I savor the subtleties of an often stark season

Various sorts of winter berries draw intrepid attention to themselves, too, as if they were valuable jewels. Who notices holly berries in summer, when they start to form? Who is aware of the unassuming white flowers on a holly tree that precede the green berries? They are there to be observed if you know to look for them. But in December and January, holly berries shout at you with redness. And, due to the law of color opposites, their bright red makes us keenly relish the strong green of the holly leaves - a green that in summer is so commonplace and uninteresting that you ignore it.

In the white New England winter, what I chiefly recall now with a zesty pleasure was the way in which the light bouncing off the snow intensifies everything everywhere and makes such taken-for-granted colors as the crude yellow of road signage, or the serviceable rust-red paint of wooden barns, take on a rich intensity that amounts to a kind of glory. Colors brandished on roadside billboards also seemed brilliant in their vivid abstraction, where at any other time of year I might well have thought them a vulgar, artificial intrusion, disrupting my view of the magnificent landscapes through which my bus or car surged.

I tried to capture in paintings this snow dazzlement that vivified commercial colors to the point of a pure, sparkling magic. I may have pulled it off a couple of times, I am not sure. But some of the notable "color field" American painters did seem to me to successfully convert such winter color into highly stimulating art. They allowed their incisive brilliance of color to simply exist, flatly and plainly, on a white surface.

There is a tree - one that never attains much height or girth but seems happy to enjoy existence in shady undergrowth - that I encountered for the first time in a New England winter. It is witch hazel, or Hamamelis mollis. On leafless dark wood, it sports small spidery flowers composed of raggedy petals like tiny unkempt ribbons. These flowers seem much more like insects than what one normally thinks of as a flower. But they are unmistakable, and they are yellow. In the deadness of a hard winter, they are a sheer and tingling delight.

Very slow growing, witch hazels do rather valuably find their way into British gardens. We have one under an apple and plum tree down in the dark corner by the compost heap. It generously comes to life with its weird, determined little flowers winter after winter. And I always quietly thank it for coming into flower at the very best time of year.

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