Botanical Short Stories: Contemporary Writing about Plants and Flowers

INTRODUCTION

Creating an anthology of botanical short stories is a dream come true for me, as it combines my lifelong love of flowers with my favourite form of fiction, the short story.

Deriving from the Greek anthologia, from anthos (flower) + logia (collection), the word ‘anthology’ could not be more appropriate for a group of stories about lives as varied, diverse, and global as the world of plants itself.

Reflecting the deep relationship between the life cycles of people and plants, this selection explores universal themes such as love, myth, loss, and healing. Wilderness is never far away, as a woman manages to bring a part of her beloved Welsh farm to a new home in the city in Clare Reddaway’s ‘The Acorn Vase’, while in Hildegard Dumper’s ‘In Search of Monkey Cups’, a group of botanists in search of rare species find more than they bargained for in the jungles of Malaysia.

The green world takes a strange and exciting turn in Aulic Anamika’s ‘Breathing Becoming Midori’ as a scientist takes a radical step in order to truly understand the life of her houseplant, while in Rebecca Ferrier’s wonderful story ‘Mulch’, a lonely, green-fingered woman shunned by her community decides to grow her own man.

Wild plants have long provided us with sources of food and medicine, as well as less-benign remedies that may harm rather than heal. This theme is explored in Kate Swindlehurst’s powerful story ‘Mercy’, where a knowledge of traditional plant lore enables a mistreated woman to create a better life for herself in historical Cambridge, while in ‘A Clear View’ by Mark Bowers, a woman foraging chalk cliffs for rock samphire meets a man struggling to survive an upbringing as harsh and unforgiving as the environment of the plant itself.

Elsewhere, the memory of gardens created and flowers cultivated over a lifetime bring comfort to those at the end of their days. In Diana Powell’s deeply felt ‘Emily – Hiding in a Flower’, we lie with the poet Emily Dickinson as she remembers the flowers that formed the heart of her life and work, while Priyanka Sacheti’s story, ‘A Homesick Ghost Princess Visits Her Home on a Full Moon Night’, beautifully imagines love for a flourishing tropical garden continuing after death. Set in a seaside village in southern New Zealand, Thalia Henry’s ‘Nigella’ is a subtle, finely balanced piece about the personal meaning a flower can hold throughout a lifetime.

In the harsh, unrelenting conditions of a Dutch bulb factory, Maria Donovan’s ‘Narcissus’ is a skilful exploration of the industrial cost of beautifying our homes and gardens. Meanwhile, the true spirit of good gardening is put to the test in a quintessential English village in Angela Sherlock’s warm-hearted story, ‘The Garden of the Non-Completer Finisher.’

In my story, ‘Flowers’, the chance to grow flowers in a Cornish field brings two strangers together, allowing them both the opportunity to heal, while love in all its wildness and wonder is to be found in the turbulent relationship between two mismatched lovers in ‘Dog Roses’ by Tamar Hodes. The final piece in this book, Elizabeth Gibson’s ‘Stitching for Clem’, shows a couple weaving a deeply happy world from the small, often overlooked things – companionship, music, sewing, and growing – which deepen the richness, beauty, and meaning of life.

I am immensely grateful to Sarah Jane Humphrey for creating the exquisite artwork in Botanical Short Stories. Sarah is a Royal Horticultural Society gold medal-winning botanical illustrator whose talent and creativity shines brightly. As well as using darkness and light to brilliant effect in four black and white internal illustrations, our cover design features Sarah’s beautiful drawing of a passionflower (Passiflora). The passionflower’s circular structure echoes the shape of our planet Earth as well as symbolising the cycle of life. Its flowing, flexible tendrils enable the plant to climb towards the light, and its petals open to uncover an intricate, complex, and exquisitely formed heart. This species seemed the perfect choice to represent the shared passion for all things botanical and literary you will find within these pages.

Emma Timpany

January 2024

ENGLISH OAK, Quercus robur

THE ACORN VASE

CLARE REDDAWAY

I have to leave. That’s what they tell me. I don’t have a choice.

