Wapley Hill Again

A lot of heavy rain recently, warm, stuffy days and cool nights, cool enough for a small fire. Everything has grown tenfold, and walking up Wapley Hill this afternoon the nettles and dock and ragged robin alongside the path seemed three feet higher than a week ago. From the top path a brief glimpse of distant hills, layered in shades of grey like tissue paper, the spikey horizons of misty pine woods. As soon as we got into the woods we could smell the pines, a dark Germanic smell, rich and resinous, the smell of vast untamed Northern forests. And yet it is a small forest in Herefordshire; one landscape conjuring another, the way a classical building in soft evening light can remind us of Italy. I do not want to describe landscape in terms of allusion or reference but this shorthand, these visual guides, are a starting point. In terms of the buildings, perhaps the aim would be to suggest Italy without recourse to columns and porches; suggest a mood, an emotion, that different people will interpret in different ways according to experience and personality. But then every allusion does this...!