Understorey: A Year Among Weeds, by Anna Chapman Parker - Colin
Understorey: A Year Among Weeds is Anna Chapman Parker’s narration of a calendar year, during which she observed and recorded weeds she saw. We all see weeds, every day. They are in gardens; they are in cracks in pavements, roads and walls. We see them, but I, for one, don’t register what I’m seeing. Chapman takes the time to really look at what’s there: the different species; their precise colour; their state of health (young and fresh; old and damaged); and whether they have appeared or changed since she last passed this way.
There are two aspects to the book: the author’s sketches and her text. Parker admits that her drawings are her attempt to capture the experience of seeing that weed in that place at that moment. I hope that they fulfil that purpose for her because I think it’s fair to say that no-one will buy the book for the drawings. I’m afraid that, in some cases, I couldn’t even tell that they represented plants, never mind what type of plant. Parker is quite open about that, stating “I’m not interested in its purporting to be anything but drawing.” And “The result may appear less accurately as cleavers, but might feel closer to being there, looking at them.” No, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t.
The text is infinitely more polished than the sketches and I confess that I had to consult a dictionary many times. I had never heard of “aleatoric”, for example. The text will be manna to those who embrace the “slow living” philosophy: it takes the format of diary entries (not daily – maybe ten a month) and the entries range from a couple of lines to a couple of pages. An entry may be descriptive, e.g. 21 February’s “First daisies in flower: white blots in the grass beside the carpark, more visible because they’re still closed up. It’s 8am; what time does the daisy call it day?”; or a reflective discursion upon trying to capture the nature of the three-dimensional plant on two-dimensional paper. There are also passages discussing the appearance of plants in paintings such as those in the National Gallery.
I have mixed views upon this book. I found the calm meditative nature of the prose and Parker’s eloquent and erudite essays upon a few minutes’ activity to be quite soothing and I was pleasantly surprised that my complete ignorance of plants and their technical descriptions (apparently nettles have “a cordite base and an acuminate tip”) didn’t matter at all. This is not a book to buy because you love gardening; it’s a book to buy because you love language. A council path’s edges “grow threadbare like patches of worn clothing rubbed thin by the body’s friction.” Some sentences are not grammatically correct but convey a moment beautifully, such as 2nd October’s “Rooks cawing, faint cries of children on the swings; a light breeze. Sharp tang of a bonfire from the allotments over the hill.” However, “Or letting the song lyric or conversation running through my head leak out of the pen?” was obscure: was Parker simply wondering if she should scribble down some unassociated words alongside the sketch? And “An X is both specificity and denial: it cancels itself out” strikes me as pretentious.
Overall, a good book – one to be dipped into and savoured, not quaffed in one go.
Colin (via NetGalley)
