Foxgloves, growing in a shady corner of the garden
My foxgloves are beautifully in flower. They began around the 11th of May and are now in full bloom. Most are dressed in traditional purple with the insides of the “gloves” spotted deep purple in white areas, as if the pigment had been dragged together into clumps. Some are in unspotted white: creamy when closed, dazzling greenish-white in full bloom. This is seemingly a naturally-occurring variation, with perhaps a single mutation preventing pigment development.
Nothing extraordinary there? The clue is the date. Back in the 1940s in Dorset, John Stuart Collis calmly states that Foxgloves come out in August.
The odd science of Phenology tracks the dates when natural events occur in different years, thereby building up an accurate picture of changes in many species. The idea is seen in one of the classics of natural history, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), which includes observations of the first Swallow to arrive, and so forth, and in some editions actual tables of phenological observations. These are described as “A comparative view of the Naturalist’s Calendar as kept at Selborne in Hampshire by the late Rev. Gilbert White MA and at Catsfield near Battle in Sussex by William Markwick Esq FLS from the year 1768 to the year 1793.” For the record, White notes Foxglove from May 30 to June 22; Markwick notes the same species from May 23 to June 15.
So in this case the anomalous datum looks more like Collis’s than mine. Still, flowering does seem to be earlier; explanations could include that London is warmer than the countryside, that plant varieties may differ, and climate change.
Mind you, even Gilbert White would have had a hard time recording the phenology of the Nasturtium this year. Without a winter frost, which usually kills them in December, the plants survived all through the winter, and have remained in flower essentially continuously. “1 January—31 December”, I suppose.
Nasturtium, all natural. The colour is as the camera saw it, and the water droplets are rain or dew, where nature left them.
As I washed the dishes by hand with some very pleasant Ecover natural washing-up liquid, having cooked some natural tofu with mushrooms in cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, served with home-grown spinach and then home-made apple pie, I reflected that “natural” is a hard-working word.
The connotations of nature are perfect for marketing. Happy cows peacefully chomp lush green grass in a rolling hill country with a tree, a winding road, a gate, a hedge, blue sky and yellow sun, at least that’s how it looks on the side of the dairy product carton. Actually the cows are probably in a shed, the fields are very likely poached, muddy and puddled by hundreds of heavy feet, the sky lead-grey, and the hedges long since grubbed out to gain the hedge-grubbing efficiency subsidy. But hey! This is marketing. Nature to the rescue! Happy cows in pretty “natural” landscapes sell more yoghurt, specially when it’s low-fat organic natural Lactobacillus bifida yoghurt.
Clearly something unnatural is going on. Are the happy cows in a “state of nature”? Hardly. They belong to a farmer, who bought them in a market, or bred them via artificial insemination, browsing the online catalogue to choose the best bull for the farm’s soil, climate and breed of cow. The cattle themselves were bred to maximise productivity through many rounds of such artificial selection by farmers and animal breeders.
Well, is the yoghurt in a state of nature, leaving aside the unnatural state of the cows it came from? Did it go sour all by itself when its Palaeolithic minders left it in a bark bucket overnight, only to discover to their astonishment the next morning that it had somehow turned solid, acquired an interesting sour taste, but was actually nicer than the milk it had replaced? Well, that may once have happened, but it certainly wasn’t how the stuff got into that carton on that supermarket shelf today.
So, why’s it called “natural” yoghurt then? Oh, you mean because it’s plain, as opposed to being full of pineapple chunks with a minty flavour? Nature = Vanilla flavour? Well, that’s a useful meaning.
But if that’s what “natural” is, why is my washing-up liquid natural? It’s scented with camomile and mango, or turnip and artichoke, or something. Surely natural would mean unscented, just as it comes. Oh, you mean it’s natural because it’s not full of synthetic chemicals, the soap is all extracted by a team of a hundred doughty washerwomen with brawny arms, pounding bales of organically-grown soapwort with lye and goat’s urine to extract the natural saponins? No? You mean the saponins were extracted in a chemical factory? Doesn’t sound terribly natural to me.
And why are we praising the benefits of natural olive oil, is it inherently better than any other oil? Sure, we now know that hydrogenated vegetable oils aren’t too clever, that was a piece of processing too far. But the olive oil has been made from trees planted in rows in an orchard, weeded, sprayed if need be, pruned, harvested. The fruits have been soaked in brine, then crushed — that’s the first extra virgin cold pressing bit — to squeeze the oil out. It’s been put in tins or bottles and carted hundreds of miles to get here. It’s as natural as the pollen in a bumblebee’s leg baskets, in fact. Not.
