Nature Speaks

The mist lay amongst the trees, gathering in the hollows and softening the distant woodland until the branches seemed to dissolve into the pale November sky. Beneath them, the bracken had turned the colour of old copper, its fronds bending beneath the weight of the season, while the last leaves clung to the hedgerows and the damp earth held the quiet fragrance of things returning to it. There was something deeply restful about the morning, about the subdued colours and the familiar shapes emerging from the mist, and I found myself lingering beneath an apple tree where fallen fruit lay amongst the leaves, some still yellow and firm, others bruised and softening, their skins beginning to lose the smoothness that had once distinguished them from the earth upon which they rested.

Amongst the apples lay a single red berry, its colour so vivid against the browns and fading greens that my eye went immediately towards it. It seemed almost deliberately placed, although there was no reason to suppose anything beyond the ordinary accidents of wind and gravity had brought it there, and I was struck by the curious beauty of this little arrangement, in which things that had grown separately, perhaps upon different trees, had come to rest together for a brief interval before the weather and the small lives of the woodland floor began to alter them again. I took a photograph, wanting to preserve something of that moment, the contrast of colour, the textures of fruit and fallen leaves, and the particular pleasure of finding beauty where nothing had been arranged for anyone to admire.

It was only afterwards, looking through the photographs, that I discovered the fungi.

Three small, pale forms stood amongst the apples, their delicate caps raised upon slender stems, so finely made and so perfectly visible that I found it difficult to understand how I could have overlooked them. I enlarged the image, examined the little cluster more closely, then returned to the photograph as I had first taken it, where they remained exactly as they had been throughout, neither concealed by leaves nor lost in shadow, but occupying their own small place within the scene. My camera had recorded them with the same indifference with which it had recorded the berry that had so completely captured my attention, yet in my recollection of the morning they had no existence at all.

I found this strangely unsettling, not because there was anything remarkable about overlooking three small fungi amongst fallen leaves, but because I had been looking so carefully at the very place where they stood. I had stopped, considered the arrangement, chosen where to point the camera and taken pleasure in what I saw, yet the photograph now presented me with something I could not reconcile with the experience I remembered. It was as though the morning had acquired another detail after I had left it, although I knew perfectly well that nothing had been added, and that the difference lay somewhere between the place itself and the account of it I had unknowingly carried away.

The more I looked, the more difficult it became to regard the photograph as a simple record of what I had seen. It contained the apples and the red berry, certainly, but also the fungi, the small fragments of leaves, the damp surfaces and half-hidden spaces to which I had given no thought at all. Each belonged equally to that particular moment, yet only some had found their way into my experience of it. I began to wonder what it means to remember a place when so much of what made it that place has never entered our awareness, and whether the scenes we carry within us are less like faithful recollections than small arrangements of significance, shaped by what happened to attract us while everything else continued quietly beyond the boundaries of our concern.

There was something particularly affecting about the fungi themselves, those temporary, visible expressions of a life extending through the damp material beneath them, whose presence I might never have discovered had I not happened to look again. Their pale caps seemed almost improbably delicate beside the weight of the fallen apples, yet they belonged to the same slow transformations taking place beneath the tree, where fruit, leaves and wood were passing into other forms and becoming part of lives whose beginnings and endings were difficult to distinguish. I could not know how long the fungi had been standing there, whether they had emerged that morning or had already endured several days of rain, nor could I tell how much longer they would remain. By the time I noticed them in the photograph, the little scene itself had already moved beyond the moment the camera had preserved.

I thought of the mist lifting from the branches, of the changing light finding its way through the trees, and of the apples settling further into the leaves as their skins softened and their shapes began to give way. Perhaps a beetle would pass beneath one of the fungi, or a bird disturb the fallen fruit, or another night of rain alter the whole arrangement beyond recognition. Nothing in the photograph could tell me what had happened after I walked away, and yet the lives within it had continued without interruption, indifferent to whether I had noticed them or not. The image remained still while the place it depicted went on changing, and I found myself returning to it with the peculiar awareness that I was looking at something which, in precisely that form, no longer existed.

There are places we believe we know because we have passed through them so often that their familiar features have become part of the furniture of our lives. We recognise a bend in a path, the outline of a tree against the sky, the sound of water beyond a wall, and from these recurring details assemble a sense of belonging that is both comforting and necessary. Yet I wonder how much of that familiarity depends upon our ceasing to look beyond what we expect to find, and how much remains unencountered even in the places to which we have given years of attention. The woodland I walked through that morning was not withholding anything from me; its small lives were neither waiting to be discovered nor diminished by my failure to notice them. They were simply there, belonging to a world whose fullness did not depend upon my understanding of it.

And perhaps that was what stayed with me most strongly as I continued to examine the photograph: the thought that the fungi had been present throughout my little moment of delight, sharing the same damp air and the same November light as the apples and the brilliant berry, while I remained entirely unaware of them. They had not been hidden, and I had not been inattentive in any ordinary sense. I had been absorbed in looking, yet even that absorption had its limits, drawing some things towards me while leaving others untouched. The photograph had preserved a meeting between my attention and a place that was immeasurably more than the part I had chosen to see.

I have looked at the image several times since, and now my eyes go first to the fungi. The red berry remains as vivid as it was when I stood beneath the tree, and the apples still lie amongst the leaves, but the little arrangement no longer appears quite as it did when I first found it beautiful. Nothing within the photograph has moved, yet my experience of it has altered so completely that I can scarcely recover the earlier image from which the fungi were absent. I wonder whether, had I noticed them that morning, I might have overlooked something else instead, and whether another person standing beside me would have carried away an entirely different memory of the same small patch of woodland.

Somewhere beneath that apple tree, the fungi may already have disappeared, their delicate forms returned to the dampness from which they emerged, while the fallen fruit continues its slow passage into the earth. The photograph remains, holding together for a little longer things that were never still, and I find myself drawn not only to what it reveals, but to everything beyond its edges, everything that was taking place while I stood there and which neither my attention nor the camera could contain.

I had thought I was taking a photograph of fallen apples and a red berry. I sometimes wonder now what else I photographed without ever knowing it.