garlic mustard to some. It is a biennial, and a few seeds find their way into the area in
front of the black shed door, where the passage of business diminishes their chances of
ever making maturity. However, a year ago and more, a chance seed eked its germination
immediately inside the door, setting an insinuating root into the native clay upon
which the shed stands and, miraculously, divining a bare adequacy of moisture with
which to commence a precarious existence, beset with periodic darkness behind the
closed door, and parched exposure whenever the summer sunshine was allowed to
pour in.
Last year, the plant prospered sufficiently to chance a modest flower-head, held above
an otherwise spare frame, and for an April week or so the small white flowers gleamed
in the gloom - and managed to attract whatever insects as were able to effect pollination.
It could well be that one of the passing insects was an orange-tip butterfly - and,
certain it was, that one of these butterflies passed this way, leaving a calling card, for
within a few days a tiny caterpillar emerged from the egg and commenced its life on
the doorway weed. It was at this point that I noticed the creature, and for the next few
weeks I looked out for it whenever I had cause to pass through the doorway - to convey
corn and layers' mash to the hens in their run, to reach for necessary gardening tools,
to store bags of hay cut from the meadow and orchard - whatever of a variety of
practical activities encompassed my reliance upon the storage space of the shed.
The caterpillar was a masterpiece of camouflage - a long, two-tone study in green,
blending in magnificently with the developing linear seedpods of the foodplant upon
which the insect fed, in a subtle balance of nature whereby the creature devoured only
a proportion of the seedpods, advantaging that proportion of seeds that were not
consumed, in the plant's long-term interest. Moreover, those pods which were not
thus destroyed served a further purpose for the caterpillar, for the time came when
maturity dictated the formation of a chrysalis - and this was another miracle of
camouflage, quite the counterpart to the earlier achievement of the developing
caterpillar, for the chrysalis was formed on the plant itself, held by the merest strand
of silk to the gradually changing stalk in such a way that its curved and pointed profile
blended in perfectly with the adjacent seedpods.
There was yet more to this miracle of coloration, though, for in the early days the
chrysalis was of a somewhat greenish-grey hue, matching the declining colours of the
few leaves and the developing seedpods. Yet as the plant, its purpose done, dwindled
and withered and died, and turned brown in the heat of high summer, so the chrysalis
matured in colour, assuming the browns and greys of its host. And thus it remained,
all summer long, and throughout the autumn, and so to the moment of my writing, in
the savagely of the January snows and unrelenting frosts.
Deep inside that seeming husk, still attached to the dried out and lignified stalk that
stands where once it grew in the corner of the doorway of the shed, there beats a
diminutive, imperceptibly-extant heart, coldened to the ambient temperature, vulnerable
to chance, unable to offer any defence to whatever might offend. It is utterly defenceless,
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 62, May 2010
15