The train stopped. I looked through the window. It wasn’t a particularly promising sight, just a junk yard with a wall-eyed dog barking at us from a small mountain of crushed cars. I turned back to my book. Happening to look up again, I noticed the scrapyard’s high wire fence was clotted with feathers. Or were they snowflakes? Actually what I was looking at were the seeds of the climbing plant, old man’s beard. In spring, old man’s beard (a wild clematis), clambers up shrubs, hedges or wire fences before blooming in a late summer froth of creamy flowers.