Bird’s-Eyes: Primulas
A COUPLE OF MILLENNIA AFTER PLATO I was in a kind of cave myself – except that, unlike a meditative Palaeolithic, I was on the inside looking out, and at a living organism, not an image. Tony Evans had set up his Wind Tent Mark 10 with a long view over the honey-coloured grasslands near Shap Fell, on the eastern edge of the Lake District. The flower at the open end of the tunnel was a bird’s-eye primrose, which we hoped to feature in a book we were making together. It was sheltered from the wind for Tony’s photo, but open to the light and the vast sweep of the fells. Caught in this curious hinterland, in its own soil but out of its environment, it seemed sculptural, in a state of suspended animation. The intense, focused stillness of the coral-pink flowers and powdery leaves had the look of minerals more than plants. The picture Tony finally took and archived is stately, a group of thin-stemmed blooms defiantly sharp and upright against a distant haze of gathering cloud, riders of the storm to come.
How to picture plants? Ice agers scratched stalks on bones and couldn’t resist making symbols from them. Stone Age medicine men and medieval theologians saw metaphors of human organs in the shapes of flowers. Is it possible to see beyond these human framings, and envisage what William Wordsworth, writing of the bird’s-eye’s cousin, the common primrose, called ‘the plant itself’? D. H. Lawrence, continuing this idea, talked of the primrose’s ‘own peculiar primrosy identity … its own individuality which it opens with lovely naïveté to sky and wind and William [i.e. Wordsworth] and yokel, bee and beetle alike’. But the quintessence of a plant can only ever be a fantastical goal, something to travel towards but never reach. Entrapped in our human brains, we can only ever see plants through our human imaginations and thought structures.
Might photography, with its receptivity to surfaces and the ‘lovely naïveté’ of appearance, be the least compromised route to a plant’s individuality? But, then again, are the superficial details of colour and form really pointers to its character, its strategy for living, so that in them – as in the Romantics’ poems on nature – ‘the optical becomes the visionary’? Forgetting for a moment plants’ intangible associations, many strictly vegetal qualities don’t lie within what we’d normally regard as ‘the optical’: relationships with cryptic geological features, for instance; invisible but intense chemical communication with insects and other vegetation. Plants also have a special relationship with time that makes photography’s unique ability to ‘freeze the moment’ of little significance. Their immobility and long periods of slow growth can make one moment in their lives appear barely distinguishable from the next. Their shapes and places of habitation, such crucial aspects of their identity, often result from historical processes involving natural and human pressures which stretch over hundreds or thousands of years. John Berger has written of the fundamental difference between photography and painting in representing time. If photography can stop time, freeze it, representational painting contains it, not just because its making takes time, and therefore incorporates it, but because it can hint at what might have gone before and might come after. Might it be possible for the photograph of a plant to have something of this painterly quality, and record not just an isolated moment but suggest the organism’s past and the invisible dynamics of its life?
I’d longed to see a real bird’s-eye primrose. In my late twenties a girlfriend had given me a watercolour of the flower, painted in 1778 by Louisa, Countess of Aylesford. I think it had been part of a large folder of sketches. Louisa was twenty-seven at the time, a precociously gifted artist who went on to produce twenty-seven volumes of illustrations. Her painting of the upland primrose is so ethereal and daintily done I’d assumed it was a miniature – and probably a faded one – of something altogether more substantial. The leaves are grey-green with glaucous undersides (which give the scientific name P. farinosa: the mealy primrose, the floury flower) and the tiny five-petalled blooms sport in their middle a bright circle of yellow – the bird’s eye. Louisa had painted her specimen in the rock garden of her family seat, Packington Hall in Warwickshire. I wanted to see it in its wild motherlode, up in the pastel landscapes of the northern limestone, its sole location in Britain. Geoffrey Grigson wrote of how ‘the small neat flowers decorate every bank, every slope, every corner between the grey lumps and outcrops of limestone. Finding them for the first time, a southerner feels like a plant collector on the Chinese mountains.’ I’d felt more like an ignorant grockle when I first searched for them, arriving in the Dales weeks after they’d finished flowering.
