Greenery: Journeys in Springtime, by Tim Dee Lucy Ingrams
LUCY INGRAMS Greenery: Journeys in Springtime
Like the chiffchaffs, whitethroats or blackcaps that grace our northern spring, Tim Dee has a foot (or ‘wing’, perhaps) in two places, with homes in both South Africa and Britain.
His migratory lifestyle would have been hard-won a century ago. Yet, for all that, the scope of Greenery: Journeys in
Springtime is magnified by globalisation. Its premise lies parallel with Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring, describing a single journey, by bicycle, from Balham to the Quantocks in 1913.
In this eerie locked-down spring of 2020, when planes wait idle on their stands and oil prices turn negative, it is possible to touch the worlds, and paces, of both books simultaneously. People on bicycles and horses feel safe on the roads again. The sky is empty of jet trails and the air is loud with birdsong, as it would have been on Thomas’s ride. At the same time, there is no undoing the intervening century of technological innovation – the tracking of migratory birds, for instance, beyond the horizon.
As a ‘birdman’, Dee uses birds as his launch pad. The book lifts off with a loose flock of swallows at the Cape of Good Hope on the December solstice. Soon
they will be crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, following the ten-degree isotherm north as the flies hatch. ‘Spring moves through Europe at a speed comparable to the swallows’ flights,’ he tells us. That’s roughly 30 miles a day or, as he calculates, ‘at walking pace’.
Dee does not literally walk from the bottom of Africa to the top of the Arctic beneath migrating swallows but, zigzagging, he covers much of the ground beneath their flyways. He pauses for rich pitstops in Chad, Sicily, Bellaghy, Heligoland, a Somerset wood and Tromsø in the company of an eclectic cast of guides. We hear from poets, physicists, researchers, pastoralists, ringers, singers. Some are well known: D H Lawrence and Charles Darwin. Others are less so, such as William, a Norwegian chimney-sweep and ‘lifelong aviculturist’.
Perhaps because he is also a
radio programme-maker, Dee layers these contrasting voices to great effect.
And his visual writing shows us more than a camera could. There are eagle owls, ‘looking like old generals in dressing gowns’. An amethyst starling holds ‘in the centre of its plum-coloured face two emerald-bright grubs … a green moustache’. In a Romanian forest one evening, Dee watches for a bear which never comes. ‘In this blank, my seeing grew... If I had seen a bear, I would have seen nothing else; without the bear, I could see everything.’
The book seeds images, voices, creatures and ideas – there are discussions of Hungarian folksong, The Winter’s Tale and the Tollund Man. It grows its own rugged jizz of seasonal meditation. Occasionally, so much proliferation bewilders you into wondering if you’ve been blown off course...
You haven’t. ‘Brids, birds used to be called,’ Dee tells us, ‘brides.’ Sleepless in the white nights of the Arctic, he aches to extend the season as long as possible.
In the book’s final pages, we discover why this has felt somehow urgent. Now and then, he has described himself as a-tremble. One of the book’s last staging posts is the neurology department of a Bristol hospital, in which Dee receives a diagnosis of Parkinson’s. And so the startled reader loops back – reframing, admitting the undercurrents of grief that all along had accompanied spring’s advance.
Another grief Dee shares in these last pages is the loss of his close friend Greg Poole, naturalist and printmaker, whose brimming monotype launches the book as its cover – boomerang swifts sluicing through textured field- and leaf-work.
Texture and circularity are marks of Dee’s art, too. The way a skein of wild geese winds out of the twilight in soft, diminishing arcs to roost for the night is known as ‘whiffling’. Dee does eventually come home to roost in his own time, too.