Nature writing

Well, the elements have certainly been showing us who’s in charge! Hopefully, you’ll have experienced no more than mild inconvenience and a few thrills of excitement over the last few days, rather than dangerous and scary disruption. I haven’t been able to work today, as my current job involves planting young trees along the upper reaches of rivers in a selection of lovely, lonely valleys in southern Snowdonia. After last Thursday’s experiences we’ve decided to listen to what the weather is telling us, and are staying in painting the kitchen until the waters subside. Well, Himself is painting. 

Excellent nature writing reads easily. It’s certainly not easy to write, and is as susceptible as travel writing to purple prose. I struggle to capture the simplicity and complexity and sheer heart-stopping beauty of nature. The squawks of a reluctant fledgeling housemartin struggling as a parent, patience lost, hauls it out of the nest for a flying lesson. Raven pairs renewing their pair bond in flight-dance, with side-flips and tandem turns and those achingly lovely deep-noted plunky calls, like a metal pail of water tapped with a stone. The colours. The bud of a hawthorn in May, a ivory ball of promise. If you enjoy trying to capture nature on the page, there are a couple of competitions to look out for. 

Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is launching a new international nature writing competition. The closing date is January 6^th 2013. First prize is a five-day residential Arvon foundation writing course PLUS £500. Entry fee £7.50. Trigger words/phrases for the 2013 competition are: ‘Roots,’ ‘Spaces’ and ‘A Whisper’; more details here.

The page links to an excellent article on how to be a nature writer. 

BBC Wildlife has run a nature writing competition for the last five years, with a closing date of April 30^th. There’s no news on the website yet of a 2013 competition but I’d be mightily surprised if there wasn’t one. Keep an eye on the website. You can read last year’s winners and commended stories here. 

A few of my favourite books of nature writing

Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey. No scary species identification guide, this; it’s a glorious compendium, divertingly readable. All the native British flowering plants are there, including trees (which are technically flowering plants). Beautifully photographed, the entries include alternative names and their origins, folk stories and myths and legends, former and current uses from the medicinal to the culinary, appearances and references in older literature, their habitats and distribution, traditions and festivals surviving to this day.  

Collected Poetry and Prose, Gerard Manley Hopkins. A devout Christian and a priest in later life, Hopkins saw God’s glory in every natural thing. Not that this makes his writing inaccessible to those of other (or no) religious persuasion; his joy in the natural world, from meadows pinned with buttercups to songbirds in flight, is palpable and infectious. And what writing it is - sometimes almost chokingly dense, so squeezed and pulled are the words and phrases so that it says exactly what he wants it to say. Take the first four lines of Pied Beauty: 

‘Glory be to God for dappled things - 

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;’

And you’ve just got to read Hopkins out loud. Say the second line out loud now. Go on, now. Doesn’t it just feel joyous? Your mouth has to move; the sounds paint the colours. And how much more lovely does ‘couple-colour’ sound than ‘two-toned’?

All that, with an anatomist’s accuracy of observation. That is the best description of rainbow trout I’ve ever read; unmistakable.  And how many of us would think of a finch’s pied wing rather than the more obvious magpie? I’d better stop now, I have a habit of raving about Hopkins once I start. 

Please, do, do read him. 

The Oxford Book of Nature Writing, edited by Richard Mabey (he is rather a giant of nature writing). Mine is the 1995 edition; there may well be another by now. From Aristotle to Primo Levi,  eighteenth century amateur naturalists to the suppositions of Dark Age thinkers and monks, this is one of those books you keep on the landing and dip into while waiting for the bathroom and have to be roused from half an hour later, still standing. Two favourites: Welshman Gruffydd ab Addaf ap Dafydd’s letter to a tree in the 1300s, ‘To a Birch-Tree Cut Down, and Set Up in Llanidloes as a Maypole; and an extract from the Journals of Richard Jefferies in 1884, ending thus:

                        ‘Never go for a walk in the fields without seeing one thing at least however small to give me hope, the frond of a fern among dead leaves.’

