Author’s notes

says. “I started Gower Lavender because I was tired of feeling helpless reading about climate change and wanted to do something practical.”

While she was writing The Language of Bees she found a native wild bee – a common carder bumblebee – dying on her driveway, and this became the motif that runs through the collection.

“My daughters and I tried to help her by feeding her sugar water and warming her up. We got very invested in her survival and she became an emblem for lots of the things I was writing about. Bees face enormous challenges, in particular from losing habitat and forage, but also from pesticides and diseases, so additional pressures like a parasite or a particularly wet summer can push a whole colony over the edge. Their existence is fragile. But also bees are fascinating. Their life cycles and survival strategies are astounding, and as a writer you can’t help but love the rich metaphor they offer for writing about many other things.”

While the book is on one level a collection of eco poems, and on another a book about loss and motherhood, it also has a strongly Welsh flavour – as in the lyrical and hypnotic verses of The Sacred Well Speaks to Mererid, an enchanting retelling of the legend of the drowned Welsh land of Cantre’r Gwaelod that has stark parallels with the current state of our planet with its rising sea levels.

“You can’t help but be shaped by the landscape, language and history of where you’re from and I’m proudly Welsh,” she says. “Our old stories have a lot to teach us. Of course Cantre’r Gwaelod is one of those myths that has particular resonance now because sea levels are rising, but I also found that the story had evolved over the centuries and been