The Open Garden: A Story with Four Essays. (1/2)
Title: The Open Garden: A Story with Four Essays.
Author: Christopher Milne.
Genre: Non-fiction, essays, fiction, literature, short stories, ecology, nature, religion, Christianity.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1985, 1988 (this collection 1988).
Summary: A collection of 4 essays and 1 short story. (Essays in this post, refer to PART 2 for the short story.) In the essay The Open Garden, the author discusses his approach to gardening and his understanding of the term "garden", as well as offering his interpretations of the symbology of the Garden of Eden. Efficiency and the Oil Beetle. is an essay that criticises our society's over-specialisation and search for over-efficiency, as compared to the fascinating anatomy and purposes of the oil beetle. The Egg, the Fox and the Dagger is the essay that examines the relationship humans have with animals and the natural world, and the relationship they should strive for to heal it. Beetles to Betelgeuse is an essay that highlights the importance of knowing the proper names of the plants, animals, insects, and stars around us in order to fully appreciate and connect to them and the natural world.
My rating: 8/10
My review:
♥ If you set off to climb Mount Everest or go on an expedition to the South Pole, it is probably that your venture will be seen as a contest, a battle between man and the forces of nature. And of course everyone hopes that you will win and return in triumph. But if instead you sail alone around the world, an undertaking that appears at first sight to call for a similar display of courage and endurance, you yourself may well not see it this way at all. "Weren't you ever afraid?" they will ask on your return. "Didn't you ever feel lonely?" Lonely? Afraid? No! Of course not! For you were not battling single-handed against the elements. You were no gladiator defying the cruel sea. Yours, when you came back, was no victory. You and the sea and the sky had been companions. You and they had been part of something that had contained the three of you - contained, maybe, everything else as well, everything you had left behind. But alone at sea was when you had been most conscious of not being alone.
These are the two ways of looking at the world. We are told often enough that the second is the better way of looking at our fellow humans - seeing ourselves and them as part of some larger community. Yet even this is hard enough. The United Nations? But we are not united. Even within individual nations there are divisions; and we spend most of our lives trying to outrival our neighbours. It is even harder to visualise man and nature as joint ingredients of something that contains them both. But sometimes we can manage it. And some of us manage it better than others.
I am too old to sail round the world, but I can still, when most of my fellow humans are in bed, make my way to a nearby hilltop and be alone with the sheep and the stars. I have no exciting story to tell on my return - just an experience that is difficult to describe but which can, I hope, be detected lying behind the four essays and the story that follows.
~~Introduction.
♥ And I fear that after a few minutes spent in our garden the visitor would shake his head. Too many daisies in the lawn. Roses need proper pruning. Colours not well grouped. And far too many weeds. Being polite, he would not say this out loud, but I should know quite well that he was thinking it. And I would want to explain to him that I like daisies in my lawn. Daisies are among the loveliest flowers in the world and the lawn is the correct place for them. To see them at their best you must wait for an evening when the sun is low on the horizon and their white petals are beginning to close to show their crimson tips. Then you must lie on the grass and face the sun and with your eyes at daisy level look at them against the sunset.
All gardens are the better cor a certain amount of explanation on the part of the gardener, but ours, I feel, needs more than most. "Weeds", did you say? It depends what you mean by weeds. If you are preferring to our shining cranesbill, our ivy-leaved toadflax, our birdsfoot trefoil, our common vetch, our catsears, our wall pennywort. . . . But Perhaps I had better begin at the beginning. The question "What is a weed? can wait. The first question to answer is "What is a garden?"
♥ Don't worry. If you have come to see our garden, and if by "garden" you mean what I think you mean, here is where it ends. Here is the unmarked frontier. Beyond is... call it what you like, but you must not think of it as wilderness waiting to be tamed or an enemy territory waiting to be conquered; for most emphatically it is neither. But if I take you no further, now that you are here I will just point out one or two things. The first is that you are standing three feet away from a hornets' nest. Does it bother you? I hope not, for they are really quite gentle creatures, and it has been giving us immense pleasure this summer to sit here and watch their comings and goings. At first it was just the queen. She was huge and made a noise like an aeroplane. (In fact on one occasion I thought I heard her approaching and it was an aeroplane.) She came every few minutes with materials for her nest, wood pulp that she would turn into brown paper. (You can see a little of it at the entrance to her hole if you come very close.) Then some weeks later the first of her children were born, her workers. Today there is growing activity as workers fly in and out, the nest is enlarged and the young grubs are fed.
