My students are still abed when I slip into the gardens on my morning recce. Though all are gifted writers, most have slept a lifetime without waking up to nature. My task this afternoon will be to fuel their senses into producing a country diary of their walk around the grounds of this university hall. Most hail from different countries, different continents even.
One student from the Gulf will not hear this dawn chorus; unnerved by the silence of England after dark, her lullaby is an aircon app. Another told me over dinner of hearing a “techno bird”, and now I enter her aural world in the treetops – the drowsy, distorted amp buzz of a greenfinch. Rave on.
In the long grass meadow below the croquet lawn, where medieval meaning-makers conjured words out of flowers, I will draw their gaze to the buttercup, day’s eye, cow’s lip, and hear the bird that blossoms in a cuckoo flower. I will pluck and brandish a toothed leaf, then proclaim dent de lion (lion’s tooth). My student from France will look at me nonplussed. She knows the flower only as pis-en-lit (piss in the bed). Norman gentility, French earthiness.
They might spin a story from a nest that’s come unspun over a topiarised yew. I’ll let them narrate the possibilities – how has it come to be draped over the bush in such strands? Did an unkind wind blow it down from on high? How did a fine beak manage to knit moss and feathers together in the first place? And how did beady eyes find what looks like interlaced horse hair, when there is not a hoof on the estate?
My charges will be too late to gasp at what I encounter when I enter the copse – a fox startled into an abrupt turn and run. But not startled by me – it is chased into the undergrowth by another fox.
A reliable prop blooms in the hawthorn tree by the path. I stretch and pull down the lowest-hanging bough to check that the scent of May will be at nose height for the shortest women. Later that day, one student breathes in that very bough and sighs, “It smells like apples”. Ah students, they give us tutors such an education.
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