I’ve been thinking about the secret life of flowers for a while and the secret life of people. I’ve been going underground. Subterranean worlds both fascinate and horrify me because I’m claustrophobic; but I realise more and more that beneath ground is where most of my writing life springs from; and where most of the life of the earth is to be found: in underground roots and systems. Unless we access those routes, we cannot write, we cannot live.

A while ago I wrote a poem about Ophelia, Hamlet’s tragic love. We all have a corner of Ophelia inside us, a discarded body, someone who has dropped out of the plot. Ophelia turns her love for Hamlet into a secret language: the language of flowers and botany, flowers as a form of recompense for a life not-lived, a romance unfulfilled, a love withered on the vine. 

Rather than leaving it to others, the Ophelia of my poem arranges her own funeral:

Ophelia sat in her coffin and coiled her hair

and the breeze from the window blew over.

She closed her eyes and lifted her hand;

at the altar, she felt something yellow:

buttercups with halos hugging the ground,

daisies with their eyes wide open. 

 Even in heaven the sky isn’t everything

and the hymns can still be forgotten. 

My Ophelia is a kind of revenant, a ghost at her own funeral. The poem reads as a kind of afterlife drama: Ophelia is already underground and so her eyes are closed; she sits inside the earth, enclosed in darkness, feeling what might be left for her at the altar. 

Ophelia can only feel, reach with her hands, for her yellow flower: yellow, the colour of sunshine and the source of life for most flowers. My poem revolves around this after life Ophelia feeling for the yellow flower that signifies life. A buttercup can be felt by the silky, tissue texture of its skin; and the yellow centre of a daisy can be sensed by its springy pincushion. Ophelia knows her flowers intimately, more than she does the body of Hamlet, for their love was never consummated.  And so her feeling life is led through the bodies and personalities of flowers: their healing wisdom. 

I am currently writing a book about buried and forgotten histories: lost folklore, lost knowledge, the language of botany and flowers wrapped around folk histories and knowledge of the land, the intimate marks of the soil and trees. Most of my characters are closed off inside remote, local spaces; spaces often stranded from neighbours and community, from wider public history. The character I wrote up today is based on the wife of our neighbour from my first childhood home; Mrs. Robinson, now called Joan or Joanie, who spends all day alone, pale and wan in her nightie, feeling her way into spaces she is forbidden to enter: namely Mr. Robinson’s cave-like backroom where he keeps sharp and dangerous tools. While Jack Robinson spends all day on a local farm crushing buttercups with a steel harrow, Mrs. Robinson wanders around their derelict flat looking for signs of life, her arms outstretched, making her dangerous way through the dark.