We stood on the edge of a wood. It was the bluebell time of year. Did you know that 50% of the world’s bluebells are in English woodland? I’m told that people come from across the world to be in England in the springtime, to see the bluebells in our woods.
And now I know how the villagers in the Alpujarras feel, when their white cottages become more spectacle, more photo-opportunity, less home.
I know this because we went to a local wood to see the bluebells. Understand the full impact of that sentence. We went to see the bluebells…not to experience them, not to be among them, not even to scent them and especially not to touch them. We went to walk a pathway, wide and stoned and roped off from the woodland. We went to witness that there is still a wood and within it, duly protected from our getting too close, there are bluebells growing.
A full carpet of blue beneath the trees is something magical, don’t get me wrong, but somehow it is much less so, when it becomes…I suppose the word I am looking for is ‘commodified’. Like when a mystical holy well becomes a “shrine” – with all that word entails. When the thing is ‘known’ and ‘marketed’ and everyone is encouraged to come and see it, and buy into someone else’s vision of it, and hopefully actually ‘buy’ something else along the way.
What it was gets trampled under the foot of ‘protection’.
If you trample on a bluebell, it will take years to recover, because its leaves cannot photosynthesise – that’s what the information boards tell me. Is all of that actually true?
That a crushed leaf cannot fulfil its life-giving sunlight-conversion magic in the immediate aftermath, that much I accept, but my (albeit ignorant & limited) belief is that when a bulb-based flower dies, it retracts into the bulb, taking whatever store of life it has left. Then it rests until the next growing season, still drawing nutrient through its root-system.
If that is true at the end of the year of blooming, why is it less true at any other stage? If less energy has been expended in the growth and production of flowers, why then is there somehow less left within the bulb for another shot at flowering…if not this year, then next, after a time of rest and regeneration? I confess that I am not convinced.
I am even less convinced of it when a colleague talks of picking bluebells as a child, and how they would send up new shoots and flower again. Were they ever so careful to not tread on the leaves when they were picking?
Earth-growing plants get trampled upon in the natural life of a wood. In the absence of man there would be deer or boar or fox or badger or wolves, none of whom would tread daintily around the new shoots or fully flowering bluebells.
I reject the notion of bluebell as delicate, frail, victim.
She dances across swathes of woodland floor in defiance of that classification. She is a coloniser. An earth mother with her clan of kindred spreading out around her.
She is strong. She is prolific. I think she would survive a few trampling feet.
Ok, maybe the emphasis needs to be on the ‘few’.
But doesn’t that then bring us back to the commodification of nature: the whole come and see this wonderful thing, here…as opposed to the go take a walk and see what you find.
We seem to have got to a point where we expect “nature” “the wild” “the wilderness” to be handed to us on a plate, like some ready-meal. How can we not see the absurdity of that?
How can we not see that what is truly wild, is the dandelion insisting on blooming between the cracks in the pavement, or the columbine that crept into a garden from who knows where, or the moss on our walls?
How can we not see that the truly wild is the garlic growing on the roadside among the red nettle and the comfrey and the goose-grass – and all of that because the council stopped cutting the verges?
How can we not see the ragged robin that have snook in among the forget-me-nots this year and made our driveways even more untidy?
How can we not see what we need to do, and what we need not to do, if we value wildness and (smaller variants of) wilderness?
To turn the question on its head, let me ask you this: what gets trampled underfoot if no-one is allowed to wander aimlessly, and sit pointlessly (or even photogenically) among the bluebells?
What are we saving them for?
If the only point of a bluebell wood is so that we can see that impressionist, watercolour, sheen, then please: take your cameras and your drones and film it all, capture on sound tapes all the bird song that goes along with it, give us light boxes and wind-machines and the tell us the ambient temperature. and lock us in the white walled room, sell tickets for the ‘experience’.
Licence the painters to sit around the edge and filter out the foreground to catch the beauty beyond the path and the rope and the signage. Show us their results.
