Katrina Porteous

If you follow England’s coastal path through the Northumberland dunes from May to October, you will walk among the vivid magenta blooms of our county flower, the bloody cranesbill. That is the subject of my first poem in Plant-Human Quarterly 22. This plant, which belongs to the geranium family, loves limestone soils and sandy dunes, and its flower attracts many kinds of insect. Hawkbit, another plant mentioned in the poem, is also commonly found in this habitat. The poem was inspired by the naturalist Mark Cocker, who writes movingly of the transfer of energy in the natural world. Plants absorb certain wavelengths of sunlight for photosynthesis to create sugars, which feed invertebrates, which in turn feed birds; so the skylark’s and meadow pipit’s songs are literally, in Mark’s words, ‘sunlight made audible’. 

I’ve been based on the Northumberland coast for almost 40 years, exploring, with loving attention, its landscapes, geology, plants, marine life and birds, together with its human communities. Working alongside its traditional fishermen, and later naturalists and research scientists, has helped me to widen my perspective beyond the anthropocentric, and allowed me to bring together a small scale, local focus with a much larger one.

Both poems reproduced here are from my most recent collection, Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), which takes its title from a three-metre long 330-million-year-old fossil fish, found on the Northumberland coast. The Rhizodont belonged to the Sarcopterygian family – the lobe-finned fishes – which was the first group of vertebrates to make the transition from water onto land. The image of those ancient creatures, from which we are descended, taking that enormous evolutionary step in the era of the giant wetland plants that formed the coal measures, puts our own species and its impact into a much wider perspective. 

My second poem, Red List Species, takes its name from the Northumberland Red Data Book of endangered wildflower species, where ‘Maiden Pink’ (Dianthus deltoids) is listed. I found this flower growing on Holy Island Heugh, a cliff of the Whin Sill, an intrusive band of igneous dolerite which outcrops across Northumberland. A ‘lonnen’ is a Northumbrian word for a lane. The poem reflects on the astonishing ‘sequence of accidents’ that has allowed Life to evolve on Earth, and this particular wildflower to survive in an often inhospitable place. 

While human beings, a very recent part of Life’s evolution, are having a disproportionately destructive ecological impact, certain things give me hope. First among these is the tenacity of Life itself, and its systems of self-regulation; its feedback loops. I strongly believe that, if we pay due attention, the interaction of science, creativity and imagination with nature’s systems might eventually allow us to understand, respond to and collaborate with the planet’s processes in more positive and life-giving ways.