Taking time

On Monday we planted a hedge of trees in slanted wind and rain, watched with interest by three small donkeys, a small herd of pygmy goats and four llamas. Yesterday’s office was a polytunnel full of cherry tomato plants; we harvested the fruits and weighed them for the friend whose charges they are, the guinea pigs for his PhD. (Our freezer is now brimful of pulped tomatoes.) Today we planted trees along the banks of a turgid stream flowing from the head of a beautiful, remote valley in southern Snowdonia.

I love my varied life. It’s not easy to forget how lucky I am; if ever I’m complacent, or feel even slightly inclined to grumble about the weather, I just remind myself that I could be wrangling with the grants department of a quango or filling in performance indicators for a nature reserve (yes, that really happens). Total job satisfaction is instantly restored.

However, patience is not one of my virtues. ‘Why’s it taking so long?’ I am frequently heard to cry when terrain or weather makes jobs a bit more difficult. (Also shouted when occupied in any kind of housework.) On Monday, for example, my partner and I planted a hedge of 300 trees in under five hours. That included hauling trays of little trees to where they needed to be, plus the canes and guards that support and protect them, laying everything out – a seedling, a cane and a guard in each spot – and finally working along the hedge-line setting them into the soil. Today it took us six hours to plant 400, only 100 of which required canes and guards (sheep were excluded, and, being on the river bank, and subject to occasional inundation, the guards would probably be swept away in the next flood, possibly injuring or killing the young tree as well; better to plant the trees securely and let them take their chances).  My impatience was running high. ‘It’s so SLOW,’ I complained.

My partner is my polar opposite. ‘Things take time,’ he says to me, often. ‘Doing things well takes time.’ Today, he pointed out to me the things I should have noticed before I began to whinge: that we had to carry materials a lot further; that the river bank inside the fences was an organic, curving, changing creature, with heights and sinks and  narrows and broads, and that we had to spend more thought on placing the trees – willow near the edge, hawthorn and hazel on higher ground, birch and alder in amongst the rushes– rather than just laying them out in regular lines; that the trees’ job would be to stabilise the banks, so thought had to be given to where they were most needed. 

It’s probably obvious that I’m going to draw a parallel between this and writing. I’m terribly impatient with this as well. One sentence in and my mind is yelling at my fingers. ‘Rubbish! Scratch it out! Delete it! Do it right first time, why can’t you?’ Which is when it’s good to remember the trees, and to hear his voice in my head. ‘Things take time. Doing things well takes time.’

If you have your own mantras - yours or a supportive dear one's - I'd love to hear them. 

Ash to ashes

These are my closest ash trees, the ones I see when I look out of my bedroom window. One mature ash stands between and behind the pair of sweet chestnuts, and together with the ash saplings and seedlings they make a small copse that the tawny owl sometimes nests in, and always brings the fledgelings to for flying practice. In the light rain afternoon I went out and took some photographs of them. 

It’s windy today. Standing underneath looking up, the still-green leaves on the sapling danced beneath the limbs and ochre saw-toothed leaves of the sheltering sweet chestnut. On the parent ash, the leaves have long gone; they were one of the first to turn and fall, a brilliant, lime-tinted yellow while other species were still green. There are about half a dozen young ash in the undergrowth here. The one in the photo is about two years old; the tallest sapling is perhaps seven years old.

Some of reasons why I love ash:

• It was the first tree I learnt to identifying in winter; it’s the only common tree with black buds.
• If you clip a bud and carefully open and unpick it with a needle, you’ll find the leaflets already fully formed, on the tiniest scale. It’s all there, ready.
• It casts the most beautiful dappled shade. Herb flora has a chance under ash and speckled wood butterflies seem to love it for the same reason, fiercely defending the dancing beams of sunlight that it allows through.
• You can burn it fairly green, but if you have a chance to let it season it is the best firewood. Whatever the number of hours of work you’ve had to barter with the land-owner in order to get it, and the hours it’s taken to carry, saw, chop and stack it, a wood-store of ash is worth double.
• It’s graceful. Look at the three trees together: where the sweet chestnut arms stretch outwards, bending and twisting, the ash reaches skywards.

