A month ago I set myself a little challenge. In response to the Wildlife Trusts’ annual 30 Days Wild initiative, I came up with this idea of 30 days, 30 wild flowers, 30 poems. And yes, I allowed myself a little leeway on what counted as ‘wild’ and maybe also on what counted as a poem…but I’m pleased to say that I did it. Without wandering very far I found 30 beautiful flowers, unplanted or gone-wild, and found words to wrap around them all.
I’m not entirely sure I have identified them all correctly but I think these were they…
Cow parsley, columbine,
forget-me-not, & clover,
campion, bluebell,
green alkanet & buttercup.
Herb Robert, iris and the daisy
birds foot trefoil, pansy & the common vetch.
Dandelion, common poppy and yellow-horned one,
mallow & the everlasting pea.
Oxeye daisies and brambles and red valerian,
Chinese privet and simple speedwell.
Lesser stitchwort, foxglove, cranesbill,
elder flower
and nettle
and thistle.
30 days of June
and 30 flowers wild.
Just listing them out feels like a poem. Or a spell. A wood-spell, hedge-spell, word-spell. Wild-spell. Everyday magic.
And that’s really the point about the exercise: that there is everyday magic in just looking at what is around us, connecting with the earth by simply noticing her beauty. The wild beauty. The stuff that grows and blooms and doesn’t care whether we notice or know its name. But we should care. We should know the names.
I set myself the challenge primarily as a wordsmith exercise: an exercise in the craft and a reason to write every day if no other presented itself. But also because I remembered how much last year’s 30 Days Wild had meant to me. A year ago, we were not only in lock-down (or whatever variant of that there was) we were also still in panic-mode with no idea of how deadly the virus really was or how at risk we were or when we would be out the other side of it. A year ago, looking closely at the natural world on my doorstep was balm as well as beauty. While we were all focussed on sanitising, this was my sanity-saver, my sane, safe, space. The unpeopled planet.
By unpeopled I don’t mean de-populated or even un-populated – I live on the edge of the city, even when we were all scared into staying home, there were walking people, doing what I was doing – by unpeopled, I mean the spaces, the tiny spaces, the liminal spaces, the insect-sized or flower-shaped or tree-formed or rivers-hewn spaces that exist irrespective of us or even despite us and our best / worst endeavours to devour those places. I mean the interstices where Mother Nature sows her seeds and sends her waters, sunlight, earth and air. I mean: the wild.
I have said before that words have power and it matters how we use them. We have come to mis-use many words in our technological advancement and work-slave world. One of those words is wild.
Ask most people what they understand by wild (in the context of the natural world, rather than in the context of angry teenagers) and they are likely to speak of the untouched wilderness – most of which has in fact been very much touched by humans. They will speak of vastness, and distance from humanity. We tend to associate wild with epic, with scale, with pristineness, with innocence.
But maybe the angry teenagers give us a clue. Wild doesn’t need to be pristine or innocent. Wild can come on the back of any prior experience or setting. Nature claims her own. Wild can be found in the inner cities where sites are left derelict. Wild can be in our own gardens. An untidy corner or two left just to see what comes up might surprise you.
The thing is: wild needs patience. Many of my beautiful wild flowers are small beauties on tall stems. Mother Nature teaches us to wait – let me grow, she says, and I will reward you…but there is always a waiting…to discover what will come of the shoots and tendrils. A learning of which ones to give rein next year and which to root out.
Many of my beautiful wild flowers have encroached upon my garden.
And they are welcome here.
Wild doesn’t need to be epic, it can be infinitesimal. Wild is simply free. Wild is the world doing what it would do if we stopped mucking about with it quite so much.
~
In rising to the challenge I quickly discovered that I wanted more than to simply respond to beauty. I wanted to know these plants. I searched out their names and their lore. I wondered about the myths and magic and medicinal properties. And at the end of this 30-day voyage of discovery, I wonder how much I will remember.
I find myself walking down the lanes near where I live, reminding myself of the names of those who are new to me, and trying to remember a story or two that span out into my own word-weaving. And maybe if I learn to recite my own words, I will learn the lore that I sought in a tiny step of re-wilding my own self.
I may have completed this particular 30 days wild but I know that it is but one more step on the road back to my own unpeopled space. Still, each step is another step, and we can only take them one at a time.
~
