Rowan by Oliver Southall, 2023. Reaktion Books.
What is the connection between an angiosperm whose leaves “organized spherical a darkish black void … evoke portals to the spiritual otherworld” (p. 198), Scotland’s highest-altitude tree [as of 15th June 2023] (Sarah Watts, British & Irish Botany 5(2): 167-179, 2023),* Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and John Everett Milais’ portrait of John Ruskin? The rowan tree,** every the subject and title of Oliver Southall’s e-book [which is appraised here].
Taking its place amongst Apple, Ash, Birch, Cherry, Mulberry, Oak, Pine, Willow, and Yew, Rowan is the newest tree-based e-book in Reaktion Books’ plants-and-people-themed Botanical sequence. And I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing numerous of those titles for Botany One by means of the years (e.g. proper right here, proper right here, and proper right here). Nonetheless, whereas Rowan continues that growth, the fairly erudite introduction to this weblog merchandise is supposed to current a flavour of the distinctively utterly completely different path that Southall has taken.
Rowan is a typical Reaktion Books title
As for various books in Reaktion Books’ Botanical sequence, Rowan has the acquainted formulaic format, and its 248 pages are divvied-up between an Introduction, six Chapters, a Conclusion, a Timeline, References, Extra Finding out, Associations and Web pages, Acknowledgements, Image Acknowledgements, and an Index.
Whereas I’ll say additional in regards to the precept sections’ content material materials elsewhere [see Rowan is a different Reaktion Books title section], some suggestions in regards to the the rest of the e-book are pertinent proper right here as similarities. The Timeline for rowan extends from ‘54-36 MYA’ [millions of years ago] – noting the doable look of the first ancestral rowan – to ‘2000-present’ – all through which interval rowans had been planted in boulders enclosed by sheepfolds. Sources to assist statements made within the precept sections are indicated in-text by super-scripted numbers, and expanded upon inside the References half. With approx. 17 pages, that itemizing incorporates >370 references, and is a wonderful combination of journal articles and books. Usually, declaration of sources used is excellent with only a few circumstances the place such sources seem to be absent all through the textual content material – and primarily inside the Introduction. Must you’ve not had enough ‘rowanabilia’ from Southall’s private e-book, >75 books of Extra Finding out will allow you to take that new-found curiosity further. Furthermore, particulars of 13 Associations and/or Web pages will present way more options to pursue your rowanesque pursuits. The Index occupies approx. 5.5 pages of 2-columned entries, from “Æ see Russell, George William”, to “Yeats, reimagining of rowan as Celtic emblem”. By means of entries for: berries (of Sorbus aucuparia); Clearances (Scotland); druids; early Irish literature; forest spirits (Finland); gender, conventions of; Heaney, Seamus, ‘Monitor’; Imbolc; ‘Joseph Rock’ (rowan cultivar); leaves (of Sorbus aucuparia); magic see witchcraft; Norse mythology; Order of Celtic Mysteries; pentagram see berries; quicken tree of Dubhros; Russian State Pharmacopeia; sorbic acid; Thor (deity); metropolis bushes; Vikings; Wordsworth, Dorothy; and Wordsworth, William, you’ll most certainly get an inkling of the topic materials of Southall’s ‘take’ as regards to rowan.
All by means of, the e-book is copiously illustrated – in every black-and-white and colour [my favourite is the stunning 2-page spread entitled “A flock of waxwing feed on frozen rowan berries”]. Rowan can be very well-written, and pretty poetic in places (as most certainly befits the e-book having been penned by a printed poet). More than likely related to the wordsmithery beloved of poets, the e-book launched me to quite a few unusual phrases – e.g.: numinous, colloguy, blazon, theophanic, chthonic animism, euhemerist, apotropaic, metonymic, variorum, shielings, circumambient, crizzled, umbrageous, bosky texture, gnomic eccentricity, hermeneutic, anamnesis, and asemic). Nonetheless, whereas I’m all for enhancing one’s phrase power, so many examples of ‘new’ phrases made Rowan a troublesome be taught.