Just below the hornets and stretching away to the right you will notice some half dozen citrus bushes. They were at their best a month ago, covered in pale purple flowers. Probably they are not a variety you will recognise, for they are in fact wild. We came upon their parents, a great community of them, while walking through the hills above Perugia. We sat down among them to eat our picnic lunch and afterwards I dug up a few of the smallest seedlings with my picnic knife and we brought them home. They don't seed themselves very readily, but with Lesley's help they managed to produce a few children, and these are they. They are a little elderly now and so perhaps next spring we will be planting out the grandchildren.
The brooms growing in the grass just above them - they too are over now - came from another hillside - in Brittany. I can never feel quite the same affection for a plant that arrives in a black plastic container from a garden centre.
Above the broom the grass is still uncut, cocksfoot and false oat standing waist high among the lower-growing meadow grass and Yorkshire fog. Further up the hillside the bracken grows even higher - well above my head - and at the top are the trees. There is a path to the top, and this I cleared a few weeks ago for the benefit of a visiting friend. It is always my hope that visitors will want me to escort them up this path and then down on the other side by another path. But mostly they don't. They are wearing the wrong shoes or have the wrong sort of legs, or the path looks too tough or too wet or too slippery. And so they just give it a glance and say "How nice!" At this time of year they will perhaps be thinking how much nicer it would look if the grass were cut. Yes, I agree; and I will be cutting it soon. Just now I am keeping it long for the benefit of the blues. (Why is it that, when I have explained that I am talking about butterflies, people always say, "Are they the large blues?" Of course they are not. Large blues are extinct in England and I most certainly do not have a secret colony here at Embridge. Ours are common blues - and to my eyes the most charming of all our butterflies.) My blues prefer their grass kept long. This is their dormitory. They spend the night clinging to the stems. And in the evening when the sun is behind the hill or again in the morning just after it has risen I go up this path very slowly and count them as I go. They are quite easy to see. One year, without moving, I was able to count twenty and then, moving to another place, a further twenty. But this was followed by a bad year in which our little colony all but disappeared. Since then they have been slowly recovering. Four. Six. Eight. This year, a few days ago, in one little patch of grass looking just as inviting, there were none. It is the same year after year: always here, on the left of the path. Seldom elsewhere.
Our little slope offers us a whole succession of delights throughout the year. Around the middle of January we start looking out for the first celandine and the first primrose and in February for the first daffodil. By March the entire slope is more yellow than green. By April the violets are appearing, the daffodils are dying, and primroses and celandines are at their best. In May the apple trees come into blossom, and, on the ground, yellow has been succeeded by blue - the blue of our million bluebells. Later this blue is patched with pink as the campions come out. By June the grasses are in flower and in July and August they are joined by the butterflies - meadow browns, gatekeepers and common blues.
I take no credit for any of this. They were all here when we came, though less visible. All I do is to tidy up when they go and then welcome them back the following year.
♥ But gardens are not rooted only in the soil; they are also rooted in the past. And however much we are influenced by the gaily coloured catalogues that come our way and by the latest ideas and suggestions for that ideal garden that could so easily be ours, there will always remain, for most of us, buried deep in our memory, visions of the gardens we know as children, those flowers we first met and fell in love with when we were scarcely able to walk. I can admire the latest rose or the latest chrysanthemum, triumphs of the plant-breeder's art. But the humble marigold or forget-me-not (so aptly named) or sweet william, if I allow my eyes to settle on it, as a bee or a butterfly will settle, and if I spend a few moments quietly drinking in its beauty, will stir emotions much deeper and stronger. The fuchsias and geraniums in the tiny back garden of the house in London where I was born; the periwinkles that - still clearly visible - grew on some forgotten bank somewhere at Decoy, the cottgage near Angmering where we stayed when I was four; orange and yellow azaleas from my grandfather's home on the Hamble; and from Cotchford the phloxes, michelmas daisies, pinks, sweet williams, nasturtiums, marigolds and forget-me-nots: these are the flowers I like to have around me here. And when I feel the need, I go to them. And it may be their colour or it may be their scent, or the way they grow or how they move in the wind or how they look on a particular day against the sky or against the grass - something, some characteristic that is peculiarly theirs, will pull a chord and stir a memory and open a door; and then a sudden most palpable gush of joy will flood through my body.
