Reflections on a Wild Flower Walk

Many languages:  ten or 12 people?, I did not count, but can see them all in my mind’s eye vividly as we walked through different meadows at Glandwr. I see too the views across the hills, the macro picture, and when looking down the micro - the tiniest plants in this species-rich environment: –heath bedstraw, tormentil, lousewort, the splendid orchids – and the feathery, different coloured grasses: - Yorkshire Fog and Crested dog’s-tail (Cynosuruscristatus) [1} being two of my favourites that I excitedly spotted at home the next morning.  
‍

We all had our own languages and specialisms that intersected as we bent down to look at tiny flowers and decide their names(Latin and English), picked grasses, and thought more broadly of the mini eco-systems of each different field and what could preserve them.  I heard the languages of botany and forestry and land management, and about butterflies and sheep and orchards, and slightly further afield of lost communities in the Welsh hills.  Our conversations were spoken, as we navigated tussocky, boggy routes up and down hill, by people from different countries and generations and academic backgrounds.  How was it that a farmer and a physicist, a specialist in bees and another in butterflies, people working in land management and pioneering conservation charities, and a historian now psychotherapist, could connect so well?

The language that connected us was passion.  Passionate about learning and growing, about the environment, about the preservation of different species, about the future of our Tir here in Wales, and our planet.

SJW 15/06/24

[1]The historian in me was interested to learn that crested dogstail used to be grown as a crop and was used for making bonnets.  

‍