Beginings

I think I was born with sap in my veins, not blood. During breaks at Pitton primary school in Wiltshire, while most kids played games or kicked a football around, I often made my way down to a mighty walnut tree near the far corner of the playing field. Leaning against its vast trunk for what seemed like hours, I’d gaze up into its thick canopy of leaves and just watch. I was utterly entranced by it.

And then there’s the old and rather grainy family photo of us on an autumn day out to the New Forest. I’m sat in a deep pile of leaves beside an enourmous fungus (maybe a washed out Fly Agaric?) and I appear to be explaining all about it to my brothers. I can’t remember this moment, but there it is – a budding botanist (or mycologist!) at the age of 3 or 4.

There are other flickers of my botanical awakening: the sheer incredulity of a sunflower seed germinating and romping away for the light, the rich fruity scent from the roses my mum loved growing, and the strange realisation that different types of grass grew in dad’s fields. I remember finding cock’s-foot in the farmyard as clear as if it was yesterday, and realising that the knobbly flowerhead really did look like a cock’s-foot. Excited by this revelation, I even made a scrapbook of the various grasses I found, a 6-year old’s herbarium with pastel-coloured pages and Sellotape.

Inspiration can come in many forms and I’m fascinated by the way that sometimes even the small things can fire up the imagination, perhaps igniting our curiosity and beginning new ways of looking at the world.

Recently, the utterly wonderful Susie Dent (‘that woman in Dictionary Corner’) tweeted about daisy and the origin of its name from ‘day’s eye’. To many botanists, such a simple little snippet of info might get forgotten, but wow it struck a chord with a lot of people! That one tweet received 37,000 likes and nearly 4,000 retweets. I love that.