Crusty

"[In the year of 1500] Few boys lived beyond easy walking distance of thick woodland, or of wild and spacious heaths, where they could work off freely the animal energies that in the twentieth century lead too many of them in the foul and joyless towns into the juvenile courts."

I'm still dipping into my book about the making of the English landscape. The author doesn't hide his opinions. I think we can guess where his heart was. He does make the more serious point that, at the time, few people regarded 'unimproved' land as in any way picturesque. Written references to forest, moor, marsh and heath treat them as threatening, dangerous, inconvenient places, of no intrinsic value, except as a source of timber. No-one wrote of 'scenery'

Feeling a little stir-crazy myself, on yet another day of cold perpetual twilight, I wrapped myself in layers and took my animal energies to the orchard. Some unpleasant cut blackthorn saplings needed clearing out of the way. The thickest gauntlets required, and great care to keep flailing branches away from your eyes. I escaped with only a few flesh wounds and definitely left feeling less foul and joyless

I just had time for a very rapid spring survey. The hazel is festooned with the densest catkins I have ever seen; I hoped my pictures would be a semi-abstract display of profligacy, but they were disappointing. Likewise my picture of the chaotic tangle of branches and moss over the brook - 'our own little rain-forest', I thought, but this light makes every picture flat and drab. Then I saw this under the hedge, seeming to shine with a luminescence of its own. Lichens often seem to radiate light, but I think this is simply a fungus, one of many species 'crust' fungi, living its dream on the soft dead wood, playing its part in nutrient recycling, and bringing a little brightness into the day