Well, what about the tofu, the mushrooms, the home-made apple pie? Go on, it’s your turn, work out their life-histories for yourself. I’ll return your scripts to you next week.
So why are people claiming the epithet “natural” for all sorts of things? Part of it is a more-or-less deliberate confusion with the warm feelings we have for a lovely view, a nice day in the countryside, a holiday in the mountains: nature is somehow good and right. The happy cows in the mescaline-bright mock Dorset countryside on the dairy carton are tapping into this feeling about nature. Being natural makes a product warmer, cosier, safer, more familiar: separate from the nasty cold modern world of dairy processing plants and integrated supply chains. Only it doesn’t, really.
The marketing man’s deliberate sleight-of-hand is one thing: at least we know that’s his game, and we sophisticated consumers know to discount his warm fuzzy claims, don’t we? Possibly.
But there’s a worse confusion out there. “Natural” = good, beneficial, health-giving, right, even somehow spiritual. This was the basis of the whole round-about-1900 back-to-Mother-Nature movement, in which Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach and his proto-hippies in their Himmelhof (“Heaven House”) commune went about in flowing robes, barefoot, with flowers in their hair — yeah, you thought all that began in the 1960s — seeking to absorb goodness from Nature.
Diefenbach and his communards at the Himmelhof, near Vienna, 1897-1899
Well, nature may be flowery and pretty, but pufferfish tetrodotoxin is straight from nature, and one drop will kill you. Tree-frog curare arrow-poison, that paralyses your muscles so you fall down, conscious but helpless, is totally natural too. So is tetanus toxin, and food-poisoning and clostridium gas-gangrene toxin, and so is … Oh, that wasn’t the sense you intended? You didn’t mean that Mother Nature could kill as well as give life, you wanted to focus on the positive. Right. As long as you’re clear about it.
The love of Nature is deep in England. And I think that what is behind this love is the instinct that Nature has a secret for us, and answers our questions. Take that foxglove over there… It stands singly where there had been such a wonderful display of bluebells that it then looked as if a section of the sky had been established upon earth… That foxglove with its series of petal-made thimbles held up for sale to the bees, puts me at ease upon the subject of — progress. It is quite obvious that the foxglove cannot be improved… The fact is we get perfection in this form and in that form… There is no point in our gazing raptly into the future for paradise if it is at our feet.
—John Stewart Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Vintage, 2009. page 253.
The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition)
I turn off the road, enter the wood, and sit down under the tree. The sun gleams upon everything, there is glittering and shining everywhere. A green caterpillar is lowered down by an invisible thread in front of me, and as it swings about, the sun shines through its transparency… A bush over there is glittering with rain-drops, little white lanterns fastened to the lower side of twigs; but if I swing my head slightly to one side, some of those lights turn colour, becoming red and purple…
We have invented a word for it: beauty. I am surrounded here with law, order, and beauty, and am myself absolutely happy here… I begin to grasp the obvious fact that this place is — perfect. And suddenly I realize where I am! I am in the Garden of Eden.
—John Stewart Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Vintage, 2009. pages 232-233.
NASA has just announced the findings of a study of the enormous glaciers of West Antarctica. The immense ice sheet slopes down, basically smoothly, into the sea, drained by the Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, Haynes, Pope and Kohler Glaciers. Pine Island Glacier alone stretches over an area of 160,000 square kilometres. All of them are thinning quickly, by up to a metre a year, and moving fast. Their bed is rather smooth: there is nothing to stop them continuing to thin until they collapse. When they do, the sea level all round the world will rise by 1.2 metres — four feet: enough to overwhelm many existing coastal cities. Worse, there are other glaciers which may do the same, adding more metres of sea level rise. The scientists state unequivocally that this is now irreversible, past the point of no return, a runaway process. There’s no diplomatic hedging and statistical mumbling: the analysis of forty years of data is about as conclusive as science can get. The line where the Pine Island Glacier meets the sea and starts to float has retreated, not a little bit here and there but tens of kilometres, as the sea melts the front of the ice, and the rest of it thins and accelerates. It’s certainly going to collapse, probably in the next few centuries.
This blog is intended to celebrate nature, to delight in its beauty and endless variety: the Web equivalent of going for a fine airy walk in the hills, a stroll by the river with binoculars and notebook, an hour in a flowery meadow stalking butterflies with a macro lens. Fun, flowers and fabulous insects, in a word.
