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| It's wick! |
"I'm glad it's wick!" she cried out in her whisper. "I want them all to be wick. Let us go round the garden and count how many wick ones there are." The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
For me, those are some of the most powerful sentences ever written in the English language, certainly on a par with anything by Dickens, Shakespeare and Austen.
In Burnett's classic story, Mary Lennox is a neglected yet spoilt orphan who discovered a secret untended garden on the estate of her uncle’s estate on the wuthering Yorkshire moors. The symbol of her neglect are roses that had tangled and grown together. She didn’t know how to tell whether a branch or a tree stump was alive or not. Fortunately the gentle and fascinating Dickon was around to teach her and her hypochondriac cousin Colin about the beauty and regenerative power of nature and a bit of pure Yorkshire dialect. As Dickon explains 'It's wick' means 'It's alive'.
Over the winter I've been considering dead wood. It can be very deceptive. The circular cambium of these felled trees in the Senat forest are providing fungi with all the nourishment they need to thrive.
How many species are represented in this tree stump? The whole mix of colours and textures from fallen leaves, acorns, moss, lichens and fungi makes a miniature landscape more dramatic than the forest landscape itself.
This fungus peeping out of the bark and inner layers of a branch was so white and fluffy that it really looked like a patch of snow that had resisted thawing. The dead wood days of winter were not as dead as they seemed.
