Natural History is a romantic bridge from the arts to science

Yesterday I sat in the garden for an uninterrupted hour, watching a spider build a web. In all my 50 years, I had never paused to observe this miracle of engineering in its entirety. Perhaps I would have died without seeing it if my 11-year-old son, Johnny, hadn’t made me stop and look.

A fat, brown-striped specimen – a European garden spider, I now know – was sitting above the back door, unspooling a long thread of silk into the breeze. It wafted around a bit before getting stuck on a bay tree about two metres away. So that’s how they get started!

The spider edged gingerly out onto this tightrope, extruding a second line of silk with which to reinforce it. Next, she fixed two ends of a loose thread onto this central line, to create a U-shape, and then lowered herself jerkily down from its midpoint. Having glued this third thread to the floor, she scampered back up her Y-shaped frame and began dropping new lines to form a square around it. Only then, and after much to-ing and fro-ing with reinforcement silk, did she start on the spokes of the web.

How extraordinary, I thought, watching her pluck the thread from her abdomen and fix it in place with her delicate arms, that I never really knew how this was done. Such a commonplace feat – my whole garden, right now, is strung with giant webs glittering in the sunshine – and yet I have conspired to keep myself in ignorance.

Or have I been conspired against? As a child I was intensely curious about nature, like Johnny is: short-sighted in the classroom but keen-eyed in the garden, quick to spot any blade of grass quivering under a ladybird’s foot. I was forever rescuing dying birds and half-eaten mice, watching with mingled sorrow and interest as they panted and expired in their shoebox death beds.

At school I chose to study biology, thinking this would best illuminate the natural world. But it turned out to be nothing but diagrams, speckled with circulating arrows, of osmosis and photosynthesis and the machinations of the digestive system.

I learnt nothing about the habits or habitats – or even the names – of native species. I was (or would have been, had I not immediately lost interest and zoned out) educated at length in the structural differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, but never taught how to distinguish an ash from an elm, a blackbird from a thrush.

We were expected to study plants and animals through their most invisible and abstract components – peering dully down a microscope at the cell of a potato – while all the beauty, romance and strangeness of our natural world went unexamined.

My interest in natural history was cut off at the knees. But Johnny, I hope, may be luckier. The Government is currently considering whether to introduce a new GCSE in natural history, proposed by the exam board OCR, which would be heavy on field work and the study of native flora and fauna.

It’s a brilliant and longoverdue idea. For pupils like me, of an arty, romantic disposition, natural history would provide an enticing bridge into the sciences. For those already of a scientific bent, it would provide context and meaning for the study of those abstract diagrams. And for every child, whatever their academic predilection, it would provide an enduring gift: the ability to see, and understand, the life around us.