Her latest project is with wildflowers, and seen surveying one of her experimental meadows, she makes a memorable figure. Short, sturdy, rather heavyset, she goes clomping along in large green rubber boots, gray hair tied back in a blue scarf, trailed nearly always by one or more of seven Shetland sheepdogs. Her uniform is a comfortable, loose-fitting dress and matching jacket she contrived herself and had made up in several colors. It is all she ever wears. “I’ve got a very great deal that I have to do,” she will tell you. “It’s important to cut out the trivialities.”
She needs no more than four hours’ sleep a night. She keeps a suitcase packed at all times, to avoid the fuss of packing for her frequent trips, and she has forsworn city life. “I appreciate museums. I have to go to libraries in London, but in the city it takes such a lot of energy to cut out the things you don’t want to hear and you don’t want to see.” Besides, she contends, all the “big dramas” happen in the country.
She lives year-round at Ashton Wold, in strange, overgrown English country splendor, a two hours’ drive north of London in Northamptonshire. Deep woods enclose much of the property. Overhanging trees and shrubs brush the sides of your car as you approach. Weeds grow nearly knee-high in the gravel courtyard. The grass goes uncut. Vines and creepers run wild over half the house, a big, sprawling, gray stone affair built by her father in 1900. It is where she was born in 1908 and it looks abandoned, or as though the Rothschilds have fallen on hard times, if such a thing can be imagined—a look exactly to her taste. “Very attractive,” she says with a smile, as if nothing more need be explained.
Her father, Charles Rothschild, was a gifted amateur entomologist who, on a trip to Egypt before she was born, discovered the rat flea, the one that carries bubonic plague. At the time the rat flea was a new species and he named it Xenopsylla cheopis. Charles and his older brother Walter were the sons of Nathan Mayer, or “Natty” Rothschild, head of the great merchant banking firm of N. M. Rothschild & Sons and the first Lord Rothschild. An earlier Nathan Mayer, Miriam’s great-great-grandfather, the first of the English Rothschilds, had arrived from Frankfurt-am-Main in the middle of the eighteenth century and established himself as a cloth merchant in Manchester. Nathan Mayer, as he said, was all business. In fifteen years, having switched to banking in London, he was helping finance Wellington’s armies.
After Nathan came Lionel Rothschild, a great friend of Disraeli, who made history by financing Britain’s purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875. But it is Lionel’s son, Natty (1840-1915), described by Miriam as gruff, sentimental, and dapper, who ranks as one of the most brilliant financiers of all time. In the popular press he was considered the real ruler of England, and was the first Jew to take a seat in the House of Lords.
Though Natty’s two sons, Walter and Charles, each conscientiously took part at N. M. Rothschild & Sons, neither cared a thing for banking. At the ripe age of seven, Walter announced he was going “to make a museum” and spent the better part of his life pursuing that ambition. In time his collection exceeded that of any private individual anywhere, ever. Housed in the Rothschild estate called Tring, it is now part of the British Museum.
Charles, though a far better banker, preferred science to finance, specializing in fleas and butterflies. It was on a butterfly hunt as a student that he first fancied a portion of wild countryside near the village of Ashton, where the house now stands, and concluded he must have it. On inquiry he learned that it already belonged to his own father.
Miriam’s memory of Charles is limited. He was ill through much of her childhood, and in 1923, when she was fifteen, he took his own life. It was thus that Uncle Walter, the second Lord Rothschild, who had no children, became such a large part of her world.
Walter is assured a place in history because he is the Lord Rothschild to whom Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, addressed the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917, saying His Majesty’s Government viewed with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. It was written in the form of a letter beginning “Dear Lord Rothschild,” the title Miriam chose for her book.
Two things distinguished Walter as a naturalist, she says—unbounded enthusiasm about every conceivable kind of living creature, and near total recall of everything he ever saw, heard, read, or wrote. “He remembered every letter he’d ever written. Never kept copies of them.” To be sure, he also had financial resources beyond most people’s imagining. Still, Walter’s reach often exceeded even the Rothschild grasp. He was constantly short of money or in debt. At times he had four hundred people on his payroll collecting specimens all around the world.
