Thistles stand against the western view from the top of Lyth Hill. Armed against the changing weathers of history, the plumes of thistly defiance feel as indomitable as the far hills, as if whatever climate or human ambition sets against them will never dent their delinquent glory.
Increasingly, all these signs of permanence and reliability come closer to going up in flames. The day we moved house it was 40C. It was crazy that this was happening here and it felt as if everything was going to burn. In many other places, it did. Now that the rain returns, it’s easy to fall into that convenient amnesia – what happened was just a weird episode that we’ll forget, until the next time.
But plants can’t forget. Back in the drought and heatwave of 1976 I was a gardener at Powis Castle and watched many old trees defoliate. Their annual rings bear the record. Some never fully recovered; many were weakened by the stress of heat and lack of water that opened them to attack by pathogens. Some died years later; others are still affected by that incident, compounded by more recent events.
Many of the trees I know and admire are declining, a visual illustration of a more pernicious reality. A post-traumatic stress has set into the vegetation of these islands and, as these so-called extreme events occur more frequently, we will watch as the trees and the fungi on which they depend change for ever.
Looking west from the hill, the picturesque view to the Marches is not of an idyll but a con we construct in photos, paintings or writings of timeless hills, foregrounding the rude and rugged thistles as character actors in a historic drama, as if they have some kind of truth.
Perhaps this retreat into the picturesque is a reaction to the cycle of creation and destruction we think of as nature, but now that wheel’s on fire and we are responsible. The picturesque is a sedative like the healing rain: it only works until the next time nature terrifies us. Maybe Cirsium vulgare thistles are tough enough to outlast the woods, to outlast us.
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