ELLIE HARRISON
Though I love finding beautiful natural treasures on walks, I prefer to leave them in the wild
Solid natural finds – rocks, fossils and bones – appeal to the collector in me.
Bringing flowers inside has always vexed me. Pressed childhood blooms consistently disappoint and dried flowers only shine in gothic fantasy. Cut flowers are more like a smiling reminder of the unwelcome ephemeral truth of it all. Nothing lasts forever. It’s why I covet solid treasures from nature instead, such as rocks, fossils and bones. Or flowers with established roots at a push.
On a windy slate-grey day on the twodimensional drab landscape of the Severn Estuary, we chipped out wonders from pre-history, filling ‘No-mixed-coin’ plastic banking bags with ammonites and belemnites that once swam in the warm seas during a time that our human brains can only recognise in flashes of understanding. My daughter had an intuition for a piece of rock that she took over to Dean Lomax, who pulled out his palaeontologist’s hammer.
I’ve often teased Dean that he’s the Billy Elliot of palaeontology. The youngest of three in a low-income household with his single mother working full-time, yet he managed to ignore career counsellors at school telling him that he must think about getting a proper job. His nan would take him out fossilling and offer her finds, which he fondly remembers were “mostly bits of brick”. After selling all his Star Wars figures to fund his first dig in America, he eventually got his PhD through years of authentic palaeontology work – less in lecture halls and more in the bowels of museums examining their collections. He remembers people talking about “papers” when he started out in academia, mistaking them for newspapers. “You are the very first human ever to see this fish,” he said to my daughter as he opened the rock. She was delighted with her cache.
Similarly, stones that show up in heart-shape form or are apparently prominent on the beach, become guarded and fought over by childGollums during a walk and eventually make it back to the house. I even brought home a newly cold roadkill badger one day to demonstrate its anatomy in close-up. My ambition was to bury it and then dig up the remaining skeleton some months later, but I credit myself with poor gravedigging skills so a fox got to it first. But that’s how much I enjoy the jewels of nature.
PUT BEAUTY IN ITS PLACE
Nature’s gems enhance simple walks, connect us to the physical world we glide through and store memories of that day. But really, they come into my house in the hope that the beauty of the natural world will enhance my interior design choices, too. Unfortunately, no matter how they’re displayed, I’m yet to see a nature table, bowl of shells or arrangement of stones that actually looks that good, unless they’re in Peter Jackson’s vision of a hobbit’s house or, as I once discovered at a festival, in a rickety steam-punk caravan with miniature joinery and drawers full of natural specimens.
In a normal house with useful hard edges, plucked raw beauty looks caged and incongruous, a vase of pine cones atop a driftwood and glass coffee table. Many of my fossils are still in their banking bags in the garage and the stones have been hurled quietly out the door to blend in with the gravel that cheerlessly emerged from the quarry already containing fossilised shells for cars to crawl over.
Perhaps the beauty lies in the very ephemerality I’m afraid of – in the fleeting moment that cannot be preserved for another day, The One Ring that can never be truly owned. I once believed that feathers were placed on our paths to guide us when we needed it. My sister believes that it’s Grandma every time she sees a butterfly. Maybe the treasure is the truth of brevity, when we’re bewitched by something small, sitting correctly and beautifully in its place in the wild.