The Lockdown Botanist

by RACHEL SLOAN

Taraxacum spp. Usually glabrous perennials. [. . .] There are currently 232 species recognised in the BI; . . . no attempt is made to deal with them here. [1]      

Hundreds of suns shine above the long grass, a shade of yellow in that sweet spot between egg-yolk and acid, held aloft on apple-green stalks freckled with red, smooth and hollow as drinking straws. Each small sun is a kaleidoscope of hundreds of finely toothed petals. No: look again. Look closer. Hundreds of flowers edged as if with microscopic pinking shears, each petal clasping its own stigma, arranged in overlapping circles with the precision of a mosaic. Pull back again and it’s a lion tossing its mane, resplendent in the sunlight. I bury my nose in it to breathe in the sharp sappy bittersweetness, come away with the tip floured in pollen. Inches away on other stalks are others halfway to the next stage, each green head like a chess piece crowned with a tuft of white rabbit fur. Look again: still others, transmuted with an ease an alchemist would envy, from suns to globes of stars, silvery white, tethered precariously to a squashed pincushion, released into the sky with a single puff of air.

I have loved dandelions for as long as I’ve been aware of them. Few things used to make me angrier, or confuse me more, than hearing adults dismiss them as weeds. (Or worse: mowed them down, dug them out, blasted them to death with chemicals that frazzled them into grotesque parodies of their living selves.) But this is the first time in recent memory I’ve gotten down on the ground with them and really looked, and if a car were to come along this lane right now and its occupants to see a grown woman on her knees in the grass, sniffing dandelions and blowing on the clocks, they would think I’d lost my mind.

But there are no cars. For weeks now, the roads have been empty.

What is a weed? A plant out of place—according to humans.

In Kent, I am a human out of place. No wonder I have an affinity with weeds.

I never planned to end up in Kent.

For much of my adult life, when faced with the question of where are you from that is the perpetual lot of the immigrant, I had a snappy answer: American by birth, a Londoner by choice. And Londoner was the key word. Not British, despite my hard-won British citizenship. Part of that was the result of the Brexit referendum and the shame and sorrow and gaping sense of loss that followed snapping at its heels, but I think at its root is my Jewishness. I’ve always felt most comfortable knowing I’m part of a community of many minorities, all rubbing along together, more or less harmonious in our differences. Growing up in a wealthy, majority white Anglo-Saxon Protestant suburb of Chicago had given me more than enough experience of feeling different and alien, with casual anti-Semitism thrown in free. Although I wasn’t naïve enough to think London was a utopia, it was where I felt able to be myself. It was where I felt safe. It was where I assumed I would spend the rest of my life.

Then I met Dylan and everything changed.

Six months after our first date, we decided to move in together. Although I had reached my late thirties without ever having lived with a partner, the prospect of sharing my life and home with another person filled me with nothing but joy. What filled me with anxiety was the thought of leaving London.

Dylan lived in Dunton Green, a place I’d known only as the first stop outside London on one of the Southeastern train lines. He wasn’t there by choice: after his divorce several years prior, a flat in a new development built over a former industrial site (a brickworks in the nineteenth century, then a cold store in the twentieth) was the only place he could afford to buy near to his two young sons in the notoriously expensive environs of Sevenoaks. As for Sevenoaks, it felt uncomfortably like the suburb where I’d grown up—the wealth, the privilege, the conservative politics, the lack of ethnic diversity, the dearth of public transport and cultural life. And if Sevenoaks felt suburban, what did that make Dunton Green? A suburb of a suburb. It consisted of a string of nineteenth-century workers’ cottages originally built to serve the brickworks, some undistinguished recent developments, a Vauxhall dealership, two uninviting pubs, a primary school, a village hall, a chippy that doubled as a Chinese takeaway, and a curry house. No shops, because the enormous Tesco down the road had killed them off. A station with two trains an hour, no ticket office, and scant shelter from the rain. And the estate where Dylan lived, a soulless construction that would have looked at home anywhere in American suburbia. The sort of place—and I fully own up to my snobbery and prejudice in saying this—where I had never imagined myself living.

