To my own chickweed

 We regularly applaud the peculiar immortality of poets who perform and die young but the achivement of youthful botanists had eluded me until I tiptoed around Thomas Edmondston's eponymous chickweed last week.

On the northernmost bit of Britain, the roof of the Queen's realm, are the serpentine rocks of Unst where the Edmonston Chickweed uniquely grows.

It does not grow very big, or very bright, but at this time of the year, when the puffins have departed and the otters are somewhat grumpy, its little rusty leaves (the picture above is of the plant in Spring plumage) have at least the virtue of being a tourist attraction required to stay in place.

The precocious Thomas, it seems, produced the first list of Shetland flora in 1836 when he was only 11. His flying start may have been helped by his staus as son of a local laird but a glorious career awaited after his appointment as Professor of Botany in Glasgow nine years later. Then in 1846, on a South African foraging tour for which he reported to Charles Darwin, he was killed in a shooting accident, leaving his memory for the reflection chiefly of holidaymakers who find their way to the final British moonscape before the North Pole.

Comments

[Shelley]

The richness of all the "amateur" research into natural phenomena by the Victorians seems connected to me with the teeming quality of Dickens' novels. Oddly, since my work is about barren ground, what my eye went to in that lovely photograph is not the blossom, but the brown soil.