Bracken light – when bright autumnal sunlight strikes a frond of bracken to ignite its radiance. This vibrant green may no longer be the fern’s functioning photosynthesis, but a climax before the fall; soon its branching fronds will begin to crumple towards decay. Then its gold, russet, ochre, dun and brown pigments will have a moody nostalgia like that of slide transparencies in old Agfa film.
The smell is of autumn – fermenting leaves, the fragrance of rot and fungal spores dancing in dappled light, and an earthiness through which the bracken rhizomes burrow underground. Above, the plant’s architecture, caught in sunlight, feels redolent with imaginary objects – things far older than modern human thoughts, ideas and emotions, something beyond them. The trampling migrations of extinct and mythical creatures; the seismic tremors of delinquent gods; the atmospheric pressure of the sky carrying spores of ancient story; the gravity of ecological webs tying them to the earth; the crushing indifference of a world that doesn’t care: history is not weightless.
This small illumination of one bracken frond belongs to an exploding colony with the potential to cover all these fields, woods and mountains when they are eventually abandoned. Mowed, baled, sprayed with herbicide, bracken is nature’s answer to the questions of land use. This frond belongs to a patch of heath recolonised by trees on the edge of the old racecourse above Oswestry, along the borderline of Offa’s Dyke, between the plains of England and the hills of Wales.
Over there, in the green folds of country, jackdaws stuff sticks down the flues of hollow churchyard yew trees. Over there, in the border-town streets, collared doves croon down chimneys like ancient gramophones. Each of these places are as magical or mundane as sunlight shining on fern fronds but both have a mystical quality in the imaginative symbiosis between the human and more-than-human.
Common to both places are the “encroachments” of bracken, its fronds autumn-turning, defiant yet buckling under the weight of human prejudice, its own radiant artfulness, the “thoughts” of imagined objects.
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