The terrible lesson of the bee orchid

We must fight to protect not only biodiversity, but bioluxuriance

Richard Mabey

At a stroke, the bee orchids have gone from our lane. Two summers of tropical grass growth have brought the verge-cutters out early, before the orchids flower and seed, and we won't any longer be able to see those fabulous, chimerical blooms, with their velvet bodies and sculpted pink wings, just an amble from the front door. It's a man-made demise, but not the end of the world. There are bee orchids a mile away in the opposite direction, round a patch of dry wasteground used for bike scrambles. They teem in countless millions around the Mediterranean. I've seen them sometimes with extraordinary opportunist impertinence poking up on people's lawns.

Yet the neighbourliness of our local patch is something that can't be replaced. For me, settling down in a new habitat in Norfolk, they completed a circle opened up one June day half a lifetime ago, when I saw my first on a picnic in the Chilterns, and knew that I had gone through some subtle graduation in the rites of botany. And, in a less dramatic way, their passing seems like a stitch dropped, part of a great unravelling.

It is these subtle processes of attrition, cultural and ecological, that are highlighted in the new British Red Data Book of plants. In May this revealed the shocking statistic that 340-odd species - 20% of our flora - are in danger of becoming nationally extinct. Note the qualification. These are not species about to vanish from the face of the earth. Many vulnerable plants of open habitats are at the edges of their range in our inclement island climate, and are abundant on the continent. The arable weeds, such as corn buttercup, that figure prominently in the list aren't even true natives but ancient, accidental introductions from southern Europe that are doing very well in their home countries. The species chosen as the symbol of the report - the beautiful blue field gentian - is prolific in Scandinavia.

This botanical Domesday Book is less about true extinction than impoverishment: the closing down of personal experiences, the vanishing of living landmarks that help define places and communities, the eclipse of the fundamental elements of those intricate, mutually dependent networks of animal and plant that make up ecosystems. It suggests that alongside the sometimes crude index of biodiversity, we need another: bioluxuriance, a measure of the spread of organisms, of their living where they belong, not herded into biological ghettoes and token nature reserves.

Yet if we're beginning to acknowledge and document this creeping erosion of the living systems we inhabit, why aren't we more bothered? Why isn't local extinction - the first, inexorable step towards a more comprehensive termination, after all - a source of horror, of self-interested panic, of public response? Perhaps, ironically, the acceptance of the process of evolution has credited it with almost supernatural regenerative power: the great engine of life will cope, somehow. Or perhaps we believe we will eventually be able to do the job ourselves, putting back into the wild species we've nurtured in captivity, even recreating vanished plants from strips of DNA.

Extinction is a fact of life, and doesn't have the power to shock any more. Stephen Jay Gould's extraordinary book, Wonderful Life, put paid to any lingering beliefs in the sanctity of species, or the inexorable "upward" progress of evolution. Five hundred million years ago there was an explosion of biological creativity that generated a variety of life far surpassing that existing on the earth today. All of it has vanished, been discarded, without a single human lifting a destructive finger.

Knowledge makes extinction a moral problem as well as a material one. Can we accept being conscious witnesses - or worse, accomplices - in the erasure of the unique outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of natural trial and error? And do we think we know enough to draw ethical lines, decide population sizes, judge which species are of most importance - not for us, but for the biosphere?

In the 1930s Walter Benjamin described the changed status that technological intervention gave to works of art. His celebrated essay could well be retitled Nature in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." Authenticity in the natural world isn't only about humans' aesthetic experiences; it is about the actual existence of living organisms.

So many of the arguments about extinction are couched in human-centred terms. The arable weed will tomorrow be the staple crop. The wild orchid has an aura that the garden specimen lacks. Forgetting their hubris for a moment, these only work for a few species. At the end of the line, the one solid argument for the preservation of species is an a priori ethical one: they are important in their own right, simply because they exist, as part of the unfathomable intricacy of life. So, of course, are we, and if we can enjoy our common inheritance and good fortune - celebrate the inexplicable, extravagant mimicry of the self-pollinating bee orchid - then so much the better.

Richard Mabey's books include Flora Britannica and Nature Cure

WATERLOG. ROGER DEAKIN

It was at the height of this drenching in the summer of 1996 that the notion of a long swim through Britain began to form itself. I wanted to follow the rain on its meanderings about our land to rejoin the sea, to break out of the frustration of a lifetime doing lengths, of endlessly turning back on myself like a tiger pacing its cage. I began to dream of secret swimming holes and a journey of discovery through what William Morris, in the title to one of his romances, called The Water of the Wondrous Isles. My inspiration was John Cheever's classic short story 'The Swimmer', in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of his neighbours' swimming pools. One sentence in the story stood out and worked on my imagination: 'He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.'

