Under a woodsmoke sky, the lime trees smell yellow, their leaves defy gravity, hanging on to summer stains, a few stray into the cool, breathless air and vanish. Those leaves that have fallen lose their leafiness to decay, as John Clare says, in the poem Decay, “To be, – and to have been, – and then be not.” This is anticyclonic gloom. High pressure, low cloud, roofed by warm air, poor visibility, misty and grey. Gloom. It’s interesting that the sullen and despondent mood, Gloom, has left its evil twin Doom, and lumbered into meteorology to be the official poster-spirit of dim light.
I like a bit of autumnal gloom, and so do the crows, it seems. In dreamy mood and a gothic disdain for showiness, they make some cursory flaps around the field to settle in old oaks and caw six times as if that has some oracular significance. Maybe it has. In the scrunch of acorns under one oak, with a thinning crown and stag-headed, are lots of knopper galls. When they first formed in August, these flanged extrusions from pedunculate oak acorns were green, then red and sticky, created by the larvae of the tiny gall wasp Andricus quercuscalicis feeding on the seed within and producing weird crown-like growths.
