The countryside in winter shows a stark beauty; the bright colors and soft contours of warmer times are replaced with blacks and browns and the view is altogether more geometric.
Yet this seemingly devastated landscape is still teeming with life, and the starkly barren nature of the winter trees and hedges is an exquisite testament to its basic structure.
The leafless landscape itself lies before us in plain sight, but to see what is still alive, we sometimes have to look closely.
I have long had a mission to stop people. Several thousand people have joined me on wild food hikes over the past 30 years and walking slowly and looking closely has always been my main message.
Walking through woods and fields is good exercise and the overview is still there to enjoy, but many wonders are hidden from casual view or are simply too small to detect.
As a very recent example, I was showing someone a sprig of water mint when I noticed a small patch of orange dots on the underside of one of the leaves. Examining them with my magnifying glass (a magnifying glass that all serious nature inquirers carry) I could see that it consisted of about 40 orange eggs, each barely half a millimeter long, each intricately ornamented and shaped like a rugby ball with spikes. pointed. .
The eggs were clearly segmented, suggesting that Diptera (true flies), although a consultation with three expert entomologists yielded three different answers: Invertebrate eggs are complicated.
Whether these eggs are hibernating or will soon hatch, I don’t know, but the insects (or Mites… one of those answers!) They need to survive cold weather one way or another. Some will, in fact, hide as eggs, but more will remain as pupae.
One of my favorite places to look is inside dead hogweed stalks. These frequently contain hibernating pupae, although again I must point out that entomology is not my specialty subject and may not be yours, so accurate identification will require considerable work or a call to knowledgeable friends (or just “friend”). if you only want one answer).
More “sleeping” insects can be found under loose bark, clinging to fallen leaves, hiding in cracks in the bark, huddled under a cottony cobweb, or even inside gills.
The gills have become one of my newfound enthusiasms over the years and several are still visible in winter. One of the most common of the several thousand known in Britain is the Marble Gall found on oak twigs. His Latin name is Andricus kolleri, but in truth this is the name of the tiny wasp that makes the oak produce the fortified eater (as I characterize it) for the growing offspring that emerge in the spring.
Several other galls, such as Spangle Galls, also caused by tiny wasps, grow on oak leaves and remain visible once they drop, although their occupants may have already left home by then.
The largest of the galls, the witch’s broom, is only clearly visible when the birch trees it grows on have lost their leaves. They can be a meter or more in diameter, with hundreds of long shoots radiating from a roughly spherical central mass. Surprisingly, this gall is caused by a fungus, Taphrina betulina, the gender Taphrina being some kind of professional parasite with various gills in its name.
One that is also still visible in winter is T. prunii. It replaces the nascent sloes with tough woody structures that are even larger than the doomed sloes it has usurped.
Some of those gloomy winter colors (in this case, slate black) are completely caused by fungi. For years I wondered why fallen beech branches and whole beech trees turn black once the bark has rotted. Enter “pleurosclerotial plaques.” These are thin, pure black defensive walls formed by some of the fungi that help rot dead beeches.
Each wall will irregularly but complete a colony of fungi, of which there will be many on a single tree. These become visible on the surface once the bark is gone, but also within the wood to form what is known as “chipping.” Spalted beech is highly prized by turners because of the beautiful patterns that come to light in the turning process. You may have seen this on beech logs intended for your wood stove.
Recently, I found a fallen beech in the advanced stages of rot and noticed that the pleurosclerotial plates had outlived both the fungus and the tree, forming a brittle, hollow “honeycomb” structure. Designed to be resistant to fungi, they remain undisturbed by their fungal cousins.
Few people, other than pesky gardeners, have heard of rust fungi. They are fascinating parasites of plants and visible somewhere all year round, although summer is the best time to see them. However, they have many stages in their life cycle and one of them, the teliospore stage of Phragmidium violaceum, is visible on the retained leaves of winter brambles.
This fungus must be the most common of all fungi, as few brambles are free from infection, showing its winter affliction in purple spots on top and dusty spots of multi-colored spore bodies. (As a side note, a word of encouragement may be in order here. You may think that learning Latin names is pointless, but with common species like this, it’s worth it, as it gives you the opportunity to sound scholarly in the company of friends).
I suspect my endless fascination with pleurosclerotial plaques and rust fungi are rare obsessions, but everyone can love the dedicated winter fungus known as Scarlet Elfcup (Sarcoscypha austriaca – you’re welcome). These are commonly found on the forest floor in February and around that time, they often grow in rows from fallen and rotten branches. Each cup is about 3 cm in diameter, pale gray on the underside and an unseasonal bright scarlet on the outside.
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If that’s not splendid enough for you, another winter fungal beauty is the Velvet Shank. These grow on dead deciduous trees in large, spectacular and rather slimy tufts of yellow / orange color, their stems a velvet black. Its Latin name is very appropriate: Flammulina velutipes it means “little llama with a velvet foot.” Slimy or not, Velvet Shanks are edible.
I can’t leave the edible mushroom topic without mentioning Field Blewits. These substantial grassland dwellers can survive below zero, and I’ve seen them in early February. With their wide cream-gray cap, which always feels a bit damp, and their short, robust, iridescent lilac stem, they are completely unmistakable. They are also excellent for toast with garlic and cream.
Briefly moving our eyes up for a change, we can see all that has been revealed by the fallen leaves: the stories of trees and hedges told in their bare form: tall, straight trees in a dense canopy forest, well spaced and wide in what is known as “low mount with banners”, and all the branches that emanate from the upper part of a short trunk as in the toppings.
The hedges also show their true structure. Maybe a boring machine cut hedge, maybe a Devon hedge with two rows of trees just placed, or staked, intertwined and ethereal (a twisted hazelnut “rope” running from stake to stake) in the hedge complex of Midland.
Also, we can finally clearly see the squirrel dreys that were always there. Requiring only an occasional bit of DIY to keep them tidy, they are permanent structures and quite complex. The outer mess of twigs surrounds an inner arrangement of leaves, neatly laid out like rainproof shingles. Inside these is a feather, wool and moss lining designed to maintain a temperature around 20 degrees Celsius.
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Dreys are easily distinguished from the other rounded formations in trees such as bird nests, witch’s broom, mistletoe, and burrs by their large size, relatively compact nature, position in a hollow, and their inclusion of dry leaves attached to outer twigs collected in summer. .
However, the strangest thing to find in winter is something I have never seen, although some friends have been luckier. “Hair-ice” looks exactly what it sounds like: hair-shaped ice crystal curls with a defined Trumpian appearance.
While inorganic in nature, it relies on organic material for its creation, the crystals emanating from barkless wood that has been infected by the otherwise unappealing fungus known as exidiopsis.
The latter is only visible when “fruiting”: a fine, whitish powder on the surface of the trunk. Magic happens around zero degrees. The water is effectively “sucked” out of the tree through the pores in the surface of the wood (vascular tissue of the radial xylem, don’t you know?) And immediately freezes on exposure to air.
Normally, crystals would collapse upon recrystallization. However, chemicals produced by the fungus prevent this, producing long, silvery-white crystalline hairs.
Enjoy your winter walks, there is much more to see than the things I mentioned above. But walk slowly and bring a magnifying glass.
John Wright is the author of A beholder’s guide to the mysteries of the countryside, from piddocks and lynchings to witch’s broom, published by Profile books, £ 16.99 hardcover