But while celebrating nature, it is impossible not to notice that something is going terribly wrong in this Garden of Eden. Forests are being cut down. Whole populations of fish are being scooped from the sea: one of the greatest of all of them, the Atlantic Cod of the Newfoundland Grand Banks, has completely collapsed and despite years of waiting with fishing abandoned, has not begun to recover. Maybe it never will. Meanwhile, the world is unquestionably warming, on the most spectacular scale imaginable. The Sahara and other deserts are growing. On all the world’s mountains (how much evidence can anyone need?), glaciers are retreating, at a speed that nobody could imagine even 30 years ago. The Arctic Ocean is opening up to shipping and mining: how much pollution and destruction will that cause? Even the fabled Northwest Passage may be open to ships, speeding trade —every cloud has a silver lining.
I said it was impossible not to notice all this. Unless you’re in denial, of course. Humans have an extraordinary capacity for denialism, if that’s a word. Men can carry on as their marriages, careers, companies, societies collapse all around them. Dictators, for instance, can bring their countries to utter ruin and bankruptcy, with bombed-out cities, millions of refugees, starving women and children, the lives of whole populations blighted, entire economies destroyed, beautiful centuries-old monuments sacred and secular smashed to dust. It all counts for nothing as long as the big man is safe in the bunker below the presidential palace, ignorant of everything, his henchmen loyal, his money hidden away.
Many plain facts about nature are denied in the face of overwhelming evidence. Rising CO2 in the atmosphere. Global warming. Climate change. Overfishing. Sea level rise. Ocean acidification. Loss of rainforests. Extinction. These things are all connected? You don’t say.
The lights in the control room are all flashing red. The klaxon is sounding. Alarms are queued on the console screens. The operators sit back quietly, chatting amongst themselves, sip drinks, flip through magazines, laugh, occasionally silence an alarm, talk about promotion opportunities, make lewd remarks about the pretty girl in Catering. They couldn’t care less. The lights always flash. It’s nice when you can turn the klaxon off. Stupid programmers. Inspectors, always complaining. Everything’s fine. Outside, fuel is spilling from a storage tank. The site’s fire service has been stood down. There’s only one fire tender, and it’s old. It will only take a spark now, it’s only a matter of time.
May is the fastest time of Nature’s year. What a difference a few days make! Last time at Wraysbury, a few sluggish mayflies sitting around as if waiting for something to happen in a one horse town.
Well, today it’s happening. In places, the sky is filled with rising mayflies: a few mating, most alone. Here and there, some repeatedly dance up, and a few seconds later, down; but most just climb, and fly about, seeming frail on their large wings, their triple tail streamers hanging below them: it’s worth zooming in on the picture. Even better, here’s a short video clip. The soundtrack combines an airliner taking off and a Blackcap singing.
Male Banded Demoiselle on Bramble
One of the glories of summer by water is the brilliant turquoise and green iridescence of the male Banded Demoiselle – the so-called band is actually the appearance of flickering of the wings, the dark spot on each of the four wings giving a hard-to-describe semblance of a sparkling blue jewel in flight, with bands of colour too fast and changeable for the eye to understand. But he’s pretty fine at rest, too.
Male Common Blue Damselfly
Common Blue, Bluetail, and Red-eyed Damselflies have all now emerged, the Red-eyed being the scarcest of the three, seemingly.
Soldier Beetle, Cantharis rustica on Cow Parsley
On the Cow Parsley were, as well as the damsels, two cantharid Soldier Beetles, Cantharis rustica or a close relative. Another enormous cloud of rising mayflies, and suddenly behind them a pair of Hobbies, hawking for insects – whether damselflies or even mayflies is impossible to tell. One comes close, wheels away on scything wings as it sees me.
Silver-Ground Carpet Moth Xanthorhoe montanata
A Silver-Ground Carpet Moth, Xanthorhoe montanata, flutters weakly past me among the Hawthorn bushes and flops onto the grass. Garden Warblers sing, a Whitethroat rasps in its songflight. A Treecreeper sings its little ditty sweetly from near the river.
On the hill, three Greylag and two Egyptian Geese form a peaceful flock. Stock Doves and a mixed flock of Crows and Jackdaws rise from the grass. A Song Thrush gives a marvellous solo recital near the road.
I try to get down to the pond on Frog Day because, whatever the weather, it’s always such fun looking into trays, seeing what people have caught, and helping people to get a rough idea of what sort of wildlife they are looking at. The parents too are frequently fired up with (especially boyish) enthusiasm. One dad turned out to be expert at catching newts; another family caught dozens of tadpoles (all still without legs).
