Cloud mist in wafts rising across
tree tops, sentinels under a grey sky
late morning and still.
Forest walkers below,
hushed by branches of needles,
unaware of the watcher above,
track-bound, receding now,
around to the next stream bridge.
Blue sky opens a small window to the North,
otherwise grey. Pottering away,
listing species from a chalk lined plot,
pencil busy on notebook, clinometer out,
bark slope taken, camera shot.
Leader bark with a few needles attached,
stem spines prickle the skin
below my hand holding fist.
The tree flexes as one moves,
a step up to a new branch,
swing around to the other side,
to do the North plot next.
A new vista across the hills
with hedge-rowed fields for miles away.
The day is improving and
the cloud base is rising,
bluer now, greener too,
air washed by rain saturates colours.
My eye rests on a white-washed farm yard,
with red-roofed sheds, among winter brown hedges,
and wet grass fields.
Another push and the list is complete,
notebook packed away, with some time to one-self.
Unfurl a teabag string, douse in the flask,
the hot liquid greens, ready for reverie,
tree top tea, with a stray spruce needle
floater, for the lips to avoid.
A grey tractor moves in the farm yard,
damp soft sounds in a lower landscape,
from the hill forest,
gazing across tree tops.
Howard Fox (C) 2015
In composing this piece as a reaction to Roger Carter’s Why (unfinished), I am conscious of writing the same poem, again and again, on the Caribbean Literary Salon site, with different words. Such a preoccupation it has been warned against, and is common among those who express ideas in lyrical and poetic forms. My concern with the cognitive method of botany is pervasive and a difficult theme to escape from and a lot more needs to be written on this theme. I am also drawing on a conversation with a retired bryologist, Donal Synnott, over the use of the words tyrrany and torture – in botany, the need to provide polite society with scientific names for plants could be considered a tyranny or torture, formalised in binomial nomenclature by Carl Linnaeus, over 250 years ago. The predictive nature of the species and generic hypotheses of science is profound and a pleasure to use. Now we are in the midst of a phase of accommodating genetic information in the botanical synthesis to the detriment of a classical botanical education in morphology or form. In providing this stimulus to Caribbean botany, I trust this Salon will appreciate how to assimilate plants into their national cultures, and this will encourage a few who on the fringes of a botanical enlightement, might take cognitive steps in their observation methods to improve their perception for and respect for plants, that possess a subversive lack of an obvious utilitarian role in the society we live.