NATURE CURE

摘要

How keeping records engages us with nature and compiles archives of time and place for the next generation. All praise to the amateur naturalist. In these early summer days, I suspect that there are very few of us who are not, on paper or just in ourheads, making records: the first brood of swallow fledglings, the brief visit (if you're lucky) of a spotted flycatcher to the garden, the record number of flowers on a bee-orchid. There's sometimes a worry- and I've had it myself- that all this incessant identifying and list-making might spoil one's imaginative engagement with nature, in much the same way that some music-lovers fear that 'learning' music might ruin their enjoyment. Both views are, of course, nonsense. I've only to look at the part that records - my own and others' - have played in my life to realise that they help narrate many of its most important stages. They link place and moment, past and present, observer and observed. They are small poems of survival.