So the flowers I saw on Shap Fell with Tony were my first. And they were to the life, in size and presence, the species in the Countess’s picture. They seemed to have been formed out of the very stuff of the rock, the calcareous farina of the limestone, the pink fragments of metamorphic rocks. I was so seduced by this conceit of stone suffusing tissue (thinking perhaps of the way a vineyard’s terroir flavours its grapes) that I never even noticed the nominative bird’s eye, the same colour as a forget-me-not’s, which sits at the centre of the flower and is the beacon that helps perpetuate its kind. I didn’t understand its role in pollination then but it sits in plain sight in Tony’s picture, a reminder that time changes understanding too.
I’d met Tony Evans four years earlier, when we’d been commissioned by NOVA magazine to do a feature on Britain’s vanishing wild flowers. Tony would take the pictures, and I would write the words, though the editor seemed uncertain about who should be the lead partner and make the choices of species. It didn’t matter in the end. We got on from the start, and the flowers we decided to highlight emerged by a kind of symbiosis, Tony sponsoring the good lookers, me the ecologically meaningful. It wasn’t long before I’d persuaded him to collaborate on a book I’d been musing about for years, on the cultural history of the British flora. It was the beginning of a working partnership as comfortable (and just occasionally as prickly) as that between a butterfly and a bramble, and a friendship that lasted until Tony’s premature death in 1992.
At the time we met Tony was one of Britain’s most successful commercial photographers, sought out by advertisers and magazines for his obstinate perfectionism and wildly idiosyncratic solutions to visual challenges. Some of his most inventive pictures have become part of the national folk memory. His cover picture for the Radio Times for the 1976 Royal Variety Performance was of a corgi emerging from a top hat, which involved days building a hidden frame in which the dog could comfortably endure Tony’s hours of meticulous preparation. He took the definitive portraits of Ray Charles and the fidgety Alfred Hitchcock. He spent weeks growing onions and tomatoes compressed in glass cubes so that he could cut them in square slices for a processed cheese advert. His record work time for a single photograph, I think, was the eleven days he took waiting by a cockle bed in Lancashire for the exact combination of tide and light needed to tempt the molluscs up into visibility. His expenses claims were legendary. But he was getting tired of the contrivance and pressure involved in commercial work, and feeling a desire to work more naturally – in fact, on nature. I sensed that his patience and Martian eye for the visually strange fitted him up very well for venturing into the world of plants, and for us working together during long summers on the road. We shared a similar sense of humour and a taste for gadgets. His working Dormobile contained, in addition to a dozen aluminium boxes of photographic equipment, an entire set of Ordnance Survey maps, an altimeter, various sunshades in different tones, a set of ski-stick ends for anchoring tripods in bogs, and a fridge which always carried a stock of decent white wine. Lunches were always a congenial prospect. But our inputs to the project were going to be different, beyond the simple provision of, respectively, pictures and words. Tony would inject the intense attention to the living plant that I so often bypassed in my concentration on its associations and history. For my part, I hoped I might stretch Tony’s already encompassing vision beyond its focus on form and composition into imagining them in their native habitats. In reality we learned from each other, and over six summers unexpected new perspectives began to emerge – especially the possibility of expressing the past and the abstractions of metaphor in that epitome of the literal and the present moment, the photograph. ‘You can’t photograph what isn’t there, Rich,’ was Tony’s exasperated response to my more fanciful suggestions. But he could, and, plant by plant, he did.
So for a few weeks every spring and summer between 1972 and 1978 we went on the road, following the primrose path across Britain. There were a few shaky moments for me at the beginning, when I felt that Tony’s technical brilliance in catching the sheer surface dazzle of flowers might preclude any more nuanced insights. But I think that was just a touch of professional envy. It soon became a journey of discovery for both of us, into corners of Britain and perspectives on growing things we had never experienced before. We travelled, in no particular order, from the Sussex Downs, where we buried ourselves in the intricate warp and weft of downland flora while listening to Virginia Wade tease her way to victory in the 1977 Wimbledon singles final, to the far north-west of Scotland, where Tony photographed yellow saxifrage and rose-root under his pink Mark 2 parasol. In the limestone country of the Burren in County Clare he took one of his most fully accomplished pictures, a confetti of burnet rose petals floating in what resembled a limestone font, surrounded by a chaplet of rose bushes. A landscape condensed into a single boulder.