When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is - water - and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control. This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water. A swallow dive off the high board into the void is an image that brings together all the contradictions of birth. The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born.

Natural water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other, it transmits its own self-regenerating powers to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression, and come out a whistling idiot. There is a feeling of absolute freedom and wildness that comes with the sheer liberation of nakedness as well as weightlessness in natural water, and it leads to a deep bond with the bathing-place.

I am no champion, just a competent swimmer with a fair amount of stamina. Part of my intention in setting out on the journey was not to perform any spectacular feats, but to try and learn something of the mystery D. H. Lawrence noticed in his poem 'The Third Thing':

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,

But there is also a third thing, that makes it water

And nobody knows what that is.

O Altitudo!

An Interview with Robert Macfarlane

---

Brian Dillon

On 2 August 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - who was already in the habit of scaling mountains and, instead of descending by the safest available route, making his way back down by the first, often perilous, pathway that presented itself—ascended Scafell, England´s second-highest mountain, in the Lake District. This time, on the way down, he got stuck, and found himself facing a twelve-foot drop to a ledge so narrow that "...if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself".
Coleridge survived, and in the account he later gave of the escapade, rehearsed some key terms from a mountainous aesthetic that has flourished for at least two centuries: the experience, he said, was one of prophecy, trance, delight, shame, pain, dreaming, madness, and laughter.
Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he teaches English literature. He has recently published Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) and The Wild Places (2007), a tour and study of the wildernesses of Britain and Ireland. Macfarlane´s first book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), essays a historical and personal description of the mixed aesthetic, moral, and scientific modes of mountain appreciation: from the crossing of the Simplon Pass by Thomas Burnet in 1672 to the disastrous attempt on Everest by George Mallory in 1924.

John Robert Cozens (1752 - December 14, 1797), was an English draftsman and painter of romantic watercolor landscapes.

The son of the Russian-born drawing master and watercolorist, Alexander Cozens, John Robert Cozens was born in London. He studied under his father and began to exhibit some early drawings with the Society of Artists in 1767. In 1776, he displayed a large oil painting at the Royal Academy in London. 1776-79 he spent some time in Switzerland and Italy, where he drew Alpine and Italian views. In 1779 he went back to London. In 1782, he made his second visit to Italy, spending much time at Naples. In 1783, he returned to England. In 1789, he published a set of Delineations of the General Character ... of Forest Trees. Three years previous to his death he became a lunatic and was supported by Dr. Thomas Monro. He died in London.

Cozens executed watercolors in curious atmospherical effects and illusions which had some influence on Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Indeed, his work is full of poetry. There is a solemn grandeur in his Alpine views and a sense of vastness, a tender tranquillity and a kind of mystery in most of his paintings, leaving parts in his pictures for the imagination of the spectator to dwell on and search into. John Constable called him "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape." On the other hand, Cozens never departed from his primitive, almost rudimentary, manner of painting, which causes several of his works to look very like colored engravings.

See also English school of painting

All the beautiful birds flew away

back to Africa warm nests, whereas the solitary Robin has nowhere to go.
She stays and he stays and they never meet because the rule for the ones in their species
is to stay put and alone.
It´s autumn, looks like winter, miss all the colourful birds of spring
but in the pale misty days the red chest brings some hapinness,
his song big joy.

The Cow

The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the wind that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow´grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing
HallelujahHallelujah
HallelujahHallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah,Hallelujah

Three Little Birds

Dont worry about a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Singing: dont worry about a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right!

Rise up this morning,
Smiled with the rising sun,
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singing sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true,
Saying, (this is my message to you-ou-ou:)

Singing: dont worry bout a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Singing: dont worry (dont worry) ´bout a thing, cause every little thing gonna be all right!

Helpless

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless.

Francis Bacon

The contemplation of things as they are,
Without error or confusion,
Without substitution or imposture,
Is in itself a nobler thing
Than a whole harvest of invention.

John Donne

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a
promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

John Lilly by Laurie Anderson

Now in this book there are a lot of stories about talking animals: talking snakes, and birds, and fish; and about people who try to communicate with them.
John Lilly, the guy who says he can talk to dolphins, said he was in an aquarium and he was talking to a big whale who was swimming around and around in his tank. And the whale kept asking him questions telepathically.
And one of the questions the whale kept asking was: "Do all oceans have walls?"

They Are Not Long

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.
Horace , Odas 1.4

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter.
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, 1896

ICE TIME

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander ...
Byron, 'Darkness'

In 1815, on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, a handsome and long quiescent mountain named Tambora exploded spectacularly, killing a hundred thousand people with its blast and associated tsunamis. No-one living now has ever seen such fury. Tambora was far bigger than anything any living human has experienced. It was the biggest volcanic explosion in ten thousand years - 150 times the size of Mount St Helens, equivalent to sixty thousand Hiroshima ­sized atom bombs.