If it is the flower gardens of my childhood that I see again in our flower garden at Embridge, then it is surely the countryside of my childhood, the Sussex countryside, that I am looking for on the hill above. This is why it has been so difficult to find a satisfying name for it. The obvious name, "wild garden", is quite wrong. There never was a wild garden in my childhood. No, it is the meadows and woods where I used to wander in search of birds' nests. It is the lanes and footpaths and hedgebanks that I visited on primrosing or blackberrying expeditions. It is the old apple orchard where I went to climb trees. And at the very top oit might almost be the top of Ashdown Forest. So part of it is sometimes known as "the copse" (though I doubt if any of the trees growing there have ever been coppiced in their lives) and part is known as "the orchard" and the whole is just vaguely "the top".
There is something reassuring about a name. It pins a thing down. It identifies it and gives us a feeling that now we understand it. Even a mysterious pain is less worrying once we have attached a name to it. And if we have a choice of names we will prefer the one that seems to suggest and so reinforce the sort of relationship we wish to establish with its owner.
♥ What had been his hopes? Had they been disappointed? Had it all been a failure? No, I don't think so. Adam had been quite right. They had not been expelled as a punishment for their misbehaviour. Eden was never intended to be their permanent home. It was where they lived, under their father's care, while they were children. It was their nursery garden.
As such it was like all good nurseries. Though the outside world contained, inevitably, both good and evil, safety and danger, pleasure and pain, inside everything was good and safe and pleasant. In the end, however, all children leave home. And so, when they were old enough to look after themselves, they shook themselves free of nursery discipline. They disobeyed. They ate the apple; and thus they learned what now they needed to know - that the world outside was not a wholly good and safe place. They acquired that most necessary piece of wisdom, an ability to distinguish what was good from what was bad.
If this was their last lesson, what was their first? What is any child's first lesson? It is what he learns through playing with his toys. The Garden of Eden was well equipped with toys to play with: indeed it was itself one vast toy. It was a toy world. A toy is a model, conveniently small and conveniently simple, of a reality the child will meet and will need to understand when he is older. As he plays with it - his teddy bear or his building bricks - so he begins this understanding. God, their father, had made the world. Like many another father he wanted his children to inherit from him what he had created and continue the work that he had begun. And he wanted them to do this with all the love and pleasure and pride that had been his. Eden as a nursery was a good and safe place because all nurseries need to be good and safe. As a toy it was good and safe for a different reason. It mirrored the world not as it was but as it might be - that unattainable ideal towards which mankind must strive. Today we look back on Eden as something lost through man's wickedness. It was no more lost to mankind than was my home in Sussex lost to me when at the age of twenty I left it to become a soldier. Lost? I have taken it with me wherever I have gone. It is with me at this very minute more strongly than ever.
♥ ..these were all as much a part of our garden as were the more conventional beds and lawns lower down, and whatever I chose to do up there - whether cutting the long grass with my sickle or planting and tending my trees or putting up nesting boxes fore blue tits or counting butterflies or watching an interesting beetle or picking a small bunch of the earliest spring flowers for Clare's bedroom or merely lying on my back on the ground and closing my eyes - all this was gardening in its truest sense; and the distinction between catsears and coreopsis, between common vetch and sweet pea, was an artificial one.
♥ Finally, there was the stream itself. Once my mother had accepted that it was never going to be crystal-clear and asparkle with goldfish she had abandoned it to him; and he and I shared the pleasure of exploring its weedy depths with a fishing net, learning about its strange inhabitants. And surely here was born my present understanding of the full meaning of the word "garden". For the best streams contained more than just what you put in them - goldfish from a goldfish shop - more even than what, as you glanced in, you noticed there. They contained also - and far more excitingly - everything you might see there, everything that was there.
