A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  Fifty years of continuous botanical use. A page from my Collins Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers, with two sightings of grass of Parnassus duly recorded.

  More illustrated books appeared in the next few years to help the amateur botanist, and the flower paintings were often a considerable improvement over the original Collins book. The Reverend Keble Martin’s 1965 Concise British Flora in Colour has a special place on many a naturalist’s shelves, not least because each colour plate is a joy in its own right. This book was more cumbersome to take on a walk than a pocket guide, but when there was a question of identification a small sprig brought home could almost always be matched on one of Keble Martin’s colour plates. He sorted out the ‘worts’ – pearlwort, crosswort and squinancywort, glasswort and pennywort, strapwort and sandwort, stitchwort and fleawort. There were always troublesome plants, like brambles, that seemed to defy identification, and these have continued to be troublesome even in the molecular era, when gene sequences have replaced close observation of prickles or the counting of leaflets. Challenges were part of the fun. The numerous yellow daisies still cause me to confuse my hawkbits with my hawkweeds, and my hawkweeds with my hawksbeards. I continue to feel a sense of achievement if I can negotiate a good identification for a confusing member of the parsley family, as the flowers of this group of plants are all very similar. In most species tiny white flowers are born in flat bouquets called umbels. I used to describe them as uriahs, on account of ’umble Uriah Heep. I learned to call all parsleys ‘umbellifers’ as did many naturalists of my antiquity (the meaning is ‘umbel carriers’). Now we are told that in modern botany they are correctly termed ‘Apiaceae’, but for me they will remain eternally umbellifers – but this is just my ’umble opinion.

  I still return to the Collins pocket guide as the place where I record every plant that I have seen in Britain. I don’t know why: it is a ritual I do not question, rather like the Anglican litany of my schooldays. The last addition I made, in 2018, was smooth rupturewort found on a heath in Suffolk, a modest, tiny, and uncommon herb growing over bare soil. It really deserved its mark in the precious old book. At some deep and irrational level I must believe that as long as I keep ticking off more plants in the Collins book I shall live for ever. I cannot possibly leave this world until they are all recorded; it is a metaphysical certainty. My tradition of recording goes back to a time before I used scientific names for animals, plants and fungi, so I remember the vast majority of my flowering plants by their old English name – or I should say names, as many of them have a plethora of local tags, as Geoffrey Grigson and Richard Mabey have exhaustively recorded. The charm of wildflower names is often only a short step away from poetry: pellitory-of-the-wall, wood goldilocks, frosted orache, ploughman’s spikenard, venus’s looking glass. They sound like ingredients for a magic potion. I attempted to teach my children some of these old names, but met a certain resistance. They felt country walks were in danger of becoming more like memory tests. ‘Moschatel,’ I would intone holding up a very small greenish herb. ‘Can’t you see it looks just like a town hall clock?’ Nobody seemed to disagree. My son found a way out by always giving the same answer. When I held up red campion and asked him to identify it he would reply ‘cragwort’; if I displayed henbit dead nettle that was ‘cragwort’, too; likewise lesser stitchwort. I almost wish there really was a plant called cragwort so that there would have been a theoretical possibility of one of the children arriving at the right answer. But of the many worts, none is craggy.

  One of the first plants I ticked off in the book was cuckoo flower – also called lady’s smock (Cardamine pratense). I allow it to grow in the rougher parts of my garden where its very pale pink flowers emerge in small clusters from among coarse grasses, displaying a surprising delicacy among their rank neighbours. Its common name says that the flowers should arrive at the same time as the cuckoo. The annual migration of this avian parasite from southern climes was once routine: as a boy I used to hear cuckoos even in Ealing W5. In 2019 I have waited in vain for the bird to be reunited with its flower: but there is no cuckoo within hearing distance of my small country town, despite the well-wooded hills nearby. The cuckoo population has declined by 80% since I started recording plants in my Collins guide, and research published in 2018 relates this sad loss particularly to adverse conditions along one of two migration routes back to Africa. There is not enough food to sustain the birds on their long journey, and a familiar inventory of causes has been trotted out, yet again, with climate change and unhelpful farming practices top of the list. The arrival of the cuckoo now largely resides as a memory in the name of its charming flower. I dread having to explain what a cuckoo once was to my grandchildren, as if it were archaeopteryx. Perhaps I should try to forget the old common name. It is much less upsetting to explain a lady’s smock.

  British wildflowers have a particular place in my story, as they were the basis of my first scientific paper. As the Cambridge entrance examinations began to loom on the horizon, it was suggested at school that I should try to win a Trevelyan Scholarship. A thesis had to be submitted in support of the application for the scholarship, which offered generous support during the undergraduate years. I decided to work on a project to survey the wildflowers of the chalk downland and adjacent areas along the Berkshire Downs, running from Inkpen Beacon to Shalbourne Hill. This was my local patch around Forge Cottage, and whenever I was at home I went out on the hunt. Intense concentration on the search was balm, or at least distraction, from the events that had shaken my life. I was out in all weathers, sometimes hunched against a strong wind, my eyes scanning the short turf for plants of particular interest. ‘Sharp sight’ is a curious phrase, but it does convey that the eye spears the sought object, pins it down. In our physics classes the rays that impinged on the retina were always shown as tracks entering the eye from a distance, coming the other way, but the sharp eye reversed the process – the eye did the catching. I thought of a photograph I had seen in Arthur Mee’s encyclopedia of an Amazonian native spearing a fish from a dugout. The eye lances the treasure. The hunter can only think of the hunt, no time for morbid thoughts, or self-doubt.

