Frost Damage

At the beginning of May we woke to a hard frost. A month later, the toll is evident. The poor young mulberry was halted in its tracks. Its tiny leaves turned black. Now, new leaves are pushing from the base of each stem and new stems are growing, but all the original branches are struck dead almost to the main stem. What this means for the shape of the tree remains to be seen. The Old Laughing Lady has been cruelly used by the frost. Whole branches high up in the tree seem to have suffered the same fate as the mullbery, struck dead back to a thicker branch.  On other branches, thin leaves are breaking out to replace the ones that were lost. A young cherry has been hit in the same way. A new pear had half its leaves turn brown, so much so that we thought it had fireblight but now seems to be recovered. The burgeoning quince, with its ten thousand huge blooms, has set a single sad fruit. The medlar has lost every fruit. At the top of the garden, the odd multi-story quince and pear triple graft hybrid combo has just dropped it's quinces but the pears have survived. The hedge-plums have dropped all of their lower fruit. Which is strange. The grapes had hardly started and slept through the damage. But the apple trees? Not a bit of it. They are so thick with fruit that they look like grapes.

Water stain

A tiny bird flies onto the drenched window and sits stunned and shivering on the sill. Past the drip-run glaze the sodden fen is frothy with new growth and topped with glistening, bouncing haze. On the horizon where the dark clouds bellied with rain dip grey as an ache into the green, watery ferment, yet more clouds rise up. These are whiter but not white and round topped, like a damp stain rising into the wallpaper of the sky. The tiny bird recovers its composure and zips away into the water-grained distance. The swelling water-spirit under the land is filled with creaking, hissing joy at this summer feed and its billion bouncing acolytes tap-dance on the roof as it rains, and it rains, and it rains.

Frost

We had a long lead in to spring, both cold and also very dry. The cherries had already bloomed at the end of March but everything else was held back so that a burst of sun and showers brought most of the orchard into blossom at the same time. The pears were almost finished, the once sickly quince was thuggish in its glory, all the apples were white clouds and the Old Laughing Lady still had her plum-blossom. The medlars were set. The new mulberry pushed tiny leaflets from the tip of every stem. It was perfect and glorious.

It was doomed. At the beginning of May we woke to a hard frost, as beautiful among the blossom as it was awful to behold. I can't say that I'm immune to the fickle nature of, well, nature, but I managed some detachment and went to study the damage. I will track it over the summer.

Stillness

This winter has been marked by mist and haze in long periods where the air has hardly moved. Today the mist is rising from the watery meadows between the two drains. The sun struggles through the bare branches of the willows along the road which crosses this curious gap in the world. The last light shines through the iron work of the long footbridge which stands above the low road. The tree branches and the rusted latticework of this lifeline across the threatened flood create a light show through the fog, twisting and segmenting it into long fingers which probe the rising mist. As the sun falls behind the land, its lava brightness becomes a neon point and then vanishes. Where the sky has rubbed against the hard-frozen land it is raw with icy pastels the colour of serum and bruises and blisters. The last sunlight has warmed us more than the content of its rays can account for and now it grows cold. The air is wet with mist. The ground is still frozen from the night before. A buzzard watches the thickening fog with disdain from a half-rotten fencepost.

The elements themselves are falling asleep. The Wind has fallen sleep and lies curled upon the fast-sleeping Earth. The fire of the sun has fallen asleep. The Water seems asleep in the river, like metal cooled and polished. The Water is curled together with the Earth, asleep on the grass and between the grains of soil. The Water sleeps in the arms of the Wind, in tender white curls turning grey and black. The Water sleeps in the face of the sun, stroking its last warm colours away with the mist rising, rising. The Water has put the whole world to sleep as fog rises past the level of my eyes and tries to stroke me to sleep with its cruel penetrating fingers. But the Water is not asleep at all. The water slips silently in the bed of the steely river like a slow, silent and invincible fist. It runs deep under the Earth in secret streams stealing the warmth away. It creeps silently across the sky pulling its blanket with it. It fills my lungs with its soft chilling voice. There are moments in the fens when the air is not simply still. It is as though the air itself has been startled by some predatory presence and all motion stops. The little hunter at my ankle, who speaks the language of the world and its spirits more cunningly than I, touches my calf with his nose. Time to leave, he says.

As I walk back to the Night Planted Orchard, which sits a few metres above the fen, I can see the mist lying on the Earth, still rising. The stillness of the air is more chilling than any blizzard. The water spirits walk silently, dancing and playing their slow games in the bitterest of colds: that cold just around freezing where water can do its most cunning work. The spirits walk among the hazy trees. They dance inside the hayricks and break their backs. They toy with the poles across the fens, making them slant at crazy angles. They work in the Willows, breaking them and laying them on their invincible backs. At last, as the light itself flees the world, the ice spirits wander from teasel to teasel, from reed to reed, from tree to tree, from grass stalk to grass stalk and sip sip sip the last colours from their dead leaves turning them paler and paler over this cold winter, until at last they turn to glass and shatter.

I see our reflections in the window as we enter and both the little hunter and I are a little greyer, him around his muzzle, me around the fringes and the ice starts to form beguiling and beautiful mocking patterns from our breath upon the glass, hiding the reflections. Hiding the evidence.

Out in the still, silent fen, something makes a noise, not unlike a screech, not unlike the call of some frozen hunter, not unlike laughter.

Recursive Recession

I bring things home with me to the fens. Sometimes like treasures to be stored away, sometimes to be slaughtered like rats and tossed in the deep, hungry ditches.

After my quite possibly sleep-derived ramblings about recession I returned from the dust of the desert to the frosted fens, armed with my new theory of the toning of the low sun lying sideways, I watched the sun rise. It came up behind a low hill on the edge of the Isle. Beyond the hill, to the right, the flatlands graded away into the distance and I saw two things. One was the endless shading of the recession, lone tree after lone tree, low hedges and the occasional church spire, rolling miles away across the fens. Each lit by the morning sun. Each a shade darker than the other. I expected that the tone of a single tree would not shift its shade as a mountain would, but they did. The trees and hedges stood in fields stained white with ice and the reflections of the sideways sun graded them individually in a very subtle way. The air was so cold and so dry, and the light so clear and so brilliant, and the thinnest layer of mist over each field, reflected the sun into their faces, so that the trees stepped back to the horizon in an almost infinite regression. All of that, I noticed, was the colour of Old Vegas. Neon. Red-orange lit by a sun appropriately the colour of brilliant helium.