Wilderness: Chapter 12

The Domestic Proxies: In which we inherit Beyoncé

This is the twelfth chapter in Wilderness: In Search of Belonging. This is my story, about my search for belonging and about seeking solace in nature by rewilding a forgotten fragment of Somerset.

The chapters are available to paid members of

Wild Writing with Sanjida

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Short dispatches from our rewilding journey are available in Wild Notes if you’d like a quick tonic from the natural world - available to all members.

Somerset - March

The rising sun is amber, a slick of raw honey on the trunks of the beech trees; the moon, huge and waxing gibbous, hovers above the conifers. There’s the sharp scent of cut pine from the logs stacked by the side of the fire track, and all the way up the hill, I’m accompanied by a dull orange glow, like the embers of a dying fire still throbbing between the cedars.

It’s the start of March and glacially cold. I’m out running, searching for colt’s-foot flowers, which should have started to bloom. I find a small patch of them behind an ancient Neolithic monument in the woods. The flowers emerge directly from the gravel path on short, stumpy stems, bereft of leaves; their little faces are screwed tightly shut, as if against the bitter wind.

The botanist, Carl Linnaeus, noticed that some plants open and close their flowers at specific times of the day. In 1748 he named his theory horologium florae, or floral clock, and proposed that it would be possible to estimate the time of day, according to which flowers were open or closed. Later, in his Philosophia Botanica, published in 1751, he grouped plants into those which opened and closed their petals in response to the weather (Meteorici), the length of the day (Tropici) and those which had fixed times for opening and closing (Aequinoctales).

It’s probably too early in the day for the colt’s-foots’ sunshine-yellow flowers. Behind me on the steep bank beneath the pines, I notice a tree bumblebee, doggedly clinging to a winter heath, proboscis dug deep into one of the magenta heather flowers, like a woolly drug addict. She has a fox-red fluffy thorax, a dark abdomen and a surprisingly white tail. There’s a shiny patch on her back as if her hair has been rubbed away. I’m reminded of Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem, Honey at the Table:

It fills you with the soft 
essence of vanished flowers…
it thickens,
grows deeper and wilder, edged
 with pine boughs and wet boulders…

We are ready for our first domestic proxies.