An online collection of poetry & photography.

Scotland has wonderful grasses. In this collaboration of poetry and photography we have brought home a harvest to share.

‘We will accompany thee and lead thee through a grass-plot…’ John Gerard’s Historie of plants, 1597. 

Grasses have been overlooked. Omnipresent but unnoticed, they cover around a third of our planet. When people overlook plants nowadays, this is often referred to as ‘plant blindness’. For ourselves, we found that what we had regarded as simply grass revealed itself as a complex and fascinating family of plants. Casting our eyes along the road-verge and shoreline we began to recognise the grasses as distinct from one another. We were starting to see the grasses. As Victorian botanist Margaret Plues promised, our acquaintance with the grasses was succeeded by admiration and ripened into friendship.

‘The grasses are an extraordinarily successful group and their success has been based on three recurring themes: (1) their ability to adapt to the changing environment; (2) their ability to coexist with man and his grazing animals; and (3) their possession of a very distinct life-form that remains faithful to a single architectural idea but which has almost endless, and often very ingenious, variations.’ Tom Cope, Grasses of the British Isles (BSBI, 2009).

When the wind is blowing through grass on the moor or on the shoreline, the whole ground moves and shimmers and there is a great green presence about it. In our experience, looking at grass and listening to words about the grass has made us feel more joyful and more connected to nature. We hope this collection does the same for you.

Valerie & Rebecca

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© Rebecca Marr

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