Category: Blog

This blog is about what I have learned about the British environment and how it informs the design of my Wilding Environment Print. 

1. The Great Un-wild
2. Un-wilding
3. Re-wilding

You can learn more by following the links and by downloading the reading list I have put up in the Community part of this website. 

1. The Great Un-wild

When I first visited Europe, a long time ago, I threw myself into the heritage buildings and history, the shops, the transport, the theatre, the galleries and the countryside. I had to see castles, cathedrals, country houses, daffodils, tulips, oak trees and all I had encountered vicariously in literature and on TV. 

But after a while, I felt a growing hole. Food tasted ‘manufactured’. Fresh produce markets sold perfect unblemished fruit and veg, packaged, chemical-laden and unlocal. The fields and hedges were too neat. I craved scraggly, uncontrolled spaces and wide skies. I longed for home where there was less resolution and order, and lots of wild. 

When I designed Savannah Woodland, I knew the animals and plants from deep within. They were the wild flora and fauna of my youth. Creating a companion piece for Britain has been much, much harder. 

To design Wilding, though, I needed to read and learn a great deal. Fortunately I live next to the River Tyne and I walk in the north Pennines almost every week and so I now have 20 years of being in British nature. This means I’ve been able to connect my heart to what I have been finding out with my head. The reading and internet searching have thus been a gift because I now feel more rooted in my northern home. And those perceptions of something being missing that I had as a young traveler have been confirmed.  

1. Haydon Bridge on the River Tyne 2. The North Pennines [Photo: Aron Mazel]

Something big has happened to Britain in the last 100 years.  The natural environment, imperceptibly for many, has been harmed on a grand scale. It has been turned into the great, neat and tidy unwild outdoors with more sheep than it should carry.  

For a summary of the damage that I have learned about, go to 3. Un-wilding.

 For my design Wilding, though, I have focused on the re-wilding that is happening, which you can read about next. 

Return to Wilding Environment Print.

My life was intensely happy until I was six. I was completely clear about what I loved most: being outside with plants and animals.  

At six and a half, suitcase in hand, I was sent to a boarding school run by Irish nuns. This was the early sixties, so no child-centred nurturing of an individual’s interests, but rather a focus on sin. Going to school was a life changing shock. For the next eight years (I moved to a freer school when I was fifteen) I spent over two thirds of each year feeling restricted. I longed for the holidays and half term weekends just to be back in expanse, miles away from that dreaded place.

On arriving home, as soon as I was out of the car, I changed into comfortable shorts and a T shirt and set about hardening my feet with no shoes. I would rush outside and just listen, soaking in the singing insects and birds, especially the different doves filling the warm midday air with unhurried tunes. It would be no time before I found a chongololo or an ant lion. 

Looking back through the long lens of time and my temperate northern home, I only now grasp the diversity of wildlife surrounding my earlier self growing up in savannah woodland. It was not unusual to spot a reedbuck or a duiker, a kudu or a mongoose.

We would picnic in granite kopjes, and there, rock rabbits roamed and porcupines hid, and in winter sprigs of seemingly dead resurrection plant greened up in a glass of water. We often saw chameleons, watching them change colour. Once, I found a tortoise with a broken shell on a road, and I nurtured it back into the wild. There were civet catsand night apes that came out in the dark.

Our dogs occasionally went hunting at night, and came back stinking of polecat (a skunk) and or with porcupine quills in their cheeks.  Once a bush pig mauled one of the dogs. There were aardvark too, in burrows near trees and termite heaps.  And, one year, the day before Christmas, an Egyptian cobra wrapped itself around the engine of a new car. At night, I sometimes switched off my reading light when too many moths and beetles were dive bombing my book.  Then if I listened carefully, I might hear nightjars, or jackals with pups in the distance.  Thus the savannah woodland became my haven and fed my soul. 

As I grew older, drawing and water colour painting became an important part of my love of nature because I discovered that they were powerful observation tools. I mainly painted wild flowers, grasses and trees, because they would keep still. 

I tried to draw animals but only put down fleeting lines, managing better with small creatures that I caught and put in a large jar for a short while. Being the youngest in the family, I was on my own in the last few years, and feeling lonely, I began to really ‘see’ what was around me. And it thrilled me.

Return to the Savannah Woodland Environment Print.

Filled with a burning urge to tell a visual story about our extraordinary and irreplaceable planet, my ideas and drawings entered an intense synchronized dance in a mandala format. You could call it a think piece because it was partly planned but mostly it unfolded out of expanding thoughts. Eventually, this environmental Earth mandala eventually crystalized into its final form. The central concept is inter being, which I grew to understand more deeply as I progressed.

Inter being is a term shared by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh who you may recognise as the person who introduced ‘mindfulness’ to the west. Inter being means that everything is interconnected. So plants, animals, soil, water, clouds, air, the sun, the cosmos, human beings are all part of each other. They may seem to be separate things, but we are all part of a whole. I am made up of Earth elements like oxygen made by plants, water, carbon, food from the soil, soil, and more. So we have inter being.

What is a mandala? And what are they used for?

Mandalas originated in Asian cultures. They are used to visually represent the interconnectedness of life and they act as guides for meditation practices and for teaching. Filled with symbolism and meaning, they work as mental maps for concentrating the mind. 

What do the colours in the environmental Earth mandala design mean?

Yellow: joy and happiness
Red: energy and passion
Blue: healing and inner peace
Green: connection and love of nature
White: awareness and truth 
Black: deep thinking, individuality, and facing our dark side 
Pink: love

What are the symbols? And what do they mean?

The stars: the universe
The sun: life and energy
The large trees (usually bell entrances to the centre of a mandala): openness, allowing entrance to wisdom and clarity 
The trees and plants: energy and the air we breathe
The animals: sentient life 
The land and river: stand solid like a mountain, flow like water
Flowers: unlocking a healthy life
The lotus flower in the centre: perfect balance, beauty, knowledge and clarity, rising up out of mud, which signifies suffering.
The swallow (my addition): the northern and southern hemispheres as a whole, equality

I will now leave you to generate your own meanings and think about the implications of this Environmental Earth mandala design. 

Should you wish to purchase this design click here or on the image above.