For centuries, August was seen as the time when the UK’s trees were at their peak. But is that still the case?
AUGUST comes with a sense of completion, fulfilment and rest and respite for nature. Tree extension growth is essentially complete, with fruits and seeds for harvest by man and beast already full if not ripe for the picking.
Early August is typically and traditionally sultry, stifling and still, neither a leaf flutters nor a bird sings, causing old timers like my grandfather to talk about ‘August Dog Days’.
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As a child I was fascinated with the phrase and imagined it was all about the days being so hot, humid and oppressive that dogs lay prone all day in the shade. However, as with so many other highly historical and traditional sayings, the origins of this one go back much further than my grandfather and the 19th century. Scottish historian Sir Water Scott said it all in these lines from ‘The Lady of the Lake’:
There is no breeze upon the fern,
No ripple of the lake ...
The small birds will not sing aloud
The springing trout lies still
‘The Lady of the Lake’ by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832)
The Ancient Greeks marked the start of this hottest period of the year with the appearance of Sirius (the brightest star in the night sky and commonly called ‘the dog star’) in the month of July. Ancient Rome referred to this period as ‘dies caniculares’ or ‘days of the dog star’, which was eventually simplified and translated into ‘dog days’.
English folklore has ‘Summer Dog Days’ starting on 3 July and ending on 11 August. That apart, the latter part of the month has always been unpredictable as far as weather is concerned.
Changing times
The month of August is traditionally tied to harvest time, related phases of the moon and weather patterns. You only have to look at the old sayings around St Swithin’s Day in the preceding month of July and how they are related to St Bartholomew’s day in August to see the connection.
St Swithin’s Day (July 15) if it should rain,
For forty days it will remain:
St Swithin’s Day if it be fair,
For forty days t’will rain nae mair
St Bartholomew (August 24)
Brings the cold dew
All the tears St Swithin can cry,
St Bartlemy’s mantle wipes them dry
If the 24th of August be fair and clear
Then hope for a prosperous autumn that year
This clearly comforting verse was associated with the harvest which began during the last week of August. Authors and poets waxed lyrical on the subject and artists painted a picture of August which may not be immediately recognisable today, and indeed no longer existing, due to the quirks of climate moving events along at an increasing speed.
A classic case is the harvesting of cereals, with cutting of spring-sown barley and wheat historically starting in the dying days of August and continuing right up to and often through the end of September. Harvesting of today’s winter barley and winter wheat starts in July and is essentially done and dusted by August.
You only have to peruse the poems of classic British bards from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to see how this is true with, for instance, the opening lines of a John Clare poem on August and which says everything about traditional harvest time and succinctly so:
Harvest approaches with its bustling day
The wheat tans brown and the barley leaches grey
‘August’ by John Clare (1793–1864)
Bards apart, I have more recent anecdotal evidence of my own to show how times have changed over the last 60 years. Though a dairyman by profession, my uncle was expected to take part in the annual farm harvest which would start at the end of August and proceed through the month of September. I always wondered why he was never able to come on the extended family holiday by the seaside in late August until some years later when he explained.
Farm workers were apparently not allowed to take their annual holiday until the harvest was safely gathered in and which essentially meant delaying annual holidays until the month of October. However, this all changed when the Transport and General Workers Union started to recruit farm workers and subsequently negotiated new holiday arrangements for their newest members.
Harvest moon
The combined effect of sped-up seasons caused by changing climate and agronomic changes from traditionally spring-sown barley and wheat to winter cereals now sown in early Autumn has caused some confusion; particularly so around phases of the moon and timing of the iconic ‘Harvest Moon’, treasured by farmers.
Most people might believe, but wrongly so, that the appearance of the ‘blooded’ Harvest Moon is in the month of August, whereas in actual fact it is a feature of the last week of September. And this is all tied up with farmers’ reliance on an extended night-time illumination to gather in the last of the corn harvest before the autumn rains set in with a vengeance in October.
The flame-red moon, the harvest moon
The harvest moon has come
So people can’t sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come.
‘Harvest Moon’ by Ted Hughes (1930–1998)
Hedgerow elm trees and rooks
Cornfields and those who harvested them were never very far from trees, whether they were the hedgerow English elm and English oak trees referred to by Ted Hughes in ‘Harvest Moon’, or in the adjacent woodlands.
If there is any single tree irrevocably associated with cornfields and harvest time during the month of August, then it is the English elm. Whichever way you look or listen, whether to old English poets or to masters of landscape artistry like John Constable, the English elm tree is invariably to the fore. And there’s a very good reason for English elm’s pre-eminence as the archetypal tree of the wayside rather than the woodland.
Now came fulfilment of the year’s desire
The tall wheat, coloured by the August fire,
Grew heavy headed, dreading its decay,
And blacker grew the elm-trees day by day.