Walter’s eccentricities were legendary. As an M.P. he once caused a sensation in the House of Commons by showing up in a white top hat. On other occasions, he drove down to Hyde Park with his coach drawn by a team of zebras. Because of a lifelong speech impediment—an almost crippling lack of breath control—he found normal conversation impossible. “You never knew what was going to happen,” she remembers. “Either the words came out in a bellow, which absolutely raised the rafters, or else it was a whisper. He was always embarrassed, and you were always embarrassed, and then silence fell.”
But Walter was a born naturalist, and naturalists, she is sure, are born, not made. She herself began breeding ladybugs at the age of four and remembers taking a tame quail to bed with her. “I just always loved animals and I was passionately fond of flowers. That’s the sort of thread that’s gone through my whole life.” She learned from her parents, from Walter, and from years of living at Tring with Walter’s collections.
“Collections are basic to zoology,” she stresses, recalling drawer after drawer of his butterflies. Walter had made butterflies his entomological passion beginning in 1895, having said good-bye to beetles, as she writes in her biography. The way other wealthy Victorians collected Chinese porcelains or rare gems, Walter amassed butterflies, and the rarer the better. The result was surpassing, perhaps the most valuable butterfly collection in existence. It was possible to open drawers and see spread before you an entire order in all its variety and from every quarter of the globe. “The mind just took off,” she remembers.
Her own earliest, serious work, starting in her twenties, was in marine biology. After her marriage, she concentrated on flea studies, partly because it was work she could carry on at home. With children to raise, her microscope became her escape, her marijuana, as she says.
“I had six children, so it was quite, you know, a full-time job. But at about eight o’clock in the evening, when they had all gone to bed, I used to settle down to the microscope, and there was nothing more delightful—when the evening would get quieter and quieter and even the sort of clink of cups vanished, and you could settle down and look at these marvelous colors. You could forget the world, and in fact, I used to be brought back to Earth by falling into the microscope with sleep at about one o’clock.”
She catalogued her father’s flea collection, from which she published a five-volume study. In time she became the world’s leading authority on bird fleas. With the appearance of Fleas, Flukes & Cuckoos, her sprightly book for the lay reader published in 1952, she became known as the “Queen of the Fleas.” What fascinated her especially was the acute dependence displayed by fleas and parasites, and the degree to which they gave evidence of their evolution. Her style was altogether her own.
“A parasite’s life is an impressive gamble,” begins one chapter. “Indeed it is difficult to envisage insecurity on such a scale. The chances of a grouse roundworm finding a grouse are far less than the reader’s chances of becoming the parent of quads, or a cabinet minister.”
With her son-in-law as photographer, she was the first to record the flea’s leap, one of the miracles of nature. (“If you were a flea,” she informed me, “you could jump to the height of Rockefeller Center and you could do that about thirty thousand times without stopping.”) Her most important research, however, concerned the rabbit flea, carrier of a viral d
isease fatal to rabbits called myxomatosis. She discovered that, unlike any other insect parasite, the rabbit flea has a reproductive cycle dependent on the hormonal state of its host. The female rabbit flea can produce offspring only while living on a pregnant female rabbit, the flea drawing on the rabbit’s estrogen supply. The flea larvae are also then in place to feed on debris in the rabbit nest.
In addition to fleas, she worked on mites and ticks (which are large mites), and a large, brown, gull-like bird called a skua, which spends most of its life at sea and gets most of its food by piracy, attacking other seabirds until they drop their catch. Research on butterflies and moths led to discoveries about the relationships between insects and plants, and particularly on the use of plant poisons by insects as a defense mechanism. Working with Tadeus Reichstein, who with two others won a Nobel Prize for his isolation of the hormone cortisone, she reported how the monarch butterfly protects itself by storing within itself poisons drawn from the milkweed plant—poisons to which the monarch has evolved an immunity—making it quite unpalatable to birds and spiders.
