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

Jon Gower

If ever there were an antidote to these cynical, rushing times, here it is. These quiet, deeply considered essays, written in the green folds of Radnorshire, offer nothing less than a fresh way of looking at the world, of appreciating the wonder all around us and in ourselves.

It follows on from the same author’s successful ‘Do Not Call the Tortoise’ which similarly captures ‘the electricity of encounter.’

This wise and wonder-filled book draws freely on other thinkers, biologists, film-makers and writers, the reading net cast very widely, so there are the thoughts and insights of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hildegard of Bingen, Robert MacFarlane, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and a legion others whose books serve to remind us that we are not alone.

Or, as James Baldwin once put it, ‘You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’

Gigantic drama

Garden designer, bookseller and author Howell-Jones teaches us how to better read the world, suggesting that all we need to do sometimes is simply stop and look. ‘We can walk through the world each day as if it were a film we’ve never seen, uncertain what might happen next, alert to each new scene and mood in this gigantic drama. It may be the only live screening in the universe; it’d be a crime to miss it.’

Thus we learn about the gift economy of plants, so much richer than that involving the stock exchange and the Renaissance polyphony of Thomas Tallis. We are also encouraged to see the distinction between ‘necessary realities’ such as the Sun and the river Amazon and ‘attributed realities’ such as ‘Parliament, institutions of any kind, classes, species, families, money, marketing, nations, numbers, business, property, even language itself.’

Wonder-ing

In the author’s case he offers us what might be seen as worked examples of looking with wonder, instances of where the himself has stopped to ponder or see, and do so with a vivifying and vitalising sense of abundant life. That’s one of the things he returns to often in the book, the ‘profligacy of existence,’ the sheer overwhelming abundance of life.

The universe

He writes about the old walnut tree which spreads its branches ‘like seaweed in a tide’ outside his Clyro home. He tells us about an imaginary friend of his childhood called Mr Bun. He presents his cat Phlo in an essay which ranges widely, from the physical matter of the universe to the relationship between himself and every other organism – ‘the belonging, the affinity, the scale of the context in which I live and my uniqueness within it.’

And he takes us with him at the beginning of the year to see lichens in Llanbadarn-y-garreg, ten miles away from his house. But he doesn’t actually need to go that far as the graveyard opposite his home is a sort of 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.’

Woodlice

The book is shot through with such fine writing, from accounts of special trees such as the banana tree in Edo and a plane tree near Sardis, through the adventurings of determined and inscrutable woodlice to musings on creativity.

‘Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows’ is one of those volumes – a truly beautiful volume in itself, decorated with fine letterpress inscriptions – that invites the reader to scribble down a word or phrase or idea before pretty much every turn of the page.

Meaningful

One of Gareth Howell-Jones’ concluding thoughts can therefore also serve as mine, as I close an account of a small, gorgeous and meaningful book one can treasure and hold close.

‘Ultimately,’ the author writes, ‘we create not because it is good for us, teaches us, forces us to be aware, unites the world and binds us to it, not because it is fun, though it is all of those things and more, but because it is in our nature to create. As the flower processes the sunlight into nectar, we process the universe into art. It is as natural as that.’

Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows by Gareth Howell-Jones will be published on the 8th May by The Cyrus Press and is available from all good bookshops.