Climate change is changing our language too.  Do you remember the old country saying about a ‘blackthorn winter’?  It was a reference to that period in March and April when the blackthorn blooms in our hedges, well before the whitethorn (hawthorn) and other hedgerow species ever come into flower.  This is a striking phenomenon in various ways. Most obviously, because in early spring the blackthorn blossom forms a brilliant white boundary along roadsides and across the fields, like a dazzling band of fresh snow.  It’s one of the most cheering and beautiful early manifestations of what is for most people the most uplifting season of the whole year, with its promise of warmth, growth and light after the long winter’s wait while nature was battened down.  One reason a blackthorn hedge looks so dramatic in spring is that unlike most other flowering bushes the blackthorn produces its flowers before its leaves, so the blossom contrasts strongly with its blackish bark, which looks as if it has been frosted like a Christmas decoration on every twig.  

But the phrase ‘blackthorn winter’ referred also to the fact that this promise might be punctuated or delayed by sudden bitter spells and chilly blasts, as winter administered a final, sharp reminder of its powers.  The nineteenth-century Scottish meteorologist, Alexander Buchan, even claimed to have identified a systematic pattern to these bitter spells, which became known as ‘Buchan’s cold snaps’.  In fact, the occasional conjunction of the flowering blackthorn with short wintry interludes was an easy prediction to make, but Buchan made the mistake of being too precise about it. April 11-14 and 9-14 May were his spring dates for a seriously ‘cold snap’.   Well, check it out when the time comes, but I’d be surprised if it happens.  Buchan may have won credibility by sometimes being right, like a canny fairground fortune-teller who tells you that something interesting is about to happen to you, but it was actually pretty random. In any case, Buchan knew nothing then of climate change. We’ve scarcely had a winter in East Anglia this year, certainly not an old-fashioned freeze-up, just a handful of frosty nights and only one day I can remember with a single snow-flake (on my birthday, as it happened). 

Perhaps the invocation of the ‘blackthorn winter’ will survive as a metaphor, annually celebrating the blackthorn’s dense drifts of white blossom, even as we re-define winter itself to suit the changing meteorological facts.  But the phenomenon of snowy blossom appearing in warm March weather may presage the next impending crisis the world is facing – as well as creating a new proverbial reference to a ‘blackthorn spring’.

Jeremy Mynott
3 March 2026

I strode out from the house on one of my regular walks the other morning and after I’d gone a couple of hundred yards I suddenly realised I was naked.  Well, not completely of course, but when I went to raise my binoculars to look at a distant bird I discovered with a shock that I’d left them back at home.  They’ve been so constantly around my neck on walks since childhood that at first I felt I’d lost an additional organ of sight. I still had my five original senses, though, and I started exploring my immediate surroundings more closely with them instead.  There were two trees still in leaf, I noticed, a beech and an oak.  I picked some of their leaves to examine them more intimately. They had a crisp, dry papery feel and crackled pleasantly to the touch. I sniffed them – the beech leaves had a soft, earthy odour but the oak ones hinted at some deeper fragrance I couldn’t quite place.  I glanced around to see if I was being watched and warily nibbled a few.  I could now taste a tang of sharpness in the oak leaves and spat those out pretty sharply.  Don’t try this at home – I think it was probably the tannin and is meant to deter deer and other foragers.  Looked at closely, the beech leaves were particularly beautiful, a rich chestnut colour with their internal veins prominently exposed as they branched out from the mid-rib like little tree skeletons.   A perfect natural image of the vascular architecture.

The leaves were still strongly intact, however, and firmly attached to the parent trees. Why, I wondered, do oaks and beeches hold on to their leaves so long, often right up to next spring, when other deciduous trees shed them – in one of the defining manifestations of autumn (the North American ‘fall’)?  When I got back home and was restored to my books (and binoculars) I tried to investigate this and learned a new word describing the phenomenon, ‘marcescence’ (evidently new to spellcheckers, too).  The scientists have this technical term for it but it turns out they don’t really know why it occurs.  Some suggested explanations are: that it helps protect the growing buds from foragers like deer (and me); that it ensures the leaves will eventually fall close to the tree’s roots and so recycle its nutrients; that it deters predatory insects; or all of the above.  But none of these answers seem to explain why as a strategy marcescence is restricted just to oaks, beeches and a very few other trees like hornbeam.

New explorations for a new year.

