The Seeds of Magic

On magic: finding it, losing it and finding it again in a bean.

On Christmas morning when I was five and he was eight, my brother explained to me and to our parents how he’d devised a series of observational experiments to prove Father Christmas did not exist. Either that, or the Big FC was a prodigious thief who stole the clementines he gifted from our own fruit bowl and wrapped our gifts in the paper from the top of our airing cupboard. Yes, my brother counted the clementines on Christmas Eve and measured the thickness of the paper roll.

My mother did nothing to preserve my belief. She had her own childhood trauma rooted in the discovery that Father Christmas was a sham and that all the adults in her life had lied to her to maintain the fiction of his existence. She was quite happy for my brother to rip off the band-aid and bring an end to her own complicity in the lie.

I don’t remember feeling especially upset. Maybe I was relieved that the taciturn man in a dingy corner of the local garden centre who’d previously been introduced to me as Father Christmas; a man whose cheap red nylon suit and beard smelled strongly of cigarettes and beer; would not be descending our chimney and wandering the house unsupervised. Better no Santa than that Santa.

As a child, I believed in fairies and in magic. I believed in them violently, in the way that children do when the desire to believe has to override nagging internal doubt and sibling scepticism. I wanted to believe in magic. But I knew that if I wanted to maintain my belief, I’d better not involve my brother.

The waning of that belief came with age and, I think, with the involvement of other people. Magic was a private belief. Not something to be shared. Teenagehood was hard. I was the kid who arrived at secondary school still sucking her thumb. My parents and primary teachers had tried to cure me of the habit without success. I had been bribed, cajoled, and threatened with dire tales of rabbit-teeth and head-braces to no avail. 

It was my first-year secondary science teacher who made me stop. In her first lesson, she shamed me so brutally and so publicly that a lifetime habit was ended in an instant. 

In that moment of shame, I knew two things. Thumb-sucking had irrevocably separated me from my new peers. And I hated science. I didn’t really hate science. I hadn’t given it a chance. But I hated science lessons and withdrew from the subject.

It was only when I left school that I found my way back to science. Not in a lab or a classroom or by observing the behaviour of fictional childhood characters. But through the magic of nature.

Island magic

In the middle of my gap year, I went with a school friend to an island nature reserve off the coast of Wales. Dulani had been to the island on a final-year school field trip. She really was a scientist and would go on to study medicine. I was just there because I didn’t know what else to do with the second half of my gap year and it seemed like a nice idea. I knew I liked nature and being outdoors, but really I was a city kid who had had little real access to nature beyond dog walks in the local woods and what had been sanctioned and supervised by my parents. 

We had a great week, bashing bracken, counting gull chicks and building fences. At the end of that week, when Dulani went home I stayed another week. At the end of the second week, I went home to collect my belongings and came back to the island for four months. I finally left only a week before the beginning of my first term of art school, when I really couldn’t put it off any longer.

It was the first time in my life, and the first place, where I completely relaxed. I discovered and released my sillier side. I laughed harder and longer than I had ever laughed before, stayed up through entire nights, and ran around after dark playing hide and seek with people my own age and older who didn’t seem to find me abhorrent or worthy of nothing but shame. The island was the safest and wildest place I could have landed. It was exactly what I needed.

That in itself was magic. 

The island is where I learned to breathe. It’s where I learned to trust people and the first place I began to differentiate between those who were worthy of my trust and my time, and those with whom I should take care. I learned about real friendship. I learned to cook and about the value of food in building community, and about the power of a hug to change the world. I also learned the basics of ecology and observational scientific practice without realising that’s what I was doing. 

I spent happy, happy hours with my eye glued to a telescope, my legs cramping underneath me, observing guillemots, razorbills and puffins; matching ringed pairs in my notebook, watching the flirtations between non-breeding pairs on the rocks below their cliffside apartment complex. I spent days at a time identifying and meticulously mapping vegetation, learning more about botany and plant ID in a couple of months than I had done in five years of science education at one of the best schools in London. 

When I returned to London to start my design degree, I also started evening classes in ecology and conservation. There I met one of my dearest and longest-standing friends. I began volunteering on a local reserve where I made more good and long-term friends. In time, after a period of work as a freelance designer, I found myself managing the volunteer programme for that same charity while also studying part-time for an MSc in Ecology and Conservation. And later, working as the communications designer for the local records centre, helping turn data into stories about the value of nature.

There is another kind of magic in learning. Once I’d left school, I found that magic in many places; in exploring the connection between human and landscape history and in learning to read that history in the bumps and rolls of the landscape; in understanding how plants work, how they change their environment and how different communities succeed each other over time. I found great joy in applying those lessons to and drawing comparisons with the human world. I also found immense joy in just being in nature.

Magic vs. Pragmatism 

Over the years, I turned a love of nature into a career. In the process, as I learned more about the scientific process and about the importance of objectivity and evidence-based decision-making, the magic slowly faded. I still loved nature and wanted to protect it, but I could see a widening gulf between the joy that had brought me into that world and the pragmatism that was necessary to make the argument for its protection rock solid. 

I was trained to actively detach from magic and adopt objectivity instead; that detachment was an essential part of the scientific process and the only way to an objective truth. If we wanted to win arguments, we had to be squeaky clean and above accusations of bias. Maybe. But detachment is so not a way to connect with people. 

And I’m not convinced that we didn’t, on occasion, conflate detachment with indifference. 

This was my biggest frustration. While we preached to the converted within our safe silos of existing expertise and told ourselves how well we were doing, the world outside our bubble didn’t give a crap. I didn’t realise how few craps they gave until I left that world and engaged more fully with “real” (non-ecologist) people.

