In These Times, Season 4 | Tangled up in Nature (Episode 3)

Alex Schein:

In Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man, the protagonist, one of the few survivors of a plague, searches for meaning in a world of loss concluding that there is about one solution to the intricate riddle of life, to improve ourselves and contribute to the happiness of others. In 2022, as COVID-19 lingers on, the climate threat looms larger and war returns to Europe. There seems to be no answer to when this era, defined by loss, will end. And many of us are finding that making sense of the intricate riddle of life and extracting meaning out of adversity is one of the things that art does best.

In this season of In These Times, we talk to scholars, musicians and poets, and other members of creative communities to explore the link between making art and making meaning, and how creativity shines a light on that way out of adversity, past, and present. In these times, knowledge is more important than ever.

In coping with the stresses of recent times many people are finding some respite in connecting with nature. Writers extolling the virtues of wellness travel, ecotherapy, and going for a long walk are just one spin on a long tradition of reflections on how to find health, happiness, and wisdom through nature in any of its manifestations, from herbs and flowers, to animals and crystals.

In this episode we talk with Rebecca Bushnell about how writers from the past have found meaning in and read meaning into the natural world. Dr. Bushnell is the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisors' Emerita Professor of English. She's a noted Shakespeare expert and a scholar of early modern literature whose books include Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens and most recently The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700. Welcome to Episode 3, Tangled Up in Nature.

Rebecca Bushnell:

Why tell of autumn storms and stars and now days drawn in and summer softens what keeps them to vigil, now or when spring falls and downpours as the sheathed harvest needles through the field and grain on the green stems swells up with milk. Often as the farmer guides the reaper to his golden track and shears the barley, winds crackling stalk, I have seen all the armies of wind clash, uprooting plump grain left and right from deepest roots and hurling it high.

And then when it's whirlwind black, the storm whisks the slight straw and the airborne slips away. And often in the sky looms tremendous host of waters, clouds levied from the ether roll of murky squall of swart rains, shelved heaven tumbles, and with its wet pounding washes off the wilting crop and the oxens' laborers. The gutter is filled, the gully swells with rushing and the seas seethes as estuaries heaving and the father himself in the midnight of clouds, hurls with his bulging fists, the thunder boat at whose impact the Earth's both trembles, quitters, scatter, terrors blast, all hearts to powering.

I think that profoundly recognizes that as whatever it is we try to do we are subject to the wrath of a natural world that obliterates everything in its path. And we have all seen now in recent years exactly what that it means. And I think this is also a sign to us of more to come.

Alex Schein:

That was Professor Bushnell reading a passage from the Roman poet Virgil's Georgics, poems about farming. In these poems Virgil highlights how human beings attempt to control the natural world, but in this passage about the power of a violent storm he reminds us that there are limits to our control. And as events like extreme weather become a more frequent occurrence or viruses that originate in animal populations make the leap into humans to spark a worldwide pandemic, people in all corners of the globe are being reminded how vulnerable we can be at the hands of nature. But then there's another dimension to the human connection to nature. One of pure appreciation.

Rebecca Bushnell:

There's a passage from John Gerard's Herbal or General History of Plants and John Gerard is now probably the most famous herbalist to come down to us from this period who wrote in the late 16th century an herbal, which is a massive folio volume of over 1,000 plants and a lot of what we know now what people believed about plants from this period, we go to Gerard as a reference point. He dedicated the volume to William Cecille who was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth.

And here's what he describes of the pleasures of experiencing a garden at this point, why we have gardens and why we love plants. So he says: For if delight may provoke men's labor, what greater delight is there than to behold the earth appareled with plants as with a robe of embroidered work set with orient pearls and garnished with great diversity of rare and costly jewels. This variety and perfection of colors may affect the eye. It is such an herbs and flowers that no apple is or Zeus ever by could by any other art express the light. If odors or if taste may work satisfaction, they're both so sovereign in plants and so comfortable that no confection of the apothecarries can equal their excellent virtue.

This is just a moment of ecstasy to say, what could be more beautiful or more pleasurable than a plant?