Tony was stretching the boundaries of plant photography in studies like this, with their melding of pictorial and ecological composition. Before he began his work in the 1970s, portraying a plant without artificial lighting was unusual, and combining foreground floral detail with habitat context barely heard of. Quite unprompted, Tony started to photograph ecologically, using, for instance, the layers of light and shade in dense vegetation to provide a kind of natural highlighting. His close-up of a square foot of Dorset hedgebank uses deep focus to pick out dog’s violets in the shadows and primroses and celandines in the community’s top layer. It is composed like a painting by Dürer. And looking at it afresh today, I spotted two small wild garlic leaves hidden beneath the celandine that I’d never noticed before …
In June, in the limestone grassland of Lathkill Dale in Derbyshire, we found a large colony of wild columbines, white and blue. They were an unsought bonus, and Tony set to work on them under the blazing sun. He had me scissor his jeans into shorts while he worked, and stayed in the same spot for the next six hours. I watched from the shade with increasing anxiety as, bare backed, he rotated round the columbines like a sundial’s shadow, or an attentive insect.
On the road we developed a slightly playful sense of plants as currency: I paid my dues to the book in stalks and clumps, Tony in the delicacy of petals. We also began to experience weather from the plant’s point of view. Tony got regular pinpoint forecasts from the nearest airbases to pick the most promising times for pictures, but we saw weather’s effects translated through responsive plant tissue every day. This was the impetus behind the development of the wind tents. Tony needed an enclosure for sheltering plants in gusty weather which didn’t separate them too much from their habitat. An open-ended, low-lying bivouac seemed the answer, but he went through many prototypes – large mouthed, small mouthed, wooden and aluminium framed – before arriving at the version in which he photographed the bird’s-eyes.
Tony had Zen levels of patience and attention. He was never a high-speed snapper, taking multiple images and postponing aesthetic judgement till he’d seen the processed film. He had built the final image in his mind before he took a single shot. On these vigils we sometimes had glimpses of the methodical way that flowers opened. How complex, perhaps mathematically pre-set forms, unwrapping themselves over the course of hours or days, invariably appeared as a recognisable type but in individual blooms, as subtle variations on that model, customised by the fuzzy logic of growth.
Tony’s perfectly achieved representation of this process, an incomparable essay on plant form and its inexplicable idiosyncrasies, happened fifteen years after we finished our book, and just a few before his death from cancer. He photographed, in close-up and high resolution, the stages through which a single bloom of Florentine iris passes during its opening. He sat with the pregnant bud for twenty-four hours, in a studio rigged with alarm clocks in case he nodded off, and took six studies. The head of the bloom opens symmetrically at first, like the mouth of a fish sucking at the surface of the air. Then what will become, in the final photograph, the right hand ‘fall’ (the term for the skirt-like lower petals – there are three of them) tilts down by itself, still scrolled up, followed a few hours later by another on the left of the picture. Only when all three are fully lowered does the entire flower – crown and falls together – unfurl into its glorious, baroque orb of pale violet, thinly streaked with reticulations of a darker lavender. I have the set of six prints framed on my wall, a reminder of Tony’s vigilance, and a soliloquy on the quiet unexpectedness of floral rhythms.
Back on the road the daily round involved these essentials. Moments of soft light: nothing made soft petals crinkle or leaves take on the shine of overheated skin like fierce sun. Long breaks for a formal picnic spread out on a tablecloth, wherever possible next to a stream, so that a bottle of Sauvignon could be cooling in the shallows, and we could review the morning’s work. It occurs to me now that, with our enormous backpacks of camera gear and creature comforts, we were like nothing so much as two Victorian plant hunters, intrusive strangers dropping into other communities’ floral landscapes, passing lofty judgements on their habits and habitats, and then wafting on with our literary and visual trophies. At Oxford we fraternised with native and colonist alike. In Magdalen Meadow Tony got in amongst the swaying tides of snake’s-head fritillaries to frame the sultry, serpent’s-skin flowers against the honeyed stone of the college tower. Later that same day, we logged Oxford ragwort growing in a scree of broken lager bottles outside the public conveniences in St Clements. Senecio squalidus had been brought to Oxford’s Botanic Gardens from the slopes of Mount Etna in the 1790s, a trophy of some don’s Grand Tour. But it had escaped, and slummed its way through the city, relishing Oxford’s venerable stones’ likeness to volcanic rubble.
