The former mansion house and grounds at Compton Verney, Warwickshire is the place to go for a quick lesson in how to lay on an art exhibition.  Critic Waldemar Januszczak described this summer’s Op Art project as “a dazzling exhibition that sets the standard for how all shows should be done”.  So, apart from the fact that their latest exhibition is all about #naturewords, I had good reason to look forward to my first visit there last night.  I was not disappointed.
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Jackie Morris’s paintings for The Lost Words, her stunning joint venture with writer Robert Macfarlane, are presented alongside Macfarlane’s acrostic word-spells, as he calls them, each celebrating one of twenty names for everyday wild animals and plants.  The story of these lost words has been told on this blog over the last three years.

Jackie Morris’s paintings for The Lost Words will be on display at Compton Verney, Warwickshire from 21 Oct to 17 Dec (except Mondays) 11am – 5pm

Countryfile’s edition from Cornwall will be broadcast on 22 October, BBC1 at 18:15, featuring poet Chrissie Gittins's celebration of nature words, and available on iPlayer afterwards.  Her Adder, Bluebell, Lobster is published by Otter-Barry Books

The Lost Words was published by Hamish Hamilton on 5 October.
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On Friday, in a field near St. Endellion in Cornwall, I found myself mic’d up for a conversation with Margherita Taylor of the BBC’s rural magazine programme Countryfile.  Shortly afterwards the poet Chrissie Gittins and a dozen children arrived for a nature-and-naturewords safari.  Chrissie read from Adder, Bluebell, Lobster, her collection of 40 children’s poems, each celebrating a lost nature word that had been deleted from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.  Then children from St. Kew, St. Minver, Nanstallon, Padstow and Blisland primary schools wrote a poem together, based on their real, direct experiences of nature.

As I was heading to the North Cornwall Book Festival and Countryfile, in Foyles Bookshop in London Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris were launching their own sumptuous treatment of the same subject – The Lost Words.  In this review by author Katharine Norbury, it is described as “a book of spells rather than poems, exquisitely illustrated by Morris [in which] Macfarlane gently, firmly and meticulously restores the missing words.”  It is almost three years since the writer Mark Cocker and I launched the #naturewords campaign, and it feels like a small October Revolution.

​In a recent article, Macfarlane summarises some striking research in which a Cambridge-based team made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British wildlife. They also made a set of 100 cards showing a “common species” of Pokémon character. Children aged eight and over were substantially better, the researchers found, at identifying Pokémon “species” than “organisms such as oak trees or badgers”: around 80% accuracy for Pokémon, but less than 50% for real species.  

The research showed that young children have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures -real or imaginary - but are presently more inspired by “synthetic subjects” than by living creatures. In a break from the usual dispassion of the scientist, they ponder on the fact that “we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren”?

Blogging here In August I responded – positively – to Guardian columnist George Monbiot’s call for poets to weave their word-magic to find a new vocabulary for conservation and the environment, we conservationists having been part of the problem with our alienating technocratic language.  Gittins, Macfarlane and Morris are deploying their artistry in an even more fundamental way, to restore #naturewords to the mouths, and the mind’s eyes, of children.

Jackie Morris’s paintings for The Lost Words will be on display at Compton Verney, Warwickshire from 21 Oct to 17 Dec (except Mondays) 11am – 5pm

Countryfile’s edition from Cornwall will be broadcast on 22 October, BBC1 at 18:15

The Lost Words was published by Hamish Hamilton on 5 October.
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Adder, Bluebell, Lobster is published by Otter-Barry Books

When writers and artists across the English-speaking world heard about the decision by the Oxford Junior Dictionary to remove over a hundred everyday words connected with nature, the response was clear:  we must save words like conker, bluebell and buttercup from extinction.  Writers for whom the loss of such words from children’s vocabulary was unthinkable, from Margaret Atwood in Canada to Andrew Motion and Michael Morpurgo in the UK, wrote to Oxford University Press to complain.  Some, such as writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris, are publishing their own celebrations of what Macfarlane has called wonder-words.

Now prize-winning children’s poet Chrissie Gittins has built her latest collection around forty of the lost nature words, with the message:  “Help save the names of these animals, plants and birds from extinction and be inspired to write your own poems using other words which have been culled!”

Chrissie Gittins was born in Lancashire and lives in south London. She worked as an artist and teacher before becoming a fulltime writer. Her poems have been animated for CBeebies and included in many anthologies. Adder, Bluebell, Lobster brings the natural world up close through dramatic and vivid poetic imagery.  

