Overnight the sycamore collapses, leaves black-blistered, cracking into scraps.
The lime tree takes its time, yellows flaming gently through a pebble lens of mist.
LINES in one of Mark Roper's new poems*, written among the soggy lanes round Piltown, Co Kilkenny, make me pleased that poems called, simply, November still get written, and sneak their souls into collections which have many smarter, post-modern things to say.
Here on the west coast, rarely frosty for long and far too windy for any proper autumn mist, our solitary and surprising lime has lit only a few of its candles. But the sycamores, indeed, are letting go.
Their willingness to be the last trees at the ocean's edge makes them a good and traditional choice for coastal farms, but the drift of sycamore leaves into barns and sheep-sheds is not always welcome. I watched a neighbour trying to chase leaves with a shovel, thus inviting unusually cheerful comment from Robert Frost: Spades take up leaves/ No better than spoons,/ And bags full of leaves/ are light as balloons,
Gathering more lines about fallen leaves, I hearkened to the measured tread of Yeats (Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us, And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves) and followed John Hewitt into his November park in Belfast where, at a four o'clock dusk, the mist/ has scarcely drawn its gauze aside/ since light at eight leaked hint of day.
Sylvia Plath, of wham one might have predicted gloom, surprised me with her Letter in November. I am so stupidly happy, / My wellingtons/ Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red. But Ted Hughes, contemplating a tramp asleep in a sodden ditch at dawn, saw only a familiar bleakness in The month of the drowned dog ... Treed with iron and birdless.
What would you expect of Philip Larkin? Exactly. A student poem, penned in November for the Oxford University Labour Club Bulletin, ends with a frown out the window: Shake, wind, the branches of their crooked wood Where much, is picturesque but nothing good, And nothing can be found for poor men's fires. Michael Longley, on November visits to the cottage across the lake, has enjoyed sleepwalking after the night alarms of whooper swans. Edward Thomas, who walked off his gloomy moods down country lanes, began his November unpromisingly November's days are thirty:/ November's earth is dirty - but eventually looked up from the mud to decide: But of all the months when earth is greener/ Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.
I CAN vouch for that. On mornings with the sun behind me, and rainbows lighting up a procession of showers from the sea, the clear bits of sky, when they come, are incomparable: brilliant, sapphire blue at the top and a lovely lemony hue at the horizon. Set this above a bog full of pinks and purples, or a russet sweep of bracken, and who minds a certain sogginess underfoot?
Much of the misery traditional to November poetry can, of course, be laid at the door of Thomas Hood, whose dalaraus and libellaus negatives still pile up patently after more than 150 years. A final few: No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees/ No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds-/ November!
He did not dare say "no nuts", and this autumn is, by all accounts, a bumper year for hazels. I have been out nutting myself, in a modest way, in the hazel scrub tucked between the ivy cliff and the swans' lake. But my few handfuls are nothing compared to the crop reported to me from the Burren where a friend, astonished, found nuts hanging from the hazels "like bunches of grapes!"
She described, a bit shame-faced, the greed that then overcame her, a two-handed, grasping frenzy to fill every bag in the ear. But such a fit of rapacity is well-known in nutting and even from poetry - John Clare and William Wordsworth both document its nature. Then up I rose, Wordsworth confesses, And dragg'd to earth both branch and bough, with crash/ And merciless ravage: and the shady nook/ Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower/ Deform'd and sullied, patiently gave up/ Their quiet being.
Was he sorry? A little: when from the bower I turn'd away, / Exulting rich beyond the wealth of kings/ I felt a sense of pain when I beheld/ The silent trees and the intruding sky... John Clare agreed about the branches split and broken under many a tree, but, being a peasant of sorts, didn't let it upset him.
An alternative way to enriching the morning muesli is to have nut trees in a garden, as I mean to do very soon. Corylus avellana, the native hazel is already welcome in, its own right as a most wildlife-friendly tree, but there are bigger and better varieties of nut-bearer which may earn their space more productively.
Cob nuts and filberts have been grown commercially in Kent for a very long time: even in this century there were farms with 50 acres of nuts, with same bushes still cropping after 100 years. But most hazel nuts on the market came from Italy and Spain, where rural labour is cheaper.
Kentish Cob is the largest fruiting cob nut, usually grown with the hardy, thin-shelled Cosford as a pollinator. The purple filbert, with red leaves and-large red fruit, was bred Corylus maxima, a native hazel from south-east Europe: this is the nut with a long husk (or "full-beard" = filbert). Such are the right nuts, but it may take a right nutter to try growing them in Mayo (none better, some will say).
