Beautiful October days can overload the senses

RED October was the name of a film, I believe, to do with submarine warfare. These days, all over our island there is a clash of the reds, not the Reds of the Cold War but the natural colours of the landscape, the gradations from the russet of bracken on mountainsides and on the stonechat’s breast, to the red of holly on the forest edge and the reddening breast of the robin which, only a few months ago, was drab and faded.

There are reds of all shades. The wine reds of haws, so dense they form blocks of colour, the reds of fuchsia, for many still remain on the branch although the leaves are gone, the reds of, yes, I’m afraid, knotweed looking elegant as always as it marches destructively in every direction anywhere it has gained the smallest foothold; the dazzling reds of rowan berries against china-blue October skies, and the shiny reds on the flower stalks of arum lilies, we came upon as a surprise in the darkness of the trees.

And, of course, there are the leaves of the trees themselves, fallen to earth, staining the ground beneath with (as Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, called it) October blood.

Were it raining, were it a season of downpours and deluges, of grey clouds almost touching the flat land and shrouding the hills, were it the dispiriting light of fore-shortened days rather than the uplifting light of yellow, Indian summer sun laid across the view, then the reds would be suppressed, dulled, hardly noticed, and nature blanketed rather than proclaiming its glory.

These magnificent October days, when we step out of the deep woods onto the cliff path and the sudden openness of the fields with their shining hedges of haws and holly and crab-apples and sloes, so brilliant is the vista that you’d swear that sun and earth and ocean have conspired to bring us a production that the budget of 50 Kleiglit Hollywood blockbusters could not aspire to.

It is magnificent, this October. It is always the best month of the year when we get the weather, always my personal favourite, and I say this not because I happen to have been born in October, but because when it is good, it is very, very good, and the uplift a bright October day delivers is unsurpassable.

In Vermont, USA, and Honshu, Japan, appreciators of autumn leaves gather to go leaf-viewing. Connoisseurs follow the transformations month by month, enjoying the deepening shades as the weeks pass. When my wife and I lived in Japan, and had a rare Sunday afternoon not busy earning — it was boom time, and wages were treble anywhere else on earth — we went leaf watching, with thousands of others, in Tokyo’s Yoyogi or Ueno parks. It seemed to be always sunny: sunny but cold is Honshu’s winter weather. Because the Japanese islands extend 3,000km from Siberian-like Hokkaido to Bali-like Okinawa, and rise to over 3,000m in the Japan Alps, a thousand mini-climates speed up or slow down the rate of reddening. I believe some sprightly Japanese pensioners follow the five-star views from place to place throughout the winter.

The red-berried, low-growing plants we spotted on a West Cork forest floor two weekends ago were familiar, but the leaves were not. The plants were, in every respect, Arum Lilies, Arum masculatum, which in, bawdy medieval times, were nicknamed lords and ladies because the pale white, candle-flame-shaped leaf that rises from the basal cluster in May was thought to resemble a vulva, and the stalk that rises within it a male member.

Even the Linnaean name is tagged ‘masculatum’ while, in some places it’s called Cuckoo-pint, connected by some contorted logic to the idea that the cuckoo was a libidinous bird, and/ or by relating the plant to a cuckolded husband. Starchwort was another name: in Elizabethan times its roots were used to make starch to stiffen gentlemen’s ruffs.

Anyway, the plants at our feet were strikingly beautiful, with variegated leaves surrounding uprisen stalks headed by clusters of red berries.

Later, I found that they were, in fact, Arum italicum, far from their native Mediterranean home, but cultivated in gardens: they were, no doubt, a small family of ‘escapes’.

Happily, migrant plants do not have to be housed in Direct Provision, as do asylumseekers who, up to recently, were shamefully made to linger in limbo for years awaiting decisions on their status.

Arum italicum can, it seems, hybridise with our native masculatum (no better man!) and produce extra-vigorous specimens.