In the same way, our garden here at Embridge includes not only our cultivated flowers and shrubs and bushes and trees - all the things that we have imported from outside. It includes also all the wild and native plants that were here already, both those we like and those we don't. It includes not only the robins and tits that we invite to our bird table but the willow warbler that stings from the oak tree, the buzzard that circles overhead and the bullfinch that strips the buds off our flowering cherry. It includes not only the red admirals and tortoiseshells that come (as we had hoped they would) to our buddleia but also the vast multitude of other insects, millions upon millions of them, that live here unseen. And best of all it includes those creatures, whether plants or animals, that I shall be meeting for the first time next year - meeting, watching, identifying and learning about, What a lot of pleasure I shall find in their company!
♥ Having widened my definition of the word "garden", I now want to narrow it a little. A toy is a toy. It is not a tool. It is an end in itself, not a means to an end. Our gardens are toy worlds in which and with which we must feel ourselves free to play as we please. In the real world that exists outside our garden we do many things of which we may be bitterly ashamed. But at least we can make the plea of necessity. We did not wish to destroy our forests but we were cold and needed to warm ourselves. We were hungry and we needed to grow more food. You cannot expect a farmer to put primroses before progress and prosperity. In our imaginary world, our ideal world, there must be no place for excuses such as these.
So, to keep our "gardens" pure and uncontaminated by outside realities, to enable us to develop within them a philosophy undistorted by outside demands, we must exclude the vegetable garden. Here at Embridge this is easily done: ours is quite separate, surrounded by a wall.
My definition of the word "garden" would therefore run something like this. It is a place, no matter how small, that is ours and where our fellow humans leave us free to do much as we please. It serves no purpose other than to be what it is, somewhere where we can work out and express that relationship with the natural world that we find most satisfying.
So what is our relationship with the plants and animals in our garden?
If we look to the Bible for our instructions we find them clearly stated in the first chapter of Genesis. "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it: have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowls of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Yes, man had first to become the lord and master of the world he had inherited. He had to bring it under his control and teach it to obey him. Once they had left Eden Adam had to become head gardener.
♥ Our love of nature is something we inherit from our distant past. The beauty we see in a flower is not something that belongs to that flower - like its petals or its calyx - and which we then happen to notice. It lies in the relationship that exists between flower and man. Our feelings for natural beauty arise out of a past experience - both our own childhood past and our ancestral past - that the natural world has been good to us. It has been our nursery, our home, indeed our mother. "Mother Nature": the phrase still has real meaning for many of us. Our lives spring from her life, our health from her health. And so we look for that gentle, predictable, reassuring rise and fall of her breathing that tells us she is alive and well, that to-and-fro movement that carries her through the seasons and is repeated year after year. Endless repetition, yet always with a slight difference. Endless variety, yet always within limits of conformity. No two trees - indeed no two leaves - ever exactly alike. No plant - indeed no flower - ever perfectly symmetrical. This is how it has always been. This is how we expect it. This is how we love it. This is beauty.
So those who wish only to command may plant their 100 all-but-identical houseleeks, but those who wish to worship will plant a rose.
♥ I have defined a garden as a place where we express, whether consciously or not, our feelings for the natural world. And I have described how my own gardening philosophy was modified by what I discovered when we came to Embridge. Two further discoveries have confirmed and strengthened it.
The first is the growing realisation of the immense harm that man is doing to the world in which he lives, both in distant tropical forests and close at hand on English farms. Undoubtedly there was once a time when dominating nature seemed the correct thing to do. That was what nature was for: to supply us with our needs like a faithful slave. But even a slave must be healthy and strong if he is to give good service, and it is now increasingly apparent that the natural world is very far from healthy.
My second discovery came from the world of science. It was the change in attitude of the scientist to what he was studying Classical science - the science that originated with men like Galileo, Newton and Descartes - saw the world as a machine that could be dismantled and examined cog by cog, a machine that was quite separate from the mechanic who was tinkering with it trying to find out how it worked. Such an attitude has served us and is indeed still serving us well. But scientists are today becoming aware of its limitations. There are times when the world is best seen as a living organism that cannot be dismantled for detailed expatiation and treatment, for it is more than the sum of its separate parts. It is a system of inter-relationships and self-adjustments, a system to which the scientist himself inescapably belongs.
♥ ..If our farmers are busily destroying our native British wild life, they can at least, in their ignorance, plead an excuse. The economics of modern farming and the exhortations that come from the Ministry of Agriculture and from the manufactures of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and artificial fertilisers all urge them on their way. But we gardeners are not obliged to imitate them. Indeed there is now every reason for not doing so, for trying to save what little is left, for turning our gardens into sanctuaries for the persecuted refugees of modern agriculture.
