Mist has gathered in the valley where sheep dot the emerald green with white. High on the hill it blows in scraps and longer straggling clouds across the black of spruce and fir. Between the two sun is reaching a tapestry of trees, finding bright gold in the larches, richer, deeper gold in maples, bone-grey in ashes and a lively yellow-brown in the swathes of bracken. Bracken in the sun is the dominant eye-catcher, and seems to grow more dominant every year.
You get the feeling, sometimes, that bracken will one day smother everything. Yet it’s scarcely a new invention. The diary of the farmer at Sylfaen next door in the 1870s speaks of the bracken-crop in autumn as one of the worst tasks of the year, It was used for animal bedding, but gathering it meant breathing in clouds of its spores, which turned out to be carcinogenic.
Bracken is apparently a universal weed. Antarctica is the only continent without it. It can grow up to ten feet high and spread with its rhizomes hundreds of yards. It won’t grow in boggy ground, so the drainage of uplands only encourages it, but is otherwise unfussy about soils. It laughs off authorized weedkillers. Its roots survive the sharp trotters of sheep. Clodhopping cows are better at breaking them up, but only repeated trampling year after year suppresses them. So expect to see more of it somewhere near you.
