Book extract: Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows by Gareth Howell-Jones

We are pleased to publish an extract from the new book ‘Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows’ by the Radnorshire essayist Gareth Howell-Jones. The volume, which follows the successful ‘Do Not Call the Tortoise’ ‘takes a clear, fresh look at the physical world around us and finds it more startling and more heartening than the media would have you believe. It raises many questions and even answers some of them.’ Here the author takes us into the small, bright world of lichen and their natural alliances.

Gareth Howell-Jones

Every New Year’s Day or thereabouts I go to see the lichen at Llanbadarn-y-Garreg. Summer concealed them with thickets of bracken, but here again are the reds and whites and unexpected blues, the constellated dots as though some ancient ancestor had plotted the heavens on the sheer dark rocks. There are puffs of crimson or yellow dust on the walls – it hardly seems possible these are living beings. Little changes from one January to the next; the photos look identical. Lichen can grow a millimetre a year, but these, I suspect, aren’t in quite such a rush. Entirely satisfied with all they have done, they resolve, this New Year, to do it again. They’re disinclined to novelty.

Lichen safari park

My peppy eagerness to drive ten miles, clamber about and take their pictures feels mildly ridiculous in the face of such sagacity, and anyway the graveyard opposite my home is itself a lichen safari park, where the dead, weathering into anonymity, are graciously commemorated with living medallions, rosettes and epaulettes. Off-white, primrose and celadon are the muted tones of the honours here, but Ada Lloyd d.1910 has been granted a golden spray like a meteor shower – I wonder what singled her out.

Alliances

Lichen are not single creatures but alliances of algae, fungi, bacteria and yeasts who patiently refute our heresies of competition and reductivism by enjoying a richness in partnership none could possess alone. Gently they erase the epitaphs, offering instead the gospel of example – quietude, smallness, endurance, togetherness and beauty.

You can read Nation.Cymru’s review of the new book here.

Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows will be published by The Cyrus Press on 8th May. It is available from all good bookshops.

Gareth Howell-Jones will be discussing his work with Owen Sheers at the Hay Festival on Sunday 25th May at 8.30pm.