Press Release

In 2001, Foot and Mouth struck. The management of the disease, run by MAFF, seemed ... extraordinary.  The horses were very grateful to have solid hooves as many of the cloven footed stock on the Devon side of the Moor ended up slaughtered and cremated on hideous pyres that could be seen burning from miles away. We couldn't ride except on the tarmac lanes and even then we had to scrub-disinfect on return to the farm where we lived at the time.

Unable to ride the Moor in case of spreading the virus by HoofPrint, I was getting a little stir crazy and a friend decided I needed a new project.  She chucked a couple of packets of seeds on my kitchen table one morning and said, "Get growing.  It'll give you a hobby until you can ride again."

I took her up on it, thoroughly.  By the time the panic was over I had about a thousand little plants growing and that summer the cottage garden was absolutely rainbowed with larkspur, sweet peas, antirrhynum, stock, zinnia, marigold, livingston daisy, helichrysum, geum ...  dozens and dozens of flowers of all varieties and scents and colours.  They were banked up in baskets and pots and disused lavatory pans, in wellington boots and dead wheelbarrows and in every spare inch of soil I could find.

Many of the flowers were harvested as bouquets for friends or cut and hung up to dry, but some of the more delicate ones found their way into a Press.  I packed layer after layer of drying-papers with larkspur and forget-me-not and pansies between, carefully adding a little of each variety, to preserve them for some vague future Other Hobby - card-making, perhaps.

I am not a creature of Edwardian disposition by nature and my elegant floral-engaging enthusiasm didn't survive that summer.  By the time I moved house a year or so later, all the beauty of the garden was largely due to the self-seeded offspring of my first crop, and the beauty of my interior decoration to the hardiness of the masses of dried flowers.  The Presses (one of them a copy of Gray's Anatomy, circa 1938) were moved into bookcases or trunks and completely forgotten.

Until last week.

I was coming back from a nerve-soothing walk after a particularly horrible day, finally relaxing enough to enjoy the late evening sunlight on my face.  I was eating wild strawberries from the hedges and admiring the very last of the Queen Anne's Lace when it occurred to me to pick a little of each of the flowers growing in the hedges. There was red campion, honeysuckle, foxglove, valerian and several tiny orchid-like purples and a host of others I can't name and by the time I got home I had a wonderful wildweed bouquet.

I remembered the flower press, thinking to preserve my gatherings.  I found it eventually and, filled with curiosity, unscrewed the wingnuts and released from a decade of squashed neglect my collection of now silk-sheen pressed flowers.  Page after page of tiny delicacies I lifted from their long incarceration. The colours had faded but everything was still exquisite and the shapes of the leaves and each petal delightful.  I spent an hour going through my lost treasures.

What does one do with such things?  I'm no artist, no card-maker, no craft-worker.

I carefully and lovingly packed them all away again, maybe for another ten years. There was no room in the main press for any additions.  I eyed up Gray's Anatomy and the Large Animal Veterinary textbooks, unopened in years and their pages full of more beautiful things than the dry words of wise men.  No room for more there, either.

So the little bouquet I'd picked in the lanes went into water instead and the scent of the honeysuckle filled my bedroom as I later drifted off to sleep.

That sleep was sweeter and its dreams more peaceful than any other I've had of late.

The healing powers of flowers, maybe?