Wild Midwinter ways

The decaying beauty of December

As I walk our dog through an old hollow way on the South Downs , where blackened branches reach spiny fingers to touch one another above my head, and Old Man’s Beard winds through ripe hawthorn berries, I think of Angela Carter’s short story The Erl King from her dark fairytale collection The Bloody Chamber.

In the story, an unnamed narrator ventures into the heart of a wood at the dying end of the year to meet her wild, green-eyed lover, the Erl King of the title. She goes to his house made from sticks and stones and yellow lichen even though he is surrounded by birds who call out to her that he will do her grievous harm. Carter describes the decaying vegetation in sublime poetic prose, with withering blackberries on discoloured brambles and ferns that have curled back into the earth. There is every type of mushroom, which the Erl King knows how to pick and cook, as well as osiers or willows, which he uses, in sinister fashion, to make cages for his songbirds.

Fawn, dun, wine-stain, mud-brown; these are the colours of countryside and garden at this time of year. The odd bloom remains, a tattered rose or fading hydrangea, hanging off the leafless shrub like a piece of discarded wrapping paper. Seed heads come in fantastical shapes, both wild carrots in the field and bronze fennel in the garden forming tiny ghostly crowns.

It is easier to look out on the garden from the warmth of the house than to venture outside, but when I do, it yields surprising rewards. Our Japanese aralia (Fatsia japonica) has sprouted miniature alien Christmas trees with sputnik baubles. Sugar plum pink sweetly perfumed flowers on our Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’ are an exquisite reminder that Spring is only a couple of months away. Feathered tails of Miscanthus sinensis ‘Kleine Silberspinne’ a wintry echo of summer’s golden corn. Our old fig tree stands guard like a magical elephant that has sprouted a thousand trunks.

Rose hips glisten in a waterfall of prickly stems which will happily draw beads of blood from your flesh if you become entangled in them. This is the season of the big bad wolf, of Persephone’s descent to the underworld, of death and decay.

But beneath the surface of the soil, life stirs. Dig down just a little and you will disturb the tender embryos of bulbs putting on pale shoots. From the decay of the old year, new beginnings will emerge.