How storytelling can celebrate the connection between people and plants

In the new book Botanical Short Stories by award-winning botanical illustrator Sarah Jane Humphrey and edited by Emma Timpany, the authors celebrate the deep connection between people and plants in 14 varied short stories.

Endorsed by Leif Bersweden Botanist and author of Where the Wildflowers Grow: “A lovely collection of short stories with plants front and centre. If you’re a gardener or plant lover, then this is a book for you.”

Advolly Richmond, garden historian and TV presenter provided the following review comment too:  “The stories are all so very different, some of them being quite compelling and tender featuring an interesting variety of voices and nationalities with a wide range of characters and settings.”

The below extract is taken from the short story The Acorn Vase by 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.

Botanical Short Stories (The History Press) by award-winning botanical illustrator Sarah Jane Humphrey and edited by Emma Timpany is available now