Three Things I learnt In a Meadow

An English meadow is far superior to the sunburnt grassplains of my home country in Australia. Whilst you might be forgiven for not seeing the clover for the grass in a long view, to look closely you discover a quiet different story. As is the fashion on these long rambles of mine in the sunshine in this time of pandemic, I find myself learning vital lessons from the natural world. I find myself hoping that others too have been forced outside into the vitalism of nature, and learn to live a little there, even if it is not in a way they expected.

Today, I relearn three lessons - or at least contemplate them, with the fingers of the warm sun resting on my neck. I am out for hours, and hours. I don't want to let the landscape go, and hug it like the bees hug the white and red clover.

One, a field of buttercups is not just a field of buttercups.

Hour after hour they ponder the warm field -
and the far valley behind, where the buttercup
Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up

I think of the war poet Wilfred Owen when I see the fields of buttercups, and his rememberance of walking with his brother. Later, this becomes an image in a contemplation of men facing their deaths, looking at life behind them and gazing ahead to the ridgeline lit up with artillery, caught in a moment of luminosity.

I think of death then, and this liminal time we are caught in, and how we are so busy being scared of it that we are scared to even walk in warm meadows. This is what this shutting down of the world is - a desperate need to control any risk that we might die. How far removed we have become from something so inevitable and so natural. We have become so scared of death that we have forgotton how to live. And so I will always walk out into the world, despite what dangers might lie there. To do otherwise is not to live at all.

There is more in a buttercup field than poetry and thoughts of death, too. There is clover, and pignuts, and plantain. There are tiny black butterflies, rare and easily missed, called chimney sweeps. Their wings are tipped every so slightly white.

A meadow will look like a sweep of one thing, but it's not until you look closely that you see all the other life within it.

Two, sometimes they let the sheep in too early, and destroy the flowers.

This, I learnt from a couple I stop to chat with on the way. They give me a fright as they come up from the valley, and I am crouched photographing clover. We talk for a good half hour. She names grasses for me - by the end of the walk, I have only remembered one, the purple yorkshire fog, named for the billowing smoke from the northern factories. There's another she has me pick and strips to smell, telling me it is used for perfumery. It is they that show me, and name, the black chimney sweeps.

We talk about ancestry, and the virus, and nature. She tells me how some meadows are full of grasses that are good for biodiversity, working in a kind of symbiosis with other plants, and some grasses just take over. She laments that the farmers let the sheep in too early, so the flowers that should flower and seed for the next year don't get a chance. We both lament that people have lost touch with nature, and if we hadn't, we wouldn't be in this pandemic pickle we are in.

Three, you can eat ox eye daisies.

I adore the swathes of plants that beg attention, die and give way to another to steal the show. When we arrived, it was daffodils, those cheery heralds of spring, and for a long while I was captivated by hawthorns flowering, and bluebells nodding in wet woods. In the meadows the buttercups and oxeye daisies are stealing the show.

The couple I meet in the fields say that they've been eating them in salads. Later, I find online that they are good fried in tempura batter - what wild edible isn't? Apparently, they are good for asthma and bronchitis as well, but there is more research to be done on my part here - a bit useless if I can't find them in Australia, though.

I have never felt such regret leaving England. Whilst it is right we are leaving, because home calls and all the things that await us there, I have not enough time to learn lessons from the meadows. I feel like I have only just begun. I want to sit for hours in the sun blessed fields with my camera, and stare at the shapes of petals and clouds, and the extending shadows from the tree lines. I want to suck the nectar from the petals of this country, to walk barefoot for months in the damp glades and dry hills, to feel the life from this natural world beat it's heart in time with my own.

But for now, this day in the meadows will have to do.