Jeremy Mynott
January 2026

It’s been a bumper year for acorns. The ground under oak trees is strewn thick with these lovely oval nuts, some of them still enclosed in their little knobbly cups.  It’s been what they call a ‘mast year’, when the weather conditions in spring and summer offered just the right combination of sun, warmth and rain to pollinate the trees and fatten their fruits.  And acorns are the fruits of the oak.  The word is derived from the Old English ac (oak) and corn (their fruit).  I asked a fruit farmer recently what a fruit actually is and he came up with this interesting answer, ‘it’s a seed dispersal mechanism’. Oaks don’t produce acorns in this profusion every year, but in a mast year they create far more of them than any of their natural consumers can possibly eat on the spot – the technical name for this strategy is ‘predator satiation’ – and that encourages long-term planners like squirrels and jays to carry the acorns away and bury them in scattered locations from which they can later retrieve them for tasty winter snacks.  Inevitably they will forget where they hid a few of them, and so will have effectively planted and dispersed lots of new oak seedlings.  Clever Nature.

Acorns are very rich in tannins and are seriously harmful in their raw state to some other animals, including dogs, horses and humans.  If they are boiled or roasted, however, you can leach the tannins out and then they are said to make nutritious flour or even decaffeinated coffee.   In some human cultures, like those of certain native North American tribes, acorns were a staple item of diet when properly prepared in this way, so maybe we should experiment more (cautiously!). Pigs don’t need that detoxification process, however, and there was an ancient forest right called pannage, whereby you could let your pigs out into the woods to gorge themselves on acorns for an authorised period every autumn.  In fact, they still observe that practice in the New Forest in Hampshire and the permitted pannage season there this year is from 15 September to 28 November, in case you’re interested.

Oak trees themselves are one of the glories of our woodlands.  They support an incredible range of wildlife: some 2,300 other species depend on them in part for their food, shelter and living quarters. These include birds (woodpeckers), mammals (badgers, deer, wood mice), many lovely moths and butterflies (crimson underwings and purple hairstreaks), bees, hoverflies, beetles, fungi, lichen and mosses; and of these over 250 depend wholly on oaks.  No wonder the oak and the acorn are such powerful symbols of growth, abundance, fertility and life.

Jeremy Mynott
October 2025

I made several wonderful trips to the vast steppes in southern Russia some years ago when that was still possible.  Standing in the steppe there you can see gently waving grasslands stretching as far as the eye can see, and beyond your horizon there are further horizons of yet more.  There are grasslands on every continent except the Antarctica, under such names as the African savannah, South American pampas and the American plains as well as these Eurasian steppes.  Grass covers over half of the earth’s land surface and it was grass that enabled the first agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago when humans exploited it as food for themselves in the form of grain and as fodder for their domesticated animals.  One reason grass is such a successful plant is that it grows from the base not the top, so if it is cropped or mown it can more easily regenerate than most other plants and will grow back up again.  The word ‘grass’ itself comes from an ancient Indo-European root meaning ‘to grow’.

Closer to home, there is grass all around you.  Or more exactly, grasses.  We think of grass as just one thing and we talk of ‘cutting the grass’ or ‘green as grass’; but in fact there are some 10,000 different species of grass worldwide, each with its own characteristics.  Here in Shingle Street there are at least a dozen different kinds growing right by the roadside.  They have some lovely names.  There’s cocksfoot, false oat grass, sheep’s fescue, meadow barley, sea couch, bent, meadow grass and the curiously-named Timothy.  This last is apparently so-called after an American farmer of that name who promoted its cultivation in the southern states in the early eighteenth century.  Feels to me like a name you might have called a guinea-pig rather than a kind of grass, but there you are.  

My favourite name of a local grass, however, is Yorkshire fog.  The scientific name is Holcus lanatus and that second term means ‘woolly’, referring to the grass’s soft, billowing look, which may also explain tits English name, conjuring up an image of smoke drifting from northern industrial chimneys.  It’s an abundant grass, tolerant of poor soils and wasteland – so much so that it is sometimes thought of as a weed.  That’s a cultural term, though, not a botanical one, and is surely misplaced in the case of such a beautiful plant, which is also an important part of our local ecology.   For Yorkshire fog is particularly attractive as a food plant to some scarce butterflies like the small skipper and the even rarer wall brown butterfly that bred here until recently.  Thank you, Yorkshire.

Jeremy Mynott
September 2025