St James’s Park – Autumn Wonder

St James’s Park is at its best in autumn. The trees are flaming with light, the leaves golden or red and falling already so that when you walk, they rustle around your feet.

A squirrel scuffles through the leaves looking for food

We’ve had the purple colchicums already, fragile leafless crocuses growing in drifts under the trees, so thin that a rainshower or a gust of wind will break their necks and lay their heads over in a sudden lilac massacre. A week or two, and they’re gone.

A misty autumn sunrise colours the park with floods of pale rose or yellow as the sun slowly streaks the horizon. Later in the year, frost will crunch underfoot for the first few visitors of the day, and tint the black footpaths with glistening crystals of white as if the park has been lightly dusted with icing-sugar; tree bark shines with the dripping moisture of a mist, and a thin rime glitters on the reeds.

For once, in autumn, the air seems clean and cool, and you want to breathe deeply.

And the squirrels seem more friendly than ever. (Last time I was in the park I met a middle-aged man feeding the squirrels. He knows each one – there’s one with no tail, another with a deformed front leg. Some live in one part of the park and never seem to cross the bridge in the middle to ‘foreign’ parts. Their lives are more complicated than you’d guess unless you got to know them. The squirrels even come when they’re called; a clicking tongue, a little sucky whistle, and they bound over, to take a hazelnut from his fingers or sit on a low railing looking at him with those huge entreating eyes.)

If you’re in the park early, sometimes you can hear the swans flying, their wings whistling through the air in the dawn stillness; then the ducks and geese start up their incessant hooting and clacking. There are a few migrants this time of year – the tufted ducks are arriving from Iceland, someone told me, though I must admit to only being able to recognise about four species of waterfowl without recourse to a book (or to one of the information boards in the Park).

St James’s Park (travel guide) is probably my favourite of all the London parks, even though you’re never more than a hundred yards away from the streaming traffic of the Mall. With all the birds, the teeming squirrel population, the reedbeds and the mature trees, it somehow feels very like a real piece of countryside – though of course that’s all a carefully maintained illusion. And while some people love it in the springtime, and others in summer when the deckchairs sprawl across the lawns and the band plays every lunchtime, for me it’s autumn that is definitely the most romantic time to see the park.

Photo by Dunan Harris on flickr