I learned a new word this winter. ‘Markescence’ means the state of a tree that has somehow held on to its browning leaves when other trees are all bare. Such trees can retain their leaves all winter, even though they are by now brown and, brittle, and seemingly just an unnecessary dead weight on the tree. This phenomenon happens most with oaks and beeches. There were a pair of magnificent examples in the dry valley near the junction as you approach Axford: mature, broad-grown oaks still bearing a full canopy of copper-brown leaves. These leaves will probably fall gradually in the winter winds, but some may remain attached come the spring. No one knows why trees do this. What are the advantages of keeping dead leaves? It may be to protect the young buds from frost, or to prevent herbivorous animals like squirrels from browsing the tender twigs (dead leaves are less nutritious than sappy twigs, and probably taste nasty). Or the tree may benefit from an all-winter supply of leaves falling near the trunk: natural recycling. Or all of them together. All we know for sure is that a few trees do it, and most others don’t.
I must trespass on Paul’s terrain here. On Newtown Road, close to the Paddocks, in early December, I heard a song thrush in full song. It was perched high up in an apple tree just behind the hedge, and, perhaps enhanced by the winter grey, its song was one of the most sensuous (and loud) noises I ever heard coming from a bird. There was even a dying fall, as though, somewhere in its short life, our bird had listened to a nightingale. It reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s well-known poem, “The Darkling Thrush”, which, defying the midwinter cold, ‘flung his soul/Upon the growing gloom’ in ‘Joy illimited’. Perhaps, thought the poet, it nursed ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware’. I haven’t heard it since, and someone told me they had spotted a dead thrush by the road. I do hope it wasn’t my darkling thrush.
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