I found the acorn on the long track that leads from the road to my house. It was paved with white stones once, but now grass runs down the middle and if I’m not careful it grows tall in the summer and brushes the underside of the car. I drive the lawn mower over it when I can be bothered. I don’t mind the grass, but Gareth the postman worries about his van getting damaged. I’ve told him a few fronds of grass won’t harm it, but he doesn’t listen, and I’d like to carry on getting my post even if it is mostly bills.

Alongside one edge of the track is a dry stone wall. It’s still in a good state. Well, I suppose they’re built to last for centuries. I often stand and look at the wall. The slabs are thick and must once have been a uniform grey, but now they are so covered with lichens they resemble a map of the world, but not a world we yet know. One patch forms the white of a frozen continent, another the speckly green of an island. There are splats of ochre and mini forests of ghost grey that sprout in the crevices. I see smears of orange, blotted with spots of black – deserts and cities perhaps. Another lichen is so dark a grey it is almost indistinguishable from the rock itself. Whenever I walk along the track I notice the spread – a new patch of yolk yellow here, a mound of moss there, new lands emerging in front of my eyes.

The acorn fell from the oak trees that hang over the wall. They are sessile oaks, twisted and bent, their branches covered in that same ghost-grey lichen with streaks of deep green moss. The track is littered with acorns in the autumn, but I have never picked one up before. Why would I?

Briony gave me the vase for my birthday. ‘It’s an acorn vase, Mum. You fill it with water and rest an acorn there, in the neck. It’s shaped to hold it.’

A vase for an acorn. Not for a big bunch of daffs, harvested down by the stream, not for an armful of dahlias gathered in the midday sun of a late summer’s day, not for a tiny bunch of snowdrops, picked when you can hardly believe they’ve dared to poke their heads out it is still so chill, offering hope that the wind will drop and the air will warm and there will be blue sky once again. No, none of these, but an acorn.

‘Thank you. How lovely.’

When she’s gone, driving straight off after lunch so she can get to the motorway before darkness falls, when her car has bumped down the track and turned left onto the lane and vanished, I put the vase back in its box and place it high on a bookshelf where I never have to look at it again. This daughter of mine doesn’t know me if she thinks I want to see an acorn in the middle of my breakfast table rather than the bright purple of a crocus or the unfolding petals of my favourite apricot rose.

I love the track. The light there is limpid green, and when the sun shines it slants through the twists of oak with shafts so sharp you could cut yourself on them. Opposite the wall, on the other side of the track, the hill rises. The hill is steep but I walk up it every day, and my feet are sure on the turf path that leads up over a slab stile, up through the bracken and the bramble, up to the close-cropped turf of what was once a fortress. On the flat top, I stand and survey the land laid out below me. The tiny squares of fields, enclosed by walls and hedges. The solitary trees, oak and beech, that look like parsley heads from here. Gareth’s post van, a dot of red crawling along the lanes. Dai Evans’s farm, his cattle sheds grouped around the yard. His herd of Welsh Blacks move from field to field, following the grass. Beyond the pastureland the moors form a protective shield, blue as they meld into the horizon, and there in the far, far distance, is a dark line that I know is the sea.

It is the hill that betrays me.

That day, there is no sun. The wind is from the west, barrelling straight into me like a fist. It takes my hair and whips it across my skin. A sudden shower of rain douses my face and makes me feel tingle-fresh and alive.

But the rain makes the rocks slippery. I often relive what happens next. It plays like a film when I close my eyes.

It is on the way back down that I slip. I place my right foot on a treacherous surface where the lichens and the mosses have turned to slime and it goes out from beneath me. I make a noise, halfway between a shout and a groan, as I crash down onto my back. My head hits a sharp stone and the breath is knocked out of me.

When I can, I breathe in, count to five, exhale. And again, and again like I did when I was in labour. It didn’t work then either. A vision of Briony as a squalling baby floats in front of me. Then I see her running with the boys along the track, racing each other, kicking a ball. They turn into the gate and vanish. As I watch them, the shock recedes.