Pond Dipping on Frog Day
People come and go; some are regulars, some are new, some were just passing by and are astonished to find a nature reserve here, let alone a pond and volunteers and free pond-dipping and wriggly wild animals.
Beetle larva from the pond
And there definitely weren’t just the usual suspects in the water, either.
Budding Freshwater Hydra, with a nymph
This really was a surprise; a Hydra, not just bright green but actually budding. These tiny animals are coelenterates, like corals and jellyfish, with no proper gut running mouth-to-anus, but just a mouth surrounded by the tentacles, and a hollow bag of a body; anything undigested has to come out the way it went in. The animal is green with symbiotic algae, so it has quite a bit of plant about it, and when it isn’t in a white dish, it’s practically invisible.
Stonefly
This little fly has two tails, and may well be a Stonefly; it is a lot smaller than the common Mayflies, which have three tails. It seems like a special animal today.
Looking at a Dragonfly Nymph
A fine Dragonfly nymph was captured in one dish; here it is, being examined closely by one youngster. I saw a Broad-Bodied Chaser near the pond some years ago, so it might be that species.
Nymphs and waterfleas
With their characteristic three tails, the Mayfly nymphs are distinctive. Here in one dish are some, along with what seems to be a long slim beetle nymph, and the Dragonfly nymph. There were quite a few Damselfly nymphs about too, some quite boldly green.
Yellow Iris or Flag
At four we packed up to go and have a well-deserved cup of tea. As I turned round, I realised the Yellow Irises the other side of the boardwalk were in full bloom.
“We’ve had a creationist … babbling away in the comments. He’s not very bright and he’s longwinded, always a disastrous combination, and he tends to echo tedious creationist tropes that have been demolished many times before. But hey, I’m indefatigable, I can hammer at these things all day long.”
Thus speaks Pharyngula (P. Z. Myers), most indefatigable of science (or should that be, anti-nonscience) bloggers. He’s been at it since 2002, and in that time he’s written about a huge range of topics.
On the way, he’s acquired a nonscience enemy who’s closely enough stuck to him (opposites attract) to have an antiblog of the same name. It’s almost a fanpop website, complete with photo portraits, CV, and a section called ‘What the heck is a pharyngula?’ which actually answers its own question. It’s a stage in the embryonic development of vertebrates, following the more familiar blastula, gastrula and neurula stages (pay attention at the back there).
He has even, by dint of writing accurately and entertainingly, and by speaking truth to twaddle, acquired his own Wikipedia article, quite a feat since generally self-published blogs are considered inherently “non-notable” by that august establishment. My spellchecker just suggested “Windpipe” for Wikipedia, not a bad try. Anyway, Windpipe tells me he won the 2005 Koufax (who?) Award for Best Expert Blog, and he certainly deserves it.
But too much of Pharyngula’s time, and the world’s, is taken up with kicking “Bad science” – he also has categories for “Bad Science”, Creationism, Godlessness, Denialism, Kooks, and Weirdness, and I expect I missed a few more. It’s a lot of energy.
I’ll write about the history of it another time – the Argument from Design thing has been going on since at least 1713, when the Revd. William Derham published his Physico-Theology.
William Derham’s Physico-Theology, first published 1713 (this edition 1723)
The curious thing about physico-theology, natural theology, intelligent design, Paleyism or what have you is that it is a circular argument. There’s assumed to be a Creator. The Creator is assumed to be good. Things in nature are seen to be well-adapted, e.g. the wings of birds are well adapted to enable them to fly. Since birds have been created, the Creator must be good, and must exist. Errm, something not quite right in this argument… it’s logically hopeless to assume what you’re trying to prove, regardless of any external facts. Assuming for sake of argument that there is a good Creator, the existence of birds with well-adapted wings says precisely nothing about that Creator. The birds might always have existed, or might have been created in a Manichean universe by an evil being, or might have evolved all by themselves, there’s no telling just from the excellence of adaptation of the wings on the bird.
