Winter is a season that few could genuinely love, yet as the leaves and flowers abandon us, the structure of the countryside is starkly revealed. John Wright takes the time to revel in form over flamboyance.
Unsurprisingly, there are very few cheerful poems about winter, with Shelley’s ‘The cold earth slept below,/Above the cold sky shone’ rather setting the tone and reflecting our own sentiments towards this unforgiving season. Many profess a love of winter, but such declarations are always suspect — indicative, perhaps, of a determined fortitude. Few would wish to live in Thomas Hardy’s poetic fancy of The Farm Woman’s Winter where ‘…seasons all were summers’, but most would nevertheless welcome winters that were a good deal shorter. There is, after all, only so much cold, dark, wet, muddy and dead we can take.
Yet as such a wish is unlikely ever to be granted to our satisfaction, what is there that might cheer us? Well, let us remember that nearly every living thing that was here in summer will still be here in winter. What we see during these long, cold months are those things that transform, those that persist, those that sleep, those that awaken and those that are revealed.
The architectural artistry of the gall wasp is showcased on a bramble stem.
The greatest winter revelation is the very structure of our countryside. Bare of leaves, deciduous woodlands and hedgerows display an unadorned beauty, one that appeals to an admiration of form over mere flamboyance; ‘Winter trees against the sky’, as noted in Shirley Hughes’s masterly children’s book Colours. At last, we can see how the trees are truly formed and the intricacies of how a hedge was laid and how well it fares.
Trees bereft of their leaves will also reveal hidden treasures, such as squirrel dreys and witches’ brooms. The latter, presumably named for a crash-landed witch, is most often caused by a fungal parasite (Taphrina species). It is frequently seen on birch trees, creating a large central mass with radially projecting twigs and with several often visible on a single tree. It often survives on its host for many years, forever making a nuisance of itself by sequestering the tree’s resources. Nematodes, insects and viruses can also disrupt bud creation to form similar structures.
With much closer attention, we will see the smaller things. Among them are the abandoned woody nurseries of tiny wasps, flies and mites that formed on twigs and branches during the summer: galls. A particular favourite is that of the small wasp species Diastrophus rubi, its swollen, elongated woody structure seemingly part of a bramble stem and usually seen with the numerous exit holes of emerged adults. There are many other such structures revealed in winter, each one made by the plant at the behest of its parasite.
Hair Ice occurs infrequently and in woodland when the temperature is close to 0˚C. Thousands of long, super-fine ‘hairs’ of ice (above) are ‘exuded’ from fallen, barkless branches that have been infected by the rather unprepossessing fungus (it looks like a weak coat of whitewash) known only as Exidiopsis effusa. Chemicals from the fungus are incorporated into the ice as it forms, stabilising the hairs that would otherwise fall apart. These astounding structures can last for days if conditions are right.
With the exception of the primrose and the exquisite snowdrop, flowers are not considered notable phenomena of winter, but some 100 of our native plants treat the season with disdain. Most are weed species — shepherd’s purse, bittercresses, groundsel, a couple of dead nettles, the ever-present herb robert and the perpetually green petty spurge — but still we are delighted to see them. There is also the cheerful if prickly gorse, a plant famous for flowering at random times throughout the year, including the dead of winter.
There are a handful of fungi that awaken as fruiting bodies only in winter (such fungi often come with their own antifreeze), the prettiest and most striking being the velvet shank and the scarlet elfcup. The former produces a mass of tufted toadstools, their caps a golden yellow and decidedly slimy, their stems a black velvet with splashes of yellow. The scarlet elfcup occurs in late January and most of February, producing startlingly incongruous scarlet cups on otherwise drab woodland floors.
Red alert: even the red breast of the robin is outshone by the crimson of the scarlet elfcup fungus.
The underwhelmingly edible wood ear — a brown jelly fungus that richly deserves its name — occurs all year, but produces its finest crops in wet winters, most often on dead elder.
It’s all ears: the edible wood ear—or brown jelly—fungus favours wet winter conditions.
Those invertebrates that sleep away the winter as adults always hide, with the most familiar of these being the butterflies that take up temporary residence in the spare room, their vitality reduced to the minimum to preserve resources. The small tortoiseshell is a serial uninvited guest to my home and makes its presence known by flapping about when the woodburning stove is overperforming.
