Possibly the brightest splashes of natural colour which appears in the depth of winter is on the fruiting bodies of scarlet elf cups. The bright red of the insides of the cups is easy to miss: the largest cups are thimble-sized; they grow on dead wood, so they are often half hidden among the debris under trees. They spring up around the middle of January, then hang around for a few weeks.
These were in the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve, in spots where they’ve been coming back each year for a decade or more, behind the former Tettenhall station and by the footpath in the Paddock.