  The downlands were in the process of transition when I carried out my survey. The village of Ham was set below the scarp of the chalk, which rose steeply upwards to the ancient track that followed its crest. This was a landscape cleared and exploited by farmers since the Iron Age. For several hundred years the steep slopes of the downs supported sheep and had not been artificially fertilised. The turf was short, and continually nibbled back. Chalk flowers abounded. At some time shortly before my survey began cattle were introduced to increase profitability, and fertilisers were applied to encourage grass growth. I was surveying on the cusp between age-old practice and modern farming. I was not to know that many of the flowers that I recorded with pleasure were destined to disappear from much of the landscape within a few years. At Ham Hill an old, steep-sided cut climbed up the scarp –maybe it was once a drover’s route. Now it made a superb habitat for orchids, those most pernickety of flowering plants. I found ten different species. Some were common enough at the time: early purple, spotted, fragrant, and pyramidal orchids, and the all-green twayblade, looking so unassuming among its more glamorous friends. All of them still survive widely in the right habitats. Several species that grew on the steep slopes would now be listed as star performers in any nature reserve: the burnt orchid, compact with a plum-coloured tip to a flowering spike that shaded to white beneath; frog orchid with strange brown-green flowers only remotely resembling the eponymous amphibian; bee orchid on patches of exposed soil, a miniature exotic with a short spike carrying just a few flowers having three pink sepals framing the ‘bee’ of the petals – the kind of flower that every tyro botanist wants to admire. The Collins book had a measure of rarity for each species, marked by asterisks – zero to three, with three being the rarest. Most of the orchids were ‘one star’ at the time the book was printed (only the spotted and pyramidal or
chids were commoner). Ham Hill yielded further orchids that were flagged with two asterisks, which meant that they were uncommon even in the early 1960s. The man orchid displayed a tall spike of brownish flowers with what the guidebook described as a ‘marionette-like lip’ – the flowers really did look like a bunch of tiny figures dangling with arms and legs. This unusual orchid was quite common towards the top of the hill and stood proud of the turf – it couldn’t be missed. The slender musk orchid was comparatively inconspicuous, with a short spike of white sweet-smelling flowers, and it grew only on the steepest slopes, tucked away. Both were a joy to discover. Even the little lane that led to the hill had a treasure. Leaning out from the hedgebank were long spikes composed of small white flowers: a ‘three star’ discovery, the Bath asparagus (Ornithogalum pyrenaicum). I assume from the name that it was once used as a vegetable, although it is now so rare that if it turns up it makes the news rather than the pot. My survey continued, with a growing inventory of pretty chalk-loving vetches, milkworts and gentians, and many inconspicuous curiosities. Where the flinty ground had been ploughed cornfield weeds were still common – poppies and corn marigolds and venus’s looking glass, brilliant scarlet and gamboge yellow washed among the wheat; but that single corn buttercup may have been the last of its kind. I compiled the details of distribution and habitat of each plant to feed into the thesis: it was simple but engrossing science.

  I failed to get the Trevelyan Scholarship. The thesis got me as far as the interview, but there I mumbled and bumbled before a distinguished if intimidating board, and I must have failed to impress, or even condemned myself from my own mouth. This scholarship scheme has now been discontinued, but I really want my thesis back. The written evidence of what I saw on the Berkshire and Wiltshire border is a valuable voucher, a benchmark against which to measure what has happened to the flora since the 1960s. It could well provide the only evidence for an important site – I remember that I even included some colour photographs. I have failed to trace any archive of the work submitted to the Trevelyan Scholarship board; I hate to think of those miles trudged and hours with the identification guides simply lost. The long view of nature depends on knowing the status of wildlife over past decades. Memories are fallible. Claims without documentary support about how things used to be might well be treated with suspicion by the next generation. I am reminded of one of my father’s eggs, collected from a red-backed shrike’s nest in Worcestershire long ago, and now lodged only in my own memory; a sceptic might say it is no more than a tall story.

  It may have been a mistake to go back but a few years ago I returned to Ham Hill, to the slopes and banks where I had made my discoveries. From a distance, nothing seemed to have changed: the downs still lay like a supine and sensuous torso below the wide sky. The lane leading to the high ground had been tidied up. When I lived at Ham one of the last hedgers-and-ditchers was still employed by the local council to keep banks in good condition. His tools were a billhook, a sickle and a mattock. Mechanical flails have long since replaced him; I now saw no trace of the rare Bath asparagus. The old track was still there running up the hillside, but it was choked with ash trees, and brambles covered the steep banks that had once been dappled with wildflowers. All the orchids had gone, even the common ones.[1] At the crest of the hill cereal crops grew almost to the edge of the ancient track. Deeply green fields of barley supported neither poppies nor corn marigolds, nothing was flowering to disturb the programmed growth of cereals. Doubtless yields per acre had trebled over the decades thanks to sprays and fertilisers. I felt bereaved. I recalled that other death: two deaths conflated on a single hilltop commanding one of the best views in the south. My vision north across the green belly of Middle England was blurred with tears.

