September

By Ronnie Reed

People and Wildlife Officer

Autumn is nudging its way into our lives. It is September and already there is a chill in the air when I open the door to take the dog for his early morning walk.

Mist hangs in the folds of the Downs. Over the field a heavy dew has quietly walked the grass and in its wake has left a pale glistening sheen across the sward. As the sun creeps up through the mist, the tiny droplets of water hanging from the tips of the hawthorn berries that brush the path we walk, become tiny jewels; alive and sparkling in the early morning light.

Everywhere there are cobwebs glimmering with dew; slung between tall yellow stalks of grass, hitched along wire fencing, silky strands floating across the path. The sun picks out small squat mottled spiders crouching in the centre of their devious traps. Spiders spin to catch their prey, wrap their eggs and in late summer and early autumn money spiders use their silk as launch pads. Thousands of them climb to the top of blades of grass or fence posts and spin strands of silk. As the breeze catches the silk the spiders become airborne and drift along on the currents. A trick known as ballooning, it allows the spiders to spread themselves over a large distance and they have been recorded 3000 feet up caught by weather balloons. Look for the gossamer (which means goose summer), the feathery layer left across the fields by the fallen silk.

Looking out across an empty field of corn, large bales still stacked in a corner, rooks lifting from the ground, it feels that summer has fled and only the bleak prospect of winter remains. It is a sad time of year, tinged with regrets of things not done and grey thoughts. A sense that something good (even the summer we have just had!) is ending. The days are getting shorter, the nights longer, the sun weaker and the shadows at midday fall further. The flowers have faded, the grass is a matted rats-tail tangle of uninspiring dried yellow stalks and the leaves on the trees are starting to shrivel. It is the start of a path that will end in winter; cold, dreary, grey and desolate.

But as any true gardener will tell you, autumn is not only a time of harvest but the start of the new year.

We pass a feast along our walk; ripe, rich black elderberries waiting to be made into wine, bright red hips and haws, clusters of blackberries ready for apples and pastry, field mushrooms appearing from nowhere. But we also pass the seeds (literally) of a new beginning.

Everywhere there is new life just waiting for the right opportunity to grow. Overnight the green prickly seed heads of the burdock and teasel have turned from green to brown. The dog brushes against trailing cords of ‘cleavers’or ‘goose grass’ and I have to stop to pick the small, round sticky seeds out of his fur. There is a fringe of willow herb with fluffy, white cotton-wool-ball seeds along the edge of the footpath. Thistle down floats across the field. Majestic heads of hogweed scatter their seeds to the ground. The white-pink blushed flower heads of wild carrot have turned brown and curled inwards locking their seeds tightly together. Dusty seed heads of ribwort plantain rock softly in the breeze and rust coloured docks sprinkle their seeds into the grass as the dog runs passed them. Wild plums, tempting but too high, purple and shinning in the morning light will fall as the temperature drops and find rich fertile soil for new beginnings. Prickly horse chestnut cases have already dropped and rolled away from their parent tree, ready to split open and cast out their future.

The season may be turning, the weather may be changing but September is not the herald of the end of the year but the beginning of something new and even more exciting.