Dylan and I agreed that we wouldn’t remain in Dunton Green in the long term, which took some of the sting out of leaving London. It’s only temporary, I kept telling myself. Yet nothing prepared me for the wave of despair and revulsion that hit me as I walked home from the station on my first evening back from work.

The faceless sameness of the buildings. The meanness and the lack of imagination in the planting—stripling trees jammed in the ground at widely spaced intervals and pinned down with grates, hedges consisting mostly of photinia clipped into dreary cubes. But worst of all, the emptiness. I saw perhaps three or four other figures at a distance, all marching determinedly to their front doors and shutting them behind themselves because there was no reason to go out again until morning.

Six months later, lockdown happened. London was walled off by the crinkling ridge of the North Downs; for all intents and purposes, it could have been Mars. Our world had shrunk to that of the average denizen of the Middle Ages, who only travelled as far as their feet or, if they were lucky, a horse could carry them.

Behind my own front door were books and art and music and the man I loved and happiness.

Outside, I was out of place. And I was stuck.

In the waking dream where the boundary between home and work evaporated, the only straw of normality we could clutch at was the permitted hour of outdoor exercise. But if an hour’s workout in a gym feels like punishment, the same amount of time outdoors feels brutally brief. Almost immediately, we started to cheat. The supermarket was a ten-minute walk from home; go on foot, and “forget” an item now and again, and take your time coming and going, and your outdoor hour is doubled. More than that—tarry, and you start paying attention to what you sped past before. Verges, cracks in pavements and walls, any bit of earth not built on. All of them teeming with life.

One evening, a few weeks into lockdown, I opened the Collins British Common Wild Flower Guide and looked at it for the first time. For my first birthday after I got indefinite leave to remain in the UK, I had asked my mother for field guides to Britain’s birds and wildflowers, reasoning that if I was going to stay here and put down roots, the least I could do was finally learn to identify more than the most obvious species. Both volumes sat on my coffee table for a year, collecting dust, after which they sat on Dylan’s—no, our coffee table collecting a fresh layer of dust. The next day I tucked the Collins guide in my bag when I set off to Tesco. It became my Bible, my book of devotions.

Sometimes I leaned over an unfamiliar plant, paging through the book until I was satisfied I’d found it. At first I studiously ignored the odd looks of passersby, then I stopped noticing them entirely. Sometimes I made Dylan stop and take a photo. But mostly I’d stare and stare until I’d committed the plant to memory and carry the image home to check against the book. I even tried, with mixed results, to turn my eye into a speed camera for plants on our twice-weekly morning runs.

Francie Nolan, the protagonist of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is physically intoxicated by her first sight of a tulip. I know how she felt: I, too, was plant-drunk. Addicted to the plants, equally addicted to learning their names: Latin and English intertwined in an ever-lengthening heady incantation. In the debate raging among nature writers and botanists over the merits and problems of Linnaean nomenclature versus the vernacular, I come down firmly on both sides: each name reveals a different aspect of the plant. Each name opens a different door to knowledge, a different door to wonder.[2] I looked and looked and felt I was beginning to really see for the first time.

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. Genesis, 2:19-20

This is the first instance of naming anyone or anything in the Torah—a text in which names, and the act of naming, carry tremendous power that must be wielded with care. (By eerie coincidence, this was the portion I was assigned for my Bat Mitzvah.) I can’t help but notice that Adam names only the animals. Plants don’t seem to merit a mention, much less a name, from him or from God.

Did God leave the naming of plants to Eve? It’s never stated. Is giving names to plants, then, because apparently a less august task, the domain of women? (And if naming plants is women’s work, then why did Linnaeus swoop in and snatch for himself a woman’s God-given task?)

The great critic and philosopher of cities, Walter Benjamin, once defined the urban flâneur as someone who “botanises on the asphalt.” Somehow, I don’t think I am quite what he had in mind.

I’m not just botanising on the asphalt. I am botanising the asphalt.

Malva sylvestris. Prostrate to erect, sparsely hairy perennial, to 100 cm. [. . .] Habitat Roadsides, banks, waste ground, on well-drained soils.

