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| marsh samphire - walberswick |
When I first came to live in
Suffolk I was shocked by many things. I was shocked by the tameness and
emptiness of the agricultural land, the restraint of villages but most of all I
was shocked by the conventional human world in which I found myself and its
relationship with plants. I was no longer living amongst the alternative earth
warriors of Oxford, nor with the radical medicine people of the American
desert. This was small-town England where flowers lived under tight control in
gardens, or in nature reserves for their scientific and educational interest.
Of course the wild strip of shifting coastline was exciting, its birch copses,
mudflats, and gorse-scattered heath. I had loved these waterlands for many
years and was happy to return. But becoming part of its human community was
something I had not bargained for.
In your twenties, in the bohemian city,
friendships come easily. You dance together, you sleep together, you get drunk
together, you give each other work, live in each other’s houses; everything is
shared. But as you get older life can calcify and become static - a fixed
house, job, family - and these easy-going social relationships end. If you go
travelling this open exchange continues because everyone’s lives are still
fluid; people come and go, in and out of your life, and it doesn’t matter what
age you are.
But in Southwold it really does.
But in Southwold it really does.
When I walk into a local lecture
given by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, practically everyone has white hair. It is
given by a warden of a nearby area called the Breckland. Once known as the
desert of England, with sand-dunes and strange forest pools, it is a particular territory with its own distinct
flora and fauna. The keeper explains the measures they take to keep this flora
and fauna in abundance. Whenever he shows a slide of something good happening
(Breckland thyme is increasing) everyone in the audience goes ooooh, and when there is a depressing
statistic (the numbers of sand larks are down this year) aaahh goes the audience, as
if we are in some kind of old timer’s music hall. At the interval I ask the
speaker about the particulars of a certain rare wormwood that grows there, and
he gives me a queer look. Artemisia
campestris, he says. Field wormwood. And I realise it is a look of horror,
of a man trapped in a net. I do not go back.
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| sea lavender - river blyth |
However I don’t give up on my human and plant communications. On May day I go to the blessing of the nearby bluebell wood by a band of local vicars. In the summer I take part in the Suffolk Hedgerow project, detailing all the trees in the neighbourhood hedges. I go to plant sales, flower festivals, garden openings and Greenpeace fairs, but there is something about joining in with these ventures I can’t quite do. There is something in the women’s faces, the ones who serve the tea and cake, the volunteers who seem to organise everything. They are my age or older. There is something in their eyes, in the way they are nervous and jittery with each other, sometimes making mistakes with the money, or silly comments - something repressed, inverted, as if their natural intelligence and creativity will never be allowed to burst out of them whilst they are serving in these places.
One warm August evening a small old
lady approaches me at a garden party. She has overheard me talking animatedly about
sheep’s bit scabious. Her name is Pam Ellis and for the last twenty five years
she has run a botanical show at the local museum. “You are going to take over
from me,” she said. “Do you know the Latin names.?”“Yes,” I replied, “Good,”
she said. And carried on talking to the others.
Of course I had no intention of
taking over. I had a horror of becoming one of those Women Who Did the Flowers
I had seen at the church jumble sales. But I had not counted on Pam’s
persuasive powers. She was a formidable botanist and mycologist, as was her
husband who had begun the flower display originally, when the museum was also a
natural history collection. Botanists, like writers, rarely give up their
passion. In fact, this passion usually increases with age. When the curator
rang asking me to visit them at the museum, I found myself saying I would do it
on one condition, that I was allowed to write a paper each week to go with the
exhibition.
“I’m radical!” I warned them.
The curator smiled. He had found my weak spot. “You can write what you like,” he said. “Now these are the jars and this is where you fetch the water.”