From Adder to Wren, forty fantastic poems celebrate forty amazing animals, birds and plants and their beautiful names.  Readers are invited to watch out for bossy Beetroot, be enchanted by a Bluebell witch’s thimble and spot a dive-bombing Lark or a cute Great-Crested Newt.
 
Adder, Bluebell, Lobster:  Wild Poems is published on August 4 by Otter-Barry Books, an exciting new children’s imprint aiming to make a difference.  It is illustrated by Paul Bommer, an illustrator, printmaker and graphic designer who worked with Chrissie on her book The Humpback’s Wail.

​#naturewords

​This year, Oxford University Press declared hashtag to be children's 'word of the year' based on 120,000 stories written by children.

"Technology is miraculous, but so is nature" says Macfarlane. "Jackie and I wanted to find a way to release these simple wonder-words back into people's stories and dreams."

In her blog Jackie writes: It grew out of a letter I was asked to sign by Laurence Rose and Mark Cocker.  The letter was a request for the words culled from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to be returned.  These words included bluebell, conker, heron, acorn and perhaps the one that cut deepest for me, kingfisher.

She contacted Macfarlane, who coincidentally had been thinking about writing a children's book for some time,  Morris persuaded him it should be a book for all ages.

I contacted Jackie Morris at her home-studio by the sea near St. David's, Pembrokeshire.  She explained that Macfarlane had already started sending her material for what will be "a dazzling full-colour book of spells and spellings that seeks to re-wild the language of readers young and old."

They have chosen around twenty of the lost nature words to "start putting nature back into the mouths and minds' eyes of readers through the magical interplay of artwork and text."

Mark Sears, CEO of The Wild Network, an organisation devoted to reconnecting children with nature that has been collaborating in the #naturewords campaign, sees the new book as "the first sign of a counter-movement, a positive move to restore nature literacy."

"There is a real music in the flow of words Rob has sent me" Jackie told me yesterday, having received texts for otter and kingfisher so far.  And this afternoon a Facebook message:  "He's sent me an acorn piece - pure music!"

It has been a week of wordplay.  On Monday I took the day off from the day job to travel to Oxford, a city with a university press and a red kite hanging over it.  I did a bit of train-spotting: that is, bird-spotting from the train, which makes me doubly nerdy and therefore entitled to look down upon those who merely spot trains from trains.  It was red kite number twenty-two, the other twenty-one being spaced roughly evenly between Maidenhead and the dreaming spires.

I made me feel old, and excited that only by being old can I remember the effort it took to see my first red kite:  a distant, fleeting view from across Tregaron Bog; and in the rain and through cheap binoculars.  I can see that bird vividly as I write this.  In a week’s holiday in Wales it was the only kite we saw, and I imagine my parents were as relieved as I was thrilled.  Now that you can see kites alongside the 13:20 from Paddington to Oxford, or from the A1 anywhere between Stevenage and Newark, the excitement should have lessened by now.  But no, I ritually record every RK sighting, each bird a monument to conservation success.

The return trip was in the dark, so I opened the New Statesman to read Lucy Purdy’s (a Twitter friend I know mainly as @loosepea) article about Dominick Tyler (whose Twitter handle @TheLandReader tells you all you need to know).  That’s how I learned a new natureword:  witch’s knickers – about which (ahem), more anon.

I was in Oxford at the invitation of OUP to talk about their Oxford Junior Dictionary.  Regular readers will know why, and newcomers can read all about it here.  I have been calling for the OUP to put back the valuable nature vocabulary they have removed to make way for some cyber-celeb chat (I’m coining here) that any dictionary needs to recognise at some stage.

The meeting started with a bit of wordplay:  the OJD had not been amended, it had been repositioned it seems, which I understood meant it was a different dictionary with the same name.  Whatever, you won’t find acorn, bluebell, conker or another 51 nature words once, but no longer, deemed fit for inclusion.

So we moved on, and into more encouraging territory.  The lexicographical rigour that led to the nature word cull includes the ability to interrogate the corpus, a nice old Oxfordy word that refers to an enormous database of usage.  It includes some 400,000 essays and stories written by children, along with the books written for them.  I have been invited to suggest some words that can be more closely investigated, to see whether the corpus reveals an importance hitherto overlooked.  

I don’t know whether to raise my hopes that this may lead to some nature words being reinstated when the OJD is next repositioned, but I gather that is a possible outcome of the process.

