Nature Speaks

The hydrangeas in a pot in my garden had long since finished flowering, their petals turned brown and papery, the delicate colours of summer surrendered to the slow processes of decay. I had scarcely noticed them in recent weeks, accepting their fading as part of the garden’s passage towards winter, as though the disappearance of their colour had also brought an end to anything worth looking at.

When I saw them covered in frost, the ice had traced the edges of every petal with fine white crystals, tracing revealing the intricate veins and folds of flowerheads I had passed without a second glance. I stood looking at them for some time, struck by their unexpected beauty, and then by the rather uncomfortable realisation that had the frost not come, I might have walked past them again without noticing anything at all.

I began to wonder what had changed, beyond the appearance of the flowers themselves. Their delicate structures had been there all along, as had the slow transformation taking place within them, the gradual relinquishing of one form of existence and its return to the processes from which new life will emerge. Yet it had taken a moment of extraordinary beauty to draw my attention to something that had never ceased to be extraordinary, even when I had ceased to find it interesting.

We speak readily of the beauty of the natural world, and of how important it is that we learn to appreciate it, but I wonder whether our admiration sometimes conceals a more troubling assumption: that the things around us become worthy of consideration through the pleasure they give us. We notice the flower in bloom, the tree in autumn colour, the bird whose plumage catches the light, while passing over what has faded, become commonplace, or failed to meet our expectations of beauty. And because these judgements are so familiar, so deeply woven into the ways we have learned to look, we seldom question what they might prevent us from seeing.

There is a difference, after all, between finding something beautiful and recognising that it has a significance beyond our experience of it. The natural world is not arranged for our admiration, nor do its countless lives and intricate relationships depend upon our ability to appreciate them. A fallen tree continues to sustain other forms of life, a spider goes about the difficult business of surviving, and the ordinary birds we scarcely notice remain absorbed in existences as immediate and consequential to them as our own are to us. Their worth cannot reasonably depend upon whether we happen to find them interesting.

Perhaps this is one of the more difficult things that paying attention asks of us: to recognise how much of what we call the ordinary world is ordinary only because we have grown accustomed to it, and how easily our preferences become mistaken for measures of what matters.

When the frost melts, the hydrangeas will return to the familiar brown I had previously overlooked. Nothing essential about them will have been diminished by the disappearance of the ice, although I know how easily my attention might drift elsewhere once their brief beauty has gone.

I hope I will remember to look again, not in expectation of finding something beautiful, but because I have begun to question why I needed beauty to make me look in the first place.