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| southwold museum |
But most of all I liked sitting down at my desk and deciding what I was going to write for the wild flower collective, as I called it. It was like having a column again, something I had not had enjoyed for years. I was unashamedly enthusiastic. I wrote about politics and poetry, railed against agricultural pesticides and the council’s slaying of roundabout orchids, the radical apothecary Nicholas Culpeper; I interviewed ecologists and ornithologists and the guardians of the local woods and reedbeds; I walked for miles over the heathlands, sat in preserved meadows and hidden wastelands, wrote about vibes of places and gave the medicinal properties of all the plants, their countryside lore and their Latin names (as promised to Pam). By the end of the summer 180 different wild plants had appeared on the museum’s sunny windowsill.
But I never met any people.
Occasionally the curator or one of the volunteers when I went in to refresh the
flowers would praise the display. Everyone loves it, they told me. And you are
so knowledgeable! But something in me rankled. I didn’t like to think about it,
but I knew nobody took any notice of what I was writing. I had a feeling that I
was being humoured. Just so long as the flowers were done.
I went to interview the creator of
the Hedgerow Project and asked him about the community and the countryside. He
had spent a good deal of his time travelling to villages all over Suffolk and I
thought he might give me a clue about belonging. He looked at me
“There is very little enterprise,” he said mildly. “It’s mostly newcomers who get involved.”
“There is very little enterprise,” he said mildly. “It’s mostly newcomers who get involved.”
One week I decided to write about the 18th century
poet and part-time botanist, George Crabbe. George Crabbe is an unusual poet. He
is well known as the poet of this coastline, but although his lines are
suffused with the nature of these marshes and shores there is nothing romantic
or poetic about them. His poem The
Borough is famous for inspiring Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, however the classical music festival founded on this
opera, bears little trace of the nature of the poet, let alone the damned
heroes and heroines of his epic tales. Crabbe hated Aldeburgh, and yet it
transfixed his imagination for his whole life. His passion lay in the
waterlands that surrounded the town. For in his heart, he was a lover of wild
plants.
I set myself the task of reading the works of Crabbe, to find all the plants that appeared in his poems for the next exhibition and to find appropriate quotations for the cards. I spoke with Neil Powell, a local poet and writer who had just published a new biography of Crabbe to ask about the flowers. You have to read about suffocated clover, he told me. It’s key. He had spent hours on the beach between Thorpeness and Aldeburgh looking for this tiny plant.People speak with raptures of fine prospects, clear skies, lawns, parks and the blended beauties of art and nature,” he wrote to his friend Edmund Cartwright in 1792, “but give me a wild wide fen in a foggy day with quaking boggy ground and trembling hillocks in a putrid soil; shut in by the closeness of the atmosphere, all about is like a new creation and every botanist an Adam who explores and names the creatures he meets with.”
“Did you find it.?” I asked.
“I think I did,” he said. “But then I am not sure.”
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| viper's bugloss - cambridgeshire |
Meadow clovers are easy to see. They appear profusely in midsummer, beloved by bees, honey-bringers, nitrogen-fixers. They appear in their different colours in the jars on the windowsill: crimson and white, sometimes a pale tufted yellow, or in the shape of strawberries. But to distinguish the smaller clovers you have, like Crabbe to get down on your knees and have a good look. On the bare ground, on the heathland track, you find them, squashed and tiny amongst the rabbit-bitten dune grass, burrowing, reversing, clustering, suffocating, hiding themselves away from human tread. As you peer among the other pea-flowers, trefoils and fenugreek, miniscule sparks of yellow and white, you find yourself in a different world. The startling pink veins of the birdsfoot show you all the beauty of the small things, of myriad other worlds within this one. You feel the enormity of being alive, of so many possibilities, as if you could begin again, yet the human world is so old, so repressive, how can you shine in your own right? How can the future begin?
