Simon Barnes - Rewild Yourself: Making Nature More Visible in our Lives

ALSO BY SIMON BARNES

The Meaning of Birds

REWILD
YOURSELF

MAKING NATURE MORE
VISIBLE IN OUR LIVES

SIMON BARNES

R EWILD Y OURSELF

Pegasus Books Ltd.

148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2019 by Simon Barnes

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition October 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN: 978-1-64313-216-7

ISBN: 9781643132846 (ebook)

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

This ones for Kim perhaps the brightest witch of her age

C ONTENTS

And so Lucy found herself walking through the wood arm in arm with this strange creature as if they had known one another all their lives.

The Lion , the Witch and the Wardrobe , C. S. Lewis

Were not just losing the wild world. Were forgetting it.

Were no longer noticing it. Weve lost the habit of looking and seeing and listening and hearing. Were beginning to think its not really our business. Were beginning to act as if its not there any more.

In the course of The Chronicles of Narnia , Lucy has to enter the house of the magician and read a spell for making hidden things visible. She knows at once that shes got it right, because colours and pictures start to appear on the pages of the magic book in gold and blue and scarlet. And then, wonder of wonders, Aslan himself, the great lion and high king above all high kings, is also made visible.

Aslan, said Lucy, almost a little reproachfully. Dont make fun of me. As if anything I could do would make you visible.

It did, said Aslan. Do you think I wouldnt obey my own rules?

Lucys joy when Aslan is revealed before her is the most wonderful and beautiful thing, the most wonderful thing that could ever be. And Lucys joy or at least some of it can be ours.

We too can say the spell for making hidden things visible. In fact, I am prepared to offer no fewer than twenty-three spells for doing so.

Mammals you never knew existed will enter your world. Birds hidden in the treetops will shed their cloak of anonymity. With a single movement of your hand you can make reptiles appear before you. Butterflies you never saw before will bring joy to every sunny day. Creatures of the darkness will enter the light of your consciousness.

As you take on new techniques and a little new equipment, you will discover new creatures and, with them, areas of yourself that have been dormant. Once put to use, they wake up and start working again. You become wilder in your mind and in your heart.

Thats the real magic. You wake up the part of you that slept. It was there all along. It needed only the smallest shake, the gentlest nudge to become part of your waking self. There is wildness in us all, but in most of us its latent, sleeping, unused. Wild we are in our deeper selves: we are hunter-gatherers in suits and dresses and jeans and T-shirts. We have been civilised tame for less than 1 per cent of our existence as a species.

Even in the twenty-first century you can be where the wild things are. These days, non-human life always seems to be just over the horizon, just beyond the threshold of our understanding, just a little bit short of our awareness but with the smallest alteration all this can change. The lost world can be found: the hidden creatures that share our planet can be brought before us glowing in gold and blue and scarlet.

Once you know the spells, the wild world starts to appear before you. Do you think they wouldnt obey their own rules?

Now you dont see it.

Now you do.

Everyone in that crowd turned its head, and then everyone drew a long breath of wonder and delight. A little way off, towering over their heads, they saw a tree which certainly had not been there before.

The Magicians Nephew , C. S. Lewis

There is a Magic Tree in Narnia. It grows in The Magicians Nephew , which is what we now call a prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Polly and Digory fetch the apple from which the tree springs, making the journey on the back of a winged horse. The tree protects Narnia from harm for hundreds of years and works further wonders when the children return to England.

The idea of magic trees runs deep in all human cultures. Every year we bring one into our homes, cover it with beautiful things and then sit before it in joy. All trees have some kind of magic about them: huge things that start as an object you can hold between finger and thumb, living things that are also life-givers, offering food and shelter to all comers.

I want to draw your attention to one kind of tree: a tree with a summoning spell and what it summons is butterflies. Butterflies, more than any other creatures, seem to have been designed to please humans: stunning little fragments of colour that sting not and cause no harm. They are without question bright and beautiful, and to look at butterflies with the tiniest bit more attention is the easiest way in the world to get a little closer to nature.

The tree in question is the buddleia. Not much of a tree in terms of height or girth, not much more than an ambitious bush. But its rather good at flowering: each summer, around June and July, it produces improbable quantities of big purple cones, flowers that seem more than their fragile stems can bear. These blooms summon butterflies and the butterflies obey the summons in unexpected numbers.

The buddleia is classified as an invasive species. It is native to China and Japan and first appeared in British gardens around 1800. It was first recorded in the wild in 1922. It makes plenty of seeds and they disperse well, and its so spectacularly unneedy that it will put down roots in a wall. More than anything else, it loves to follow railway lines. Buddleias can damage buildings and have also caused problems on chalk grasslands, so not everybody loves them, but they have an utterly beguiling trick. They attract butterflies like no other tree, like no other flowers.

The buddleia is the bar no butterfly can pass. They come in like absinthe drinkers in an impressionist painting and as they drink, they spell out their own theories of colour and meaning. If you want to find butterflies, all you have to do is find a buddleia in bloom. Gaze at it for a few minutes on a fine day in early summer and you will almost certainly find yourself gazing upon butterflies.

There are plenty of nectar-rich plants, and many that attract butterflies, but the buddleia has the power of summoning butterflies from vast distances and it makes all other plants seem second-best. Here the butterflies drink and bask, spreading their wings out just like the illustrations in the field guide, making it easy for the greenest of novices to make an ID. They are so taken up with the glories of the buddleia that they will more or less ignore your presence. You can walk within a couple of feet of the bush and be unlucky if the butterflies move. The buddleia gives you a unique, almost impertinent intimacy with butterflies.