Silk is one of the oldest known fibres and, according to Chinese legend, was accidentally discovered by Empress Hsi Ling Shi, wife of Emperor Huang Ti (also called the Yellow Emperor). One day when the Empress was sipping her tea beneath a mulberry tree, a cocoon fell into her cup and began to unravel. The Empress was so enamoured with the shimmering threads she took the trouble to find out more and learned that their creator was the silkworm Bombyx mori found in the white mulberry. She oversaw the earliest development of sericulture (the cultivation of silkworms and production of silk) and invented the reel and loom, so beginning the history of silk. Whether this legend is true or not, the earliest surviving references to silk history and production place its origins in China, and for nearly three millennia the Chinese had a global monopoly on silk production.

“Although browns and greys are the predominating colours of the month, they still form a background for the splashes of brighter hues. The flowers, though few, have not wholly gone; the garden still yields a bunch of chrysanthemums and starwort; the smaller gorse is blooming against the sere brown of the heath and in the sheltered recesses of the woods a tree here and there stands out in its red or yellow.

Beside the field paths, at least a dozen later lingerers may be found - yellow toadflax with its butter and egg tints; pimpernel, charlock and the last of the rosemallow, and a few belated poppies, with the petals all crinkled and blanched to a pale pink by the rain and the cold. Of such things it would be possible to gather quite a respectable nosegay, but for the most part they are passed over; the faded beauties of a deserted season have lost their charm, and the hedges hold a more seasonal selection - hips, haws, and brightly-tinted leaves with long strawcoloured trails of crimson berried bryony.