In our first spring Tony came back from Scotland (we didn’t take all our research trips together) with an extraordinary image of marsh marigolds. We’d been talking about how to illustrate the flora of what is known as the Atlantic period that set in about 6000 BC, and during which an increase in rainfall and a rise in sea level submerged parts of the great summer forest that had succeeded the glaciers. Plants of swamp and bog flourished. Tony shook his head at the impossibility of capturing any living representation of this vanished sogginess. Then he went to the moors of Inverness-shire and brought home a photograph of an ancient pine stump – it might almost have been fossil pine from the Atlantic era – heraldically studded with five marsh marigold flowers, kingcups rampant. They were rooted in damp crevices and pits in the rotting wood, portals into the boggy northern past, and Tony had achieved what he always insisted photography was incapable of, showing something that was not there.
For me it was another primrose, the oxlip, that brought our meandering search for the full picture most sharply into focus. The true oxlip, Primula elatior, had pushed its way into my life in unexpected ways ever since I became seriously interested in plants. It’s the most gracious of all the European Primula species, bearing clusters of primrose-yellow cups hanging to one side of the stem, in the same style as bluebell flowers. And for those with a nose for it, the blooms give off a fugitive scent of apricot. In Britain at least, it also has a quality which I’ve always found irresistibly romantic, of being fiercely loyal to place. It only grew, or so the books I read in the 1970s insisted, in a cluster of ancient woods in a roughly oval-shaped area of East Anglia covering west Suffolk, north Essex and south Cambridgeshire. Its cloistered distribution came to be an existential definition of the territory.
The concept of ancient woodland was a radical one in the 1970s. The popular wisdom was that woods were human artefacts, and could only begin their lives by being deliberately planted. The idea that they continually regenerated themselves, and in some places had survived on the same site for thousands of years, was heretical, and is still uncomfortable to those brought up in a culture of human dominance. One consequence of this continuity is that there are suites of flowering plants, finicky in their habitat requirements and not good at colonising new sites, which grow only in such places. It’s not clear why this should be so. Most of these so-called ‘ancient woodland indicators’ are perennials, and don’t reproduce well by seed. They may also have evolved associations with the micro-organisms in old-forest soils, or with the mycorrhizal fungi symbiotically entwined with the trees’ roots.
The oxlip is one such indicator species in East Anglia. In the 1970s I used to go on oxlip hunts, seeing how often I could find the plant in woods which looked, from their names and quirky outlines on the map, as if they might have ancient provenance. My foragings weren’t much more than ego-massaging treasure hunts, but they paid off in ways I couldn’t have expected. Oxlips proved to be doughty communards. They stood their ground, often against the odds, and sometimes even when the wood in which they’d originally grown had vanished. I found colonies in full flower in Easter Wood in Suffolk, just days after Easter Sunday, even though they were sharing it with grazing cattle. They spilled out over the roadside verge alongside a thicket called Haws Wood, the rest of which had vanished under a pall of conifers. I found one colony mysteriously tucked under a hedgebank and alongside a track leading to a wood. Later, on a map from 1783, I saw that the track once lay inside a part of the wood which had been grubbed out in about 1800, leaving the hedgebank as a relic, a woodland ghost.
Then one spring I was walking through a small hornbeam wood I’d known since I was a child near my home in the Chilterns, and spotted a couple of oxlips in flower by the path. I think I was confused more than astonished. So cut and dried was the oxlip’s supposed confinement to the woods of East Anglia, fifty miles to the east, I assumed I must have made some kind of slipshod mistake. I’d walked through this wood every April for thirty years and couldn’t have missed something so conspicuous. So they must have been obscured by now-vanished foliage, or sneaked in behind my back, or I’d simply misidentified them. The last possibility was easily ruled out, and everyone I took to see the plants confirmed they were true oxlips. But talking my find over with some neighbours I heard a rumour that a retired vicar who lived in the next road was fond of planting out wild species in provocative places. I liked the idea of the Reverend Moule buzzing round the countryside on his antique autocycle with its panniers stuffed with sheaves of feral vegetation, like some botanical evangelist.
