When I go rock pooling with my son, he’ll be first to spot the tiny glass shrimp flittering through the pellucid waters and first to identify the beaded strings of seaweed commonly known as Neptune’s necklace. Whilst grand vistas and far horizons may wow adults, like most children, his attention is more likely to be captured by what’s close at hand. If a new discovery needs a name, he’ll make one up – the gelatinous goo swashing around the miniature fjords between the rocks is of course sea snot. Clearly, he doesn’t need to arrive armed with a marine biologist’s vocabulary to be enchanted by the rock pools, but a little priming can be helpful. Sending him on a mission to discover some weird little snakeskin chitons or grisly sounding dead man’s fingers stokes his imagination and brings some focus to his manic exploring. Thrilled with having found them, we add cushion stars and beaked barnacles to the hunt, and with each new species identified, his sense of connection grows.
For adults too, fostering our language for the landscape can have a subtle but powerful effect on how we experience the natural world. As a primarily visual person, I hadn’t realised how true this was until, in my mid 40s, I decided to publish a book about the Outer Hebridean island of Barra. With a life-long connection and having thoroughly explored, photographed, and painted it in the past, I presumed I’d hit the ground running as soon as I arrived back. However, settling into my brother’s cottage and contemplating the familiar view over the bay, an uneasiness stole over me. The steely water and treeless, rocky hillsides stared blankly back – mute and inscrutable. Visually and viscerally, I knew this place intimately, but when pressed, I lacked the required literacy to read and reflect upon the landscape.
Chastened and fearing I’d bitten off both more and less than I could chew, over the following year, I immersed myself in everything I could learn about the island’s history, geology, ecology, and folklore. My abysmal Gaelic didn’t improve any, and I remain far from expert in any one area, but my lexicon for that landscape and hence my ability to conceptualise and decode it was transformed. The ubiquitous granite was specifically Lewisian gneiss (pronounced nice) – its monochromatic banding and fine jewelling of feldspar and quartz tell-tale signs of a turbulent journey into the depths of the underworld and dramatic metamorphosis through deep time. The confusion of anonymous lichens painting the gneiss were infused with the poetry of their taxonomy – sea ivory, blood spot, thorn cladonia, and the like. The previously unidentified palimpsest of feint lines and tonal variances in the vegetation came into focus as the traces of human occupation stretching back over millennia. Beneath those steely waters were beds of maerl (a hard purple-pink seaweed) and, lurking always just out of sight, selkies – mythical shape shifters capable of transforming themselves between seal and human form. By the end of the year when I cast my gaze over that same view, my mind hummed with the richness and complexity of it all.
For this book, I’ve widened my net beyond Barra to explore the broader treasure trove of vernacular and specialist language we have inherited from those who’ve lived, worked, studied, painted, mythologised, and otherwise engaged with the natural world. Each has honed and expanded their vocabularies according to their needs. Botanists know their crispate from their comb-like, and meteorologists their graupel from their virga. Poets have coined portmanteaus to capture the lyrical magic of a storming sea or blazing sky, as have chemists to describe the subtle scent released by the land after rainfall. As our environment changes, so too does our vocabulary. In modern times, town planners must be mindful of their edgelands and the potential for illicit desire lines!
With the world now awash with heavily manipulated photographs, the old adage “the camera never lies” seems hopelessly out of date. That said, the camera sometimes reveals certain truths the naked eye cannot. Long exposures can reveal otherwise invisible and often startlingly beautiful patterns of motion. Lightning fast shutterspeeds can capture the minutiae of fleeting ephemera. Drones allow us to peer down from the gods, and polarising filters let us see beyond the reflecting surface of water. For the images in this collection, I’ve used all of these devices and occasionally some judicious cropping to exclude an unsightly sign or nearby road. The images speak the truth – but not necessarily the whole, unvarnished truth.
By adopting an alphabetical structure, I’m in no way implying any suggestion of completeness. Rather, it proved the simplest way to impose order on material that otherwise resisted easy classification. Likewise, having necessarily limited my scope to the language and landscapes I know best, I make no claim to objectivity. I’m mindful of the many gaps – that for instance, just across the Tasman Sea, there’s a culture at least 65,000 years old with an intimate relationship to an enigmatic landscape I’ve little experience of. Similarly here in Aotearoa New Zealand, te reo Māori is freighted with subtleties and insight that could no doubt warrant a similar collection of its own that I’d love to read but am wholly unqualified to write.
As I was researching this material, I was struck by how the evolution of our vocabularies for the natural world mirrors that of nature itself, echoing the same patterns of cross-fertilisation, modification, and the relentless generating of new and novel forms. It is a deep repository of knowledge and insight, resonant with a sensitivity to nature’s inherent poetry, rhythms, and subtleties to which many of us have become estranged. As such, it can also help to reconnect us, sharpening our perceptions and our appreciation for the wonder of it all. As art historian E.H. Gombrich writes in The Story of Art:
“We can never neatly separate what we see from what we know.”
Introduction Aeolian Alpenglow Apricity Asperous
Benthos Crepuscular Crispate Crown shyness
Desire lines Dreich Endragoned Edgelands
Frondescence Fumarole Gluggaveður Gossamer
Karst Komorebi Lawrence Long acre
Machair Monkey’s wedding Moonglade
Psithurism Quartz Rakuyou Roaring forties
Snag Soft estate Specular, diffuse and pellucid
Spoondrift Steam fog Swash zone Sylvan
Tellurian and thalassic Terracettes Uliginous