Troublesome phrases aside, the poet’s craft is writ large in a number of of the e-book’s phrasing, e.g.: “Practically really, it’s possible you’ll take into consideration the frothy corymbs of clotted-cream blossom in spring and that defining burst of late-summer colour as a result of the lightness of flowers gives strategy to the clustered gravity of scarlet berries” (p. 7); “Whatever the actual logic of the thought, such examples provide a window into the ingenuity of the creativeness, its functionality to craft a psychic defence in direction of in every other case insoluble points” (p. 81); “The rowan, then, was an vital part of the superior ecology of the Wordsworthian ideas – and thus of the occasion of English Romanticism and its environmental thought” (p. 154); and “Proper right here, determined renunciation fades into introspective silence; the reader is abandoned on the purpose of a Proustian reverie for which no phrases could be conjured by the poet” (p. 168). Persevering with the theme of distinction…
Rowan is a particular Reaktion Books title
Although Southall touches upon the additional smart makes use of that humanity has manufactured from the tree [all more or less dealt with in the Introduction], “The rowan is simply not a tree whose first significance to folks has been smart in a straight mechanical sense. Its specific fascination and power – ritual and magical, aesthetic and emblematic – derive primarily from its magnificence, its unusual taxonomic traits and its predilection for precarious and distant locations” (p. 31). And that additional philosophical view dictates the way in which wherein that rowan [and which tree is exclusively Sorbus aucuparia (M Räty et al.) other than in the Introduction] is taken under consideration inside the e-book’s six chapters and Conclusion, and why Rowan differs loads from the alternative tree titles inside the author’s Botanical sequence.
The creator’s hope is that, “taken collectively, the tales I inform with rowan will frequently reveal the rich and intriguing half that one factor so apparently straightforward as a tree can play in our collective earthbound life” (p. 37). Accordingly, in Rowan: Chapter One “examines the mythology*** of rowan in a transitional interval, as poets and scribes tailor-made native lore to Christian frameworks, turning into it to new ideological needs” (p. 41). Chap. Two is devoted to the folklore of rowan, and “explores the tree’s perform inside the obscure lives of people paying homage to Agricola’s nameless Karelian peasants – people who eked out a difficult and precarious existence in Europe’s northern latitudes: in Ireland, Scotland, upland areas of England and Wales, Scandinavia, the Baltic and northern Russia” (p. 73). In Chap. Three “ we uncover an antiquarian and folkloric impulse that has frequently shadowed, and typically fed into, the modernizing beliefs of political nationhood, making it doable for artists and writers to hunt out new symbolic meanings for the rowan” (p. 101). Chap. 4 “takes Ruskin’s portrait as a springboard for learning the presence of rowan bushes in Romantic literature and painting, arguing that appreciation for the species is a marker of shifting attitudes to pure magnificence” (p. 135). Chap. 5 “carries us into the twentieth century, exploring the significance of rowan in Russia’s post-Revolutionary literature of exile and displacement” (p. 36), significantly Russian writers Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak “whose meanings allowed the rowan to perform the sting to an alternate, counter-factual Russia: an imaginary, however very precise refuge from the economistic autocracy established – murderously – inside the a few years of Stalinization” (p. 163). Chap. Six seems at “writing and paintings that maintain land-use change and rural-to-urban migration, along with poetry and non secular anthropology that draw on occult associations of the tree to forge non-public, counter-cultural mythologies” (p. 36), and highlights works of newest artist Andy Goldsworthy (Naomi Blumberg), poet, novelist and classicist Robert Graves, and poet and scholar Kathleen Raine. “Lastly, inside the Conclusion, we have in mind the tree’s future as a provide and picture of ecological regeneration” (p. 36). All of which ought to present the would-be reader some considered the ideas thought-about and the language used to maintain the plants-and-peopleness of rowan.
Or, to put it additional succinctly, Rowan points the ‘mythology’ of rowan – inside the expanded sense of “social significations at play in regularly symbols and footage” (p. 30), a notion attributed to French literary critic Roland Barthes. As abstract – and as utterly completely different from a additional typical Botanical sequence title – as which can sound, Southall’s e-book labored correctly for this botanist, and delivered a decidedly utterly completely different – nevertheless welcome – plants-and-people tome on a tree theme.
Summary
Oliver Southall’s Rowan is a extremely thoughtful account of the perform carried out by that iconic tree inside the mythological, magical, creative, and literary enchancment of humankind all by means of the millennia. Nonetheless, I feel it’s not going to be ‘all folks’s cup of tea. Nevertheless, when you occur to make the leap and offers it a try, you’ll be rewarded with a particular kind of plants-and-people e-book, making the aim that the connections between crops and individuals are myriad and multifaceted.
* And this plant was moreover Scotland’s favourite tree of 2020. Inside the curiosity of some sort of steadiness, do observe that completely different nations contained in the UK even have ‘tree of the 12 months’ competitions.
** Certain, I do now respect how daft it most certainly was to pose a question whose probably reply incorporates the title of the e-book that’s confirmed immediately after this weblog merchandise’s title…
*** For readers concerned that there’ll possible be no biology inside the e-book, I’m glad to say that, Southall delivers a commendable account of the ecology, taxonomy and evolutionary historic previous of Sorbus – with acceptable level out of the tree’s utility – inside the Introduction. Although Southall acknowledges the existence of various species of the genus Sorbus [and nine – but not S. aucuparia(!) – are separately listed in the Index], the e-book is devoted practically solely – to S. aucuparia, the rowan or “widespread mountain ash” (p. 8).
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