I’ve had a delicious midsummer week, having just finished a temporary job, visiting Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, swimming at Wardie Bay in Edinburgh on the solstice, and finding a hedgehog on the doorstep in Cumbria. This issue isn’t the usual essay but I thought I’d share a couple of things I’ve been thinking about and inspired by recently to tide me over before the next full-length log.
Botanics
Growing up near Kew Gardens by the river, a greenhouse always feels like home:
I’ve been reading Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s new book Twelve Words for Moss, so I was pleased to spot so much of it wandering through the greenhouses. Moss contributes to the creation of peat bogs, crucial carbon-stores. Throughout the book, Burnett tunes ‘into different kinds of time that are already in motion […] Like the slowness of moss, or soil, or the deep accumulations of peat.’
Beatrix Potter
I’ve just written a review of Rebecca Smith’s Rural: The Working Class Countryside for The Quietus. We had the video set of the BBC’s The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends (1995) growing up. I remember being captivated by the live-action intro to each animated tale, which featured Beatrix Potter (Niamh Cusack) painting outside, until a rain shower hurries her in amidst shots of the animals, wild and farmyard, that inspired her. In a pleasingly gloomed room with a fire and a cup of tea, rabbit Peter free on her desk, Beatrix sits down to write a story. Reading Rural, it turns out that Peter was played by Smith’s rabbit Sherbet, paid £80 a day in a brown paper envelope for his charisma — so of course I had to include this in the article somehow.
Although I adored Beatrix Potter’s stories as a child, I found them a bit disturbing. For starters, there is no obscuring of the fact that Mr. and Mrs. McGregor want to eat Peter Rabbit and the Flopsy Bunnies in a pie (and did eat Peter’s father). Kindly Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s spines piercing through her bonnet and petticoat were slightly worrying. And Squirrel Nutkin — Old Brown Owl as some kind of authoritarian cult leader, taking tribute from the poor squirrels of Derwentwater. The only irreverent soul who dares to tease him is almost skinned alive but escapes with the loss of his tail. It’s not for nothing that surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington was inspired by Beatrix Potter’s tales growing up.
Potter herself is a remarkable person — taking mice-friends on the train in her pocket, submitting a scientific paper on fungi to the Linnaean Society, reinventing herself as a be-clogged Herdwick sheep farmer. Apparently, she shouted at my Grandma Vida (characteristic saying: ‘first up, best dressed’) from her garden gate when she was a girl (author Diana Wynne Jones shared a similar account, perhaps suggesting this experience has become a kind of folk story).
Potter’s meticulous studies make me think of Albrecht Dürer’s famous observational drawing of a hare. This understanding and underlying naturalism grounds her clothed anthropomorphic animals.
Reading
I’ve not yet finished Briefly, a Delicious Life by Nell Stevens — the ghost of a medieval teenage girl falls in love with author George Sand when she comes to stay at a monastery in Mallorca in 1838, her lover Chopin and two children in tow. I’m searching for more easeful summery reading, so please send any recommendations my way.
Do you have any midsummer celebrations?