Compost

HEAVEN IN A WILD FLOWER

Naming a thing is giving birth to it, acknowledging its existence and loving it. The common names of wild flowers precede classification, the power that arises from a sense of possession. These names are fashioned out of love, a totally useless, though necessary impulse.

Saying the names of wild flowers is also an act of love, admitting their essence into our bodies and giving it back, setting it free in the breath that forms the syllables of their names, the complex and utterly natural arrangement of lip and teeth and tongue, small buds on a stem of warm air.

A wild flower can never be tamed by naming it. Learning what a plant is called is a gesture of seeing and remembering, honouring each one in its season and its setting. Naming them is in itself an act of preservation, pressing them gently between the roof of the mouth and the mind.

Without knowing it I began a lifetime of discovering the names of hedgerow plants as a child when I collected the cards out of my mother’s Brooke Bond tea packets and glued them carefully into their special album. The images were blurred, unremarkable splashes of colour but the names sang clear in my ears – primrose, campion, thrift – like secret friends. I knew this had something of the spell about it when later I came across Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies in our local library. I admired all their pretty outfits, delicately stitched out of petal and leaf. Even some of the flowers’ names seemed to catch a sense of needle and thread, silk against skin – ragged robin, cowslip, stitchwort, foxglove, cottongrass, skullcap.

Nearly twenty years later when I came to live in the Northumberland countryside after five years in cities, I found the tea-scented names still fresh in my mind, rooted in my imagination. I’d walk the lanes around our house, establishing the lie of the land, and gather them about me like a blessing – germander speedwell, dog’s mercury, bird’s-foot-trefoil.

I made small coloured drawings to record what grew nearby, to remind myself of their persistence and fragility, their beauty and variety as I carried and grew my own two sons. The Reader’s Digest Field Guide to British Wild Flowers (1981) – a birthday gift that first year of living on the top of a hill with no road or electricity, just acres of sky and wild flowers – was my favourite bedside reading. It taught me the origins of the names I felt so close to and collapsed the years between their naming and my learning them. I found out that chickweed was good for feeding to chickens, mullein, with its felty leaves, took its name from the Latin mollis meaning soft, the Old French moleine. It satisfied my hunger for language by listing alternatives. Wild garlic was also known as ransoms or bear’s ears.

These nursery years sparked the connection in my mind between wild flowers and self-sufficiency, nourishment and healing. So many of the names are associated with mending and mothering. Another name for shepherd’s purse is mother’s hearts. Then there’s feverfew, self-heal, fleabane, woundwort. Lady’s mantle is explicitly dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

As my children grew up, so did I, and I came to understand the change inside every living thing in a deeper way. I saw the ineluctable wildness in the flowers and every year added new names to the list in my head from walking in a new place, finding a different species and looking it up or talking to a friend. I’ve enjoyed getting to know hay rattle, stinking hellebore, butterbur and, last year on the Northumbrian coast, restharrow. The names get wilder and wilder, like the creatures they are often named after – viper’s bugloss, hogweed, yellow toadflax, bee orchis. This seems to let slip how irrepressible life is, the gentle flame of sexuality that lights up the darkness, the blossoming of the individual open to their own senses and other people’s, the play of the elements.

The names of plants are unashamedly erotic, redolent of scent and texture and tender, secret places. In Sri Lanka, where they are less shy about these things, a man showing me round a Buddhist Temple drew my attention to a little blue pea-like flower. His finger probed the closed hood of its petals as he told me it was called the clitoris flower. We don’t have these in Northumberland but names like honeysuckle and lady’s bedstraw, nipplewort and navelwort reveal our own homespun sensuality. In the past lords and ladies were sometimes called sweethearts or silly lovers. There is some doubt if its other name, cuckoopint, arose from the supposedly strong sexual appetite of the male cuckoo or the old idea of the cuckold.

The erotic is just one aspect of the creative urge captured in the names of wild flowers. Some of the names sound like poems themselves – forget-me-not, meadowsweet, speedwell, traveller’s joy, loosestrife, selfheal – small injunctions to live, to open, to be. Many of them are in the tradition of kennings, intense compounds of habit and habitat – snowdrop, frogbit, bindweed. Their tendrils curl through the leaves of literature, joining here to there in a way that confirms our sense of ourselves, helps us speed well, lose strife and heal ourselves. We have narcissus from the Greeks, the wild daffodil, that remembers death in its nodding golden trumpets; yarrow that lets us know that every Achilles has his heel; Shakespeare’s Mustardseed and Peaseblossom, his rude mechanical flowers as well as the more aristocratic, though deranged, rosemary and rue. The names of the plants are as beautiful as they are themselves and bring all their fragrant and subtle associations whenever they are used.

On National Poetry Day 2006 Prince Charles read Robert Byron’s These I Have Learnt on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. It is a poem that creates a map in the memory of the names of wild flowers to pass on to a child not yet born, knowing they need to be saved for everyone’s sake.