More recently she discovered that her beloved ladybugs—or ladybirds, as she calls them—are also extremely poisonous. A single ladybug egg, she found, can kill a cat if injected into the bloodstream. “Just one egg!” she says, her face filled with wonder.
At present she is working with caterpillars, allowing them to feed on castor-oil plants and other euphorbias with extraordinarily toxic seeds, which the caterpillars use as protection from bird predators. She grows about a half dozen such plants in the old, rather worse-for-wear greenhouses of the estate. There are worktables covered with plastic sandwich bags filled with seeds so poisonous they can’t be touched. There are tables filled with seedling wildflower plants, a cage with a veteran white rabbit from her days of rabbit-flea work, a pet magpie that she has raised by hand safe from exposure to hornets, in preparation for the day when a hornet with its stinger removed could be put into the cage.
The idea was to determine how much of a bird’s fear of hornets is inherited, how much learned from experience. If the bird were to eat the hornet, then obviously the fear was learned, which is what Miriam expected and what did not happen. She was flabbergasted, she admits, when the bird refused to go near the hornet.
She has just completed a book on insect tissues and with entomologist Traub she is producing still another flea study, this on the discovery in Utah of a flea of Latin American origin called a chigoe that burrows into the ear of a mouse and grows to the size of a pea. Until recently none was known in North America.
Wildflowers, however, are her main preoccupation, her experimental gardens and meadows her greatest pleasure. In the eyes of any conventional farmer she is busy growing weeds—wild poppies, cowslip, cornflowers, corn marigolds, harebell, wild violets—and harvesting their seeds as a cash crop, an enterprise local farmers once took to mean she was “absolutely crackers.”
Wildflowers are rapidly disappearing from the countryside, she stresses, and the loss is not just one of beauty. “You’re losing the gene pool and that’s something that, once gone, you can never get back. That’s millions of years of evolution down the drain.” Creating nature reserves as a means of protection, the scheme favored by her father, is no longer enough. Instead, she wants to reintroduce wildflowers everywhere possible—along highways, rivers, in parks, backyards, vacant city lots. She had been told that to recreate a medieval meadow—a wild hayfield with approximately the variety of grasses and flowers common to medieval England—would take about seven years. She has done it in three, recreating a meadow containing one hundred species.
“I think the flowering meadows are going to come back. They’re finished now. We just have these terrible monotonous crops of dull green grass. I mean it, it is so boring. I don’t know how the horses can stand the stuff.”
While machines can be used for harvesting some of her wildflower crop, most of it must be done by hand. It is slow, unusually tedious work, and consequently many of the seeds are extremely expensive. Two pounds of harebell seed, as an example, sell for nine hundred English pounds. But her work has stimulated enormous public interest, and harebell, as it happens, is the seed second in demand after cowslip. In time, she hopes to market more varieties, including wildflowers mentioned in the Bible.
Beyond her gardens and experimental meadows and the encroaching woods she loves as her father did, the estate opens out into broad wheatfields, rich, flat land almost like prairie that seems to go on indefinitely. The one interruption is the tiny village of Ashton, which includes the pub and art gallery. The thatched-roof pub is the Checkered Skipper, named for a rare butterfly. By her direction, the decor is all natural history exhibits, making it a pub like none other in England. The gallery includes only paintings by schizophrenics—strange, intense works, many of amazing skill and nearly all dominated by images of large, threatening eyes. The paintings are part of a collection she had assembled with an art therapist, Edward Adamson. None of it is for sale, nor is there another collection comparable to it. (Schizophrenia is an “old interest.” To help understand and treat schizophrenics, she and her family founded the Schizophrenia Research Fund in London.)
