Katherine Swift and Loren Eiseley
The English writer Katherine Swift created a garden in Shropshire and wrote about the experience in The Morville Hours, using the Book of Hours as her inspiration. In her book, she recounted some of her area's earlier history. During the Pleistocene Ice Age, Morville was covered by an ice sheet which would sometimes surge, "the ground vibrating with a roar like that of a continuous volcanic eruption", but then would retreat, the glacier sporting a "dirty white snout" with its meltwater "accompanied by the trickling of gravels, the noise of stones falling from the hillside...." These quotes are excerpted from just one striking sentence encapsulating the geologic changes which occurred in a three-hundred-year period. In The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley wrote about the "Cretaceous explosion of a hundred million years ago" that altered the course of evolution. Instead of the limited world of spores and pinecones, seeds were "travelers" that were "skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys" or wielding the "clutching hooks of sandburs." The "world of giants" was being replaced by one of color, pollen, and nectar. The Morville Hours was published in Britain by Bloomsbury in 2008 and in the United States in 2009 by Walker and Company. The Immense Journey was published in 1957 by Random House.
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AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
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