Bracken

The rain has stopped, but the ground is still sodden. I walk through puddles to the canal, and by the time I reach the towpath my boots and the hems of my trousers are splattered with mud. The grasses beside the track across the field are flattened and yellow, the taller clumps dull ochre. And yet the hills are green, a green made even greener by the redness of dead bracken. The painter John Constable knew how to use red to strengthen the colour green; as a child I’d searched his pictures for the red - a scarlet cap or waistcoat, or an ornamental saddle to bring out the green of stream and meadow.

Today the redness of the bracken is astonishing; it defies analogy. Not amethyst, not chestnut, not madder, but all of these and all at once, a rich deep drowning of the hills in garnet. And the redness is doubled, each bracken frond reflected in the ebony surface of the canal. It is quite simply breath-taking.