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.’