Like many enthusiasms, an interest in bryophytes crept up on my dad quite organically. Ever since he donned some hiking boots as a teenager, he has wondered what grows underfoot. Today, as he visits unrecorded corners of Sussex, he is likely to be able to tell you exactly that. “It kind of forces you to go to places that you wouldn’t ordinarily go to,” he says. “Even here, an area I thought I had explored very well, I wandered up to a wood last month that I had never been to before. It was only a mile from the house and I found a moss that I have never seen in Sussex before!”
Yet my dad’s attitude to exploration has not always been so focused on the local. He held a naturally inquisitive approach to place while on holiday, especially abroad, but noticed that this was not something he necessarily retained upon return. “I think this realisation made me a lot more conscious to notice stuff locally, and then I found how much that enriched my experience of living somewhere. I also appreciate that we are lucky living where we do, only a mile from this wonderful habitat.”
As we emerge from the trees onto open heathland, I wonder what came first: a knowledge of plants or of the local landscape. In a true chicken-or-egg scenario that perhaps I should have anticipated, my dad says he can’t imagine one without the other. Indeed, questioning why plants grow where they do is crucial for a botanist. He considers everything from the acidity of the soil to the underlying geology when identifying a moss. “Even within tens of meters, a habitat can change drastically,” he says.
Like many others before him, William Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape proved particularly influential in shaping my dad’s view of local land. “I think it opened my eyes to the idea of local specificity and the impact that people have on the landscape,” he says. As we take in our surroundings, he observes that this apparently wild expanse is, in fact, very much managed. Traditionally a royal hunting ground, Ashdown Forest has since been shaped by grazing animals and conservation. “It is certainly not natural,” he states matter of factly. Human impact on the land is not something he sees as inherently bad, though due in part to agricultural and housing pressures lowland heaths are now scarce in the UK.