Common mallow is one of the first new plants I come to know. Tough as old boots, taking poor polluted soil, exhaust fumes, heat and dust and parching dryness in its stride. It clambers out of the cracks in the kerb around the zebra crossing on the way to Tesco and pushes skyward, the hairs coating its stem soon powdered with dust, unfurling its petals to the assault of the cars’ slipstream. In spite—or maybe because—of the harsh places where it sinks its roots, it’s a surpassingly elegant plant. The blossom is a ring of five mauve hearts facing outward, each veined as delicately as a Tiffany lamp; blow the dust from the leaves and you could weave them into a Bacchante’s chaplet. Unwrap the green swaddling of the fruit and you find a tiny Camembert already neatly marked into portions. (And yes, it’s edible by humans—the whole plant is.)

If mallow were uprooted, planted in herbaceous borders, coddled within an inch of its life, would people finally realise how beautiful it is? Or would it just fade into the background?

Florilegium viarum var. Duntongreenicum, 2020-21 (incomplete)

Great willowherb / pale willowherb / rosebay willowherb / yarrow / hedge mustard / sow thistle / dandelion / common groundsel / vervain / wild clary / birds’-foot trefoil / greater stitchwort / common bistort / common chickweed / common mallow / dwarf mallow / travellers’ joy / wall lettuce / hawkweed / meadow buttercup / common poppy / Oxford ragwort / lesser celandine / greater celandine / yellow corydalis / common nettle / small nettle / pellitory-of-the-wall / red campion / white campion / common sorrel / garlic mustard / wavy bittercress / bramble / silverweed / creeping cinquefoil / wood avens / broadleaved everlasting-pea / black medick / white clover / red clover / gorse / evening primrose / small-flowered crane’s-bill / herb-Robert / cow parsley / rough chervil / ground elder / hogweed / wild carrot / hedge bindweed / field bindweed / white comfrey / green alkanet / borage / petty spurge / sun spurge / white deadnettle / red deadnettle / greater plantain / ribwort plantain / great mullein / germander speedwell / cleavers / elder / welted thistle / common fleabane / Mexican fleabane / pineapple weed / daisy / oxeye daisy / colts’ foot / Spanish bluebell

Ficaria verna. Glabrous perennial to 25 cm. [. . .] Habitat Woods, hedgerows, damp pastures, road verges, river and stream sides.

More than any other plant I’ve met, lesser celandine looks like a child’s drawing of a flower come to life: the heart-shaped leaves peeping shyly from the grass, the stem straight as a single stroke of a fine-tipped marker pen, the halo of lemony petals sticking straight out, the variability in the number of those petals, as if the plant can’t quite make up its mind about what looks best. Until this year, the only lesser celandine I’d ever knowingly encountered was the illustration in Cecily Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring, which must unconsciously have reinforced my image of it as childish and innocent—even if Barker’s twee anthropomorphism now sets my teeth on edge.

Flowers Mar-May.

It’s February. Lesser celandine shouldn’t be in bloom yet. I want to weep with rage and sorrow that something so miraculous—a harbinger of spring—has now, the moment I first discover it, become a sign of how out of kilter the earth is, at the havoc we’ve wrought on the planet.

Geranium robertianum. Much-branched, pubescent annual or biennial to 50 cm with distinctive unpleasant smell
[. . .] Habitat Woodlands, hedge banks, scree, limestone pavement, old walls, coastal shingle.

Five pink petals, veined red, the lowest cupping a pearl of dew; in the washed sunshine they sparkle as if made of packed diamond dust. Five unopened stamens, round and red as a juggler’s balls. Pomegranate seedheads, ribbed like an Art Nouveau vase. Feathered leaves of emerald flushed with ruby, offered up on brittle stems like cherry-coloured wires. I can attest that herb-Robert loves old walls; I befriend a patch of it that’s made a home at the base of the railway viaduct that separates our estate from the older part of Dunton Green. As the days, weeks, months melt into each other and other flowers come and go, herb-Robert keeps blooming as if it didn’t have an off switch.