News didn't travel terribly fast in those days.
In London, The Times ran a small story - actually a letter from a merchant - seven months after the event. But by this time Tambora's effects were already being felt.
Two hundred and forty cubic kilometres of smoky ash, dust and grit had diffused through the atmosphere, obscuring the Sun's rays and causing the Earth to coo1. Sunsets were unusually but blearily colourful, an effect memorably captured by the artist J.M.W. Turner who could not have been happier, but mostly the world existed under an oppressive, dusky pall. It was this deathly dimness that inspired Byron to write the lines quoted above.

Spring never came and summer never warmed: 1816 became known as the year without summer. Crops everywhere failed to grow… Yet globally the temperature fell by less than 1 degree Celsius. The Earth´s natural thermostat is an exceedingly delicate instrument.

Bill Bryson
from A Short History of Nearly Everything

THE BIRTHPLACE OF Robinson Crusoe

was the little Pacific island of Mas-a-tierra in the Juan Fernandez group off the coast of Chile.
It was uninhabited, well wooded and mountainous, a useful point of call for a buccaneer to fill his water casks, cut wood for the gallery fire, and refresh his crew ashore without being seen.
In 1703, one of William Dampier's ships called at the island. Her quarter­master, a twenty-eight-year old Scot named Alexander Selkirk, quarrelled with his captain and asked to be left behind when the ship sailed.
No doubt he expected another ship to call soon, but in fact it was over four years before he was rescued, by Captain WoodesRogers. Rogers found 'a man clothed in goatskins who looked wilder than their first owners. He had so much forgot his language from want of use that we could scarce understand him.'
He had built him­ two huts; one he used as a kitchen, in the other he read and sang psalms. He had lived mainly on goats, cray-fish and fruit. He had tamed hundreds of cats to sleep round him at night and keep the rats from gnawing his feet. Here was Defoe's Crusoe in the making.
When accounts of the voyages were published in London, the story of Selkirk made a sensation. Journalists made much of it, one of the most popular of them, Richard Steele, giving up to it a special number of his periodical the Englishman. But it was left to Daniel Defoe to give Selkirk his pseudonymous immortality.

Recibimos a Andersen y a la infancia.

En el bicentenario del nacimiento del cuentista da­nés, Gustavo Martín Garzo nos explica por qué la vida sin amor carece de sentido.

Augusto Monterroso dijo que la literatura aspiraba a representar la totalidad de la vida, y puesto que la vida era triste también la literatura, la gran literatura, lo tenía que ser.
Pero hay obras que son tristes a su pesar, porque lo que cuentan lo es y no quieren renunciar a reflejado, y hay obras que lo son por vocación, ya que parecen haber surgido para enfrentarse a ese enigma, el de la tristeza.
La obra de Andersen pertenece a ese segundo grupo, y la razón de su éxito arrollador, de su indiscutible poder de seducción, me atrevo a pensar que se debe precisamen­te a eso. En realidad, todos los personajes de Andersen buscan denodada­mente el amor y no logran encontrarlo. Ésa es la enseñanza de sus cuentos: que la vida sólo merece la pena si hay amor, y que éste no con­siste en pedir sino en dar. Por eso ni a la princesa de Los cisnes salvajes ni a la protagonista de La sirenita les importa su sufrimiento. La princesa tendrá que tejer camisas de ortigas con sus propias manos para salvar a sus hermanos; y a la sirenita el simple hecho de andar le causará un dolor tan insoportable que apenas podrá mantenerse en pie. Pero esto no es bastante, ya que mientras llevan a cabo su misión, ninguna de ellas podrá hablar. Es decir, que tienen que abstenerse de pedir.
A algo así es a lo que se refiere Simone Weil cuando, al analizar el cuento de los cisnes, escribe: “Actuar nunca es difícil: siempre estamos actuando en exceso y dispersándonos incesantemente en actos desordenados. Hacer seis ca­misas de ortigas y estar callados: ese es nuestro único medio de adquirir un poder”
Eso es la tristeza en los cuentos de Andersen, una forma de conseguir poder.
W. Faulkner, en una de sus novelas, hizo decir a uno de sus personajes: «Entre la nada y la pena elijo la pena». Y eso hacen todos los grandes personajes de Andersen: entregarse a la pena como si fuera la más dulce y extraña de las aventuras.