It's not the same, I hear you cry.
And my only answer is: precisely!
The only point of a bluebell wood is to be a bluebell wood. A wood, just existing and just happening to have its annual, transient, carpet of blue.
Remember the old Joni Mitchell song? I reckon she got one word wrong.
She sang that they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. The word she got wrong was ‘paved’.
That word should have been ‘fenced’ or ‘corralled’ or ‘contained’. We haven’t paved over the whole of paradise – though maybe we’ve had a good go at doing so – what we have done is to hem it in, fence it around. We’ve put up the parking lot outside, and added ticket booths, and drawn maps, and told us not to get too close to the animals…or even the flowers.
Another 1960s question, I seem to remember, though I’m nowhere near old enough, was “where have all the flowers gone?”
Twenty-first century answer: still here, but you need to stay clear, and we’d rather you paid to see them…these so-called ‘wild’ flowers in the wood.
We're told that they need protection from our love of them, our desire to possess them, even in memory or on our photo-screens; that they need us not to pick a few of them…even though, actually, they’re designed to be picked…not uprooted, but plucked…taken home and enjoyed.
We're told that they need us not to sit still, surrounded by them, their scent increased by our crushing of a few petals, even though they’re designed to release more of their insect attracting scent by the crushing of a few petals. We're told they need us not to breathe them in, or to breathe upon them, that they need us to keep our distance.
The flowers are timid now, the signs imply.
I am not convinced.
There are no paths and boundaries and ropes and signage in my local bluebell wood - and there they thrive, regardless.
We stood on the edge of that wood, at bluebell time, and noticed the hard and fast boundary between the wood and the farmland. The improved soil of the ploughed field was empty, dusty, waiting for someone to do something.
On this warm Spring day, all the life was happening on the other side of the ditch – that might once have been a hedge – all the life was under the shelter of the trees, all of the life was in the un-improved soil.
One amongst us called it untroubled soil.
They need the untroubled soil in order to live, she said.*
Don’t we all? I thought.
Her phrasing came back to me a few days later when I was reading Roger Reeves’ essay Through the smoke, through the veil, through the wind. That essay is about a different troubling of the soil, the slavery and share-cropping and human-life and soil-life depleting of the southern states of America, but in it he says, standing on the edge of land that eventually refused to bear cotton, “we troubled history, even as history troubled us…”
It struck me that whenever we try to work land, or work people, or work anything beyond our own selves, we are troubling that other thing. In some way we are hurting it, damaging it, destroying it…and that sooner or later, it will rebel against us.
The troubled land of South Carolina stopped being willing to bear cotton.
The troubled soils of England are fighting for their right to raise poppies and cornflowers and corn marigolds and, yes, bluebells. But here’s another thought or several…
..what if we allowed people to walk into the bluebell woods, with the simple request that they respect the plants’ greater right to be there?
…what if we asked people to look not only upon the bluebells but upon the golden archangel, the delicate wood sorrel, the gaudy dandelion, the red nettle, the goosegrass, the comfrey, the hedge mustard, the wild garlic, the dying bracken from last year, the slowly unfolding ferns of this one, the leaflings of the trees catching the spring-light?
…what if we let people learn the old names for plants, and the old uses of them?
…what if we didn’t constrain the imagination of those who want to walk in the woods?
Might they then fall in love again with what it means to live upon untroubled soil?
Might they then come to the aid of our troubled soils beyond the woodland’s edge?
At the same time as I was reading Reeves, I came across a quote from Mireille Juchau who talked about the simultaneous unfolding of beauty and ruin.
That’s where we are, right now. All of our soils are troubled, and we all need untroubled soils upon which to live. We are in the midst of beauty and ruin…and ruin is winning right now.
So, I started to wonder, what are we going to do about it?
*Thanks to Tina Green for the comment about our needing 'untroubled soil'.
