Victoria Gatehouse

As a poet with a degree in zoology and biochemistry, I am naturally interested in plants from the perspective of a scientist. Our species depends on plants for survival, and we share a deep connection at the molecular level. The life‑giving pigments chlorophyll and haemoglobin, for example, are almost identical in structure, differing only in the central ions at their core.

I live and walk daily through a landscape of moorland, woodland and peat bogs, the latter of which I’ve become rather obsessed with.  Peat is formed under very specific conditions resulting in incomplete decomposition of plant materials. Bogs can hold vast quantities of carbon and support some remarkable plant life, such as carnivorous sundews, and hollow-stemmed cotton grasses, which somehow manage to flourish in waterlogged, low nutrient conditions – a testimony to survival and inspiration for several of my poems. 

‘Sphagnum peat, under microscope’, is a response, as both scientist and poet, to scanning electron microscope images of Sphagnum peat pores; dark, grainy, mysterious, a ghostly network of connections and the dark spaces that exist in between. It’s fascinating to see how the elongated photosynthetic cells are surrounded by barrel-shaped hyaline cells which are essentially dead, but act as water storage reservoirs. This architecture of dead and living cells is one of many small miracles that can be observed when researching the physiology of plants.    

While my initial perspective might be scientific, I am also inspired by the age-old connection between folklore and plants, including the magical and protective properties our ancestors would have attributed to them. Some early medicinal uses of plants are still relevant today. These themes run through my first poetry collection, and I am continuing to explore them in more recent work. 

‘in response to bracken’ centres on early games of hide‑and‑seek in a local forest, and how our close encounters with plants can become wired into memory. As a child, bracken fronds felt like vast green umbrellas. Those crouched moments of hiding gave me time to observe the hairs prickling the stems, the spores clustered beneath the leaves, and the startling moment when a fleshy dark rhizome was unearthed by the family dog — who always found me first! Bracken has existed for millions of years and is thought to be the most common plant in the world. As a child, the bracken‑covered hillside was a place of safety and familiarity, yet there was a small thrill of wildness in the close scent and textures of this ancient, vascular plant. Those fiddle‑head unfurlings evoked a sense of wonder that has never left me.