Alex Schein:

These passages, one extolling the beauty and delight to be found in a plant, another a humbling reminder of nature's terrible power are both included in Professor Bushnell's recent anthology of early modern nature writing. In this collection she explores the complex and sometimes tangled threads to be found in writing about nature in forms ranging from poetry and creative writing to scientific writing, recipes and how to books.

Rebecca Bushnell:

The book is called The Marbles of the World and it was an anthology that actually came out of a desire to counter that prevalent knowledge in the West that a concept of nature really wasn't invented until modern times or at least not in the way that we would recognize it. Because usually this story of environmentalism begins with this brutal anthropocentrism dominating early Western thinking about nature for centuries. And then it evolved in 19th century with romanticism and to be truthful most people when they think about nature writing, they just can't reach back further than throw a words worth.

I would tell people I'm writing this book on nature writing before 1700. They said, "Oh, you're writing about the Ro, right?" I said, "No, I'm not." So also in this project the other thing I wanted to do was broaden the idea of what constitutes nature writing. So extending it beyond canonical, philosophical and

literary works to other works. For example, how two manuals and recipe collections, which offer I think really important insight into how everyday people were involved with the stuff of the natural world.

There's so much more there than just what we read about in poetry or we read about in Aristotle. So the book covers a wide variety of texts, different ways of thinking about the natural world. It begins with natural philosophy and science, talks about plants and animals, gardening and gardens, weather and climate, different kinds of literary representations of humans inhabiting the natural world and it ends with encounters with nature outside Europe.

Alex Schein:

Coming from an age before the existence of the scientific method, Professor Bushnell finds an approach to nature writing that combines direct observation with poetry and symbolism and meaning derived from the myths and stories of writers from before reflecting a rich and multifaceted engagement with nature.

Rebecca Bushnell:

That ideas that have come down to us and observations about nature that have come down to us are really interesting mix because on the one hand in this writing a lot of people are what you get. They're writing their ideas and writing down their ideas about nature that are derived not by looking at nature, but actually from books, some other books or for long held myths or stories about the natural world.

But on the other hand, what you increase you find, and really, again, going back to antiquity mixed in with that also are direct observations and accounts of nature. And so you get people talking about and recording their experience. What you don't have in terms of the representation of nature is knowledge that comes out of what we would now call the scientific method or experiment. Although sometimes they will call it experiments that they're doing with nature.

So what you get is this really interesting mix of you might want to say poetry, prose, direct observation. What might look like science, what might look like natural philosophy and they're all mixed up together. What happens when you get to the enlightenment is more of those become separated. So you have on the one on hand the establishment of a language and a method of what we would call science to describe and engage with nature. And then over here you have poetry, or pros, or nature writing that you might think about more when you talk about throw or you talk about words worth.

Alex Schein:

Many of these elements come together in a passage included in the anthology by a writer named Edward Topsell. He reveals a complex mix of beliefs, associations, and feelings while connecting with modern audiences through his fascination with cats.

Rebecca Bushnell:

One of the texts that I include in the anthology is a wonderful selection from an entry on cats from Edward Topsell's History of Four-Footed Beasts and he goes on and on about cats. And some of the things that he talks about cats re very much taken from lore handed down about cats. Cats can be familiar with witches, but in the other hand he has this incredibly specific and elaborate descriptions of cat behavior that could only come from his living with a cat.

So there I think was a perfect example to me of that mixing of that kind of ways of talking about first out of what I know about nature from books, but what I know about nature from an intimate experience with it. The section on cats ends with recipes for using cat flesh and cat parts for medical cures. So he says cat flesh is really good.

Warm roasted cat flesh is really good for getting winds or warts out of your body, oil and dry of a head of a black cat and mash it up into powder and you can blow it into your eye and it will help to cure an eye disease. And that's a very different relationship than I have with my cats. I'm not looking at them and saying, I love you, but I'm going to eat you too.

Alex Schein:

The case of food or recipes can be understood as another form of nature writing, reflecting prevailing beliefs about the power of various parts of plants and animals and how they can be used to our advantage.

Rebecca Bushnell:

One of the things that is absolutely fascinating are some of the recipes from this period, which involve intimate acknowledge of plants in a way not just to appreciate them for their beauty, but also to appreciate them both for their food and also their medical uses. I mean, plants were understood to have what we're called in virtues or extraordinary powers.

