There was a moment on Tuesday’s fern hunt when a troubling thought occurred to me. “Why” – I wondered – “do I get so emotional about finding plants?” I think it’s a good question and a useful one. I remember we were once walking on Black Down (Burrington Combe) up at the top where the carboniferous limestone has been eroded away exposing the Old Red Sandstone underneath which is more acidic than the limestone everywhere else, and has an altogether different mix of plants. I was confused about this eccentric outcrop in the Mendips for years until it was explained to me how different the geology of that little area is. So there we were wandering along one of the tracks when suddenly a tiny flower caught my attention and I saw at once that it was an Eyebright, Euphrasia. As usual for me it’s not tremendously rare although it’s difficult to identify fully because it hybridises so readily. But what ran through my mind wasn’t the rational sequence of questions such as a professional field botanist might ask, as much as an explosion of joy; an anschauung, the intuitive understanding that comes with something discovered or revealed. No-one loves a list more than me, but that encounter involved a beholding such as might inspire a poet or artist; but when it comes to describing it, it’s just like trying to hold a writhing eel – trust me on that one, I’ve done it and failed on both counts!
The troubling moment on Tuesday came when I wondered if this emotional response might be no more than a form of sentimentality.
‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’
Charles Dickens, Hard Times.
‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’
Obviously you can take a fact and wrap it in sentimental drivel but it will always lie dead and cold on the page. On Tuesday the first fern we found was an almost perfect Rustyback; a textbook example if you really must but I’d prefer to think of it as an expression, an outpouring of natural energy which, when you give it its name, connects itself to you. The plants become my sisters and brothers – hence all the emotion – love, gratitude, respect not to mention aesthetic pleasure. The naming doesn’t create the plant; but it gives it an address, a point of reference to which I can return – named, and therefore capable of being found and greeted again in a way that makes the earth a bigger, more relatable place.
What is undoubtedly the case is that my childhood was full of such moments because – especially during the long holidays – I wandered (unsupervised) for miles through the countryside with my friend Eddie; laid in the grass on Rodway hill and watched the wind as it swayed the harebells, swung on the trees in the big woods, fished for Sticklebacks in the Oldbury Court ponds and picked bunches of wildflowers for my Mum who always placed them reverentially in jam jars. I suppose we all have that sense of a lost Arcadia. If there were any clouds in the sky we would rarely notice. My Mum was a country girl and she knew the names of plants and taught me and my sister how to love them too as we learned their names.
So yes of course plant hunting takes me back into my happy place, not because I want to be ten years old again, but because it was my ten year old mind in which I first experienced what I came to know later as the “oceanic feeling” and which seems to occur more and more as we search for the ferns, plants and fungi out in what’s left of nature after Thomas Gradgrind has had his filthy way with it.
In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to “a sensation of ‘eternity'”, a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole”, inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics.
Romain Rolland (From Wikipedia)
The kind of earth we need to aspire to rediscover is not just a rewinding of the calendar to the nasty 1930’s; of Janet and John books, Ladybird and iSpy. More than anything else I’d just like to create the opportunities for our grandchildren to walk in the woods at night; count the stars and name the constellations; find and name plants and know some of their uses and qualities; feed the hens as my sister and me used to do in Stoke Row, and understand and practice the art of growing and harvesting. We need to rediscover and celebrate our relatedness to the earth, not in empty, sentimental, bound-to-fail aspirations but fully and deeply; surrendering any thoughts of domination. It is religion, you might say – but not as we know it!