If I have a son, he shall salute the lords and ladies
who unfurl green hoods to the March rains,
and shall know them afterwards by their scarlet fruit.
He shall know the celandine, and the frigid, sightless flowers
of the woods, spurge and spurge laurel, dogs’ mercury,
wood-sorrel and queer four-leaved herb-paris
fit to trim a bonnet with its purple dot.
He shall see the marshes gold with flags
and kingcups and find shepherd’s purse on a slag-heap.
He shall know the tree-flowers, scented lime-tassels,
blood-pink larch-tufts, white strands of the Spanish chestnut
and tattered oak-plumes. He shall know orchids,
mauve-winged bees and claret-coloured flies climbing up
from mottled leaves. He shall see June red and white
with ragged robin and cow parsley and the two campions.
He shall tell a dandelion from sow thistle or goat’s beard.
He shall know the field flowers, lady’s bedstraw
and lady’s slipper, purple mallow, blue chicory and the cranesbills –
dusky, bloody, and blue as heaven. In the cool summer wind
he shall listen to the rattle of harebells against the whistle
of a distant train, shall watch clover blush and scabious nod,
pinch the ample veitches, and savour the virgin turf.
He shall know grasses, timothy and wag-wanton,
and dust his finger-tips in Yorkshire fog. By the river
he shall know pink willow-herb and purple spikes of loosestrife,
and the sweetshop smell of water-mint where the rat dives
silently from its hole. He shall know the velvet leaves
and yellow spike of the old dowager, mullein,
recognise the whole company of thistles, and greet
the relatives of the nettle, wound-wort and hore-hound,
yellow rattle, betony, bugle and archangel.
In autumn, he shall know the hedge lanterns, hips and haws
and bryony. At Christmas he shall climb an old apple-tree
for mistletoe, and know whom to kiss and how…

He’s passing on his love as well as the names of the flowers, a faith in continuity and growth, the rhythm of natural cycles and intimations of the sacred in the ordinary, Blake’s ‘a heaven in a wild flower’. I always told my children the names of wild flowers when we stumbled across them on our walks but they never seemed very interested. They were interested in the elderflowers we made into champagne every July, the wild garlic we chopped into pizzas and the nettles we cooked into a soup that didn’t sting our lips. They made their own undrinkable concoctions out of pineapple weed, sorrel and dandelion. These are the ones that took root. Both my sons, now grown up, earn their living from cooking. The circle is turned and together they and the fruits and blossoms of the earth nourish me.

Time itself is marked in the names of the wild flowers – dandelion clocks, bellflowers, the Lent lily and Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon. We see the passing of our own lives in their mirror, reminding us who we are and what we need, how short a time we have. Each flower is a little book we can read, petal by petal, a small heaven we can lose ourselves in and find ourselves over and over again. What would happen if all these books were burned or lost? What would we pass on to our children? How would we know ourselves and each other?

© Linda France

2006

THE FIRST MUSE

My name is Linda.  I am a poet.  Hard not to introduce myself and my profession without it sounding like an affliction, an embarrassing disability.  Mostly when people ask what I do for a living, my answer is met with nervous laughter.  Better that than horrified incredulity.   And so I take Water Violet because I prefer to be alone with my thoughts, wild thoughts that tie me up in knots and unravel me so I must also take White Chestnut.  Poet’s remedies both.

My familiarity with Bach Flower Remedies goes back over thirty years.  What I appreciate most is Dr Bach’s creation of a system based on giving form to feeling and translating emotions into words.  Emotions, as we experience them, often exist in a state of pre-language.  More than half the challenge is knowing what they are, letting them come into awareness sufficiently to coalesce into a mood that is able to be articulated, expressed in words, both to ourselves and for sharing.

The tension in my belly can at different times warn me of anger or fear, grief or desire.  Sometimes a powerful cocktail of all four.  I feel an affinity with the spirit of investigation and diagnosis embodied in Dr Bach’s system, a longing for wholeness.  It seems to me this noble aspiration is common to us all, poets or no.  ‘Health is the first Muse’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.  If putting names to things, expressing feelings in words, doesn’t make the world a better place and us happier, healthier people in it, why bother?

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The term ‘remedy’ fills two pages in Roget’s Thesaurus, compiled by another venerable doctor keen on order.  It covers the gamut of possibilities from ‘succour’ to ‘sanitate’, noun to verb, a whole medicine chest of practical, primarily Latinate, words.  The sense that ‘remedy’ carries of redress, repair is almost soothing in itself, suggesting the possibility of an original state of wholeness, a natural condition of good health, soundness, a place of safety only temporarily lost to us.  Our lives thread us backwards and forwards towards this haven of greater trust and awareness we bear like flames inside ourselves, unpredictable but persistent.