Elaine and Vineeta wanted to persuade me that their children’s book catalogue included some great nature literature.  I wanted to persuade them that they didn’t need to.  I was already persuaded.  In fact, my big problem, as I explained, is that I think the OUP is great.  It just made one mistake, in the routine course of its work; and that was to allow itself to be swept along by one of society’s most alarming trends: the decline in connectedness between children and nature.  To be a symptom when I dearly want it to be part of the cure.

I was writing this piece when I heard the news that Oliver Rackham had died. I was in my first year at university when his Trees and Woodlands in the British Landscape (1976) was published.  From prehistoric times, through the Roman period and into the Middle Ages, Rackham describes the changing character, role and history of trees and woodland. It immediately became required reading for ecology students, but, as well as being a solid scholarly basis for understanding the British countryside, it is a masterpiece of nature writing.

A few years later his History of the Countryside set a new benchmark for communicating a passion for nature.  Exploring the natural and man-made features of the land - fields, highways, hedgerows, fens, marshes, rivers, heaths, coasts, woods and wood pastures - he gives a fascinating account of the ways in which people, fauna, flora, climate, soils and other physical conditions have played their part in the shaping of the countryside.

The temptation to link the passing of a great authorial champion of of the countryside with the concerns of a new generation of writers is unavoidable.

And so back to Lucy Purdy and her conversation with Dominick Tyler.  Tyler is part of that successor generation to Rackham’s – a writer with a photographer’s eye for detail and a forensic examination of the language of the countryside.  His Landreader project is busily cataloguing words that are falling into disuse, or that served the minute distinctions most people no longer feel the need to make.  But he also celebrates new coinings.  As he and Lucy take a stroll through a stagnal London, he points out a pair of witch’s knickers – a term that he believes originated in Ireland; a plastic bag caught in the upper branches of a tree.

For Lucy there is a link with the #naturewords campaign.  For me, one passage in particular leaps from her article: Not knowing the names of things makes them easier to discard. If our politicians know only “rain”, “silt” and “dredging”, the complexity of the flooding in Britain will never be understood.

Now there's a bullseye of an observation. It was precisely this lexical vacuum that enabled Eric Pickles to invent hydrological orthodoxy in the space of a TV soundbite.  In the Somerset Levels it risked undoing years of relationship-building and ensuring that whatever long-term policies are established, they will probably be wrong.  

It is a specific example of the fear expressed at the start of the campaign by Mark Cocker:  “if we lose the language we will eventually lose the land itself”.  Mark is another author who shares Oliver Rackham’s explorer’s zeal for land and language.

On Monday top authors, poets and naturalists were among 28 prominent people who wrote to Oxford University Press calling for some of the fifty nature words lost from their Junior Dictionary to be reinstated. The issue first arose in 2007, was not corrected with the 2012 edition, and is now a growing concern as we look for cultural leaders to help resolve a seemingly unstoppable problem - the rapid decline in children's formative experiences of nature.  The letter sets out the problem here, and now we have a response from the OUP.

In Margaret Atwood's home country Canada, coverage included articles in Huffington Post Canada and the CBCNews website.  

Alistair Fraser from Kootenay Lake, Canada, writes a nature blog Exploring Kootenay Lake.  In a thoughtful piece he writes “It seems to me that the Oxford Junior Dictionary is being blamed for recognizing a deeper problem: the decline in the relevance of the natural world to today’s children. Is this a problem of Oxford’s making? Hardly. Does Oxford make a convenient scapegoat? It would seem so.”

Fraser’s blog is beautifully illustrated with his own pictures of some of the wildlife removed from the dictionary, including otters, a (great blue) heron, a (belted) kingfisher and a beaver.  He concludes: “The solution (if indeed there is one) does not lie with shooting the messenger (Oxford University Press); it involves dealing with the problem: the increasing irrelevance of the natural world for urbanites and their children.”

Alistair Fraser emailed me to alert me to his blog and I have replied:  “To some extent I accept the charge of shooting the messenger and completely agree that the problem lies more deeply in society.

“However, making any kind of inroad into such a seemingly unstoppable process requires strong signals from those who have a leading role in cultural life.  The Oxford Dictionary brand occupies such a position throughout the English speaking world.  The OUP's edits, as you say in your blog, have all the appearance of being systematically anti-nature and pro-technology.  Whilst I am sure there was no overt agenda in this, it makes them part of the problem.  Correcting their error would be an even stronger signal in favour of natural childhood, and this is what we are calling on them to do.”

