The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (22 page)

No, we could not have invented America’s warblers: it is nature we need, to come up with such endless diversity of tint and tone. And yet, breathtaking though it is, I think I am drawn most of all to the intense single colours the natural world sometimes offers, such as the large copper’s saturated orange or the pure white of some waterbirds such as egrets, fresh snow against the background of a greeny-brown marsh, or the lipstick scarlet of poppies, or the purple flash along the flanks of rainbow trout, or, indeed, the blue of the bluebells in the wood to which, that springtime (it wasn’t very long ago), I returned for five days in succession.

It was the blue which drew me back. I know I am more drawn to blue than to any other colour. Let me give some examples, leaving bluebells for the moment to one side. Two other blue flowers also move me greatly: one dark blue, one pale.
The dark blue is the cornflower, prominent among the plants exterminated from the countryside by Farmer Giles with his unkickable herbicide habit. I have seen far more of them in Normandy than I ever have in England; in France
les bleuets
are held in special affection, as they are the flowers associated with the French soldiers who fought in the trenches in the First World War, the
Poilus
, just as in Britain the scarlet poppies remain the symbol of their English equivalents, the Tommies. The particular aspect of cornflowers which attracts me is that they seem to glow, such is the depth of their colouring – it is indigo, really – but to glow with dark rather than with light, almost as if they are throbbing with darkness and shedding it; and when I got to know them, in mid life, this quality suddenly triggered in me the memory of a forgotten poem I had read and loved as a teenager, which actually articulates the precise idea, hypnotically, almost as an incantation. It is D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Bavarian Gentians’:

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom,

ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue

down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day

torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,

black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,

giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off light,

lead me then, lead me the way.

Lawrence asking the flower to lead him down to the underworld may be seen, if you wish, as prefiguring his own death (the poem was written near the end of his life when he was ill with
the tuberculosis that was to kill him), but the truly lovely invocation of ‘blue darkness’ saves it from any hint of the morose or the morbid. And whenever I see cornflowers now, they glow with that added layer of meaning for me, which Lawrence’s poem has infused into my mind: they too might be torches to the underworld.

But if cornflowers are about darkness, the other blue flower I love, the harebell, is right at the opposite end of the spectrum: it is noted for its pallor. In fact, the paleness of harebells is part of their attraction, which is about delicacy. Occasionally confused with bluebells – they are of similar size, but whereas the blue-bell is a hyacinth, related to irises and orchids, the harebell is a campanula or bell-flower, distantly related to the daisies – they are flowers of the end of summer rather than of the springtime, and while the bluebell’s massed ranks are overpowering and unmissable, harebells can be overlooked. Sometimes you find them in small clumps; often they’re just in ones and twos. Skimpy, skittish things, they are altogether frailer plants than bluebells; while the latter, growing in the rich damp soil of a woodland, have a fat sturdy stem which is bursting with sap, harebells, which flourish on dry open ground – I first got to know them on sand dunes – have a stalk which is just a wire. The bell-like azure flower on top of it could be made from tissue paper; it might have been cut out and pasted together by a child in primary school. This frailty means that it picks up the slightest puff of wind, quivering and nodding and catching the light in a continuous flicker. Christina Rossetti wrote:

Hope is like a harebell trembling from its birth . . .

The frailty and the flickering are among the points people notice immediately about the flower: a light show in the wind, a friend of mine once said.

(Christina Rossetti, by the way, was not the only nineteenth-
century woman poet to refer to harebells; there is also a hare-bell poem by the American Emily Dickinson, Rossetti’s exact contemporary – they were born within a week of each other in December 1830 – which is so unusual and forceful, especially in the shock of the minor but unmistakable erotic charge of the opening, that I cannot resist quoting it:

Did the Harebell loose her girdle

To the lover Bee

Would the Bee the Harebell hallow

Much as formerly?

Did the ‘Paradise’ – persuaded –

Yield her moat of pearl,

Would the Eden be an Eden,

Or the Earl – an Earl?

It might take a bit of deciphering, but what Dickinson is saying with her characteristic compression is that things which are cherished because they are pursued, may be cherished no longer, once attained.)

The deepest attraction of the harebell, however, is not so much the flickering light show as it is the combination of its colour with its timing. Its flimsy, pale sky-blue stands out because when it appears, at the end of the summer, much of the life has gone out of the landscape; the grasses have yellowed and browned, the birdsong is silenced, the swifts have departed and the trout no longer rise. There are flowers in bloom, such as the pinkish-brown hemp agrimony, and harsh yellow ragwort, but somehow they are part of a palette of exhaustion. The calendar says what are you complaining about, it’s still summer, but I’ve always felt that summer really ends about 15 August, and after that it feels like post-coital depression in the natural world – a sort of in-between nothingness before the arrival of
autumn, with its own sharp identity. Into this time of melancholy (for me, at least) pops
Campanula rotundifolia
: on heaths or dunes, grasslands or hillsides, the translucent blue bells catch the wind, catch the light, and catch the heart, with a colour which somehow seems to speak of the future rather than the past, even though everything around is starting to fade; they give the landscape a last flare of life at the point when the year begins to wither and die.

