The Large Piece of Turf is a medium-sized watercolour that does exactly what it says on the tin. It shows the kind of patch of grass that the painter, Dürer, might have chanced across at the edge of a German meadow in 1503. Nothing extraordinary about that, except it turns out that ‘grass’ is a miserable disservice of a word.
Certainly it doesn’t do justice to the 10 or more different types of plant shown in the picture. They are painted with an attention to detail that is botanical in more sense than one. Whatever Dürer’s purpose for painting it (the piece was likely a study for use in more demanding works), it shows that there is as much value in a patch of grass as in the most elaborate of subjects.
My suggestion is for The Large Piece of Turf to be placed on the national curriculum as a core image. Continuing education would be provided in the form of refresher courses for the public at large, and especially for the people who run local councils. The benefits, as I shall explain shortly, would be tremendous.
‘Sweet Alison’ does not sound like something you would destroy on sight. The looks live up to the name, too, because the plant’s white flowers have a habit of carpeting large patches of ground and turning them into places that are intensely pleasant to look at.
Unless you are the ironically-named Environmental Landscapes Consortium, that is. A few weeks ago a small roundabout in front of St Clement’s chapel in Żejtun was a riot of white and easily the prettiest work of nature in sight for miles. That was until the men in yellow showed up and destroyed the whole thing in favour of bare soil.
Equally luckless was a large piece of grass in Rabat that until yesterday was about to transform itself into a multitude of yellow marigolds. Except someone had other ideas, and consigned it to the dustbin of misplaced optimism. This morning, it was all gone.
Everywhere I drive or walk, it’s war. Fennel, sorrel, snapdragons – all are fair game, as roadsides and roundabouts are systematically stripped of wild plants for no apparent reason other than to provide employment. If the devil finds work for idle hands, busy hands are the work of a whole continent of hell.
The derogatory words that were once used to describe people with disabilities have largely been replaced with a language that is more sensitive and accurate. This is not political correctness, but rather a good thing that mirrors a general attitudinal change for the better. The same cannot be said of wild plants: ‘ħaxix ħażin’ (weeds) they were, are, and look set to be.
Roadsides and roundabouts are systematically stripped of wild plants for no apparent reason other than to provide employment
Ħaxix ħażin are wild plants that grow in the wrong places. I can understand why a gardener or farmer might remove them, especially when they compete with cultivated plants.
Thing is, the war on wild plants has listed pretty much everywhere as the wrong place, and all plants that do not come from a nursery as undesirable.
Local councils in particular are obsessed with weeding where none is needed. But for their misguided effort, winter and spring would be alive with whites and yellows. What we get instead are bare earth and rubble walls that look like they have been shaved with a blunt razor. That, or the insipid and plasticky pansies and turf.
Partly the problem is that bare earth, pansies and turf provide employment and profit; alisons and marigolds, on the other hand, grow in profusion and at no cost. It is undeniable that things that cost time and money are better than those that are free.
The other difficulty is that many people appear to find it impossible to see value in a random patch of grass. Thus my prescription of the Dürer remedy, because the man was obviously fascinated by the richness of even a few square inches of natural growth. Language is not the main reason why I cannot imagine Dürer calling his subject ‘ħaxix ħażin’.
This, then, is my first point: the war on wild plants betrays an insensitivity that is easily translated into a general philistinism. There is no reason to suppose that someone who thinks that marigolds are rubbish should think the opposite of a valley, or sand dunes. And, if they do, it will likely be the result of a vacant and rhetorical environmentalism.
There’s another thing. As a child I used to spend hours in the school grounds (sports fascism had not yet flowered in those days) looking for caterpillars in folded nettle leaves. Back home, I would watch the freshly-emerged Red Admiral butterflies pump fluid into their wings as they prepared to take their first flight.
The point is that the large piece of turf is the home of very many insects, and in turn of the animals that feed on them. If we must lapse into environmentalist babble, ħaxix ħażin is a valuable natural habitat. Considering the length of country roads combined, it is also an extensive one and probably much bigger than all our nature reserves put together.
One wonders why a watercolour that shows something so unassuming should have retained its fame for 500 years. I think the answer is that a patch of grass contains the world.
mafalzon@hotmail.com