What’s in a name?
On plants and places, and the words they shape
bird’s-foot-trefoil. snapdragon. wild strawberry
Last year we joined the cult of ‘Picture This’, an app that turns hastily snapped photographs into knowledge. Spring through to winter, the app confidently gives not just a name to the foliage in front of you, but details about its origins, an assessment of its health (“this plant is sick!”…the tone is quite insistent), a poem that is variably specific to the species. It will also tell you if it’s toxic – if you pay. Proceed at your own risk.
wild basil. ragwort. rose hips
We stood by a grassy bank and and counted. Two, four, eight… a wealth of species immediately visible to an untrained eye. It was a seemingly unremarkable spot, and yet a quick count hinted at the diversity present. An encouraging moment, particularly as it came during autumn’s dieback, slow down; time to be buried.
raspberry. rosemary. conker
Boots and jacket on for a bit of a pack down of the garden. Less sowing, more sweeping. Less cool bear, more warming cup of ginger tea. The swifts are long gone from the sky. But the raspberry canes seem confounded by the season, offering a bright burst even as the rest of the plants huddle down. The rosemary goes in the stews. The conkers on the desk.
I have been reading Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane. It is a book of words. Aren’t most? Fair. But this is one is about the relationship between landscape and language. Reflections on the words of other nature writers. Glossaries of words to describe the natural world. Where ‘Picture This’ expanded our vocabulary with common names, McFarlane’s book leans into the dialectic and poetic, with a conviction that to be able to name is to connect.
after-drop. drindle. cop*
The book is in many ways a call to attention. MacFarlane writes about the vitality of language for the natural world around us because
it allows us to speak clearly about such places, and because it encourages the kinds of allegiance and intimacy with one’s places that might also go by the name of love, and of which might arise care and good sense.
I was struck by the story of local people collecting stories of Brindled Moor on the Isle of Lewis to stop the land from being developed. They found existing and created new accounts of the moor – written, drawn, mapped – to counter the perspective that this was a barren space and therefore ripe for intervention. They had a conviction that it was already vibrant, and sought to show it. It reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go in which (spoilers in the next sentences) clones that have been bred as organ donors create art as an attempt to see if they have souls. To chronicle is to sustain; forgetting is a form of death.
Lists of words are, in some ways, hard to read on the sofa. Engaging with the specificity of words that articulate the particular way that water falls down a mountainside, or mud falls from wheels requires an act of imagination. One thing that struck me was that this is written language. The lack of guide on pronunciation, in some ways keeps the words on the page. It is a beginning, then. MacFarlane himself proposes that we need something more: a ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’ to capture the wonder of the natural world – in layering it with language, recognise its inherent value. I was struck that he used the word ‘phrasebook’ rather than ‘glossary’ here. A phrasebook is picked up when we recognise our lack and seek to create a bridge of understanding. It is not just for seeing, but for connecting.
santer. print-moonlight. lighty-dark*
I was particularly taken by the last chapter of this book, an addition after the first edition was published. Titled ‘Gift’, MacFarlane reflects on people’s responses to the book, with many sending in postcards and notebooks of more words found locally or invented personally. It seemed to embody the generosity and creativity summed up by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he said:
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
And in sharing, it also showed the travel of words around the world; a Wessex word for icicles had made its way into life in Newfoundland. We are closer than we think.
Excerpts from the glossaries
after-drop | raindrop which falls after a cloud has passed (first cited in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia c. 1580) (from poetry)
drindle | diminutive run of water (from East Anglia)
cop | bank of earth on which a hedge grows (from Cumbria)
santer | to ramble, seemingly endlessly (from Northern Ireland)
print-moonlight | moonlight bright enough to read by (from Sussex)
lighty-dark | light occurring at the edge of darkness after a cold clear day (from a childhood in Lancashire)
On COPs
Landmarks was first published in 2015, before the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change had been agreed. The additional chapter in the latest version reflects on the need for a glossary of lost terminology to remind of us what is at stake. I have been reading it as this year’s UN Climate Talks unfolded in Baku, and reflected here on what difference COPs make and how our disappointment with them shines a light on our longing for a more hopeful future.