You might not want to look closely
like this, but somehow you have to. You have to think of Crabbe as he stands
exhuberant in the primordial fen, downtrodden and despised in his various
curacies. You have to consider yourself, squashing your knowledge and breadth of vision for a new
world into these small cards on a windowsill. You want like all writers to
share this knowledge, your love of the natural world, have an intelligent and
lively conversation with your peers, but the old forms will not let you. Hemmed
in by taxonomy, by a restricted imagination, by minds trained to dismiss the
wild and the beautiful, you can get no further than a smile. You are clever to know the Latin names,
the women will say down at the museum and look away. Nature table, says the guide to the local museums of England.
Community is a feel-good word in
the modern world, but there are good historical reasons to be wary of them, for
their unconscious collective intent can stifle one’s very life-force. People
from the outside, visitors, city people, often imagine country communities to
be well-meaning friendly village things. They do not recognise them, as
agencies of constriction and conformity. No one who has paid close attention to
the testimonies in Akenfield recorded
by Ronald Blyth in the late sixties however could be romantic about community
in Suffolk. Everyone yearns to get out of Akenfield; no one would want to live
in The Borough. Enjoying a country retreat is one thing, becoming part of the
local collective is another. No creative individual really wants to belong to a
community. Not if they are smart. It provides you with roles that you have no
business playing.
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| sandwort - southwold |
ii
When you read poetry you need to
crack the poem’s linguistic code, and find out what the poet is really saying,
beyond history, beyond literature, underneath all that difficult style. The
flowers cracked the code of Crabbe’s writing for me, as I struggled through
pages of rhyming couplets. Bitter and repressed plants are everywhere in his
work. Especially the end-of-the world wormwoods. Artemisia campestris is one of the plants he requests for his
botanical garden in Mumford. “Wholesome wormwood” is spied by Orlando in The Lover’s Journey as he speeds through
the green lanes. Southernwood appears outside Ellen Orford’s door in The Borough.
Like the clovers and grasses he loved to seek out, Crabbe’s human subjects are the undistinguished worth paying attention to,” I write for the exhibition in late July. “And he presents their lives with all the accuracy of a botanist, rather than the idealisation of the romantic or classical artist. Where he can be as florid and as mannered as anyone of his time, writing to the aristocracy for patronage for example, when speaking of plants and the land his language is modern and direct. It blows like a breath of fresh air through the formal gardens and hierarchical houses and universities which as a saltmaster’s son from Aldeburgh he was not heir to.
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| emerging sea kale - aldeburgh beach |
I walked around Crabbe’s Aldeburgh in search of the
“unsightly weeds” his son wrote were so precious to his father. I walked around
the fens and waterlands, finding the “soft slimy mallow of the marsh”, creeping
dwarf sallows, wiry-stemmed salt lavender, bull-rush, sea cotton and sea asters
that appear in his poetry, and the atriplex
he loved to grow in his botanical garden. I walked through the blighted
agricultural fields, finding painted viper’s bugloss and field poppy, sea poppy
and sea-pea along the Aldeburgh shoreline. I thought I found suffocated clover. But I am not a botanist and tiny
introverted clovers are not easy to distinguish.
Suffocated clover is the “new species” of plant that Crabbe was delighted to come across and name. However it was also identified by another botanist in Norfolk, and the plant’s “discovery” was formally given to him. It was a disappointment to Crabbe. Disappointment was a great part of his repertoire. Disappointment, despair, derangement, and most of all claustrophobia. It was this emotional tone I recognised from my own experience of rural Suffolk, a dark undertow that you can hear in Britten’s music also – a certain gloom and oppression, a feeling tone linked with the spirits of the oppressed:
Suffocated clover is the “new species” of plant that Crabbe was delighted to come across and name. However it was also identified by another botanist in Norfolk, and the plant’s “discovery” was formally given to him. It was a disappointment to Crabbe. Disappointment was a great part of his repertoire. Disappointment, despair, derangement, and most of all claustrophobia. It was this emotional tone I recognised from my own experience of rural Suffolk, a dark undertow that you can hear in Britten’s music also – a certain gloom and oppression, a feeling tone linked with the spirits of the oppressed:
He knows the plants as he knows the difficulties of the villagers. He writes as an insider with an outsider’s eye, unencumbered by the classical allusions of eighteenth century poetry, or the reforming zeal of the nineteeth century novel. It is the ‘what is’ of his writing that is startling and original. This makes him however a difficult and unfashionable poet to read: for the suffering of Keats or Shelley can still speak to every youth with a strong imagination and desire. And there is none of this sensitive poet in Crabbe. The suffering is of a deeper, maturer sort. It comes from experience: not only an awareness of his own difficult childhood, his awkward position in society (he burned his botanical treatise for example when told by a Cambridge don it was worthless because not written in educated Latin) but also from his first hand observations as an apothecary, surgeon and curate at the beginning of the industrial era.