And finally, BBC Newsbeat asks "Are celebrities really more important than conkers?"  Given that 28 celebrities have just supported NATURAL LIGHT's campaign to save the conker, I'll take the fifth on that one.

Robert Macfarlane's forthcoming book Landmarks develops the theme.  Robert says "it was one of two chief motives for the book's existence - the other being the 'peat glossary' I was handed on the Isle of Lewis...a beautifully precise and evocative word-list of more than 120 Gaelic terms for aspects of the moor."  

Landmarks, published on March 6th, is a celebration of the language of landscape. “It opens with my dismay at the OJD deletions which I see as a symptom of the natural and the outdoor being displaced by the virtual and the indoor” he says.  “I’m worried that the basic literacy of nature is falling away. A should be for Acorn, not Attachment.”

Award-winning author and ecologist Mark Cocker agrees, and sees a threat to nature as well. "Without language we will eventually lose the land itself" he fears.

NATURAL LIGHT and the Cheltenham Literature Festival have tickets to give away for two great events! Click the button to go to our tickets page.

The festival opens on Friday 3rd October when we are offering a free pair of tickets for The Great Outdoors  Writers Will Atkins (The Moor) and John Lewis-Stempel (Meadowland) and natural navigator Tristan Gooley (The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs) discuss our relationship with the British countryside.

Another free pair of tickets is on offer on Friday 10th October to hear top nature writers (l. to r. below) Simon Barnes (Ten Million Aliens), Richard Girling (The Hunt for the Golden Mole) and Richard Kerridge (Cold Blood) journey around the animal kingdom, covering biodiversity, conservation and the relationship between man and beast in Nature’s Wonders.  

For ten days every Autumn Cheltenham welcomes over 600 writers, actors, politicians, poets and leading opinion formers to help celebrate the joy of the written word. Established in 1949, The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival is one of oldest literary events in the world.

“Nature has always been a boundless source of inspiration for writers over the centuries" says Cheltenham's Candice Pearson, "so of course we always programme a number of events about, or informed by, the natural world”. 

After just over a year, BBC Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day is already a national institution.  “This year  we’re delighted to be welcoming the BBC team behind Tweet of the Day to talk about their fantastic feature which gives listeners a daily dose of birdsong" says Candice.  Series producer Brett Westwood and naturalist Stephen Moss explore changing lives of Britain’s birds – their songs, calls and habits. Regulars will know that NATURAL LIGHT has started Re:Tweet of the Day and we’ll be putting out a Re:Tweet Cheltenham Special on the 3rd.

I asked Candice why nature is such a strong theme at Cheltenham.  “Writers and nature lovers have so much in common: both are great observers of their surroundings, perceiving and drawing meaning from the countless mini dramas that take place but go unnoticed by most”.

The first afternoon - 3 October - sees no fewer than three nature-inspired events.  After The Great Outdoors and Tweet of the Day  Canadian  anthropologist, ethnobotanist and photographer   Wade Davis, author of Into the Silence shares his extraordinary and inspirational stories of exploration and discovery in the Amazon Rainforest in One River.

As always, Cheltenham will be providing a platform for debate about tough issues of our time.  “Our natural environment is of course always changing and so we’ll be looking to the future as we tackle big debates, such as how we’ll feed the world in the years ahead and what repercussions this will have on the countryside.” Artists Ackroyd & Harvey, Kathleen Soriano, former Director of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts and author Andrew Brown (Art & Ecology Now), explore how contemporary artists are responding to growing ecological threats in Can Artists Change the World? on 6 October while the next day James Lovelock talks to  Crispin Tickell  about his new book A Rough Ride to the Future.

On 11th we can expect our view of the countryside to be challenged when Guardian columnist George Monbiot gives a deeply personal talk about reconnecting with nature and challenging what he calls “ecological boredom”.  Later in the day Monbiot will be joined by Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence) and Ian Goldin (The Butterfly Defect and Is the Planet Full?) to contemplate the global landscape in 2114.

Poet Pascale Petit, who was interviewed by NATURAL LIGHT a couple of weeks ago is joined by Ruth Padel on 7th so we can expect two very different, but highly imaginative, expressions of a shared passion for animals.  Another NATURAL LIGHT favourite, composer Harrison Birtwistle, reveals the challenges, uncertainties and rewards which have shaped his life and work, in conversation with Fiona Maddocks.

For full details of the many other green bits in this year's Cheltenham Festival, from Amazonian river life to water voles, see our What's On page.