I wrote this post 13 months ago and then, for some reason, never published it and it’s been sitting in the drafts folder ever since. I used to have a producer on the radio who would say -“I know what you’re trying to say, and I know that you do too – but you haven’t actually said it!” – and re-reading it yesterday I think it fell into that category; so I’ve tweaked it a bit and added a couple of paragraphs to say what I was actually trying to say and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it worked.
Rather an arresting sight on the pavement outside the flat today. I wondered for a moment whether caterpillars have hen parties but obviously this one wasn’t wearing a tiara so I didn’t bother to look and see if there were any tipsy bridesmaids about. I don’t think the Sycamore moth is particularly rare but I would have noticed had it crossed my path. Anyway, it must have fallen from the tree outside and was making its way across the road to the relative safety of the Green – relative safety because it would surely make a tasty snack for a gull – or a magpie, what with the ginger wig and all.
I frequently have trouble trying to figure out what my real vocation is; I’ve done so many things – but there’s always been writing somewhere in it. I fell in love with the natural world as a child and now I’m a passable amateur field botanist but when I sit down to think about it, what really gets my juices flowing is the beauty of plants; their histories, traditional names and uses for food and medicine and their journeys around the railway yards of Europe. DNA and microscopic identification skills are no more exciting to me than completing a hard crossword; fun but not significant. I get as much thrill from the Biting Stonecrop outside the door as I would from finding a ghost orchid (unless it was in the pavement outside!), and I don’t have a tidy mind so I like to root around on my hands and knees to find plants rather than see them displayed like zoo specimens in wire cages and bare earth. If it came to a choice between writer and botanist it would have to be a writer – a no brainer. Latin binomials have their uses of course, and when it comes to the correct naming of plants they’re essential, but where’s the romance in it?
The abundant Mexican Fleabane here could be and often is seen as a weed. I just don’t get it. Last week the official council weed scraper laboriously removed nearly all the plants along the bottom of our retaining wall but then stopped when he came to a glorious waterfall of the daisy lookalikes at the corner and put his scraper away. The bottom of the wall is now alive with the resurgent leaves of Nipplewort, Dandelions and Hemp agrimony which simply shrug off the insult. The whole object of a plant, I suppose, is to be visible and visited by pollinators. You’d think that for caterpillars the opposite would be the case; that they’d make themselves as invisible as possible until they’d pupated and emerged in their final forms. Not so, though. The ginger Sycamore Moth caterpillar, like so many of its cousins, doesn’t even try to be cryptic in its appearance. Does it actually taste filthy or does it just look as if it will. There’s an extravagance in nature which breaks all the bounds of decency and order – especially if you happened to be a Victorian philosopher like John Ruskin who once wrote of Selfheal:
It is not the normal characteristic of a flower petal to have a cluster of bristles growing out of the middle of it, or to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish’s jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal’s throat.
John Ruskin, Proserpina – quoted by Richard Mabey in his book “Weeds”
Richard Mabey’s book, cited above, is an erudite source of wisdom about weeds that deserves a place on any bookshelf. In his description of Self Heal he mentions the visual effect of swathes of the plant as akin to “brazed copper”. Ruskin seems to have had a bit of a thing about the colour of copper. One account of the reason for his inability to consummate his marriage to the red headed Effie Gray was given by her years after their marriage was annulled – “the reason he did not make me his Wife is that he was disgusted with my person the first evening.”
I can only assume that Ruskin found much to disapprove of in the disorderly and occasionally ginger world of nature. Sometimes anarchy is just a way of describing something whose connectedness and complexity is utterly beyond us. Science is the scalpel to the butterfly net of the poet’s work. Reductive or expansive – that’s the challenge. Are the tools we use to engage with nature intuitive and imaginative, or laser focused, seeing nothing beyond the quarry?
Well, I’m for the butterfly net approach every time. Of course, in this critical age of triple breakdown; environmental, climate and economic, we need science as never before, but just as I’ve always taught, myths are the way we tell the truth about mysteries – and the intuitive, expansive and imaginative tools of the poet are every bit as important as the scanning electron microscope and the DNA printout. To choose just one approach to nature wilfully limits our understanding. Slippery and indefinable as it may be, to exclude beauty from our calculus is to take us into Gradgrind’s miserable world. Ruskin’s failure to appreciate Effie Gray’s sensuous beauty was a failure of his humanity. He pursued her, courted her and married her so he could push a pin through her heart as if she were a trophy butterfly.
But enough! I bet you didn’t know that John Masefield liked to keep a box of rotting apples under his desk to fire up his imagination. Stanley Spencer kept something entirely more unpleasant near him but you’ll have to google for that. We have a neighbour on the allotments who has a tree laden with quinces which have the most lovely perfume, enough to fill the whole flat, and every year we put a bowl of them on the table. I’ve made quince jelly in the past and believe me they’re as tough as old boots and need a lot of cooking. When you cut through the fruits the black pips have a positively satanic look and they also contain hydrocyanic acid.
Of all the virtues of nature we mustn’t ever forget its sensual pleasures. For us, it’s more than just the necessity of eating, or growing or intellectual understanding because every one of the senses is engaged in a merry dance. Autumn is not merely mists and mellow fruitfulness, it’s celebration, festival, recollection and thanksgiving, singing, dancing and feasting. Oh and it’s also available in copper coloured.