I may not have hung a notice on my garden gate saying "Garden Open Today". Nevertheless it is open - all day and every day - though not to the passing holiday-maker or member of our local horticultural society not indeed to humans at all. It is open to all the rest of us, fellow natives, both plant and animal. Here, if I have what they need, I am happy to give them refuge until the day comes when they can return to their homeland, to the fields and the woods that, in a moment of aberration, we once took from them.
~~The Open Garden.
♥ We asked a naturalist friend, a great authority. But alas his authority extended only to birds, and he could not tell us. This is the trouble with naturalists these days. They know so much about so little. They specialise too narrowly, and outside their chosen field know less than I do. In the end I found the answer quite by chance - in a book I was reading. The two bees, so different in appearance and behaviour, were in fact male and female of the same species. They were "flower bees" and he was not attacking her. He was making love.
♥ If you pick up an oil beetle and allow it to explore your finger it will probably in self-defence exude little drops of yellowish liquid from all its joints. It is this oily liquid that gives the beetle its name. It is supposed to be evil-smelling, like the milky liquid you get on your fingers when you pick up a grass snake, and this is intended to discourage would-be assailants. But though Fabre says it makes your fingers "stink", I have not noticed it; and I have even tried tasting it without ill effects. But I will agree that at first sight there does seem to be something wrong with the beetle's shape. It is as if the Creator had assembled it out of the bits and pieces left over after the other beetles had been made, so that nothing quite matches or is quite the right size. Meeting a female for the first time you think she is carrying something on her back. I am reminded of peasant women in southern Europe weighed down beneath huge bundles of sticks or of the caddis fly larva that crawls around dragging its home-made stick-house with it. But the burden that the oil beetle carries is not fuel for the fire or a home to retreat into. It is itself: its own vast stomach. All other beetles have elegant wing cases, smartly styles, smoothly tailored, gleaming in the sunshine, black, brown, green, red, often iridescent and with spots or stripes. But the oil beetle, so it seems, has to make do with the cast-off and rather bent wing cases originally made for a beetle a quarter its size. And even these are not stitched on properly but overlap in the middle. Finally its antennae have an odd kink as if they had been broken and rather badly glued together.
♥ The obvious lesson to be learned from this is that one species can depend upon another in ways that are not at first sight apparent. Who, coming to Embridge and seeing, as we had, the lungwort that grew close beside the house and the oil beetles that wandered through the grass on the hillside would have imagined any connection between them? Yet I guessed that if we dug up all our soldiers-and-sailors we would lose our beetles too.
So when I am assured by a "spokesman" or an "authority" or even an "expert" that no link has been established between something that they are in favour of and something that the rest of us dislike, I am sceptical. Such links may be quite hard to discover. And they are, of course, even harder if one is not a very enthusiastic searcher.
That, as I say, is the obvious moral - that there is much less independence in this world than we commonly like to suppose.
♥ But on reflection I see now that I was misguided. Why should I suppose that an oil beetle would welcome my efforts to increase its efficiency? Why should I suppose it was not perfectly happy with things the way they were? What benefits would increased efficiency be likely to bring? Might not such benefits be offset by drawbacks that left the beetle worse off than before? These are the questions I now ask myself; and they ought to be the sort of questions we always ask ourselves before, in our passion for efficiency, we change people's lives, all too often for the worse.
The oil beetle can give a ready answer to our criticism. It may not manage to dig more than three holes in a season but it lays several thousand eggs in each. A weakness in the legs is thus compensated for by magnificent ovaries.
And so it is with other creatures; and so it is with man. Efficiency and inefficiency exist happily side by side and both have a place in our lives. We may wish to change things in order to enjoy greater comfort or greater security or in order to have more time for other desirable things. Greater efficiency may well help us towards these ends. But it should never be thought an end in itself.
♥ Looking at the larger world beyond Embridge I am becoming more and more convinced that the blind pursuit of efficiency is doing us immense harm. It has led us to specialisation, which may well have been good, but it is now leading on to over-specialisation, which is dangerous. It may well have been a good thing when the carpenter specialised and became a chairmaker, but it became less good when the chairmaker specialised and became the man who operates the machine that cuts the dowels that pin the rails to the legs.
