You find yourself wanting to go see something you’ve seen many times before because you suspect you might see it in a new light.
It’s one clue that the book you just finished is a good one.
Nan Shepherd, in writing about the Cairngorms in Scotland, points out that the alpine flora is Arctic. That means that those plants that cling to rock faces were around when ice sheets covered Europe.
I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower — that is harder. It means that these toughs of the mountaintop, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age.
I read that passage and thought of the elf-orpine that seemingly grows out of the rock at Arabia Mountain. Elf-orpine is a primitive little plant. It’s pollinated by ants, having evolved before bees did.
In February, we went to see the little plants turn from green to red. A month later, we saw them put on little white flowers.
It’s summer, and I want to see what they’re doing. I just want to see them again.
• Source and notes: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, p. 59.
Leslie Edwards, Jonathan Ambrose and L. Katherine Kirkman, The Natural Communities of Georgia; Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2013. You can find a photograph of elf-orpine here:
https://arabiaalliance.org/themes/natural-systems/diamorpha-blooms/The
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