klimt models, their skirts flouncing over the flint walls of the Holkham estate. Pheasants strut and squawk in their russet finery and from within the Park comes the throaty croaking of the rutting fallow deer stags.

Keats wrote 'To Autumn' in September 1819, aged 23, savouring the cyclical splendour of the season while knowing that he had the tuberculosis that would kill him two years later. He, perhaps more than anyone, imbued the cultural psyche with a sense of autumn's beauty coloured poignantly by change.

 

  

John Keats' ode to the season, 'To Autumn' (1819), has embedded this image of warmth and beauty in the English cultural psyche   its 'mists and mellow fruitfulness'  to embed t