Now, what we don't recognize today is actually a lot of the drugs that we take come from plants, but they come from us and these white pills that we suck down. There most women were involved with the production of medicine, growing the plants in their garden and then in their own homes producing medicine by preparing plants. So it was just a completely different relationship with the understanding of plants and what the powers of plants could be for both good and for ill.

Alex Schein:

Professor Bushnell notes that then as now a lot of medical advice was focused on healing and controlling your body and even your personality through what you take in, that is through your diet. The connection between the humors that leave to make up the body, the plants and animals that we eat and even the effects of the seasons all reflect the profound understanding that while people may seek to control nature they are nevertheless fully embedded within it.

Rebecca Bushnell:

This is a passage of medical advice that comes from a book called a medieval text called the Secretum Secretorum or The Secret Book of Secrets and it took the form of an imagined letter from Aristotle to Alexander the Great offering all sorts of advice on things like state craft and magic, but also health. And he has a section in there, the writer has a section in there to give advice about what to do in every season of the year, health advice every season of the year.

So here's the advice, a little bit of the piece of the advice for winter because he says, in winter the earth is like an old decrepit person that by great age is naked and [inaudible 00:13:40] to death. So winter is very cold and moist and therefore it behoove to use hot meats such as chicken, hens, mutton and other hot and fair flesh, to eat figs, nuts and to drink green wines. They wear too much [inaudible 00:13:55]

and bleeding and assure the company of women for it will feed with thy stomach and bads be good for the great cold, the natural heat enter into the body and therefore the digestion is better in winter than in summer.

Alex Schein:

Another writer widely known for reflecting on the human connection with the natural world whether in the form of plants, animals or weather is Shakespeare. And as a noted scholar of Shakespeare, Professor Bushnell is a contributor to an upcoming anthology of essays on nature in Shakespeare's works.

Rebecca Bushnell:

One of the things about Shakespeare's works is you can see that he was intensely aware of and involved with the natural world and partly asked every everybody was in the period, but he grew up in a small town in the country and his works reflect and make mention of those plants and animals that he would've encountered in that world.

Oberon:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.

Rebecca Bushnell:

Midsummer Night's Dream, I refer to it as the most flower saturated a ball of Shakespeare's place. At the center of that play, of course, the lovers, the quarreling lovers go into a forest and at the center of the forest is also there are fairies and there is a bower for the fairy queen who was Titania, which is described as being festooned with all these flowers that would've have been recognizable from the forest around Stratford-upon-Avon. Although as one commentator has noted, there were also plants in there that would not have been in Stratford-upon-Avon. There was the wild time that only grows in the Mediterranean. And so I thought it was another really interesting example of how in Shakespeare's plays combine this brilliant, beautifully detailed local texture of what the natural world was like in his own time with mythological plants.

The spell that is put upon the lovers by Oberon is done with a flower and which we now think is the pansy, which has both a mythological story behind it, but also was understood in Shakespeare's time to have its own virtues or powers and one of them was to ease the heart.

Oberon:
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound, And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”
Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once. The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb, and be thou here again

Ere the leviathan can swim a league.

Robin:
I’ll put a girdle round about the Earth. In forty minutes.

Alex Schein:

In writing about plants, Professor Bushnell is returning to what has been a long running theme in her own scholarship, how people write philosophies and dispense advice on gardening. The garden, as it turns out, has long been a metaphor for cultivation and improvement of our children and ourselves and a sort of laboratory for experiments in control and order.

Rebecca Bushnell:

So my interest in the question of gardening and nature really dates way back to the mid-1990s when I wrote a book about humanist teaching and there I explored the ways in which in early modernity teaching was always compared with gardening. And I said, well, that's interesting. So I started to go out and to read gardening books. Most notable in that book was my discovery, the respects that both gardeners and teachers exhibited then for the force of nature.

They're understanding really that the act of cultivation involved understanding the inherent qualities of both children and plants even as we're trying to shape them according to our own desires and our own will. So, again, reading all those gardening books for that book on teaching led in due course to my writing a book on early modern English gardening itself, which was called Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens.