I sit up. Good. I can manage that. I will be slow, gentle with myself. My head is throbbing from the stone, but that is to be expected. I push myself to standing and there it is: a shooting pain through my ankle when I put my foot to the ground. I test it. I can move my foot, that’s positive, but if I put any weight on it, the pain is too much to bear.

I curse myself for not bringing my walking stick. For not taking more care. For choosing to walk in the rain.

It can’t be helped.

I cannot manage the path on one leg; it is too steep. But I must get down. I have no means of communication. The mobile phone that my children are so keen on was left on the kitchen table. No one passes this way. No one will be here until Gareth, tomorrow morning, and I know that at my age a night on the hillside with no protection will kill me.

I drop to my hands and knees and crawl. What had been a short trek up now seems interminable and it takes an eternity to get back down to the track.

I flop onto the ground at the base of the wall, my wall, to rest.

The house is not far.

The house is so far.

I lean my back against the stone slabs and run my hands over the scrubby grass. It is then that I find the acorn. It is green and luscious, fatter than most of the plants around here which scrabble for water and life in the thin earth. I roll it in my palm. I sniff it. It smells of the earth. I put my tongue out and lick it. It tastes of tree and wood. I put it into my pocket. Steeling myself, I back onto my hands and knees and crawl along the turf to my house, my home.

‘A small fall, nothing serious,’ I tell Jake on the phone. ‘My ankle’s swollen, but I’ve put a bag of frozen peas on it and I’ve got the leg up. I’ll be as right as rain in the morning.’

‘Thank you for ringing,’ I say to Ben. ‘But there’s no need to worry.’

‘I was being careful,’ I tell Briony. ‘Don’t fuss.’

I find it hard to move out of the kitchen. I find it hard to do anything at all. I haven’t taken my coat off. I put my hand in my pocket and I find the acorn. Briony said that it had to be wrapped in a wet cloth to help it germinate. I put it on the table in front of me and I stare at it. It doesn’t move.

I’m lying about the peas and I’m lying about having my foot up. I sleep on the old sofa in the kitchen. In the morning my ankle is like a hot red football.

It is two days before I hobble out to the Land Rover, clamber up behind the wheel and drive, slowly and probably dangerously, to hospital.

‘It’s just a broken ankle!’ I say to Briony. ‘I can manage!’

‘Mum!’ she says, and I can hear the exasperation in her voice. ‘Of course you can’t. I’m coming to get you.’

I should be grateful. I have friends whose children never call. Who visit at Christmas and send a card for birthdays. I have other friends whose children live next door. I’m not sure which is best. What I would like is children who listen. But then maybe I didn’t listen to them.

Her car pulls up outside the house. My home, her home for many years.

‘We need to leave straight away,’ she says as she strides into the kitchen.

I’ve lifted down the acorn vase, taken it out of the box. I’ve read the instructions. I’ve wrapped the acorn in a wet tea towel and it’s sitting beside the vase right in the middle of the table. I think it will please her, and I want to please her. She doesn’t glance at it.

‘Have you got your bag?’

‘I’ve asked Maggie to keep an eye on the sheep and feed the hens,’ I say. ‘She’ll take the eggs of course. I’ve got a couple of boxes for you though.’

She can barely stop herself from rolling her eyes.

‘We’ve got shops you know, Mum,’ she says. ‘And I can’t believe those sheep are still alive. They must be, what, ten years old?’

‘Your father –’

‘Mum, tell me about it in the car. I want to get going before it’s dark. I took a day off work for this.’

She takes my bag and I shuffle after her, awkward on my crutches. I take the big key and lock the back door. I never lock the back door. I pause before I get into her car. The air is silken soft on my cheeks. I can smell wood smoke floating up from the valley. I can see the blue hills in the distance. The oaks are rustling.

Briony revs the car. I climb in. It smells of pine air freshener and the beige interior is spotless.

‘Off we go,’ she says. I can see the muscle in her jaw twitch as she clenches her teeth.

We bought the house on impulse. It was the ’70s; we’d got married in a whirlwind of free love and cheap cider. Soon we had three children under four and were bouncing off the walls of our tiny flat in Kentish