The supreme example of pointless over-specialisation is that we now have in our world two vast groups of men who, independently of each other, are engaged in making the most highly efficient engines of destruction whose one and only purpose is that they should never be used. If only they could look up from their work for a moment and then look around at other parts of the world and then perhaps meet and talk things over, they would surely agree that a ludicrous waste of time it all is.
Only marginally less alarming is the over-specialisation and super efficiency to be seen in our attempts to grow more food. From the Minister of Agriculture and the President of the National Union of Farmers down to the humblest packer of battery eggs, everyone is pursuing his task on the narrowest possible front. Looking neither to left nor right, all forge blindly ahead. More tonnes of wheat per hectare, more sacks of fertiliser sold, more ingenious pesticides invented, more money in the bank. Success after success after success. Yet when it is all added up and all the battery chickens that have managed to stay alive have come home to roost I don't doubt that the total will be reckoned a failure.
Our world is full of holes and hole-makers. Some of the holes are brilliant feats of engineering. Others are not. It doesn't follow that the best holes are drilled for the best purposes. It is the purpose that matters. I would rather have oil beetles in my garden drilling holes for their eggs than human drilling holes for their oil.
~~Efficiency and the Oil Beetle.
♥ This is the pleasure of being a spectator. One can see a bird sitting in a bush or flying overhead: this, unless it is something rare, is not particularly exciting. Much more exciting is to watch it visit its nest to feed its young. One can of course remain an ornithologist, watching and recording with scientific accuracy the number of caterpillars consumed per hour. This may well be pleasure enough for some; but not for me. The pleasure I am thinking of is the one we share with the audience at a theatre: of watching from the shadows, of seeing without being seen, of eavesdropping on someone's private conversation, of taking a surreptitious glance into someone's private life.
Where I live, if you want to enjoy a few minutes of domestic bird-life, a good vantage point is the top of a cliff. Here, sitting on the short grass, you are in the upper circle and the stage is below you; and at the right time of year you will almost certainly be able to watch the comings and goings of at least one pair of herring gulls together with the anxious waitings, eager welcomings and joyous feastings of their children.
I have used these three adjectives deliberately and I realise that this is something the serious ornithologist would deplore. Birds do not have human emotions. Anthropomorphism is forbidden. But I do not look at birds through ornithological eyes only. I am like the playgoer who, though he knows that the actors are only actors, likes to imagine them as the characters whose parts they are playing. Indeed the acting can sometimes be so good that it is hard to know where truth ends and imagination begins; and this is as true of bird as it is of man.
..Thus my second pleasure brings the actors alive, turns them from a list of dramatis personae into individual characters. Yet though they perform, I merely watch. And so my third pleasure - and the final one in our relationship - is to find myself, not a spectator sitting unnoticed in the upper circle, but a fellow actor on the stage. If it was a privilege to be allowed to watch, it is an even greater privilege to be offered a part.
One becomes, I know, a fellow actor when at a picnic the wasp arrives and gets mixed up with the jam, or when, later in the evening, the mosquito settles on one's arm. But I am not thinking of those occasions when man plays his customary role - that of enemy to be avoided or supper to be eaten. I am thinking of those very much rarer occasions when, to our surprise, we are given (or appear to be given) a much more unusual and altogether more flattering part.
Yes, indeed, on such occasions we are flattered; and we feel greatly honoured when an animal forgets to be either afraid or fierce and comes to us for our help. Androcles, even if he had never seen his lion again after their first meeting, would still have had a story worth boasting about.
♥ Those, then, are my three steps towards a closer - and I believe a proper - relationship with the non-human world. And of course the naturalist, the biologist, will have stopped short after the first. He is quite right to do so, but he must not think that he can tell us all we need to know about nature any more than the doctor can tell us all we need to know about humanity.
In my first step I saw the natural world through the eyes of the scientist. A plant or an animal was what my reference book said it was. I could look it up and beneath its picture read a brief description of its appearance and its habits. It is at this stage that flowers are picked and pressed, birds' eggs are blown, butterflies and moths are pinned on to a board and animals are stuffed and put into cases in museums. or rather this is what used to be done when I was a boy. Today this is considered cruel and we prefer other methods of collecting and recording, such as taking photographs. But whatever method we choose, this first step is an essential one. We must start by learning what the scientist has to teach us. If I had been unable to identify my fox moth and my grey dagger I should never have enjoyed so much pleasure in their company.