And that book really focuses on the mostly practical while sometimes actually quite impractical discourse of horticulture in the period which I profound to be profoundly imaginative and also aspirational. So there I saw really the ways in which early gardening books evoked the desires of gardeners dreaming about what they might create in nature and what I call green desires, their green desires inspired dreams of power and self improvement, fantasies of beauty achieved without effort, and I think most profoundly hope for order in an unpredictable world.

Alex Schein:

In gardening books, Professor Bushnell observes that frequently what we are really talking about is ourselves as demonstrated by the story of the gillyflower.

Rebecca Bushnell:

So one of the critical and most fascinating issues in early modern gardening books and advice about raising plants is the controversy about the plant called the gillyflower. Now a gillyflower is what we now call a carnation or a version a carnation. And there was an obsession in the period with the idea that you could create a bigger and better carnation. The double what we call multi-flower and multicolored carnation was considered to be more valuable than just one with a single layer of flowers and one color.

So gardeners who didn't understand at that point how plants reproduced tried so many ways that they could think of to try to turn a single gillyflower into a double gillyflower with grafting or planting it in

different kinds of colored soils. Anything that they could think about doing not understanding actually how plants reproduce. But embedded in that conversation and that debate about how to change a gillyflower, I believe that gardeners are really talking about themselves and how they could transform themselves from just a common, ordinary person into something better.

Rebecca Bushnell:

In fact, one of the reasons why I believe that is because there was a reaction against these dreams of improvement of flowers and self- improvement in the latter part of the 17th century when people started to say, all these dreams are vein boasting, you can't change things in nature. Things are in nature as they are. The status of a flower is as it is and you can't change it. And so there was a directed attack against the gardeners who are trying to improve the flowers as trying to improve themselves.

Alex Schein:

In the heart of our 21st century pandemic, the hopes and desires that drive people to nature have been expressed, at least in part, by a spike in an interest in gardening with one survey reporting that 2021 saw 20 million first time gardeners. Based on her reading on gardens of the past, Professor Bushnell has thoughts on what these gardeners are looking for.

Rebecca Bushnell:

The turn to gardening came in those circumstances when so many people were confined in their homes for a long period of time and they were looking for ways to occupy themselves and their families. But I really think the impulse was more profound. I would link it back in a different way to those dreams of the early gardeners and to my own dreams. I think when the pandemic closed in on us I was really lucky to have an already established garden, but it was still in progress.

So I found myself in the early spring of 2020, even when my local plant store was closed, when everything was shut-down I spent all these hours out in the cold, digging up perennials, relocating them, weeding. I was starting plants inside from seed because then again what I also found that spring and thereafter is gardening is all about hope. It may be about desire, but it's also about hope. It is a kind of hope for order and predictability in an unpredictable world.

And this of, course, I think was a form of hope at a time when we felt our world was so profoundly unpredictable. And I think for gardening with me it did represent a way in which I could shade my world. And then also I could believe in the natural cycle of growth, predictable cycle of growth that would continue in spite of everything else that was going on around us. Of course, I did find as one does find that as a gardener you really do never really control nature no matter how hard you work. And as a season progressed that year, once again, I combated the pests that undid my tomatoes. In my own garden there's something called gooseneck loose strife, which is a pretty flower, but it has rhizomes and it threatened to take over everything in my garden no matter how hard I tried.

And so I think while there were many successes that summer I learned, again, the lesson that every gardener must learn, that you cannot impose order on the natural world. Instead, you learn from it and you have to adapt to its own impulses and its own will. And I do think this was an important lesson for me and for everyone else who was trying to cope with the uncertainties of the world in which we live.

And you can hope, you can plan, you can dream, but at the same time you have to understand what it is that you don't control.

Alex Schein:

This concludes Episode 3 of In These Times: The Intricate Riddle of Life. Please join us in two weeks for Episode 4, the many mediums for confronting trauma or we'll talk to a PhD student in history about a patchwork quilt and a family's journey from enslavement to educational access in the Ivy league and an anthropologist about using film, dance, and photography to empower victims.

The Omnia Podcast is a production of Penn Arts and Sciences. Special thanks to Dr. Rebecca Bushnell for sharing her time and reflections for this episode. I'm Alex Schein. Thanks for listening. Subscribe to the Omnia Podcast by Penn Arts and Sciences on Apple iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts to listen to every episode of In These Times: The Intricate Riddle of Life.