Tomorrow we start planting work. The seedling trees have arrived, four thousand plugs in bundles of twenty, carefully laid in a large crate and sent to us from a nursery in western Scotland, where the locally sourced seed has a similar genetic make-up to that in western Wales. No ash this year.

When I hear a government minister advising the public to wash their boots and their dogs’ paws after walking in woods, I want to weep. This is an island, we live on an island. There are twenty-one miles of seawater between mainland France and Dover, the best possible defence against an invading pathogen. This shouldn’t have happened. 

Sending it out into the big wide world

Don’t you just love cold, wet weather? All you have to do is spend a couple of hours out in it  - working in the garden, or the graveyard in our case, or on your bike battling against crosswinds and hail for thirty miles - and then you can spend the rest of the day in toasty warm indoor pursuits, feeling virtuous. That was yesterday - today it is just cold, cold, cold, and I’ve got a dodgy tum so I’m inside by the fire while Himself is off cycling in the mountains. 

I’ve been taking some Looks At What I Do, specifically comparing what I’ve achieved in October against what I achieved in September. I’m not talking about word counts, which I think can be misleading unless qualified. (I tend to write two or three drafts of a short story by hand before it gets typed onto my laptop, for example, and never count the words; life’s too short.) No, my yardstick for progress is how many pieces, stories or ideas I have submitted. In other words, how often I’ve stuck my head up from behind the big, safe wall and said, ‘Hello, this is me! I’m trying to be a writer! Umm, what do you think of this?’ 

During October, into the world I sent:

Three short travel articles, unsolicited

One pitch for another travel article

Two short stories to women’s magazines - result unknown as yet

Five short stories to competitions - one unsuccessful, results of others yet to be announced

That’s eleven. Eleven.

Paltry as this may seem to some of you, this is a huge improvement on September (three submissions in total: one article accepted, one competition not won and one unsuccessful womag submission), which was in itself the first month in my entire life that I’d submitted or pitched more than one idea or story. 

This doesn’t include all the stories that I aimed to finish for competitions but didn’t finish in time; some of these are on my To Be Worked At list because I think they’ve got legs. It doesn’t include my drafts of other travel articles, ready to be worked up if any of my pitches (sent out in the last couple of days) get any bites. It doesn’t include my long-term projects, the novel I’m currently plugging away at daily and the cycling memoir that I work at a couple of days a week. 

Eleven submissions. Eleven. 

It’s been nice and safe behind the wall. If you don’t send work out, no-one can reject it, can they? 

One of my hobbies is hula-hooping. Now, I am not a performer. Being the centre of attention has always been a nightmare for me, I can’t stand the sound of my own voice, and having more than three people look at me at once does horrible things to my knees. However, you can’t practice hooping in the garden (indoor practice has been forbidden since the smashed-lightbulb count hit double figures) without attracting some attention. I’ve become used to people stopping for a stare; I’ve even busked a little, and performed with my fire-hoop at some chilled parties. The performance-fear is still there, jellifying my knees and my digestive tract, but I do it. It’s a simple equation. The sheer loveliness of hooping is now greater than the fear. Just a smidgeon greater, but that’s enough to make it better to perform than to sit down wishing I had the guts to perform. 

At last, I’m getting to a similar place with my writing. Far, far better to keep sticking the head up and sending work out into the world than endlessly working on it in the safety behind the wall. My stomach muscles clench every time I click Send, or when my fingers release the envelope into the postbox, but then it’s done. On to the next piece of writing. 

By the way, if you are curious about hula-hooping, type Safire’s Hoop Manifesto into YouTube. It’s all about persistence and practice - transferable to any art or discipline - and there are some clips of beautiful hooping. Have a look.