‘Fulfilment’ by William Morris (1834–1896)
From a tree (the English elm) that has featured frequently in poetry, prose and on the artist’s canvas to others which are hardly ever spoken of, irrespective of season. A classic in this respect is our collection of conifers gracing the landscape for hundreds if not thousands of years, but without acclaim or accolade. But English poet John Betjeman changed all that. While common ash and common elder had pride of place in the first stanza of ‘Upper Lambourn’, at the very end Betjeman acknowledged the importance of conifer plantations to the downland landscape of West Berkshire:
And Edwardian plantations
So coniferously moan
As to make the swelling downland,
Far surrounding, seem their very own
‘Upper Lambourn’ by John Betjeman (1906–1984)
Of course, rooks were always associated with English elm trees. According to Thomas Doubleday, rooks were still around the hedgerows in the heat of August, but with English elm trees now gone forever, except in pockets along the Sussex coastline, I wonder whether the same close association between rooks and August cornfields still exists today.
Far off the rook, tired by the mid-day beam,
Caws lazily this summer afternoon
‘Summer afternoon’ by Thomas Doubleday (1790–1870)
If you ever doubt the historical close association of English elm trees with cornfields at the beginning of harvest time in late August, then savour ‘The Cornfield’ in oils and on canvas by John Constable, perhaps the artist’s most acclaimed work. The painting peers along an Essex lane into a cornfield, apparently during 19th-century August given the tall, golden corn highlighted at the edge of the field. Much has been written about this iconic landscape portrait, but what the experts won’t tell you is how the trees either side of the lane and which funnel the observer into the cornfield were some of 19th-century Essex’s biggest and best Ulmus procera (English elm).
Leaves on trees
According to the poets, August was the month when trees, wood and woodland were at their maximum strength, although I am not so sure that is true anymore.
August trees in 19th-century England may well have been at maximum strength with every leaf on the tree, but not any more. By August 2022, deciduous trees native, naturalised or exotic were well into the new phenomenon of a so-called ‘false autumn’.
Indeed, many would lose their leaves prematurely with some perversely producing new ones during September and October. One of these was the white-flowering horse chestnut in southern England which has been experiencing an ‘early autumn’ during August for the last 20 years, ever since the horse chestnut leaf miner, originating in the Balkans and entering England some 500 years after its primary host (white-flowering horse chestnut), was brought to these shores from the same area, where south-eastern Europe merges with Asia Minor.
Victorian and Edwardian writers and poets were obsessed with escaping to the country during early August. They escaped to avoid the oppressive city heat and to enjoy the still-green country tree canopies while trees lining the city streets were already the worse for wear. Kate M. Hall in her book Nature Rambles in London (1908) notes the trees lining London streets, especially limes and sycamores, were already yellow and drying on return from her summer holiday, while country trees had still been thick and green with summer foliage.
FAST-FORWARD FOR THE FRUITS OF THE FOREST
August was the major month for blackberries, the fruit of the bramble bush. Indeed, naturalist Edith Holden – famous for The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady – talks about gathering the first blackberries on August 25, 1906. Granted this was in St Fillan’s at the head of Loch Erne in Scotland, but even so, late by today’s standards. Here in southern England the best of the crop may well have been foraged by two-legged mammals by the end of July.
Similarly, sloes on blackthorn bushes are already big and blue by early August, though not ready for fermentation into sloe gin until bletted months later by frost, and just like the chequers (fruit of the wild service tree), traditionally used to brew and flavour beer. Berries of English holly trees are already blood-red in the hazy August sunshine, but of no consequence to soft-fruit-eating birds until the bitter component has dissipated in the new year. Scarlet hawthorn berries (haws) are already brightening the bushes and hedgerows in August.
Rowan or mountain ash is an interesting one because the big bunches of berries have assumed their deep orange/scarlet colouration, and presumably a ripened condition, in the south of England by the month of July, if not earlier. Edith Holden wrote in her Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady how the blackberries were beginning to ripen and rowan berries turning scarlet. And this was in Devon (Yannadon Down) on August 18, 1905.
Last but not least is our only native tree which bears universally-edible nuts. Ancient poet William Browne paints an idyllic picture of squirrels cracking ripe and shiny brown nuts in autumn for the soft, sweet kernels within.
Then, as a nimble squirrel from the wood,
Ranging the hedges for his filbert food,
Sits partly on a bough his browne nuts cracking,
And from the shell the sweet kernel taking.
‘The Squirrel Hunt’ by William Browne (1591–1643)
As an early 17th-century poet, Browne was clearly writing about the filbert feeding of native red squirrels and probably in the month of September. But today’s greedy grey squirrel can’t wait that long. Hazel bushes grow and fruit freely in the suburbs and are laden with clusters of full, green nuts until a particular day in the middle of August.
Inspect the shrubs the following day and all you will find are scattered green shells on the ground.
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