Traveller’s Joy…

Sea-Stock, Sand-Rocket, Traveller’s Joy – just some of the wonderful names to be found among the pages of Familiar Wild Flowers:

Picked up for a pound in a charity shop, these fortnightly guides published between 1902 and 1903 are full of fine words and illustrations that feel as though they do indeed come from a bygone age. An age when wild flowers were both familiar and abundant. When a popular periodical could be filled with long, lovely sentences like this one: “Where we found happy hunting-grounds for our botanical and entomological tastes now stand great museums, and if one wants to see the “red admiral” or the “tiger”, one can now only meet them and their fellows all neatly drilled in rows in glass cases, and each transfixed by its special pin.”

That’s not to say that long sentences are always lovely, let alone the most appropriate length. No! Nor that we should all hanker for times long gone. Just that we can learn a lot from the life and language of the past, particularly at a time when we are encouraged to concentrate on the here and now, the new and next.

So let’s find time now and then to travel back. There’s sure to be some joy there.