A quick share of a project that I’ve been involved in over the last couple of months. I’ve written a poem about the magical flowers that are harebells for ‘26 Plants’ - a collaboration between 26 Writers and the Bloomsbury Festival. You can find the poem and the story of the research that went into it here.
There you can also find poems about a range of wildflowers, from ragwort to bluebells to brambles. The poems all had to be exactly one hundred words, and start and end with the same word.
It was a joy to dive into learning more about one flower in detail, and seeing where that journey of discovery took me. It was also disconcerting to be faced with the sharp decline in wildflowers in the UK - and the abundance in contrast that I found in Finland. There’s been a loss of 97% of grasslands and wildflowers meadows in the UK since the 1930s.
There is much talk, in sustainability circles at least, about the biodiversity crisis. But, too often, this can seem abstract. Getting to know more about one plant was for me an eye-opening way to find out more about the real life implications of this loss - and come face-to-face with what we are losing as a society - both in terms of the plant life and the animal life that it might support, but also the richness from many other perspectives, including the mythological and culinary. I had no idea that you could eat harebells until I came across a recipe by chance in a foraging cookbook.
The point of this post is to direct you in the direction of the poem and the essay, as well as the other plants growing on the website, so I will stop here. Do let me know if you have a favourite flower that has disappeared or has become scarce in recent years.