It must either be calmed down for relocation to a protected spot in the garden or, if it is late in the winter and the weather is fairly warm, released after a breakfast of diluted honey. More naturally, adult ladybirds can be discovered nestling in sheltered spots, such as beneath logs and even between the clustered buds of leaves. Various instars (life stages) of shield bugs can also be found hiding in odd nooks.
Many other species of invertebrate overwinter as eggs, larvae or pupae, the last being my choice if I were an insect (nice protective shell). Several species hedge their bets by pupating within a hogweed stem or, indeed, any hollow stem. The golden-bloomed grey longhorn beetle, for example, feeds inside the stem as a larva, eating its way downwards before pupating at ground level. I seldom take a walk in winter without cracking open the odd stem to see what might be inside, always returning any pupa to its slow transformation afterwards.
The larvae and pupae forms of the golden-bloomed grey longhorn beetle see out the colder months inside plant stems.
The winter quarters provided by leaf litter are the preferred refuge of many thousands of invertebrates. The lumpy, red-then-brown knopper gall that appears on pedunculate oak is one, the gall falling into the litter and the adult female wasp duly emerging in spring.
She then lays her eggs on the young catkins of turkey oak to produce a small conical gall. This gall will produce a sexual generation. So Baroque a lifestyle safeguards resources by not overburdening the species with males that are, of course, only useful very briefly, yet preserving the benefits of sexual reproduction.
An interloper earwig emerges from a wasp’s knopper gall on a pedunculate oak.
Many lichens thrive chiefly in winter, especially those that live under a deciduous canopy. At last, the troublesome leaves have fallen, providing them with much-needed light at a time of year when they will seldom suffer a lack of moisture. Lichenologists often collect their best records and photographs during the winter.
Mosses, otherwise unregarded by all but long-suffering custodians of lawns, also appreciate the wet and, if in woods, the light of winter. Some are strictly winter annuals. The species-complex usually rendered as Microbryum davallianum (bryologists rightly eschew common names) is one such, maturing from late autumn to spring on its favoured habitat of bare chalk.
The golden toadstools of the velvet shank highlight one of our few winter-fruiting fungi.
There are, of course, more noticeable seasonal joys: the birds. There are several winter visitors that migrate to Britain, rather than from. These include the fieldfare, redwing, waxwing and brambling, the last feeding on beech mast as the others take advantage of the (usually) vast numbers of hawthorn, rowan and cotoneaster berries (among other things) that await them.
The most spectacular, however, is the starling, a species with a population that increases considerably with the arrival of northern migrants in late November. The spectacular part is the so-called murmuration, where vast flocks form at dawn or dusk, swooping as a twisting cloud of bird.
A starling murmuration at Brighton pier.
This is believed to be a ‘safety in numbers’ strategy, with the formations no doubt a product of each bird following rules — keep within a certain distance of your nearest neighbours and follow whoever is in front of you, perhaps. One’s heart sings.
Liverworts: Last February, I noticed a small patch of green in a large pot of bare soil that housed a resting hosta. It proceeded to grow, then form small cups (above). Each cup grew several tiny green ‘flying saucer’ discs. When it rained, these discs splashed out and settled in the soil to form new patches of green. The discs were propagules—that is, protoclones of the parent plant. The daughter plants proceeded to do the same and eventually filled the available space. I was utterly entranced by this busy liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha) and watched its progress for several weeks with delight.
Ice is only found outside a gin and tonic in winter, so it is not to be ignored. It comes in many forms: Jack Frost on single window panes and, now a fading memory, icicles, hoar frost, the frozen dew that so artistically adorns spider’s webs and, of course, snow.
Snow performs the greatest of all transformations of winter and we see the countryside anew. Despite covering all, it can reveal as well the passage of animals ephemerally recorded in their footprints. At last, we see where they go and even what they are. My copy of Collins Guide to Animal Tracks and Signs is an old companion, allowing the identification of individual mammal species. Bird tracks, however, form little more than undecipherable hieroglyphs and their authors must be left unnamed.
Let there be light: leafless trees are the definition of heaven for lichen that thrives in winter.
Ice has many more tricks than snow. Last winter, I saw ice in a sheltered part of the garden form collections of vertical pillars some 5in high over a single cold week and, some years ago, an unusual combination of strong winds and cold weather covered the trees and hedges with large icicles that were completely horizontal. ‘Pancake ice’, a rare phenomenon of far northern seas where multiple discs of ice cluster together, has found its way to Scotland. It occurs during ice formation by the jostling of the waves.
On that note, I am off to warm myself by the stove.
Picture credits: Getty / Alamy / Nature Picture Library
