Green beginnings/endings

Towards the end of last summer The Old Man had a yen for a potted  dandelion plant and sent me out to procure one. There had been a spell of dry weather and the ground was hard. The rusty old trowel buckled when I tried to lever out a plant or else the tap root broke. Eventually I managed to scrabble up a dandelion from some softer soil and it's been growing, none too well, on The Old Man's table ever since, reminding me of Durer's famous Piece of Turf. Now he's gone I'll have to try and re-establish it outside again.

He hated being confined indoors too. Although he occasionally tried to venture out with walking aides it wasn't the same as striding off through the dells and glades of the Heath, or tramping the coast path for hours on end. You could say that The Old Man had a strong sense of biophilia, the term coined by Erich Fromm and then used by biologist E.O.Wilson  to describe the human need for contact with the natural world.  Not simply via pot plants, flowers, gardens, parks and nature trails, but pets, zoos, wildlife watching and our enduring fascination with life forms of all kinds, our urge to get out to the countryside/seaside and commune with nature, or else to challenge it, paint it, photograph it or bury ourselves in it. 

The firm of undertakers  responsible for The Old Man's  funeral is called Green Endings and it caters for an environmentally-conscious clientele.. However he won't  be getting a woodland burial because he long ago showed us the exact place he wanted his ashes scattered,  on a remote part of the Dorset coast where he ran wild as a boy released from school captivity.  This struggling dandelion plant will soon be getting a new lease of life in the great outdoors too.