Both of these blues draw me powerfully, the pale defiant one and the dark pulsating one, yet neither can compare with the bluebells, for there is another blue which goes beyond and has a quite electrifying effect on me and I imagine on other people too, and which the bluebells contain, in their shade-shifting: it is the extreme, dazzling blue which nature very occasionally offers, a tone in which the basic colour intensifies itself more than any other colour seems able to, so that it becomes one of the most remarkable visual phenomena of the natural world. I think of it simply as brilliant blue. The exemplar of it, for me anyway, is the blue of the morpho butterflies of South America, but it can be found in Britain in two other organisms besides the bluebells, both winged, one of which is a butterfly of our own, the Adonis blue, something of a morpho in miniature: it has the same lustrous brightness, the same glossy radiant sheen, on a much smaller scale. The seven blue butterfly species found in Britain are all pleasing, in fact, and one of the most attractive is the common blue,
Polyommatus icarus
, with wings of an iridescent lilac, which I feel is probably under-appreciated because of its dismissive name – were it called the Icarus blue, say, people might cherish it more – but the Adonis blue edges it, in its brilliance. The first time I ever saw one, I was called over by a friend: the butterfly was resting on the turf, wings upright and closed, showing only the spotted brown undersides, and I crouched down and looked, heart beating, as he touched it with his fingertip, and there was a tiny explosion of blueness.

The other species is the kingfisher. The key point about kingfishers is that they bear two blues. One is the glowing greenish-blue of the folded wings, the colour seen in standard illustrations of the perching birds: it makes a striking and splendid contrast with the rich chestnut-orange of the underparts. But it is the other blue which takes your breath away. This is the blue of the kingfisher’s back, and it is the blue you see in real life, rather than on the painted teapot or the greetings card, because your first sight of the bird is almost certain to be of it zooming away from you, and when its wings are outstretched, the back feathers are exposed and there it is.

It’s a blue so bright it appears to be lit from within.

It’s brighter than the sky.

This is not on any colour chart I have ever seen in a paint shop, and I feel that, as with the large copper, many people seeing this for the first time might have a sort of elated experience, which is that their sense of what the world can contain is actually expanded. That was certainly the case with my son Seb, when the two of us went for an evening walk while on holiday in Normandy, when he was seventeen. We were strolling along the side of the river which runs through the Perche, the Huisne, at an isolated spot near one of the many Percheron Renaissance manors, in this case the Manoir de la Vove; in the gathering dusk its fairy-tale towers stood out against the evening sky. The river ran between high banks and as the gloaming deepened, a blue light suddenly shot along the dark water beneath us and Seb pulled up sharply and exclaimed: ‘What was
that
?’ I told him; he was fascinated. It was a moment Seamus Heaney captured precisely with a line tossed off in a song of haunting music:

I met a girl from Derrygarve

And the name, a lost potent musk,

Recalled the river’s long swerve,

A kingfisher’s blue bolt at dusk . . .

Seb’s is not a generation which looks at the natural world, but the blue bolt at dusk stopped him dead in his tracks.

As did the bluebells with me. In that wood, in that spring not long ago, for five days in succession I was struck dumb by the beauty of the earth. For five days I went back purposely to look at that colour, that living colour, because when I accidentally came across it, it was at its peak, and I knew that soon it would fade. Day after day after day after day after day. And I told no one. I think I was . . . what? Ashamed? No, not at all; but I am influenced by prevailing cultural norms as much as the next person, and I suppose I felt that declaiming about five successive days of bluebell-peeping would be regarded as eccentric? Or something? Yet I was drawn back there ineluctably, to glut my senses on colour. Without telling a soul. It felt almost like being part of the underground . . .

For if the beauty of nature is not high in official cultural favour, as we set out into the twenty-first century, it still holds its magnetism for countless unpolemical minds, with a force which strongly suggests it is rooted in our underlying bond with the natural world, and that culture is being trumped by instinct. That is certainly the case with me. I do not care a fig that modernism may have cast beauty aside, and that the legacy of the rejection may be with us today; to me, the beauty of the natural world retains its joy-giving power and its importance undiminished by artistic, cultural, or philosophical fashion – indeed, its importance is increased immeasurably by the fact that now it is mortally threatened.

And as for blue, and its special attraction for me, I think this is instinct trumping culture too; I know I am drawn to it beyond other colours, but I cannot see that I was socialised to be so in the course of my own life. If we accept that the human imagination was formed by our interactions with the natural world, over the fifty thousand generations, then I think that my blue-love is in there somewhere; that I probably have, planted within
me, in the genes, a bond with a colour which was for our wandering ancestors the most predominant hue of all, stretching over their heads so far and wide that eventually they called it heaven.

•

The beauty of the earth, of course, goes far beyond colour. It is found just as much in form, both in its landscapes and in the life it hosts: in the harmony of vistas, the majesty of mountains, the intimate charm of valleys, and the changing light of the sun upon them all; in the killer grace of leopards, the elegance of antelopes, the dash and fire of falcons, or the poise, as I have said, of wading birds. I admire all of these, but there is one form, one type of landscape feature in particular whose beauty has given me joy, and that is rivers. Not just any rivers, though: a specific group of rivers, in a specific place, whose beauty is such that, to me, it almost seems to reach beyond the material world into the realm of the ideal.

I start from a point of prejudice in their favour: I have loved rivers all my life, or at least since I was entranced, at the age of eight, by the first threatened species I encountered, those gnomes of BB’s Folly Brook. Their amiable watercourse with its unending murmurings and plops and splashes, its weirs and watermills as it swelled and widened, its hidden anchorages and overgrown islands, was very much the fifth main character of
The Little Grey Men
, especially when Dodder, Baldmoney, and Sneezewort, accompanied by their lost and now found brother, Cloudberry descend it towards the sea, desperately seeking a new life, in the book’s sequel,
Down the Bright Stream
. Ever after, I have been unable to see a river, any river, without a quickening of the spirit – if I cross a river on any journey I want to know its name, and if at all possible, stop on the bridge and gaze into
its currents – and yet, this is such an automatic reaction that as I have got older, I have wondered if perhaps this fascination too may be hard-wired, if this too may come from long before my childhood, from the hunter-gatherers; if perhaps the story of the Folly Brook may have switched on a pre-existing longing, one which was already there, deep in the tissues.