Looking Back at Winter

After reflecting on the language of winter, I started to look at what happened in my lockdown nature diary as spring began.

9/2/2021
Snowdrops stretching down the bank of the stream & into the water. Freezing cold

20/2/2021
Yesterday – daffodils in the park – first of 2021
Snowdrops and crocuses in the mud

27/2/2021
Purple crocuses in a spread under the trees
Daffodils across the car park
Lunch outside in the warm sun

2/3/2021
Muntjac prints. Roe prints, which we follow as they follow the path by the stream Muntjacs seen through the undergrowth round, brown bristly and cautious. Stops and looks before running…
Hawthorn leaves cracking open the cold air Magnolia buds – for the iguanadons! Hawthorn blossom A horse chestnut has gone early, the green looking alert among all the saggy winter browns

14/3/2021
Robins visible through skeins of twigs. Starlings in a flock overhead
Lime leaves just breaking through, the green wet – bright & intense
Burst of song suddenly impinging on my mind….
Bluebell leaves in the wood Green swathes of moss & the grey of lichens among the undergrowth & the dull brown leaf letter
Sense of the high trees

29/3/2021
Brimstones waking up from winter floating element in the air against the sun, light reflecting from tips of leaves
Bee fly weird and enigmatic on the wall, fuzzy
Buff-tailed bees.
Listening to songs – great tit, blackbird. Sound of the magpie all polished up raiding next door’s birdseed….
Violets and forget me nots outside…. & still there are full trees of blossoms, daffodils in the copses & under the tree on Abingdon Road in full flower. The tree in bloom a perfect image of cherry blossom
Magnolia The ants outside The smell of mint Cut grass
Things I am not noticing

Down the Track

Everyone had cancelled, again, so I went for a walk. Night wasn’t far off, and rain kept flushing from the uneven clouds. I didn’t take a map, I didn’t really have a plan – I just wanted to walk. I know much of Oxford too well to wander completely aimlessly – but after a few familiar roads dusted with the smell of cow parsley and privet flowers, my walk changed character, became closer to a London exploration, where I follow my whims.

I crossed Cowley Road just where suburbia propert begins, heading towards the irregular tops of hawthorn trees, my nose already anticipating the thick sweetness of their scent. I was sure there’d be a path of some kind out from an otherwise dead-end residential street – I was right: a broad cycle track stretched out either side.

Cow parsley and campion stood motionless in the green light of the overhanging trees. A blackbird made a momentary silhouette on the sunlit track, but otherwise the route was deserted. I set off east.

When the wind blew, it scattered a few blossom petals past my feet. I saw and heard instants of robins, wrens, sparrows. Over the sports field I soon reached, swallows were arcing down and rising, busy with their twittering calls. Two wide men jogged heavily on the long grass.

I went quickly, but trying to take in all the details. Trees thick on my left were threaded through with nettles, and beyond them a flank of cut grass rose up past the leaf canopy. On my right were the roofs of east Oxford: terraces, semis, new-builds like a child’s plastic bricks, industrial chimneys here and there, tower blocks far off. I could hear the city like a faint murmur, an unclear sound. The birds and the tree branches, and the sound of my feet, were much closer.

Early on, the path crossed a little stream that bounced down the slope, under me and out, tree-lined, on the other side. One of the many waterways that flow through the city, it had attracted a robin to its steep, muddy banks. It sipped, tipping its whole body forward, then saw me and flew. I wondered if the cycle track would take me right to the edge of the ring road, leave me teetering on the brink of the traffic flow. (If I fell in, survived, how far would I go before reaching land again?)

The track stretched on, between trees. I knew I was surrounded by city, but I saw no one, only the roofs in the distance. I could imagine the suburbs like a subducting tectonic plate, gradually sinking under this evening-lit strip of green.

I surfaced on the tarmac of Barracks Lane, beside semidetached houses. To my left the trees continued, but when I followed a path between them I found myself on the bank of that stream I’d seen before. Facing me on the other side was a sign warning me off the private land of the golf course.

The neatly mown grass rose up the hill towards Headington, while a robin sat on the overhanging branch of a chestnut with a territorial air. Headington was where I, too, was going now, but I had to go along the road, up towards where the traffic sluggishly rolled among the houses. Still, there was more walking yet, and the streetlights had only just come on.