WE ALL once lived in the landscape. We worked and loved, slept and dreamed inside it. We observed the change of the seasons, the incremental growth of plants and flowers, the sudden movement of wind and rain. We relied on plants for everything, but we did not view them as mere objects for our pleasure and use.
We studied them in order to understand the purpose for which they were created. Each plant signified a larger story in which we played a vital part. Wheat was not only food but the breath of God calling us to communion with each other. Flowers fattened bees, but they also showed us how to live, their faces turned all day to heaven, and inward at night. We were not the authors of nature, but part of its fabric.
This was our experience of the natural world until we became modern people. In the 16th century, a convergence of events severed us from the plants we lived among, transforming them into objects for our use and changing the shape of the landscape that is still around us. Today, our relationship with plants has grown distant. Trees and flowers have become ornamental, the backdrop to concrete and steel.
We still rely on plants — for food grown in the soil, fruit from trees, fibres for the fabric of our clothes — but few of us remember how to cultivate the land for these purposes. Nor do we need to: the modern world has learned to produce what it needs in places far from view. But not that long ago, our every day was shaped by the need to grow and make in order to survive, and to do so artfully. It was knowledge so precious, so long perfected, that we passed it carefully to our children.
Modernity has reshaped entirely the way our imaginations are formed from childhood to old age. We no longer set our daily lives to the seasons, our communal life to the harvests, nor the stages of our personal growing and decay to the rhythm of the plants that live around us. When we go out of our cities to the woods and meadows, we follow an urge long embedded in us by centuries of living in the landscape.
We no longer survive on the individual plants that grow around us — for that, we are content with someone else’s plants, grown near by or miles away, even overseas — but we still remember something of the personal love that we once felt for those plants with which we lived and worked every day. That work has shaped who we are in ways we can sense but don’t remember. It’s a pattern of labour that our bodies have inherited, a skill we hold somewhere in ourselves even if we’ve never lifted a hand to it. Our eyes are made for horizons and the daily alteration of colour in the tree cover and the carpet of field, meadow, and heath. Our bodies are made for open air and movement, for labour under sun and wind.
IF OUR deep immersion in the land had been taken from us all at once, in one moment, we might have understood the scale of our loss. Instead, change crept slowly, one plant at a time. First, apples — an orchard fruit, once widely accessible — then household medicines like saffron, cloth dyes, grapes for making wine, and then, eventually, the timber and reeds that we used to build our houses and the wheat that we grew for bread. In their place we acquired private property, global trade, modern medicine, industrial manufacturing, the corporation, and the banking system.
And yet these changes all occurred within the span of just 200 years, from the rule of Henry VIII in the early 1500s to the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. In this short space of time, we ceased to be medieval and became modern. These centuries mark the time when our society shifted its focus from preservation to improvement — from having enough to wanting more. The “Enlightenment” and the scientific revolution, so often assumed to be the moment that Western culture embarked on its greatest ethical and intellectual path, was also the moment at which we lost our home in the land and severed the ties that once bound us in deeply spiritual ways to all green and growing things.
NOT all of the changes were sought or welcomed. Many early modern people expressed alarm at the prospect of losing touch with the life they had known for centuries. They realised that the longer-term outcomes of innovation would serve those who held much greater power, those who had never worked the land at all. The more we moved away from life in the landscape, the more we found ways of managing plants that required academic training, corporate business models, high levels of technology, and a form of centralised management that further separated us from the fields and orchards.
The old life is gone, but we can still find traces of it, if we look carefully. I’ve spent my career as an academic reading about the past — the way we lived, the literature we wrote. My life is as modern as any other urban woman of my generation but the university in which I spend my days teaching and writing holds on to some traces of medieval society: not just the quads and spires of the older Cambridge colleges but the meadows and orchards still protected by the rights of the common, and the division of the year into three terms of indoor work — Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter — calculated to fit around the demands of the harvest.
These mere traces of the past pull at my mind with the instinct that we all feel when walking in woodland or fields cut through by ancient hedgerows. Knowing that instinct to be nostalgic doesn’t make it any less important. There’s much in our modern lives that we would not give up, just as there was much in the rise of modernity that was good for us — but when we look around at the world we now inhabit, who feels they have had any direct choice in creating it? The cityscapes, the ever-growing centralised governance, the ceaseless expansion of commerce, our reliance on technology, the depletion of plants and insects, and the loss of a community of labour.
WE MIGHT think that the breach between plants and people, emerging 400 years ago, has very little to do with us — but that history is our story, too. Early modern people were grappling with the arrival of a world that they did not understand, a world that brought opportunity but which also threatened to dismantle the intricate systems of growing and making that had sustained human societies for so long. The modern world — whose emergence they witnessed — now has us all in its grip.
We might feel powerless to stop its ever-faster advance, but I want to show that we are not. The fight to protect our place in the landscape can teach us how to be part of change, to resist where necessary, to shape new methods for living with innovation. Modernity — the enemy of nature — began 400 years ago, but it is still unfolding. We can take our own place in it and be part of where it leads. We can — if we choose — reclaim something of what we lost.
This is an edited extract from Vanishing Landscapes: The story of plants and how we lost them, illustrated by Rosanna Morris, and published by Hodder at £22 (Church Times Bookshop £19.80); 978-1-3997-3152-2.
Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson is a writer and academic. She is a Fellow and Associate Professor of English Literature at Downing College, Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow of Blackfriars, Oxford.
