On gossamer wings

Less than a minute ago , by Richard Lutz

RICHARD LUTZ takes a September stroll as the world changes

A thousand drops of dew speckle a spider’s web, throwing a veil over a September morning. It’s one of hundreds spread like tiny silken carpets across the woods today.

The gossamer nets blanket the forest floor, arching over heather, gorse, ferns and hedges of The Trossachs, a remote range of hills and lochs about an hour’s drive north of Glasgow. But before the deluge erupts, it’s time to take in this early morning empty landscape.

The forest is dry or at least dry-ish. The bracken is rusty from a post summer chill:

And this means colour decorates the rippled land. Not so much from the foliage above. But from the berries, hips, haws, nuts and seedpods below. And from flowers too, such as wild honeysuckle which is still vibrant and more resilient than its delicate petals indicate:

There’re berries as red as a Christmas card from a cotoneaster which isn’t a normal woodland plant. It must be a ‘blow in’ from a nearby garden.

and there’s seedpods from wild broom, ominous, as if deposited from a creepy sci-fi film:

The dry weather this summer didn’t help the brambles (aka blackberries to the rest of the universe beyond Scotland). On these hills, they’ve never really ripened, never attained Full Tangy Juiciness:

But its neighbours have flourished such as this spikey growth from a sweet chestnut:

And, of course, look down and there’s a world of mushrooms.

I don’t know exactly what kind they are…I’m not a big fan of our fungal pals. I just think of digesting them and either getting poisoned or coming across giant red squirrels driving buses and chattering among themselves in fluent Bulgarian for the next ten hours. But here you go- a forest floor mushroom cupping a feather in a drop of overnight water:

Meanwhile overhead, there’s a wall of trees woven from Douglas fir, Scots Pine, Spruce and Western Hemlock:

They dwarf a lone walker winding her September way through the rolling forest.

She passes this lovely flower with a white trumpet-shaped bloom. Careful now, it’s every gardener’s nightmare:

It’s bindweed- so vigorous that it smothers other plants. Even small trees. Its underground roots creep more than 12 feet in length and choke their neighbours. They strangle the life out of a garden, a hedge, a wooded riverbank. ‘One person’s weed,’ say those who know, ‘…is another’s perfect flower.’