This lack of knowledge about nature was blamed on the growth of technology and safety issues. Concern for children’s safety means that wandering across fields and wading through minnow-rich ditches is a thing of the past. I remember school days, afternoons, of walking out of the building and through a couple of fields down to a bridge crossing the Grand Union canal. We poked cow pats and watched a flurry of flies. We picked rosehips and sent them off somewhere to get made into rose-hip syrup. We kept a beady eye on frogspawn waiting for tadpoles in a pond.
Maybe the makers of the games that they play on computers
need to decorate the scenery with trees and wildflowers. Rather than skirting
around buildings and scaling rooftops armed with automatic weapons to kill
people, they should move it into the forest. People perhaps should get shot not
on the basis who has the biggest gun or the fastest reflexes, but according to
how well or not they can name the wild flowers and insects around them!
Last week on a walk along the river I visited the
cathedral. I like the quiet space inside and time to sit and be still.
Part of the space was taken up with an exhibition “My Ark of Nature”. An artist and environmental conservationist, Jonathan Sainsbury,
had set up the exhibition. His artwork filled the small chapel space. He is
based in Perth and has received a number of awards for his work in protecting
the environment. His pictures are amazing. There were a number of very big
charcoal sketches next to smaller, painted versions of the same thing. The
scenes, of highland landscapes, trees and wildlife had an almost “middle earth,
Hobbit look” about them. It’s not New Zealand at its most fantasy-landscape
best – but just a few miles down the road, or up the road, or along the way
from where I live – the rivers, the forests, the mountains and the deer that
appear on my horizon.
Interspersed with the artwork were poems:-
I caught this morning
morning's minion, king-
dom of
daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the
rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung
upon the rein of a wimpling
wing
In his ecstasy! then off,
off forth on swing…
(from the The Windhover by Gerard
Manley Hopkins)
And Bible verses:-
Just
as the sparrow seeks her home,
and the swallow finds in her own nest
a place to lay her young,
I, too, seek Your altars, my King and my God,
Commander of heaven’s armies.
How blessed are those who make Your house their hom
who live with You;
they are constantly praising You.
and the swallow finds in her own nest
a place to lay her young,
I, too, seek Your altars, my King and my God,
Commander of heaven’s armies.
How blessed are those who make Your house their hom
who live with You;
they are constantly praising You.
(Psalm
84:3-4)
And along the walls at various intervals
there were child-level bird boxes to peer into and see pictures of birds.
And there was a wooden shelf stuffed to
spilling over with books and feathers and little wooden birds.
And in the background was the sound of bird song.
I think if I had inhaled deeply enough I could have been
breathing in a forest fragrance.
It was a delightful exhibition. The artist and his wife
were there and talked through some of the pictures. One of them was of sparrows
hopping around a blackberry bush. Jonathan explained that it was just the one
sparrow that had posed for him, a sparrow that they had nursed as a baby, who
lived in their house and ate at their table and really thought itself to be a
person rather than a sparrow.
I was reminded of the few nature poems I had written over
the years. I shared the poems with them. The last line of a poem “Abriachan”
ends with this verse – which brings me full circle to the newspaper article
this morning:-
Shame on me I
cannot tell
The names of trees
some know so well
Hazel, downy birch
and yew
A tongue now
spoken by so few
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