Season of splendour

This autumn promises to be a memorable one. 2025 is shaping up to be a ‘mast year’, one where trees like oak and beech are producing a surplus of nuts and seeds; and it is set to be a spectacular year for autumn colours.

Mast years are an elegant evolutionary strategy and occur every 5 to 10 years. It is likely that the pollination conditions in April created the right conditions. The warm, dry weather may have enhanced flowering success and pollination meaning that those trees are producing a super-abundance of nuts and seeds. The animals, like squirrels, mice and jays simply can’t eat all the fallen nuts and seeds – biologists call it ‘predator satiation.’ Producing so many seeds demands extra energy from trees but when the conditions align, it pays off. We should expect to see far more oak saplings pushing through next spring than would usually be the case.

The backdrop to this natural spectacle is a summer that smashed records. Provisional figures from the Met Office confirm that the summer of 2025 was the warmest on record in the UK with a mean temperature of 16.1 °C, which is 1.51 °C above the long-term average. The Met Office estimates that outlier hot summers like this are seventy times more likely due to greenhouse gas emissions.

However, those warm months have created the conditions for the autumn display to be particularly pronounced this year. Heat and sunshine intensify the production of sugars in leaves, which, as trees shut down for winter, create vivid pigments of red, orange and yellow. We are also experiencing a ’false autumn’ – leaves turning and berries ripening earlier than they would due to the stress of extreme summer conditions.

When I walk or cycle through the countryside, I am often alert to the quiet warnings that nature is under pressure: insect declines, pesticide drift, river pollution and drought-stressed trees – a walk in nature can end up being a cataloguing of environmental decline. Yet I am also caught off guard by the beauty, intricacy and interconnectedness of our natural world, especially in a season like this. Perhaps the tension between concern and wonder is our common challenge today.

As the evenings draw in, perhaps we need to remember to pause, look up and appreciate the blaze of autumn while it lasts. In this ‘season of splendour’ there is space to care more and also to be amazed.

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