A seasonal extract from Melissa Harrison’s latest book — a month-by-month guide to plug you back into the rhythms of the natural world.
At this time of year, many fungi are busy breaking down the waste products of the growing season – spent leaves, seed pods, fruit, twigs, old bits of bark, dead wood and dead invertebrates, as well as moulted feathers, dead birds and other creatures – so that their nutrients can be made available to power the next year’s cycle of growth. This is the shadow side of spring’s mad uprush and it is every bit as important. We imagine decay to be about endings when really it is all about new life.
Fungi are aided in this work by detritivores: invertebrates like woodlice, worms, millipedes and beetles that break up organic matter ready for fungi and bacteria to process. If you turn over some nice damp leaf litter, you’ll see it’s full of these kinds of creatures, all hard at work. That’s why, if you have a garden or help out in a park, one of the best things you can do is leave plant matter to decay naturally, instead of bagging it all up, resorting to ecocidal leaf blowers1 or carbon dioxide- and particulate-releasing bonfires. Natural detritus like seed heads, hollow stems and shed bark also provide safe shelter for eggs, larvae and chrysalises of next year’s moths and butterflies, so when you remove it all, not only are you depriving your soil of potential nutrients, you’re banishing vast numbers of vital living things. Whether you have a window box or a country estate, take pride in how busy and rich its operations of decay are, as well as the more obvious processes of growth that take place earlier in the year. One fuels the other, after all.
A good compromise is to gently rake up only the leaves that you really must – from your lawn, say, but not your flower beds – and either scatter them somewhere else or make leaf mulch from them which you can then spread back on to the soil next year. You don’t need a mulching machine, a shop-bought bin or fancy structure to make it, either: I use a few old plastic sacks saved from when I’ve bought peat-free compost earlier in the year. I stab holes in the bottoms so they don’t fill with water, pop in fallen leaves (no trees overhang my garden, so I nick them from the edges of our village lanes), leave the tops open to the elements and stick them round the back of the shed. By the following autumn, I’ll have free bags of crumbly, organic soil improver. Win-win.
Much of the organic detritus rotting down right now derives from herbaceous (leafy) plants whose strategy for surviving winter’s rigours is either to set seed and die off (annual and second-year biennial plants) or abandon all their vulnerable above-ground growth and retreat to the underworld, where they will survive as tubers, corms, bulbs or root systems, ready to put out fresh new growth in spring (this is the case for perennials). It’s odd to think that when you see a barren-looking flower bed in November, all bare earth and sad fragments of shrivelled gubbins, it might be no less full of plants as it was when it looked riotous and colourful back in June.
And sometimes the detritus is beautiful: the teasels and honesty seed heads we admired last month, for example, but also the ghost-grey, fluffy seed heads of wild clematis scrambling through a hedgerow. A favourite of the poet Edward Thomas, who tried to capture it in his poems several times, it’s classed as invasive in New Zealand, where it was introduced some time in the last century; here, however, it’s the caterpillar food plant for several kinds of moth, and these tend to keep it under control. I suppose it’s to New Zealand what Himalayan balsam is to here: a reminder that it’s not about a species being inherently bad, it’s about whether it can fit into an ecological niche in a new location, prove useful, and be kept under control by other things.
Remarkably, there are a few native plants that seem at their most vigorous at this time of year – so much so that a couple have been immortalised in song. The holly and the ivy, when they are both full-grown, will put out their fruit in November: the blood-red berries (technically ‘drupes’) of female holly trees and the clusters of small black berries that follow the ivy flowers with their unique smell. Both are important winter food for birds and small mammals; ivy berries are particularly calorie-rich, with nearly as many as a Mars bar, gram for gram. Keep an eye on your nearest ivy ‘tod’ (the name for a large clump of mature ivy): you’ll likely see blackbirds and thrushes feasting on the berries, helping to keep them alive through winter, while the dense evergreen foliage shelters many small birds through freezing winter nights.
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Out in the wider countryside, some bigger mammals are disappearing for winter, too. Across the UK, most cattle will spend the colder months under cover, eating fodder harvested earlier in the year and stored as hay, haylage or silage. Grass doesn’t grow much over winter, so this stops pastures being nibbled bare and trampled to mud. If you live in an area of the countryside with lots of dairy or beef farming, you’ll notice the empty fields. It can make the landscape feel oddly unoccupied.
There are compensations, though. November is peak season for mist, one of the subtler weather phenomena but one which gives me all sorts of interestingly melancholic feelings – perhaps because it can hide some of the more obvious marks of human activity on the landscape, or maybe just because it acts to defamiliarise a view, as snow does, making me look properly at how beautiful it is. Depending on the overnight weather conditions, on still winter mornings tiny water droplets can hang suspended in the air forming what is, in effect, a cloud that hugs the ground. From this milky layer, skeletal trees emerge like wraiths; it gathers in damp hollows or even traces the shape of long-lost rivers, hinting at history and re-enchanting the land.
1 In Germany, the government has told citizens that leaf blowers are contributing to ‘insect Armageddon’ and should be avoided. According to the charity Buglife, 40 per cent of known insect species face extinction, while nearly 9 per cent of all insects are lost each decade.
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This is an edited extract from the November chapter of Melissa Harrison’s ‘Homecoming: A guided journal to lead you back to nature’, recently published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Buy a copy here (£19).