In the second stage of the relationship creatures are no longer merely representatives of their species. They come alive. They move. They are individuals in their own right, going about their everyday affairs in their own private worlds. They are fish in a fishpond, caterpillars in a shoe box, ants in a formicarium, animals in a zoo and flowers in a vase of water. We can watch them; but we ourselves remain outside, spectators, peering through the glass or between the bars. Their world is not out world.
In the third and final stage the bars are pulled down. Our two worlds become one. This is the relationship we normally establish with only a few carefully selected species: our garden flowers, perhaps, and almost certainly the household cat.
As yet we are a long way from regarding every beetle as a first-class citizen or granting equal rights to every dandelion. We have, after all, only very recently reached this stage in our relationship with our fellow humans, particularly if they belong to a different race.
♥ Yes, I had much to learn. And I had to start at the beginning. But though the adult has much to teach the child, the child in return has something to teach the adult. For our journey is, or should be, a circular one in which we end up where we began, returning to the world we left when first we went to school, and bringing with us the wisdom and knowledge we have fathered on our way.
The child's world is a single indivisible world in which all creatures, human and animal, live together as equals. Instinctively he feels this to be the truth - as indeed it is.
But in order to understand it, in order to learn how it works, we need to examine it bit by bit; and so we take it to pieces, separating it into its various layers - its species and subspecies, its races and classes. At school I learned how to distinguish a verb from a noun, a Cavalier from a Roundhead, a logarithm from an antilogarithm and an atom from a molecule. When we have finished studying the world in this way and have learned all we can about it, perhaps we remember it as we once knew it. But can we ever put it together again?
This is the question that today faces not only the middle-aged adult but humanity as a whole. Can we, the human race, reassemble a world that, over the millennia, we have been taking apart? Can we put it together before it totally disintegrates?
There is not much time left. The child is waiting for us, beckoning to us. We must hurry.
~~The Egg, the Fox and the Dagger.
♥ Today most of the world's separate parts are already named: all we need to do is learn them. The naturalist has to learn them all - or rather all those that lie within his particular field of study. The nature lover may think he can get away without learning any: that he can walk through the countryside and look at the flowers and listen to the birds and enjoy it all without bothering about names. But he will miss a lot.
Just as we enjoy the company of our fellow humans the more because we can distinguish Miss Smith from Miss Brown without fear of muddling them up, so it is with chaffinches and robins, with celandines and buttercups. But equally, just as we have no special wish to increase our circle of acquaintances indefinitely, tapping every stranger on the shoulder and asking his name, so it is in the non-human world. With both, we need our friends. We welcome their companionship - some more than others. But there comes a point when we are satisfied.
..Flowers, too, need naming if you are to enjoy their company to the full. Unnamed, they too often remain unseen. The eye passes over them as it does over the faces of strangers in a crowd. It it only when they catch and hold your attention - ah, there's a familiar face! - that they have any hope of impressing you with their beauty.
♥ The daisy, for example, has a whole string of other names, such as baby's pet, baiyan-flower, cat posy, curl-doddy, ewe-gowan, golland, innocent, little open star, Mary Gowlan, silver pennies and white frills, showing that our most beloved of wild flowers had been taken into our hearts long before dictionaries had been invented.
♥ It is like that small boy who, having played with his clockwork toy for a while, then took it to pieces to find out how it worked. "Why have you done that?" asked an astonished mother. "So that I can put it together again," was his answer.
If this is what the scientist is doing, it is also what we all do. Naming is the first step in taking to pieces so that we can put together again. The naturalist names in order to study. We who are not naturalists name the better to enjoy.
♥ My fondness for darkness began - in a negative way - when I stopped being frightened of it. I remember the occasion quite well. We were at Cotchford. Would I go up to the attic to fetch something? There were no lights. I had no torch, no candle. But I went, feeling enormously brave; and I returned, to the praise of my family, feeling enormously proud of myself. The next step, many years later, was when I walked back from Ashdown Forest through Posingford Wood one night: in spite of the darkness I had found my way. So when, six years ago, I was asked to list my pleasures, these included "wandering over hills and under trees, especially at night".