It wasn’t a love of academia and the scientific process that brought me into ecology. It was a love of nature that brought me into the academic world. As a kid, I was drawn to the magic of nature, to the wind in my hair, the sunshine on my face, the reflection of light on dewdrops. I was not drawn to nature’s economic value or the data that demonstrates our dependence on natural systems. I fell in love with the trees and bugs and flowers in our garden and in the parks and woods near our home, not with a bank of data about all the trees and bugs and flowers across the country. I’m sure the same was true of my colleagues. But somewhere along the line, many of them had become so specialist that they had forgotten the importance of their own origin stories. They had forgotten what it was like not to know this stuff. 

Maybe they had always had a degree of involvement in the natural world? Maybe they had had the privilege of being born into families and environments where access to nature was a given? Maybe they had never known what it was like to be excluded from nature?

I tried to tread a fragile line between science and humanity, to convince my academic colleagues that data alone was not enough to win hearts and minds. I tried to remind them that it wasn’t data that drew them in to first love that world.

I failed. Or I succeeded only minimally. 

And so I stepped away. I could no longer keep cycling through the same internal conversations and ignoring the mass of the population outside our rarified world where no one really gave a shit about the “important work” we were doing. Not because they were fundamentally uncaring. But because they had been given no relatable reason to care. They had never had that moment of magic that caused them to lean in and learn about nature as more than just a pretty/muddy/damp backdrop to life. 

I didn’t know what the answer was. But I seemed to be the only one asking the question.

It was only when I stepped outside that world that I realised how bad the problem was. How little “normal” people cared about this stuff and how little relevance it had to their day-to-day lives. How poorly we had all been educated about humanity’s role as part of the ecological whole. 

When I left, I slipped into a deep and abject grief. At my failure to change the world. And at the loss, not just of a way of life but of my whole community. A community that didn’t seem to notice my absence. I reached out to a few people and heard nothing back. I didn’t try again.

So deep was my grief that my usual solace in nature felt closed to me. Where once I would have walked my way back to myself through woods and fields, every step I took in the outside world was a reminder of what I had lost. Nature was no longer mine. It had lost its magic.

It’s only writing this now, some ten years later, that I realise how profound that loss was. 

The Magic Bean

In the intervening years, I’ve been through many changes in place and circumstances. I picked up work in the commercial sector where I struggled with a different type of disconnect. I moved out of London; moved home several times; moved in with my partner; tried and failed to be a film student; renovated a beach hut; and renovated a flat where I created a garden from a wilderness, only to have to sell the flat when Covid hit. I finally found Home in the house where we are now. 

Here, I built another garden. I built a studio in that garden with my own hands. I taught myself about basic building methods, about insulation, roofing and cladding with the help of YouTube, and built up an enviable library of power tools. I got a dog with the intention of taking him on long walks only to find that my furry buddy had deformed feet and, while he loved a good snuffle, long walks were off the cards. I taught myself to forage and grow food and preserve the results.

It was in this new garden that I found magic again. It wasn’t a huge moment. It was a very small moment that I found in the smallest of places. 

I found magic in the core of the seed of a climbing French bean. 

Have you ever considered the miracle that is a seed? I mean really considered it?  The tiny package that contains all the potential for an explosion of life? Every time I’ve grown for food, on an allotment or at home, I’ve always started with beans. They’re easy to germinate, space-efficient, fast-growing, self-reliant, and oh-so-productive. All the time I was inhabiting my ecologist’s brain, I never really took the time to appreciate quite how extraordinary the transformation from seed to vine to fruit to seed really is. I understood the biological process (kind of). But it wasn’t until I stepped away from my ecology head for a while that I saw just how incredible that cycle really is. 

During the first lockdown, I threw myself into the garden. It became my safe space, my sanctuary and my primary tool for exercise and mental stability. I converted the back section of the back garden into a small allotment and turned the whole of the front garden over to food production.

I planted seeds and filled the bedroom windows, top to bottom, with shelving to house the tiny pots. When, after a week of careful nurturing and daily checks my bean seedlings pushed their heads above the soil surface for the first time, I felt my heart lift and I wept with relief that the most basic functions of a broken world still worked.

I documented every moment of those early days wanting to preserve that fresh sense of wonder. 

How a single seed can grow and grow into a plant that will feed me for an entire season still blows my mind. There is no greater joy in life than to pick a handful of beans from your own back garden, cook and eat them in that same garden while watching the next handful of beans grow.

When I miss a few days, when I slip into one of my frequent attention comas and fail to keep on top of the harvest, the plant will begin to slow its production, turning its attention to converting those soft edible shells into the miraculous hard seeds that will perpetuate this process. 

Yes, I know it’s not literal magic. I know my bean is the product of millennia of evolution, an agricultural revolution, and selective breeding by thousands of generations and agricultural companies. But that doesn’t detract from the basic miracle that is the existence and diversity of life. I don’t mean miracle as in created by God. 

It’s better than that. Better than a magician’s trick. More powerful than an instant miracle conjured from nothing on a whim. It’s the existence of something so unlikely after so much time, so many adaptations, mutations and a Googol of different possibilities that ended in This One Bean. In my garden. In my hand. In the soil. Growing to feed me and my small family. How is that not magic?

It’s definitely more magical than some creepy dude in a red suit in a 1980s garden centre. 

Nature wins.

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This is where I’m supposed to ask you a specific question to generate engagement and conversation. But, honestly, I’d just like to hear from you, whatever you have to say. Hello, bean lovers. Leave me a comment and let’s chat.