One of those white sky days, when it feels like it should be foggy, but everything within a few hundred yards is rendered in crisp relief against that most blank of backdrops, when it looks as though it might be foggy over there, but over there retreats in perfect step with your approach. Tricksy. There’s probably a scientific reason for the phenomenon, but today, I don’t want to know it. There are days when understanding this kind of thing helps, and others when I’m content simply to call it magic, and revel in the delicate exotic fruit of my ignorance (“touch it, and the bloom is gone”, as Lady Bracknell says in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Honestly, I think my muse is a haughty Victorian maiden aunt, there’s literally no hope for me).
A week or so ago I had a conversation with a trusted someone about the book proposal I’m currently working on, over the course of which she told me how much she enjoyed the sciency bits in my first book, and how I should do more of that. I most assuredly don’t enjoy the sciency bits, or at least working on them – not when they feel like science, anyway. This is probably just me grumbling because those passages are the hardest for me to write – when I first research and then explain a botanical process it comes out sounding like a textbook, which is fine if you’re writing a textbook, but absolutely hopeless if you’re trying to convey the wonder of plants and gardening to your reader while engaging their enthusiasm, and not sending them straight off to sleep. And so I have to rework things, until it all sounds less like something you’d find in a textbook, and more like something you’d discover in the pages of a storybook, or even a songbook. I feel like when the sentences are singing, then the sciency bit is doing its job. Tough work though and since, like all living things (excepting the most perverse examples of their kind) I gravitate towards the path of least resistance, I’ll often find myself wishing a scientific explanation would make way for its magical counterpart.
Maths though – there’s some magic in that, I think, though I probably understand it less well even than science, and doubtless it’s this mystery that lends it such power over me to enchant. Just now, I’m finding myself mildly obsessed with angles and forces – a kind of applied maths, I guess (I scraped an A Level in the subject; barely, and three and a half decades ago). It’s a fascination that usually kicks in towards the end of winter when I’ve been gazing at snowdrops and images of snowdrops for weeks; marvelling at how the flower hangs out into space, at the mechanics of the connection between the domed ovary and the peduncle, how the trajectory of that peduncle diverges from that of the spathe that protected it on its original journey up through the soil, and how the thin stem might lean but rarely finds it necessary to bow out in the opposite direction to compensate for the weight of the flower.
The snowdrops are all but over now, and my attention’s turning to the daffodils I cut for the vase last night. I’m drawn to the sharp right angle at the top so that the trumpet (corona if we’re pretending to be scientific), pointing demurely downwards, sits lower than the bend at the apex of the stem. In engineering terms, there seems almost to be something of the spider’s leg about the design, and I wonder if it’s just coincidence or something to do with the practicalities of supporting mass against gravity, using nothing more than a long, spindly rod. And now I’ve tuned into this, everywhere I look I start to see an improbable amount of weight being held above the ground by stems and branches frozen in the process of describing absurdly baroque paths through the air, and while you’d think that such exertion would fill the garden with grunts and groaning, it feels like every plant is dancing ever so slowly, precisely in balance, perfectly in flow, imperceptibly transferring their burdens through space, exactly as they were designed to do. And that might be physics, or maths, or science, and one day I might even take the trouble to discover some of what’s going on, but today, it feels like magic, and that’s all I need just now.
Well, maths, science or whatever, there's magic in your words, Andrew. I marvel at the shy flowers that seem to stare at their feet, urging us to bend down and lift their heads to drink in their beauty. Those angles would give us neck pain but as you say, they float effortlessly into space. Talking about the weight thingy, (poetic, me) I have always found it disconcerting to watch a crane at work, building edifices higher and higher, with what seems like a ridiculous pea-sized box at its bottom, how on earth it does what it does... That aside, I'm fascinated by the word "peduncle", which, by the way, rhymes with "carbunkle", from a previous post. Love it.
I agree with you about the magic of maths. I play snooker now and then and so much of the joy is in the geometry of it all, and seemingly contriving against it by making the white do what it doesn't want to. I'm not sure how that relates to daffodils, but still