Wednesday 14 February 2018

The flowers of Scotland

I wrote this in 1997, and presented it to the Botanical Society of Scotland. It was later published as a poem card.

The Flowers of Scotland; a personal field-trip
by Colin Will

To the upward limits of the land
there is green, there is growth.

In the depths of the blackest lochs
skeins of cells float on thermal contours.

In between, layers of life profess
the goodness of sun, and wind, and rain.

Ice shaped the uplands,
filing mountains to points
or chiselled ridges
on which the distance balances.

In summer, on Schiehallion,
cloudberries ramble over the quartzite cobbles,
before the winter-whitened ptarmigan
peck over the snow crust, scavenging seeds.

The calc-schists of Ben Lawers
are over-grazed by sheep (and botanists),
and on the one way up
peat-slopes are cut to slurry
by tourist trainers.

Luckily once, the wrong path up Cruach Ardrain
revealed a field of saxifrages,
not known to unlost walkers.

On the high moors, soil and grass
scab the tops of rock outcrops
where rabbits bob and sentinel.

Wrens flit in archipelagos of gorse,
yellow-edged, and dead-centred;
flowers verging with the trefoils
while track-side whin-pods pop in the heat.

A ewe gives a mother-worried bleat
to her hidden daughter
cropping grass between the junipers.
Their meadow is dimensioned by orchids
and fanned by butterflies
rushing for thyme.

A hoodie stalks the crag’s grey summit
then glides in the updraught
to a rowan perch -
an outpost of his circuit.

Moss and fine grasses
flush the larch-wood’s floor
between cast branches
with their grey crusts of lichen.

Deeper in, ferns feather the clearings
where each toadstooled hump
conceals a tripping stump.
Blaeberry patches smother unplanted outcrops
in green and reddening leaves on wire stems.

The pine’s green candles relax and darken
as the needles wax.
Old trees are many-branched,
like Caledonian menorahs
under rounded crowns.

Coppiced oak woods
yielded stripped bark
for tanning leather.
What’s left, neglected,
are shaky poles, thin growth,
feebly-rooted, or rotted
into woodpecker drum-holes.

Alder’s roots, knotted with nitrogen,
flushed clean by the spring flood
exposed at summer’s ford
where we back-packed the kids,
freezing feet sliding
on the slippery boulders.

As the stream’s course swivels
the trees are undercut
until a final blow
will topple them into the burn.

Green hair streams in the shallows
as if a vegetable Rapunzel
lies entowered below the waterline.

The soft bells of water over rocks
die to the silent power
of the broadening river
pushing to the sea.

On the islands
the machair’s multi-jewelled blanket
is Hebrides Heaven
for ascended larks.

Down south, behind the dune slacks,
sea-holly prickles picnickers’ toes
as their baggage brushes ragwort skeletons
cinnabarred with caterpillars.

On the flats, beyond green banks
which bolster and bend the water’s flow,
mud-plants, sea-rinsed, grow green skins
like paints on a black and smelly canvas.

Kelp throngs the surging sea-front;
tugged from every side
its living glue holds it fast
as the slow waves of the moon’s weight
raise continents of water daily, nightly.

Free-floating aggregates of organelles
pump sunlight into sugars
below the surface turbulence,
making a crop which turn
the world’s cycles of air and earth.

The true ‘Flowers of Scotland’
are the landscapes where they grow.
Plants have no tongues to tell
their provenance;
no patriotic theme-songs
twist through the thistles,
and nationality is more arbitrary,
than climate, latitude, or soil.

They are here because
this is where their seeds fell
and found favour,
spreading the green stain of life
over Scotland’s bedrock.


Copyright © Colin Will 1997, 1998, 2018

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