Curiously, “the survival of the fittest” looks at first sight like a circular argument, and intelligent writers like John Stewart Collis have fallen into the trap of thinking that’s what it is. But it isn’t. Darwin didn’t say that the ones that survive, survive, so species evolved — the first part says nothing, and evolution doesn’t follow. Darwin did say that the ones that don’t survive, don’t have children. It’s a what-happens-in-the-next-generations argument, and that breaks the circularity. Or to look at it from the present back to the past, back all the way to the origins of life on Earth, each thing living now is descended from parents and ancestors which survived long enough to reproduce, while countless others failed to do so. Some were simply unlucky: in Darwin’s words, nature is prodigal: tremendously wasteful. Others were just slightly less well-adapted, just slightly less likely to survive long enough to reproduce, and did not so survive. The result: in each generation, the offspring carry the genes of the just slightly better adapted. Darwin was right, it is a prodigiously wasteful mechanism. A more wasteful approach could not be devised — you generate a tremendous variety, and in each generation you throw almost all of it away. Out of thousands of eggs in frogspawn, only a few will become adult frogs; out of tens of millions of eggs of the Atlantic cod, only a few will become adult fish that breed. “Only the fittest survive”: not exactly. Many perfectly fit fish are unlucky. But the fit ones are on average luckier than the rest. It’s a slippery argument, though not really complicated, and it has to be stated carefully. But it has proven to be a pons asinorum for far too many.
Right, I don’t review poetry books, and I don’t read them that often either, though I have my favourites. But this one is extraordinary. I very nearly read it in one sitting, as Claire Tomalin claims she did on the back cover, but I had to make do with two sittings instead. Gushing newspaper critics often say they couldn’t put a book down. In the case of Padel’s Darwin, it was almost true for me.
Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter. She heard her grandmother (and Darwin’s biographer) Nora Barlow, aged 95, reminiscing about her grandfather. Reading this book, I was in no doubt that Padel, too, could easily have written a prose biography of her ancestor. But I’m very glad she didn’t. What she has achieved in Darwin, A Life in Poems is a miracle of conciseness. We say a picture is worth a thousand words: a good poem, more so. With a poet’s and a granddaughter’s sensibility, Padel builds up, step by step, poem by poem, a glittering portrait of the great man. Each moment is encapsulated, seemingly without effort, certainly without a wasted word, in a short poem.
I read the first one or two, and felt — they were quite good, and I might soon stop for a cup of tea. I read the next few and the little marginal notes attentively, and started to feel these were rather enjoyable, easy to take in, giving quite a nice picture of the young Darwin in Shrewsbury. I began to reflect on the choice of imagery, how collecting allowed him “to assert control over what’s unbearable.” Unbearable. Collection was about pain? I read a few more. Barmouth: “A child on a beach, alone.” Five lines of the eleven in the poem were a single extended quote from Darwin’s own notes, laid out as verse. Ingenious. Did they scan? Yes, they seemed to have a kind of metre. How subtle were her rhythms? An hour later I was still reading.
Rhythm, metre, the feel of the words; the choice of topics; the use of materials; the different shapes of the various poems. Many are short, in three-line stanzas: “The forms are themselves. They do not change with the changing light / but unfurl in the mind. They swirl and settle new / in the kaleidoscope in his head” — it could be the start of something quite abstract, something about a drug addict or … a visionary. That poem is “The Tiger in Kensington Gardens”, Darwin’s thought wandering to imagining “if a tiger stalked across the plain behind / how feeling would be ignited”. It is light as thistledown, compact, dreamy.
One or two poems are longer: Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Journey up the Sadong River” — Padel travelled extensively in the East, wrote a nature book, Tigers in Red Weather — has four-line stanzas, more of a plodding rhythm, an earnest self-taught Victorian: it is with a shock I realize the first 27½ lines are a direct quote from Wallace! What a marvellous, virtuoso trick: what confidence as a poet, what insight to feel and to share Wallace’s prose for what it is, at its best: exciting poetry.
And the pieces fit together to make the puzzle: the wood comes into focus from the individual trees: Darwin the man emerges from the hundred-odd poems. How did she do that? I suppose a prose writer can occasionally get away with a flabby analogy, a woolly opinion, a soggy simile. A poet cannot: certainly not a modern poet, writing short pieces: each must work, or fail utterly.
I have read a few ‘natural history poems’, some simply bad, some cheerfully zoological, like Walter Garstang’s The Ballad of the Veliger (The Veliger’s a lively tar, the liveliest afloat… ), some, like Ted Hughes’s animals, enjoyably insightful. But I’ve never before experienced the life of a naturalist, perhaps the greatest one at that, in a whole book of poems, and it works wonderfully. Darwin, A Life in Poems is quite simply a triumph.
