This is the right time of year to be looking for plants to use on my greetings cards. August to early October, before the Autumn storms come – everything is dead, dried up, and therefore more translucent under light. The growing year is over, what was green is brown, tendrils curl up, seed cases become desiccated.
Looking isn’t quite the right word – half looking is better, out of the corner of the eye, alert to the possibility that I might notice something, or nothing, drifting in the air, fallen on the grass.
It doesn’t have to be much – a single seed-head, a couple of leaves, a handful of stems. The Italian poet Cesar Pavese said ‘The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare…. at a single object’ (Dialogues with Lucco)
I don’t necessarily have to look somewhere special either. The plant could be a weed in the cracks of the pavement, or end-of-season growth spilling over the path where I have an allotment. It might be in Brockwell Park, my nearest green space, the place I see in all seasons and weathers. This is from Richard Nelson ‘The Island Within’:
‘As time went by, I realised that the particular place I’d chosen was less important than the fact that I’d chosen a place and focused my life around it…. What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it’s flat or rugged, rich or austere, wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame.’
