The meadow is still wearing its drab winter coat, although the warm weather of the last few months has made the grass much greener than usual for so early in the year. The snow that fell in the middle of January melted quickly, with just a few isolated patches remaining for a little longer in sheltered spots. Elsewhere in the park there are clumps of snowdrops in bloom but nothing at all is flowering in the meadow. This month, while everything remains colourless, we are looking at some of the ways in which Nature produces her own works of art across the year, using shapes, colours and beautiful patterns to brighten up even the coldest and darkest days.

On a bitterly cold winter morning the puddles in the meadow are solid sheets of ice, many of them filled with patterns; there are lines, sunbursts, bubbles and long, crystal-clear protrusions. Even when the day begins to warm up the ice stays on the puddles in the deeper ruts and freezes hard again as evening approaches.

In the winter months the sun stays low in the sky and the area along the left-hand, southern hedgerow remains in shadow all day. The corner at the bottom of the meadow, where the hedge is thickest, is a very cold spot where little or no sun penetrates and the grass and fallen leaves are often edged with silvery white, picking out the detail in the leaves as though glitter has been applied with a fine paintbrush.

Nature uses lines in many different artistic ways. Sometimes the patterns are abstract, as in these two photographs of Old Man’s Beard, Clematis vitalba. In the first photograph the trailing tentacles of the clematis are blended in silhouette with the network of branches and twigs in the trees behind, backlit by the low winter afternoon sun. In the second photograph the structural lines of the plant seed heads are outlined against a colourful backwash of green leaves.

In contrast to the abstract shapes of Old Man’s Beard, a feather is made up of many precise parallel lines, each interlocking with the next to form the pastel softness of a bird’s plumage. Just as intricate is the design of a cluster of Musk Mallow seed heads, with the seeds already fallen and just the skeletal structure of the pods remaining, open to the sky behind.

Nature’s woodcarvings are more often abstract, but their shapes suggest different things to the people who see them. The centre of a cut log resembles a star, or perhaps the spokes of a wheel, the dead branches radiating round the trunk of a pine tree look like a hand or a claw and the gradually decaying end of a dead log has taken the shape of a dragon’s head, with its open mouth full of wooden teeth. The last two photographs show the centre of a log where the heartwood appears to be dying, which would eventually cause the trunk of the tree to become hollow. The centre has an almost flower-like appearance in this “sculpture”.

Rainy nights and heavy dewfall leave the meadow wet and glistening and if you walk round it early in the morning everything looks fresh and clean, with green as the predominant colour. Water droplets sit on leaves and branches in perfect, crystal-clear spheres. Water in Nature’s art brings pictures to life. A scene viewed through a water droplet appears as a perfect miniature, but upside down, with the sky above the land. Water droplets sitting on the surface of leaves act as tiny magnifying glasses, which make everything beneath them appear larger.

The artist J.M.W. Turner is well known for the beauty of his landscape paintings, and particularly for his wonderful pictures of the sky. Well, Nature was there before him and produces skies using every colour of the rainbow. There are the dark greys and purples of stormy weather, the clear blues and billowing white clouds of summer days, and finally, as evening approaches, sunsets of breathtaking patterns and colours. We are lucky enough to see many of these sunsets over Reg’s meadow, which faces south and west to catch the very best of the evening colour. The two sunsets shown here, one red, pink and purple, the other orange and yellow, are every bit as spectacular as the sunsets of Africa and you do not have to travel nearly as far to see them! Even one of our local herons stayed behind on the mound to watch the sun go down, after all its companions had flow away.....obviously an art lover!