WE ALL once lived within the landscape. We worked and loved, slept and dreamed inside it. We observed the change of the seasons, the incremental growth of plants and flowers, the sudden movement of wind and rain. We relied on plants for every little thing, but we didn’t view them as mere objects for our pleasure and use.
We studied them with a view to understand the aim for which they were created. Each plant signified a bigger story through which we played a significant part. Wheat was not only food however the breath of God calling us to communion with one another. Flowers fattened bees, but additionally they showed us the right way to live, their faces turned all day to heaven, and inward at night. We weren’t the authors of nature, but a part of its fabric.
This was our experience of the natural world until we became modern people. In the sixteenth century, a convergence of events severed us from the plants we lived amongst, transforming them into objects for our use and changing the form of the landscape that continues to be around us. Today, our relationship with plants has grown distant. Trees and flowers have develop into ornamental, the backdrop to concrete and steel.
We still depend on plants — for food grown within the soil, fruit from trees, fibres for the material of our clothes — but few of us remember the right way to cultivate the land for these purposes. Nor do we’d like to: the trendy world has learned to supply what it needs in places removed from view. But not that way back, our on daily basis was shaped by the necessity to grow and make with a view to survive, and to accomplish that artfully. It was knowledge so precious, so long perfected, that we passed it fastidiously to our kids.
Modernity has reshaped entirely the way in which our imaginations are formed from childhood to old age. We not set our each day lives to the seasons, our communal life to the harvests, nor the stages of our personal growing and decay to the rhythm of the plants that live around us. When we exit of our cities to the woods and meadows, we follow an urge long embedded in us by centuries of living within the landscape.
We not survive on the person plants that grow around us — for that, we’re content with another person’s plants, grown near by or miles away, even overseas — but we still remember something of the non-public love that we once felt for those plants with which we lived and worked on daily basis. That work has shaped who we’re in ways we are able to sense but don’t remember. It’s a pattern of labour that our bodies have inherited, a skill we hold somewhere in ourselves even when we’ve never lifted a hand to it. Our eyes are made for horizons and the each day alteration of color within the tree cover and the carpet of field, meadow, and heath. Our bodies are made for open air and movement, for labour under sun and wind.
IF OUR deep immersion within the land had been taken from us unexpectedly, in a single moment, we might need understood the size of our loss. Instead, change crept slowly, one plant at a time. First, apples — an orchard fruit, once widely accessible — then household medicines like saffron, cloth dyes, grapes for making wine, after which, eventually, the timber and reeds that we used to construct our homes and the wheat that we grew for bread. In their place we acquired private property, global trade, modern medicine, industrial manufacturing, the corporation, and the banking system.
And yet these changes all occurred throughout the span of just 200 years, from the rule of Henry VIII within the early 1500s to the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. In this short space of time, we ceased to be medieval and have become modern. These centuries mark the time when our society shifted its focus from preservation to improvement — from having enough to wanting more. The “Enlightenment” and the scientific revolution, so often assumed to be the moment that Western culture launched into its best ethical and mental path, was also the moment at which we lost our home within the land and severed the ties that when certain us in deeply spiritual ways to all green and growing things.
NOT all the changes were sought or welcomed. Many early modern people expressed alarm on the prospect of losing touch with the life that they had known for hundreds of years. They realised that the longer-term outcomes of innovation would serve those that held much greater power, those that had never worked the land in any respect. The more we moved away from life within the landscape, the more we found ways of managing plants that required academic training, corporate business models, high levels of technology, and a type of centralised management that further separated us from the fields and orchards.
The old life is gone, but we are able to still find traces of it, if we glance fastidiously. I’ve spent my profession as a tutorial reading concerning the past — the way in which we lived, the literature we wrote. My life is as modern as every other urban woman of my generation however the university through which I spend my days teaching and writing holds on to some traces of medieval society: not only the quads and spires of the older Cambridge colleges however the meadows and orchards still protected by the rights of the common, and the division of the yr into three terms of indoor work — Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter — calculated to suit across the demands of the harvest.
These mere traces of the past pull at my mind with the instinct that all of us feel when walking in woodland or fields cut through by ancient hedgerows. Knowing that instinct to be nostalgic doesn’t make it any less essential. There’s much in our modern lives that we’d not quit, just as there was much within the rise of modernity that was good for us — but once we go searching on the world we now inhabit, who feels they’ve had any direct alternative in creating it? The cityscapes, the ever-growing centralised governance, the ceaseless expansion of commerce, our reliance on technology, the depletion of plants and insects, and the lack of a community of labour.
WE MIGHT think that the breach between plants and folks, emerging 400 years ago, has little or no to do with us — but that history is our story, too. Early modern people were grappling with the arrival of a world that they didn’t understand, a world that brought opportunity but which also threatened to dismantle the intricate systems of growing and making that had sustained human societies for thus long. The modern world — whose emergence they witnessed — now has us all in its grip.
We might feel powerless to stop its ever-faster advance, but I need to point out that we usually are not. The fight to guard our place within the landscape can teach us the right way to be a part of change, to withstand where obligatory, to shape recent methods for living with innovation. Modernity — the enemy of nature — began 400 years ago, however it continues to be unfolding. We can take our own place in it and be a part of where it leads. We can — if we elect — reclaim something of what we lost.
This is an edited extract from Vanishing Landscapes: The story of plants and the way we lost them, illustrated by Rosanna Morris, and published by Hodder at £22 (Church Times Bookshop £19.80); 978-1-3997-3152-2.
Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson is a author and academic. She is a Fellow and Associate Professor of English Literature at Downing College, Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow of Blackfriars, Oxford.