On paper it all sounds so simple: a diet of fresh healthy food; clean water to drink; adequate exercise and unpolluted air; a restful night’s sleep, restorative, renewing; somewhere to belong, to root our need for love and work.  A tried and tested recipe for a happy life.  But we human beings complicate matters and, in the name of improvement, often end up making a situation worse rather than better.  We tend to think too much, want too much, and so we suffer, and pass our suffering on in our attempts to fix it.

If it’s true – and I, like Dr Bach, tend to think it is – that the natural state of the body is one of health and it is designed, given the right conditions, to adjust itself so that it can return to that optimum state and maintain it, then isn’t what we need to bring to the process a prescription of awareness and restraint, kindness and humility? Jung believed that the psyche was also a self-regulating system and would find its own place of balance if paid proper attention, dreams recalled and demons faced.

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Since the Age of Reason we have made it harder for ourselves in the West by splitting our minds and hearts into two.  In the Eastern world view, the same Sanskrit word ‘citta’ means both mind and heart and allows thoughts and feelings and aspirations to live together and find their expression in what the body does and doesn’t do.  I am very aware that my mind and heart often passionately disagree and sometimes they sulk and refuse to talk to each other at all.  My poor body is worn out with their bickering but tries its best to stay in one place and assume a position of integrity and calm to contain the ructions I feel inside myself.  I can see this same struggle in others and recognise how painful it is.

Words are a big giveaway.  What people say and what they mean, let alone what they do, are quite different things.  Words are shaped breath, the body talking.  If we listen to them carefully, the way they’re said and the silences around them matter maybe even more than what they seem to be saying on the surface.

The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa talks about synchronising mind and body, expressing our basic goodness:

The body can be likened to a camera, and the mind to the film inside the camera.  The question is how you can use them together.  When the aperture and the shutter speed of the camera are properly set, in relation to the speed of the film inside the camera, then you can take good, accurate photographs, because you have synchronised the camera and the film.  Similarly, when mind and body are properly synchronised, then you have clear perception and you have a sense of being without doubt, being without the tremors and the shaking and the shortsightedness of anxiety, which make your behaviour totally inaccurate.

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We live in a culture of alienation, where ‘more’ always wins.  The system of health promoted by Bach Flower Remedies works rather on the principle of ‘less’, a richer and more profound connection with what it means to be human.  The sense of responsibility and discipline at the core of it is subtle and creative, responding to the truth of change rippling through every moment of our lives – a flow we resist at the cost of our bodies, hearts and minds.  The pressures of overstimulation, ambition and expectation incubate anxiety and neurosis, fertile ground for the seeds of physical illness, dis-ease.

Ecological dangers currently implicate us all.  Looking away, or even simply within, is no longer tenable.  Our inner lives and our outer world must face each other in a less than flattering mirror.   Redress and repair are necessary on a much larger scale.

Bach Flower Remedies encourage us to reflect upon ourselves and our world and know what we see, then choose how we act.  Identifying a feeling, acknowledging discomfort or imbalance and deciding which remedy we need creates a space, a small pause to help us be accurate, move towards a safer place where we might find some peace.  Working in this way with our own changes benefits all the people we meet, all the structures we move in.  Instead of sharing our suffering, we are able to share our ease.  Moment by moment we can choose what we think, what we feel, what we do, what we say.  Again, it sounds simple on paper.

I take heart by remembering the flowers themselves – Star of Bethlehem, Clematis, Agrimony, Mimulus, Mustard – small miracles of perfection.  I find ancient trees to lean against, borrowing some of their strength and wisdom – Oak, Larch, Pine, Beech.  Nature is also nurture and Walnut, Sweet Chestnut, Crab Apple and Cherry Plum nourish me.

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There is plenty I don’t understand about how Bach Flower Remedies work but I don’t want to live in a world that has no mystery to it, or faith, or openness.  The way plants and trees embody the essence of interdependence, their stems and trunks a thread between heaven and earth, is real enough to me.  The fact also that the remedies have no ill effects touches a chord. Of how many things can we say that and know it to be true?

According to the Buddha ‘Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship’.  His teachings evolved from the ancient system of ayurvedic medicine, based on the principle of balance, the human tendency to fall out of kilter through forgetfulness, lack of attention and constitutional propensity.  Like Dr Bach, the Buddha made his observations of human behaviour, came up with a diagnosis and offered a remedy.  That’s all any healer can do.  The patient must get well on their own.

In the right conditions – of understanding and compassion, relaxation and safety – we can heal ourselves.  Perhaps it is our only task – becoming whole, letting ourselves be who we were born to be, not as something to be striven for, acquiring yet another burden of being perfect, not seeing our health as a commodity, the hollow materialism of ‘lifestyle’, the tyranny of fashion.  But rather as a right and a responsibility, part of an ongoing, endless process that brings its own joy and happiness, comfort and reassurance, whatever we need, in each moment.  Even if sometimes that includes sickness, old age and death.  Far from being failures, these are what make us human, complete the cycle of our seasons – they are our Last Muses.

© Linda France

2007