![]() ![]() They can be vulgar, poignant and romantic. "To know wild flowers," she says, "adds a new layer to the way you experience the world."įlower names can be peculiar down to individual parish, corrupted by geographical accent and dialect. She sees what I cannot see, a ground-hugging world populated by delights unknown. She has poked about every hedge, dune, marsh, lane and wall. Raven has traversed wood, meadow, heath, down and dale. Here are stitchwort, spleenwort, woundwort, sneezewort, lousewort, mugwort and nightshade. Here are polypody, pignut and pudding dock, sowthistles, sorrels and spurges. Here are dodder, madder, fat-hen and ling. Here are adder's tongue, autumn lady's-tresses, betty-go-to-bed-at-noon, runaway jack, change-of-the-weather, codlins-and-cream and creeping-jenny. The names are, in truth, the pictures, recording how country people down the ages have seen in nature a mirror of their lives. Hence when Sarah Raven's colossal new compendium, Wild Flowers, thudded into my lap, it was not to the pictures that I turned but to the index. We shall soon be decking our houses in holly and kissing under mistletoe. This month we worship the poppy, condemning those who would burn it as defiling the dead. Nations honour the rose, the thistle, the maple. Wild flowers are freedom's flags, victorious over authority, cultivation and weeding. It is a realm of unrivalled colour and richness, defying time and order. Nature's wilderness is a foreign land, yet its tongue is strangely comforting. I hardly know these flowers, let alone could recognise them. They once cowered under the stern eye of the local vicar/poet, RS Thomas, who bleakly dubbed Aberdaron "compassionless". Here is an uplifting array of thrift, vetch, yarrow, mayweed, lady's bedstraw, rest harrow, bird's foot trefoil and dozens more that toss and chatter like Shakespeare's mechanicals, apparently immune to the salty south-westerlies. I go when times are hard to the wild dune church of Aberdaron in north Wales, where is pinned up (or was) a list of flowers that battle against the wind in the graveyard outside.
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