Crabbe's (hidden) opium addiction connected him to the dark mental and emotional residue that English society does not wish to account for: uneasy moods, fickleness of perception, lack of compassion, blighted lives, cursed outsiders, the nightmare visions of his tales for which the marsh and fen and sea are perfect mirrors. The ‘wild amphibious race’ he writes of are the same as the boggy ground and sterile soil of Suffolk. These are not metaphors.
This is why E.M. Forster says ‘to speak of Crabbe is to speak of England’. He is saying what exists, not what should or could be. For these things he is the poet of our thistles and tares. Those plants, like himself, which struggle out of the inhospitable soils. Not for him the dancing daffodils of Wordsworth or the mystic rose of Blake or the imaginal globed peonies of Keats. His poetry is full of real human weeds rejected and scorned by the land-owning society. No one is going to come to Crabbe country in the way they can go to Hardy country or the poetic Lake District. Who would want to identity with the sadistic Peter Grimes or the religious maniac Jachin, the Parish Clerk? And yet to this day, the characters he describes are still here amongst us, within ourselves. Just as the Cambridge botanical garden he collected seeds from still exists. Just as the tiny suffocated clover still grows on Aldeburgh beach and the thistles in the fields spread their prickly arms, threatening war.
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| opium poppy - aldeburgh dunes |
I finished the shows on the Autumn
Equinox as the last of the year’s flowers were departing. Shortly afterwards I
was invited by the curator to a drinks party to celebrate the museum’s year
with all the trustees and volunteers. So
many people enjoyed the show, he said. But I couldn’t somehow enjoy myself
as I made an attempt to mingle. I felt
constrained and inarticulate in a way that was totally unnatural to me. I stood
awkwardly with a glass of sticky wine, whilst an old man ran down the arts
centre where I had just begun work.
These
creative places never last of course, he said dismissively.
I could not answer him. As I
struggled to find the words to defend myself, I felt a sudden immense pressure
bearing down on me. I could hardly breathe. Then I noticed a certain agitation
around me. My eyes glanced nervously around the room, as a sea of grey-haired
people wearing red poppies began to merge together. Then I realised: it was
November 11, and almost eleven o’clock. I looked at the crowd and they all
suddenly seemed like dead people drinking a toast to war and more war. May it
never end! I though I was going to pass
out. The atmosphere was suffocating.
Before I knew it, I was rushing out
of the Red Cross hut into the wild fresh autumnal air. Running, half-crying,
half-laughing, as far away from death, from grey-haired community, from the ooh and the ahh and the ghosts of the thousands of women who did the
flowers. The relief was extraordinary,
as if I had been let out of a prison. I was bursting out of hundreds of years
of church fetes and bell ringing and jam
cakes and politeness and charity cases and men who crushed the spirit of any
creative enterprise before it had a chance. We are free, I called to all the
poppy women constrained all these years, to all the plants, to all the writers,
as I ran and I ran across the green, the sea shining in the distance, with the
gorse-scented wind in my hair.
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| common wormwood - thorpeness |
Dark Mountain: Issue 20 - ABYSS is available 
phew! glad you got out. Lovely article.
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