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A sapling field maple has thrown weirdly shaped, deep-red leaves against a greying sky. Three-lobed, almost hand-sized and such a rich burgundy, the leaves give the maple an exotic look, as if it’s escaped from an arboretum. With only a fragment of light in the sky, its redness glows in a wood where most of the leaves have fallen.
Red is not so common in the autumn colours of British woods and it takes on a symbolic significance, not of danger but of hope and vitality. A neighbour showed me a photograph of a ”red” squirrel on a fencepost she had taken down the lane. Of course, it was a very ginger grey squirrel but nevertheless, it was like a hopeful memory, an almost-being.
Red is love and luck in this landscape where all the leaf colours from gold to copper and bronze fall together on the ground to become brown. The colour for danger is not red but grey – the colour of the dead badger, bloated like a stuffed sofa, legs in the air, dumped behind the hedge.
There is another field maple here, which in the weekend sunshine was a glorious brick red and smoky orange but is brown in today’s mizzle. Field maples are often an unexpected surprise at this time of year, colouring from buttercup yellow to pillar box red; small and characterful trees with a lot of variation.
The maples in this wood are youngsters but there’s an ancient one laid into a hedge on the medieval bank that separates wood from field. This red one may be a descendent.
A nuthatch hammers at a hazelnut in a hawthorn behind the maple. It sounds like dash-dot, dot-dot-dash, dash: Morse code for “nut”. The redwings are beginning to arrive, drawn to the yew, rosehip, hawthorn and holly berries but none seem ripe enough yet; they need the nip of frost and the air is still so mild. Apart from the nights drawing in, it has hardly felt like autumn until now, when the little maple flashes red, the sky goes dead-badger grey and there’s a storm coming.
Twitter: @DrPaulEvans1