  I have known scientists who regard enthusiasm for the identification of organisms as a kind of stamp collecting. This is not intended to be flattering. They ask: what is the need to know all those damned names? The real business is with sequencing the genome, identifying chemical pathways in organelles, crunching vast sets of data in supercomputers, and other research at the cutting edge. Nineteenth-century vicars did the naming stuff. I have wondered whether some of these critics might regard the extinction of species as rather a good thing, since it would reduce the complexity of natural systems available for analysis. The issue is more than the well-rehearsed division between ‘whole organism biologists’ and ‘scientific reductionists’. I have been on walks with dedicated professional botanists who cannot identify the commonest wildflowers; identification has never been part of their culture. It would be harder for them to experience the empathy with the natural world that I have described earlier in this book. Perhaps they have never felt the harmony that comes with a throng of different flowers buzzing with dozens of insects, a sense of countless natural livings earned in countless ways. Life is polyglottal, symphonic, inventive, and inevitably diverse. Complexity and richness are the hallmarks of life itself. If I could make one generalisation from studying the long history of life on earth it would be that evolution has generated richness. Repeatedly. After the sudden mass extinctions that punctuated life’s leisurely trajectory richness reasserted itself every time. After the terrestrial dinosaurs were removed from earth, mammals exploded into a thousand ecological niches. Rich forests reappeared again and again after being wiped from the face of the planet. Nature did indeed abhor a vacuum, but repopulated the ecology with a hundred thousand species each pursuing its own ends, jostling, collaborating or competing within a multifarious biosphere.

  The language of nature is written in an abundance of species. When human beings exterminate many of these species they are diminishing that language. To fail to recognise species is like being unaware of words that are essential to cogent speech. The extinctions of recent decades mean that strands in the web of communication are being slashed, leaving an impoverished language. I don’t know how all those plants and animals on Ham Hill talked to one another but I could recognise that there were subtle interconnections. There is a feeling of rightness when an ecosystem is functioning as it should; the organisms are comfortable with themselves, a kind of contentment. It does not matter that competition is ruling what is happening between individuals, what matters is the sound of the language. But the names/species are the words, and without them you cannot understand the narrative. Those who don’t appreciate this are effectively deaf.

  * * *

  Forge Cottage had a small greenhouse, and this became the focus for a short-lived passion for cacti. My interest was sparked by moving a miserable-looking, spiky cactus that had been refusing to die for many years into the greenhouse to see if it would cheer up. It rewarded my attention by producing a huge white flower, longer than the plant itself. The trumpet of slender, pointed petals curved outwards l ike some sort of exploding firework to surround numerous yellow stamens: it was spectacular. I started to collect as many species of succulent as I could and learned a fundamental principle of evolution. True cacti were just one family of plants that had learned to cope with arid conditions by storing water in their bloated stems, the surfaces of which became the site of photosynthesis. Other families had learned a similar trick, and several had become such close mimics of true cacti that you had to look closely to spot the differences. I would later come across many of these interesting plants in the wild when my fieldwork took me to deserts around the world, but for the moment the greenhouse was my passport to New Mexico or Namibia. Real cacti are almost confined (as natives) to the Americas. In Africa, Euphorbia evolved into numerous species that look very similar to cacti, but their unspectacular tiny flowers betray their true identity; no exuberant blossoms for these succulents. They are related to troublesome weeds that flourish in my garden. Euphorbia is one of the most widely distributed plant genera, and species can be anything from a leafy herb to a tree. All of the 2,000 species have a white juice and all the books warn that it is noxious. I can confirm that judgement: I once accidentally rubbed some of the juice into
my eye and was dancing up and down in agony for hours. The ones that resemble cacti have spines, but they usually originate as outgrowths coming directly from the ribs; on true cacti spines emerge from little woolly cushions, so the two kinds of succulents can be told apart even when not in flower. There is no better example of convergent evolution than cacti and Euphorbia, a demonstration that similar habits and habitats generate close resemblance derived from separate ancestors, even down to details like spines. I soon discovered that much of the charm of cacti lay in the symmetry and arrangement of their spiny covering. The spines could be viciously hooked or delicately splayed, or cover the whole of the plants like a strange cobweb. I grew large prickly pears and mounds of mammillarias and ferociously armed barrel cacti (Echinocactus). The real triumph was persuading them to flower in a garden in a corner of the English countryside. True cactus flowers often have an odd, shiny brilliance that can almost hurt the eyes, and I had red, pink, yellow and white flowers to prove it. No cacti have blue flowers. I grew succulents that stored water in plump leaves rather than in their stems, culminating in the ‘stone plants’ which were reduced to a single pair of fat leaves, and really did look extraordinarily like rounded pebbles – until the surprising yellow, daisy-like flower emerged from between the leaf pair.