April 15, 2020

The 30 | Experiment No. 4

This passage really stuck with me, something of a prose-poem during National Poetry Month.

The big oak at the end of our Norfolk garden is a kind of coda, a flourish of contrapuntal woodiness that says decisively: cultivation ends here. Its canopy is twenty-five yards across, a dome of craggy, arching, algal-tinted ribs. Standing in its aqueous shade is like being inside some immense beached cetacean. Tawny owls, flocks of fieldfares, rising moons, the sentence I was mulling over as I wandered over to look at it, can vanish in a trice in its surf of flickering leaves.

Richard Mabey, The Cabaret of Plants