I suppose the first and most obvious reason for preferring to do my wandering at night rather than during the day is that I can do it where and how I please: there is no one to watch. Hilltops are exposed places, visible for miles around, and I'm not quite sure what local farmers might think if they saw me up there among their sheep. But that too is a negative reason for liking darkness. A more positive reason is that at that late hour, when most people are in bed, I am unlikely to come upon others doing the same thing. I have the world to myself. And then there is the complete contrast between day and night. During the day it is the detail that catches the eye, the small things that hold the attention. You hear a thrush - or possibly an approaching car. You notice a patch of violets - or possibly an empty beer can. And so on. But at night there is little to see and less to hear. The small things - both pleasant and unpleasant - have vanished away, and you become conscious instead of the larger things - shapes and distances.
Nights vary enormously. The most universally admired, that of a full moon in a cloudless sky, is, to the night wanderer, perhaps the dullest. The moon dominates the sky. The stars are invisible. One's surroundings are scarcely invisible enough. When the moon is up I prefer a sky patterned with high cloud. For then you get movement. The moon travels through the clouds. You can sit on the ground and watch its progress, as it comes and goes, brightening the cloud's edge a moment before emerging, then sailing free into the jet black sky. The clouds, which in the day time you can watch moving across the sky, at night remain stationary. It is the moon that moves. Other nights, too, have their charm: misty nights, murky nights, windy nights. And then there are the nights with neither cloud nor moon, when the sky is bright with stars.
♥ The first thing that surprised me was that of all the stars only two possessed ordinary, homely English names: the Pole Star and the Dog Star. All the rest we had left to the astronomer; and what an astonishingly heterogeneous collection of unpronounceable names he had chosen. Some, like Arcturus, were Latin. Others, like Betelgeuse, seemed French. But most, like Deneb and Dubhe, Algenib and Caph, were Arabic. Instead of naming the individuals, we, the ordinary star-gazers on our hilltops, had preferred - so it seemed - to group our stars into constellations. But though these had names that were familiar enough, I found most of them extremely hard to identify. They trailed aimlessly across the sky and included stars far too dim for me to see at all.
So individuals it would have to be. It was not easy. Even a few clouds would upset the pattern. But with every success - a new star identified or an old one recognised without help - I became more enthusiastic. And gradually I discovered, as my collection grew, how much more they were than mere names that needed a dictionary to give me their pronunciation. A relationship was developing between us which, surprising though it may seem to most people, is, I guess, familiar enough to the mariner. The stars were becoming my companions. As with insects and with humans, of all the millions in existence, I needed to be able to attach names to only the tiniest handful. A bare fifteen, it was.
The Times Guide now lives permanently in the left-hand pocket of my anorak and a small dim torch lives in the right. I have a choice of four hills. Which shall it be tonight? I climb quickly against the cold winter wind, eyes on the ground ahead of me to avoid stumbling. Not until I have reached the top and turned to face the south where the stars are brightest do I look upwards. I start with Orion, surely the most recognisable of all constellations. Beneath and to the left is Sirius, the Dog Star, and the brightest of them all. From here my eye swings outwards and upwards: Procyon, Castor and Pollux (that very recognisable pair) and thence to Capella, my favourite of them all because she never sets. There are others. Vega and Deneb, two members of the great triumvirate, are now low in the sky; Altair, the third, has vanished. The Square of Pegasus points the way to Algol, and from there you can return to Orion by way of Aldebaran and - the merest hint of whiteness - the Pleiades. I stare upwards for a while, greeting them all, and feeling much as a man might do when he enters a room that is warm and welcoming with familiar faces.
It is well past midnight: time for home. And so I begin to walk, very slowly, eyes upwards, down the hill. This is the moment of putting together. What comes of it? Sometimes nothing. The stars take their places, sinking back into anonymity; and I continue down the hill to where I can see a terrestrial light waiting to welcome me. But sometimes there is something more. I won't attempt to describe it. I will only say that I can now understand why in the past - and before astronomers had corrected him - man had looked upwards to find his God.
From beetles to Betelgeuse: I now have names enough. Botanist, biologist and astronomer: they have all lent a hand and helped me on my way. But in the end each of us must make his own solitary pilgrimage towards whatever lies at the centre of it all.
~~Beetles to Betelgeuse.