Gustavo Martín Garzo

John Steinbeck, Viajes con Charley

Las secoyas, una vez vistas, dejan una impresión o crean una visión que permanece con uno siempre.
Nadie ha conseguido nunca pintar o fotografiar con éxito una de ellas.
La sensación que producen es intransferible. Llega de ellas silencio y sobrecogimento. No es sólo su talla increíble, ni el color que parece cambiar y modificarse ante tus propios ojos, no, no son como ningún otro árbol que yo conozca, son embajadores de otra época.
Tienen el misterio ­de los helechos que desaparecieron hace un millón de años convirtiéndose en el carbón de la era carbonífera. Poseen una luz y una sombra propias.
Hasta los hombres más vanos y más despreocupados e irreverentes se sienten dominados por un asombro, un respeto mágicos ante la presencia de las secoyas. Respeto ... ésa es la palabra. Siente uno la necesidad ­de inclinarse ante unos soberanos indiscutibles.
Conozco a estos grandes desde mi más tierna infancia, he vivido entre ellos, he acampado y dormido junto ­a sus cálidos y monstruosos cuerpos, y pese a la estrecha relación que he tenido con ellos no he sido capaz de llegar a menospreciarlos nunca.
Y se trata de un sentimiento que no es exclusivamente mío ni mucho menos.

Missing My Son, Tom Waits

I was in a line at the supermarket the other day, and uhm... y'know, I had all my things on the little conveyor belt there. And uh... there's a gal in front of me that is uh.. well, she's staring at me and I'm getting a little nervous and uh, she continues to stare at me. And I uh, I keep looking the other way. And then, finally she comes over closer to me and she says: "I apologise for staring, that must have been annoying. I, I... You look so much like my son, who died. I just can't take my eyes off you." And she precedes to go into her purse and she pulls out a photograph of her son who'd died. And uh, he looks absolutely nothing like me. In fact he's... Chinese. Uh... anyway, we chatted a little bit. And uh, she says: "I'm sorry, I have to ask you. Would you mind, as I leave the supermarket here, would you mind saying "Goodbye mom" to me? I, I know it's a strange request but I haven't heard my son saying "Goodbye mom" to me, and "So long" and it would mean so much to me to hear it. And uh, if you don't mind I... " And I said: "Well, you know, okay, yeah, sure. Eh.. uh... I can say that." And, and so, she uh gets her groceries all checked out. And uh, as she's going out the door she waves at me and she hollers across the store: "Goodbye son!" And I look up and I wave and I say: "Goodbye mom!" And then she goes, and uh... So I get my few things there, on the conveyor belt and the checker checks out my things. And uh, and he gives me the total and he says: "That'll be four hundred and seventy nine dollars." Uh... and I said: "Well, how is that possible! I've only got a little tuna fish, and uh some skimmed milk, and uh mustard and a loaf of bread..." He goes: "Well, well you're also paying for the groceries for your mother. She uh, told me you'd take care of the bill for her." And I said: "Well, wait a minute! That's not my mother!" And he says: "Well I distinctly heard her say as she left the store "Bye son!" and you said "Bye mom!" and so what are you trying to say here, uh..." I said: "Well, JESUS!" And I looked out into the parking lot and she was just getting into her car. And I ran out there. And she was just closing the door, and she had a little bit of her leg sticking out of the door and she was pulling away and I grabbed her leg and I started PULLING it! Just the way... I'm pulling yours...

Pegaojos , Hans Christian Andersen

Al anochecer, cuando los niños están aún sentados a la mesa o en su escabel, viene un duende llamado Pegaojos; sube la escalera quedito, quedito, pues va descalzo, sólo en calcetines; abre las puertas sin hacer ruido y, ¡chitón!, vierte en los ojos de los pequeñuelos leche dulce, con cuidado, con cuidado, pero siempre bastante para que no puedan tener los ojos abiertos y, por tanto, verlo.
Se desliza por detrás, les sopla levemente en la nuca y los hace quedar dormidos.
Pero no les duele, pues Pegaojos es amigo de los niños; sólo quiere que se estén quietecitos, y para ello lo mejor es aguardar a que estén acostados.
Deben estarse quietos y callados, para que él pueda contarles sus cuentos.
Cuando ya los niños están dormidos, Pegaojos se sienta en la cama.
Va bien vestido; lleva un traje de seda, pero es imposible decir de qué color, pues tiene destellos verdes, rojos y azules, según como se vuelva.
Y lleva dos paraguas, uno debajo de cada brazo.
Uno de estos paraguas está bordado con bellas imágenes, y lo abre sobre los niños buenos; entonces ellos durante toda la noche sueñan los cuentos más deliciosos; el otro no tiene estampas, y lo despliega sobre los niños traviesos, los cuales se duermen como marmotas y por la mañana se despiertan sin haber tenido ningún sueño.