No one knows how these little pink stars ended up with a name half-plant, half-man. Is Robert a corruption of the Latin ruber, red? Does it have a human namesake (a Norman duke or a Cistercian abbot-herbalist) or a fantastical one (Robin Goodfellow, the hobgoblin who haunts the woods and sets in motion the machinations and misunderstandings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream)? Along the way it’s piled up a staggering list of vernacular names which suggest a certain ambivalence. Red robin, Our-Lady’s-needles, storksbill, cranesbill, wild chervil, dove’s feet, crow’s foot, fox geranium, Virgin’s pin, red herb, but also stinking chervil, dragon’s blood, devil’s fork, death-come-quickly, stinking Bob, squinter-pip.

It’s food for bees and hoverflies and moths. For centuries, it was medicine for us: an antiseptic, a healer of wounds, used to treat upset stomachs and nosebleeds. But ask most people these days what herb-Robert is, and if they notice it at all, they’ll say: a weed. An annoyance. Ordinary. Common, too common. They want to rip it out. But for those who refuse to see its beauty, herb-Robert has a weapon up its sleeve. Pull it out and it comes up in handfuls. The stems snap like spun sugar. The roots are weak, barely anchored in the earth. But there’s a reason one of its many names is stinking Bob: the stench it leaves on your hands is that of burning tyres. And it lingers for hours.

Good luck washing it off.

August 2020. I’m having a drink in the garden of a village pub near Otford one golden evening with Dylan, his parents, and a handful of regulars: a strange, blessed breath of normality after months of restrictions and isolation. Two of the regulars, twin brothers in their late 70s, on learning I’m American, subject me to a genial barrage of tales of their travels in the land of my birth. And then, apropos of nothing, they launch into a tirade against the George Floyd protests. Those Black folk should know their place. They’re a menace. Wasn’t like this when we were young, was it?

I freeze, horrified. Mostly at the suddenness and violence of this outbreak of venom, but partly at my own cowardice. I hate myself for not speaking up. I will spend days picking over why I didn’t. It takes a long time to admit that it was a twisted sense of self-preservation that tied my tongue: that in my experience, those who have a low opinion of Black people also tend not to like Jews much, either.

I don’t “look” Jewish (whatever that means). I have an English-sounding surname that no one ever guesses was originally Polish. I hide in plain sight, as easy to miss as herb-Robert. In consequence, many people over the years have felt comfortable making anti-Semitic remarks to me because they assume I’m one of them, I’m on the same page. I have to confess to a bitter satisfaction in revealing myself and making them redden and splutter Oh, of course we didn’t mean people like you. You’re OK.

This time I couldn’t do it.

After that conversation in the pub, I find myself googling synagogues in Kent. Not because of sudden stirrings of rekindled faith, or the urge to attend a service for the first time since I left home—and even if I wanted to, I’m sure it wouldn’t be an option, unless online (and by this point, I don’t think I have the mental space for a single other Zoom version of any activity). I think it’s because I need some reassurance that I’m not alone.

Across the entire county of Kent there are a mere four synagogues, five if you count Bromley—which I don’t, because if living in Dunton Green has taught me anything, it’s that the M25 is an attitudinal dividing line as much as it is a physical one, thus making Bromley indisputably part of London in my eyes, regardless of its Kent postcode. They’re all where I would expect to find them: Chatham (nondenominational), Maidstone (Liberal), Margate (Orthodox), and Ramsgate (Reform). Canterbury had one once upon a time but, despite the city’s age and its universities, the Jewish community has dwindled to the point that neither synagogue nor cemetery is any longer in use.

Sevenoaks doesn’t have a synagogue. Nor, as far as I can discern, has it ever had one. It also has no mosque, no Hindu or Buddhist temples, no gurdwara—not a single place of worship that isn’t Christian. According to the 2001 census, only 0.15 percent of the population of Sevenoaks district identified as Jewish—given the fate of Canterbury’s Jewish community, it’s likely that the current figure is even smaller.

None of this comes as a surprise, and even as I search I question why I’m doing it. If Sevenoaks had a synagogue, would I ever go? The thought would never have crossed my mind in London, where I have Jewish friends and colleagues who are every bit as secular as I am. But it’s not pleasant having my suspicions confirmed with cold fact. It’s hard knowing you’re alone. Alone and out of place.

