A surprising cluster of novels and fairy tales are set in the snow.

Our knowledge of winter is a fragment of childhood, almost innate.

All the careful preparations that animals make to endure the cold, foodless months,

hibernation and migration, deciduous trees dropping leaves.

This is no accident.

The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed

by ordinary creatures to survive.

Dormice laying on fact to hibernate, swallows navigating to South Africa, trees blazing

out the final weeks of autumn.

It is all very well to survive the abundant months of spring and summer, but in winter,

we witness the full glory of nature's flourishing in lean times.

Plants and animals don't fight the winter.

They don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives

they lived in the summer.

They prepare, they adapt, they perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.

Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying

our tax of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight, but that's where the transformation

occurs.

Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but it's crucible.

Once we stop wishing it was summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world

takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavement sparkle.

It's a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your

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