The flowers appeared again next spring, and I began to wonder if they were the only two local specimens. On the slightest of hunches, I wriggled under the barbed wire of the biggest adjacent wood. I could scarcely believe my eyes, or my luck. There were oxlips blooming amongst the budding shoots of woodruff and yellow archangel all over the south-facing slope. I eventually found them in four pockets of old woodland in an area of about a square mile, more than 200 plants in total. When I looked at the First Edition Ordnance Survey map (circa 1820) of the area, I saw that the four woods were all featured, and were part of a cluster of eleven whose outline and close jigsaw formation suggested they had been carved out of what was once a larger tract of continuous forest. The local oxlips began to have the look of an oasis population, an isolated relic perhaps of a time when the woodlands of East Anglia and the Chilterns were joined, 6,000 years ago. The thought of a tract of primordial forest joining the two places I knew best in the world made me feel strange, and transported.
Botanical notables came to visit the plants, pronounced them authentic and almost certainly native. Two dots confirming their presence appeared in the new edition of the official Atlas of the British and Irish Flora (2001), my one and only original contribution to botanical science. But what affected me more at the time was the way their presence had subtly changed my sense of where I lived. Right through my late childhood and teenage years these woods had been arenas of the present moment, stages for the quotidian and unreflective sensory excitements of adolescence. I stalked them ritually, touched their trees, left buried messages for teenage crushes, scoured them for fragments of reputedly crashed World War II planes. Now they and the place I called ‘home’ had a deep history, mapped in the lineage of these apricot-scented bellflowers. It was seized by the irrationally Romantic feeling that the oxlips were using me to retrace their ancient connections.
*
Tony and I needed more concentrated clusters than these Chiltern tufts, so we went looking in the Bradfield Woods in the heart of Suffolk’s oxlip country, one of the plant’s classic sites. The auguries weren’t good. Many of the flowers were over, or had been chomped off by pheasants, and I was embarrassed that I hadn’t done my preparatory work. When we did eventually find a few clumps large and fresh enough to satisfy Tony’s demanding pictorial criteria, I was tempted to disappear, in some relief, on a private hunt for some of Bradfield’s other specialities. (It has a genuine wild pear tree.) But Tony needed to know why I wanted to feature oxlips, what they meant to me and to the story we were telling. So I tried to explain my rather clingy attachment to them, and their clingy attachment to ancient sites, and the way they responded to the increase in light after coppicing, and how their companion plants did too, and how it had not been until the 1840s that they had been recognised as a separate species … And as we talk, Tony sizes up the flowers around us. He chooses a luxuriant clump, with the flowers in a pyramidal, almost tent-like canopy above the leaves. He anchors the tripod, like a stout umbellifer, and takes the camera down to woodland floor level. After a while he finds in the viewfinder the narrative picture he will take: a dozen or so flower spikes, deeply grounded but rising like a sheaf in the left foreground, tangled up with dead twigs, young meadowsweet leaves, and a protective tussock of grass. In the background, caught by the wide-angle lens, is a fragment of cut-over coppice, and beyond that the new poles, still leafless, shearing towards the clear spring sky.
Without really planning it, our meandering progress across Britain moved in a vaguely northern direction, homing in on the poetical landscapes of the Lake District, where Coleridge and the Wordsworths had meditated on primroses and daffodils. We eventually hunkered down in a hotel not far from Grasmere. In Little Langdale nearby, Tony spent a whole day up to his waist in a mere to photograph white water lilies at the eye level of an approaching dragonfly. In the picture the foreground lily flower is so close to the camera that you can see the pollen on its stamens. But dozens more are visible with fly’s-eye sharpness deep into the photograph, a vision of insect opportunity. Another evening we made our way up a hill nearby and found what I can only describe as a sundew meadow. Where the hill flattened out into a patch of bog, about a hundred square yards of these insectivorous plants were swarming amongst barrows of red-tinged sphagnum moss, and the whole ensemble was glowing in the setting sun. The beads of sticky fluid that tip the sundew’s spines to entrap visiting insects seemed to be acting like prisms, and the bog was sparkling with minute and ephemeral rainbows.
