After five years in Orkney, my partner and I have moved “sooth” – that is, to the Scottish mainland. There’s a lot to get used to, not least carrying our house keys again. But what has caught me by surprise is the sense of having rediscovered a whole season.
I’d forgotten about autumn, you see. No trees up north. Or what few hardy souls brave the gales lose their foliage to the wind in a single afternoon. Not so in our new street in Glasgow, where leaves of scarlet, tan, lemon and rust amass in knee-high banks and block the drains. The neighbours complain, but to us it is still novel.
Hoping to soak in as much forest as I can find, I take a break from unboxing belongings and head to Pollok Country Park, the 360-acre grounds of the old Pollok House. In mature woodlands there, I greet trees like old friends: calm stands of beech, bronze leaves fluttering like prayer flags; the rough, scaly torsos of horse chestnuts. And hiding among the leafdroppers, a little yew, dark and sharp-spined, still fully dressed while the others shrug off their clothing.
From each twiglet grows a little scarlet bauble, which softens the tree’s otherwise gothic affect and lends it a festive air. Strictly speaking, these are not berries, but “arils” – a similar fleshy jacket around individual seeds. Every part of the yew is deadly poisonous – consumption can easily kill a cow or horse – except for these tiny arils. These are soft and sweet, if rather gooey, but perhaps not worth the risk – the seed they encase is highly toxic. A daredevil’s harvest.
Just beyond the yew’s dark form, more mellow fruitfulness awaits: the snowberry, bare-branched but hanging heavy with globular white fruit, each a striking matte white that seems aglow in the shady wood, though I see a few already deflating, browning. It’s an import from the US, long become native and a firm favourite of small birds, which take shelter in its dense branches (I can hear them in the thicket, but I don’t see them).
Beneath my feet, leaves are crisp or already gone to mould. A welcome mat. Honey, I’m home.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
