D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) is a novel in which natural desires perturb the lives of people fixated on artistic and intellectual transcendence. Ursula, Gudrun, Gerald, and Birkin struggle—even to death—to resist their inevitable coupling. The story is uncomfortable, full of bad feelings created by the dissonance between individual freedom and what the …
We love it when the protagonist of a poem is a plant. If on top of that a multitude of other plants star, then even better. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792 – 1822) lyrical fable The Sensitive Plant is a mammoth work, exploring the small matter of the meaning of life, with allegorical support from plants in a …
The Trees by Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985) was published in his fourth and final volume of poetry, High Windows in 1974. It meditates, laments but ultimately celebrates the life-cycle of trees. Time lapse videos by Neil Bromhall demonstrate the anatomical wonder of opening tree leaf buds that will be occurring everywhere in the coming weeks. The Trees by Philip Larkin …
Once voted the UK’s 5th most popular poem of all time in a Radio 4 poll, Daffodils, also known as I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, is Wordsworth’s best known poem and one of the Lake District Tourist Board’s favourite plants. It was first published in 1807 in Poems in Two Volumes, with a few …
Few activities in urban life combine mental reprieve with repetitive, outdoor labor. Middle-class city folk have long turned to the pastoral tradition to imagine an idyllic countryside populated with fresh-faced shepherdesses and singing harvesters unburdened by anxieties of the city grind. Their innocent work in the fields was seen as an antidote to stress. Indeed, …
Solid, strong, and enduring, the heroic oak spreads expansively in all directions, steadily growing an imperial command of the landscape. All the more sublime, then, when such a tree is struck by lightning. Stark in its isolation and bearing the deep scars of violence, the “blasted oak” evokes the melancholy of blighted glory and death. …
Rain in an Oak Forest by Ivan Shishkin, 1891 Trees hold a special power over the human psyche, perhaps because we identify with their individuality and perhaps because, like us, they link earth to the heavens, reaching skyward even as they root to the ground. Our respect for the knowledge and sublimity of trees invests …
Stevie Wonder became blind just after birth, so he never saw a plant or a flower, yet in 1979 he recorded Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants”, a whole album that explored human connection to them. The subject of that connection was not just your average, everyday relations with plants, but instead the idea …
There is nothing as moving as a heartfelt song sung for a plant. That is why, Ombra mai fu, the opening aria from the 1738 opera Serse by George Frideric Handel, is probably the most popular number from any of his operas. Sung by the main character Xerxes I of Persia, the title translates from …