Maybe it’s because we’re so conscious now of the dark days of winter to come, or maybe it’s the intensity of the light at this time of year, but to me autumn always seems the most colourful season. There’s an intensity in the air, colours are more concentrated, the sunlight lower and more searching, and the scarcity of flowering plants make the flowers that are still around that much more welcome. It’s almost a last hurrah, a final act of defiance before the misty, dank, dripping days of November, the long nights and short days of December and the cold and gloom of January.
While the heather that gave the hillsides their wonderful purple blanket in late summer (the ‘blue remember’d hills’ of Housman’s yearningly evocative ‘land of lost content’ in his poem ‘The Shropshire Lad’ ) is now fading to brown and merging with the chestnut hues of dying bracken, there’s plenty of colour closer at hand. The turning leaves of birch and rowan (or mountain ash ) bring to the palette of the countryside an almost acidic yellow, and, when the wind blows, a mournful confetti to carpet roads and fields; as the blackberries rot and turn to mush, bramble leaves are slowly changing from green to yellow to vermilion to deep maroon; berries, in shades of red, black, white, orange and purple, are keeping the birds content; everything is in a state of change.
Flower power
In the hedgerows and field verges in my immediate neighbourhood, summer colour is being kept alive primarily by the last of the fuchsias, the final vivid flowers of montbretia hanging on like grim death to the end of their stems, and the last scabious flowers bobbing and dodging in the breeze.
Montbretia, or Crocosmia x crocosmiflora, isn’t – unsurprisingly, given its exotic appearance – native to Ireland. A precursor of the crocosmias that can be grown as garden plants, it originated from southern Africa and escaped from domestic gardens into the wild, where it has made itself comfortably at home. In America it’s also known as falling stars, which perfectly sums up its appearance. Like, for example, irises, it grows from underground corms: and these are protected during winter by the dying foliage that forms a blanket over them. The corms will suppy nutrition to the growing plant when it re-emerges from its winter slumber next spring.
The field scabious (Knautia arvensis ), a member of the teasel family, is also known by the highly descriptive names pincushion flower, lady’s pincushions and blue bonnets. The flowers do look exactly like miniature pincushions, complete with tiny pins, and can range in colour from pale blue to lilac to purple. Devil’s-bit scabious is a smaller (because, presumably, the devil’s had a good chew at it ) version of field scabious, which thrives in damp places and stream margins.
If you had to choose one plant that immediately conjures up a picture of the west of Ireland it would probably be fuschia (Fuchsia magellanica ), another escapee from domestic gardens, but this time hailing originally from South America. Growing in hedgerows, by streams, in rocky areas and even on waste ground, it’s a magnificent sight during the summer, with its dense foliage and dancing flowers. By this time of year, though, it’s lost all its jauntiness, and the colour that was so vibrant earlier in the year has become damp, tired and worn out. The foliage holds up well for quite a while during the autumn, though, and even when it fades and falls, the stems are still sturdy enough to repel much of the winter wind, which makes fuchsia a popular choice in domestic hedging schemes.