At one time, during the Second World War, there were six thousand Americans billeted in and about Ashton, and every year there are some who come back for a visit. They were part of the Eighth Air Force. The Rothschild wheatfields were once Polebrook Field. Miriam’s house was the base hospital. She remembers well the intense excitement when the American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers first arrived from the United States. No one had seen planes that flew so high or that left vapor trails.
Of the American airmen, she says, “I thought they were absolutely tremendous…they won the war for us, no doubt about it.” One of those she got to know best was Clark Gable, then an Air Force major, whom she delights in talking about, telling what a crack shot he was (they often went shooting together in the evenings, he at rooks, she at targets), and how he had almost no sense of humor.
More than three hundred missions over Germany were flown from her now tranquil fields. One colossal hangar still standing is used to store potatoes.
“You know I was the first person to install seat belts in a motorcar,” she told me as we drove out to see the site of the old airfield. “It was in 1940, when the first American aviators arrived in civilian clothes, even before you got into the war. I saw the safety belts they had in their training planes and I said we ought to have those in motorcars.” Using a girth from an old sidesaddle, she made up seat belts for her car and tried without success to have the idea patented.
It was during the war that she met and married a British commando and war hero named George Lane, a marriage that was dissolved in 1957 though he is still a good friend. To many of her scientific colleagues it also seemed that she did remarkably little with her mind all that time, little at all of consequence, which was puzzling largely because it was so out of character. Nor did she offer an explanation. Only long afterward did it become known that she had been involved with the famous Enigma project, working with the top-secret group at Bletchley Park, trying to crack the German code. Scientists from many fields were enlisted and marine biologists were known to be particularly good at such work. She got a medal from the British government for her part, yet still won’t say anything about what she did.
“I never hated anything as much as I hated the war,” she told me, recalling the airmen who did not come back. “It’s impossible to describe it. You know, for years afterward when I woke up in the morning, my first thought was, ‘Well, thank God the war’s over.’”
Her conventional farming enterprises are large-scale and serious business. “I am a farmer,” she says emphatically. Farming has supported her and all her scientific researches year after year. But farming, as she points out, is “an old story” in the family. Grandfather Natty was an avid breeder of shire horses, president of the Jersey Cattle Society, and active in developing new agricultural pract
ices. The farms at Tring, where she spent so much of her youth, were showplaces and a favorite stop for visitors from all over the world.
Though Walter Rothschild found talk difficult, Miriam, in addition to everything else, is one of God’s great talkers and never more so than when she reflects on the changes that have come to our relations with the natural world.
“Somehow people have lost the sense of being in a landscape. There are no more figures in a landscape like there used to be. I tell my children they’re like Sputniks spinning in space with a sort of speedy background swooshing by. You just see the figure, the landscape is gone.”
I asked her if her recipe for life is different from what it was twenty-five years ago.
“No, not at all. If I had to wish one wish for my children, I would wish that they were interested in natural history, because I think there you get a spiritual well-being that you can get no other way, and what is more, life can never be long enough…. I think all naturalists retain a sort of keen interest in what’s going on in life. It’s all part of natural history. I mean Karl Jordan, curator at the Tring Museum, was ninety-six and he was just as enthusiastic as he was at nineteen and I always remember him sitting at the microscope saying, ‘I shall know it all in the next world, I shall know it all in the next world!’”
She was settled on the couch in her study, one of her dogs curled up beside her, the picture of Uncle Walter on the tortoise displayed directly behind her.
“I must say,” she said, “I find everything interesting.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
South of Kankakee: A Day with David Plowden
“I THINK THAT in many cases—as I was just saying a minute ago—I ask perhaps too much of my audience. I’m asking them to really take the time to look…. To me everything that I see is very important in those pictures, even down to the last blade of grass. And so I demand an enormous amount of myself and I’m demanding an enormous amount, I think, of my audience, maybe too much…. I gave an assignment to my students: I said, ‘Go out and photograph something that’s boring. Go out and photograph the state of being bored—to see if it’s possible.’ Some of them did it beautifully.”
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