I suppose you are familiar with the ghettoisation of Britain’s towns and cities. To take a few rather random examples, Bath, Bradford-on-Avon, Edinburgh, Marlborough and Oxford are seen as ‘nice’ (terrible word), become populated with the middle class, Waitrose, estate agents and boutique shops, and suffer enormous rises in house prices, while nearby places are seen as less desirable, acquire sink housing estates, crime, and scruffy concrete jungles where once there were perfectly decent town centres. Areas of London do the same, but in a more rapidly shifting way, as the sheer pressure of population, and the desperate shortage of housing, forces people into scruffier areas which thus become ‘gentrified’ (though hardly by landed gentry, actually).
Perhaps the ghettoisation of nature is a little less familiar. As a boy, I was allowed out to go and do as I pleased in between meals (ah, those happy days when we didn’t know about paedophile celebrities: mind you, nobody is actually suggesting they stalked the countryside attacking random children, they had more subtle means of approach. But I digress). We used to go down the stream and build dams — the farmer never seemed to mind, and I guess our small engineering works of sticks, mud and stones never lasted long. It was tremendous fun watching the water well up, and exciting to run for more materials as the level rose and the water found new places to escape; I don’t think we ever tried to construct an intentional spillway anywhere. Or we wandered out in autumn to gather blackberries, returning with heavy plastic bags full of the squashy fruit, demanding blackberry-and-apple pie for supper like latter-day Peter Rabbit siblings. We scarcely remarked on the Yellowhammers in every hedge, Song Thrushes in the woods, Lapwings, Skylarks and Grey Partridges in the open fields: they were just there. There were Spotted Flycatchers, Swifts and House Martins nesting in the village, too; we noticed these last as the upstairs windows couldn’t be opened for months to avoid breaking their nests.
Leaving aside whether parents will allow children to go out unsupervised nowadays — kids have to learn to take care of themselves eventually, and the sooner they learn to be sensible, the better, specially if they have fun and play adventurously at the same time, a visit to the countryside today will, on average, involve less than half as many farmland birds as in 1970, and far fewer than that in the case of Lapwings, Skylarks and Grey Partridges. The countryside has emptied of birds — and of bumblebees and primroses and much else.
Instead, if you want to see Nature (the capital letter is intentional) you go to an official Nature Reserve. If you want to see a traditional village you study the web or the official Heritage handbook, fuel the car, pack a picnic, and travel to the official Heritage site, or rather to the official Heritage car-park complete with high-visibility-jacketed attendants and ticket machines, and walk down the officially landscaped path (keep off the official bit of woodland with bulbs underfoot to the officially declared bit of Heritage. It looks pretty attractive, but for the hordes of amateur photographers taking pictures of hordes of amateur photographers, ice-cream lickers, picnickers, dog-walkers, beer-swillers and motorcycle enthusiasts (why do oily chains, throbbing Harley-Davidsons and polished chrome go with pretty places? Answers on a postcard, please) in every street.
The official Nature Reserve also has a car park, which is at least generally free, at least to members. There is a big official sign with a colourful map, sometimes painted with happy butterflies, frogs, foxes and woodpeckers — the more conspicuously coloured species seem to be favoured in this form of natural selection, perhaps aposematism has something to do with it. There are quite often free maps and nature trails, even colouring sheets and clipboards for crayon-carrying children. Sometimes the trees and flowers are officially labelled as well, complete with Heritage notes about what Comfrey used to be grown for in the days when real people lived in the countryside (it was to help healing of bones, if you’re curious), or what Hazel coppicing was and why it was practised (tufts of small straight flexible wands, cut and used to make hurdles to fence in animals temporarily, and so on).
All of this effort is quite admirable in its way: relaxation, getting out of the house for the day, being together as a family, learning a little history, a little about nature. But what has been lost in the process is more striking: freedom, simple personal discovery and exploration (think blackberry-picking, dam-building, just coming across birds singing and bees buzzing). Don’t get me wrong, given the lack of nature in ordinary farmland there is a pressing need to rescue at least some areas of habitat; and given people’s cramped urban lives, it’s right they have some attractive places to visit. All the same, Nature, like Heritage, is being ghettoised. The process has not yet run to completion in Britain — there are still magnificent areas of mountain, moorland and coast where you can wander free of twee signs and uniformed attendants — but the paraphernalia are spreading: you can find them on Access Land in Northumberland, for instance.
As Joni Mitchell sang long ago, “Take all the trees / Put ’em in a tree museum. Charge all the people / A dollar and a half just to see ’em. Don’t it always seem to go / But you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. / They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
