Flora in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal

15 July 2017
We have travelled to Grasmere, UK, to participate in a course entitled “Wordsworth, Poetry, and Ecology,” sponsored by Baylor University, Waco, Texas. The purpose of the course is to develop the language and multi-faceted perspective necessary for responding to environmental degradation and climate change by studying the poems of William Wordsworth in critical dialogue with the contexts and places in which he wrote them. This project will identify the flora that William’s sister Dorothy mentions in her journals, and attempt to locate those flowers in the current ecology of Grasmere. For these two weeks I will be researching the books and manuscripts of the Wordsworth Trust to identify the Wordsworth’s flora and wandering about in the Grasmere landscape to photograph examples of that flora. Dorothy kept a journal for the years 1800-1803, the first four years she lived in Grasmere. She provided many beautiful accounts of her attentive observations of the natural world in those journals, mentioning flowers, mosses, shrubs, and trees more than 400 times. These two weeks I will be focused on learning more about the flora that Dorothy describes in the journals. I will also be making observations of other flora currently in Grasmere, providing a data base for the posts for other months. I will be posting the flora that Dorothy mentions in her Grasmere Journal by months in which she observed them, beginning this month, July. My hope is that other visitors to the Lake District will also submit observations to the project, Flora of Grasmere so that I can use as their observations as resources for the guide, Flora in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, after I return to Texas.

Posted on Ιούλιος 27, 2017 0608 ΠΜ by melindacreech