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.