Tony’s pictures exist in two planes of time and understanding for me. I can remember the circumstances in which they were taken, and what I felt at that moment. I also have the finished pictures, forty years on, and the knowledge I have now gives them depths of meaning that I never glimpsed at the time. Lying on our fronts on the moor and seeing the sunset through the orbs of dew was an extraordinary visual experience, but not much more. Now I see Tony’s picture of the plants’ leaves, red and glistening on the hillocks of sphagnum, as a portrait of a softly glowing vegetable foundry, where the sundew leaves forged sunshine and insect flesh into another kind of energy.
There is no record of the Wordsworths (William the expert in the refractions of memory, Dorothy, I sense, the potential photographer) ever seeing a bird’s-eye primrose, though they grew on limestone outcrops near Grasmere and had a local Cumbrian name, ‘bird een’. But on one of their strolls with Coleridge they found a tuft of common primrose in a favourite spot that was to become significant in their lives. On 24 April 1802, nine days after their encounter with the ‘dancing’ daffodils that led to William’s famous poem, Dorothy notes in her diary: ‘A very wet day. William called me out to see a waterfall behind a barberry tree. We walked in the evening to Rydale, Coleridge and I lingered behind. C. stopped up the little runner by the roadside to make a lake. We all stood to look at Glow-worm Rock – a primrose that grew there, and just looked out on the road from its own sheltered bower.’ William had always been drawn to plants in this kind of situation, and their demonstration of grace under fire. The Glow-worm Rock primrose was, in Molly Mahood’s words, able ‘to make a home for itself in the bleakest spot, its roots anchored in a crevice’s minute parcel of soil, its leaves spread low in a wind-resistant rosette, its light, bright, flowers free to move on their flexible stalks – an embodiment, all in all, of the Wordsworthian virtues of delicacy, independence and fortitude’.
Over the years that followed William returned often to this plant, in life and in his writings, and its survival seemed a kind of domestic anchor for him. In 1808, with his brother John dead and Coleridge gone from the Lakes, he wrote the poignant ‘Tuft of Primroses’:
What hideous warfare has been waged,
What kingdoms overthrown,
Since first I spied that Primrose-tuft
And marked it for my own;
A lasting link in Nature’s chain
From highest heaven let down!
The final version, entitled ‘The Primrose of the Rocks’ was composed twenty years later, by which time the primrose’s associations, reflecting William’s own strengthening Anglicanism, have become as much theological as ecological, and the poem declines into pious Sunday School parable.
The flowers, still faithful to the stems,
Their fellowship renew;
The stems are faithful to the root,
That worketh out of view;
And to the rock the root adheres
In every fibre true.
It was left to Dorothy, still of sharp and allusive eye, to nail the primrose decisively back onto the rock and the hard realities of natural and familial survival. The title it bears in a copy she had made herself is: Written in March 1829 on seeing a primrose-tuft of flowers flourishing in a chink of rock in which the primrose-tuft had been seen by us to flourish for twenty-nine seasons.
In the fells north of Grasmere it had taken Tony and me ages to find the bird’s-eyes. Geoffrey Grigson’s description of their decorating ‘every bank, every slope, every corner’ was either wildly exaggerated or out of date. Having never seen the plant in the wild, I had no idea of where or what to look for, expecting them, I think, to be sprouting like tufted alpines on the bare rock. We traipsed over sheep pastures and rocky outcrops, and scanned road verges from the van. Eventually we found them by chance, growing in lime-rich trickles through the peat – a distinctive niche I soon learned to recognise. So up went Tony’s meticulously refined wind tunnel in the bleached grass, and the picture was taken. Looking at it now, and putting aside my fanciful idea of the bird’seye as a distillation of limestone, I find the pastel wiriness of its stems, held tight against the vaporous background of the hills, compelling and strange, as if the protection Tony had given them from the Pennine winds had, paradoxically, revealed their animation by it. And I can make out the bird’s eye that I missed when I was only feet away. It is a true picture of the ‘primrose itself’ (lacking only perhaps the squidginess of the ground) that transcends that ephemeral moment when the shutter clicked. It seems a plant as defiantly and immemorially in its place as the ‘Primrose of the Rocks’. But as a photograph it also records that specific moment and unlocks its mordanted memories; and every time I look at it I remember the migrating lapwings that were passing overhead, and the grass scented as if it had just been mown, and Tony, watching intensely from inside his cave.