I’m thinking about dandelions again: Jon Silkin’s dandelions. Dandelions are the subject of the first of his Flower Poems, a pamphlet he published in 1964 inspired by the flowers—cultivated and otherwise—growing in front of his flat in Leeds.

When it comes to writing about flowers, Silkin bundles up all the Romantic clichés about beauty and innocence and chucks them out the window. His dandelions are, frankly, terrifying: hybrids of plant, animal, and machine, oozing appetite and sexuality and barely contained violence. The flowers are “eyeless” and yet the petals, like “metal shreds [. . .] irregularly perforate / Their yellow, brutal glare.” It would be easy to recoil from “Dandelion” convinced that Silkin hated and feared these monstrous weeds, but I think this would be to misunderstand the poem—and Silkin himself. His dandelions are survivors. They thrive in poor soil. They regrow from snapped stems and broken roots. I can’t help thinking that, as a second-generation British Jew, descendant of emigrés from the western fringes of the Russian Empire, who was himself uprooted several times (as a child evacuated from London during the Second World War, then as an adult, by choice, for his education and career), Silkin saw something of himself in the dandelion. Or maybe something of the dandelion in himself.

Anacamptis pyramidalis. Stems Leafy; flower stems to 50 cm. [. . .] Habitat Well-drained calcareous grassland, scrub, roadsides, dunes, dune slacks.

What if you’re trying to botanise on the asphalt from the window of a car going fifty miles per hour?

There’s a stretch of motorway verge near Dunton Green, running down Polhill Bank just where the North Kent Downs cross the M25, that’s carpeted with wildflowers for most of the year. For the better part of two years, it’s the road we travel more than any other because it leads to Dylan’s parents’ house, the road we take whenever we park in their drive and conduct a half-shouted conversation with them standing just outside the door because it’s all we’re allowed, because it’s better than nothing. Walking along the motorway means taking your life into your hands and so, for much of the time, I strain my eyes out the car window while Dylan drives, trying to catch a few flowers before they disappear in the rearview mirror. Waves of cow parsley, dandelions, and green alkanet in early spring gradually give way to paint-spatters of poppy and oxeye daisy, then the bright bottle-rocket explosion of rosebay willowherb.

After months of this I can’t stand it anymore. One warm day in June I drag Dylan out for a walk on the section of the North Downs Way that hugs the motorway for just over half a mile. The air stinks of petrol and I’m sure I will carry the evidence in my lungs for a while, but it’s worth it: ambling along the road shoulder, botanising at a gentler speed, I can pick out miniature pyramids of purple lurking in the grass where I never would have noticed them before. I bend to look closer. Dead straight lollipop stems emerging from lime-green leaves barely wider than blades of grass, raising aloft an inverted chandelier of blossom. They’re not as uniformly purple as they seemed at first glance: the flowers pale as they open, the lower tiers of blossom a pinkish lilac starred with white, shading upward to the vivid rose-purple of closed petals. How can they look both so at home among the verge grasses and yet so alien?

Even the rankest of amateur botanists—a category to which I’ll probably always belong—can recognise them as monocots: the parallel venation of the strappy leaves, the six petals of the open blossoms. Miniature lilies? No, that can’t be right. This time I’ve got a hand lens in my pocket, and it reveals a surprise. A lily’s petals aren’t fused together, like the flickering tripartite tongue of some strange, mischievous beast. It must be something else. But what?

At home, I dig out the trusty Collins guide: pyramidal orchids. My first orchids. My head spins. I continue paging through the orchid section. It turns out there are two dozen species native to Britain, many of them favouring calcareous grassland—in layperson’s terms, the poor chalky soil of the downlands. Five of them grow on roadsides. Orchids as roadside weeds are not something I ever thought existed. Between now and September, I can go back and search out more of them.

My world has shrunk, there’s no getting around that, but it’s also expanded in ways I’d never imagined. And so has my circle of friends: my fellow weeds.

[1] All species descriptions are taken from The Collins British Common Wild Flower Guide, 2015 edition.
[2] I am well aware of the issues with the colonialism enshrined in countless Latin names of species indigenous to places outside Europe, not least the presumption inherent in naming a plant after a European “discoverer.”