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6
Greening the Desert
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream
John Keats
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
All Hallows' Eve.
Nos Galan Gaeaf
. Early frosts and still days had
engineered a blazing autumn. The birches looked like a shower of
gold coins. An occasional beech tree flamed against the pale ash leaves
and the mauve-brown oaks. The sun was a pewter gleam behind the
clouds, the air was almost still. There was a thickness to the day, as if
it had been laid on with oil paint, or as if air and leaf and ground were
the flesh of a single organism. The berries of the hawthorn exuded
from the woods like specks of blood.
Beside the track the dying willowherb had sprung white whiskers.
Rills trickled through saxifrage and honeysuckle. Late caddis flies
rose from the water and oared the thick air. From across the valley I
heard an ancient sound, now rare in these hills: a farmer calling and
whistling to his dogs. I left the path and stepped up into the last scrap
of woodland before the desert began.
The woods climbed a gentle slope. As I walked towards the light,
sheep clattered away from me. I startled a jay and a great spotted
woodpecker, which swooped off through the autumn trees with a
long, high note. The forest floor had been scrubbed clean. Beneath the
fallen leaves there was nothing but moss, sheep shit and mud. A single
wood hedgehog mushroom had been turned over by the sheep, and
showed its long fine teeth. There were no leafy plants, no saplings, no
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