One of his hobbies was keeping bees. He had about fifty hives in his garden, and told us that their total population was nearly four million. "That’s as many bees as there are people in a great city. What a vast kingdom I rule!" On the first spring days he would stand contentedly for hours watching the workers sally forth and come back with the yellow crocus-pollen upon them; but at high summer he would often load some of the hives in the back of his small open car and go prospecting far afield for patches of beanflower or clover or sainfoin, and then beg the owner’s permission to leave a hive or two there so that his bees could gather the honey. It was a familiar sight to see the Rector driving down the lanes with half a dozen skeps occupying the back seat while a little swarm of his turbulent passengers rose from them like a thin smoke and swirled about his head.

I cannot resist mentioning a trifling incident, which showed his kind consideration. Whilst examining some pollen-grains on a damp surface I saw the tubes exerted, and instantly rushed off to communicate my surprising discovery to him, Now I do not suppose any other Professor of Botany could help laughing at my coming in such a hurry to make such a communication. But he agreed how interesting the phenomenon was, and explained its meaning, but made me clearly understand how well it was known; so I left him not in the least mortified, but well pleased at having discovered for myself so remarkable a fact, but determined not to be in such a hurry again to communicate my discoveries.

Quote from Barlow, Nora, editor (1969) The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, p. 66. W.W. Norton and Co., New York.
In CAP Newsletter (2009) 32(2):25.

Dust itself is nothing new. Like the circle, it is a symbol of eternal time. Long before the days of the microscope and the chemical balance, it was understood that dust is the beginning and the end of all things. Dust is always in the air we breathe, an invisible world of tiny, buoyant particles, infinitely rich in its variety, and with laws of its own. While most people think of it as being only minute bits of earth stirred up by strong air currents, it contains a host of living organisms, bacteria, molds, pollen, animals, as well as fragments of material from larger plants and animals. Except perhaps in air newly washed by rain, these particles float about perpetually sustained by gentle drifts in the atmosphere of which the human senses are scarcely aware. Even such a giant citizen of the world of dust as the plumed dandelion fruit can remain afloat indefinitely in a breeze of not more than three miles an hour. The microscopic grains of pollen and fungus spores, capable of ascent to the stratosphere, have their own curious globular symmetry, often richly marked, but with neither right nor left, top nor bottom, as fitted to the ocean of air as the fish, the fly, the elephant may be to the respective worlds in which they live. With the rising and falling of the currents, the particles of dust, living and dead, are perpetually settling out. The world of dust is never at rest...

The island of rock, or nunatak, was a crag a few acres in size a mile and a half from the edge of the icefield, and was probably not so very long ago buried under the glacier; but it now had its plants and animals, a little world enclosed in white. Beside the expected lichens and mosses were three flowering plants, pink campion, short-stemmed daisy-like blossoms and a low plant with a yellow, composite bloom. A few flies had escaped the dangers of the glacier and were on hand to do their duty to the flowers as carriers of pollen from plant to plant. In the sun toward the end of August things seemed cheerful enough, but more than three-quarters of the year must be winter.

He had pretended to be careless of the storm-but he had been so young; in secret he trembled with weariness. And he had not come through unsoiled: his heart was surely as turbid as the tarn north in the woods, when on the melting of the snows all the grey and rapid streams had emptied themselves into it. And no sooner had it cleared a little after the flood than the spruce forest round its banks came out and powdered the brown bog-water with yellow. But here at the foot of the altar he felt the Spirit of God as a cleansing wind-the mawkish pollen blown away: once more his life would be bright and open as the tarn, reflecting the sheer blue and the sun and the clouds on their passage across the sky.

He encountered diverse communities and vibrant cultural groups before they suffered postwar homogenisation. His books are filled with descriptions of different regional clothing styles, vernacular and formal architecture, speech and dialects, foods and drinks, and social customs. All the places he visits are set firmly into their historical context, when the bend of a river can recall a medieval battle, the name of a local family is linked to the Crusades, and the looming mass of a castle is a response to long-ago political struggles. Even small events are described with lyricism and nostalgia. Here is just one example. With some friends, he visited a church near a small town in Transylvania. While talking to the church organist, they were caught in a sudden storm, which he describes as follows:

There had been a warning rush and a flutter. Then all at once the branches were banging about, hitting each other like boxers, and dust and pollen flew from the boughs in a twisting yellow cloud. Grass flattened twirling and forking into channels, every poplar in the valley shuddered from root to tip like a Malay kris and the loosened hay-ricks moulted in spirals. Husks, chaff, straw, petals, young twigs, last year’s leaves and nosegays scattered out of the jam-jars on the graves were rushing up the slope in a gale which tossed the dishevelled birds about the air. The clouds had darkened, a volley of drops fell and we and the organist sheltered from the downpour under a clump of chestnuts. It stopped just as abruptly and we found ourselves, as a rainbow formed and dissolved again in a momentary foxes’ wedding, looking down, as though through a magnifying glass, at a world of hills and meadows and the flash of a river and an upheaval of distant ranges. Outraged cawing and twittering filled the branches and the air was adrift with the scent of pollen, roses, hay and wet earth.

From Patrick Leigh Fermor (1986) Between the Woods and the Water. Penguin Books. page 158.
In CAP Newsletter (2005) 28(2):4-5

A bee poised on a flower has stung a child. And so the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees are there to sting people. A poet delights in the bee sipping honey from the calyx of a flower and says the bees exists to suck the nectar of flowers. A bee-keeper, seeing the bee collect pollen and carry it to the hive, says that the object of bees is to gather honey. Another bee-keeper, who has studied the life of the swarm more closely, declares that the bee gathers pollen-dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists of the propagation of its species. The botanist, observing that a bee flying with pollen from one dioecious plant to the pistil of another fertilizes the latter, sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, remarking the hybridization of plants and seeing that the bee assists in this work, may say that herein lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first or the second or the third of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect soars in the discovery of possible purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.

From War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1869. From Volume 2, Penguin Classics edition, 1957, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, pp. 1349-1350
In CAP Newsletter (2005) 28(1):4

... The triangles, ovals, trefoils and eared circles of pollen are minutely perfect. The pollen grain of chicory - an outer and inner hexagon united by rays - is a rose-window in a shrine of lapis-lazuli. It needs no light behind it, for it illumines itself. Within is no mere painting, but a powerful principle, an active creature, the architect of next year's sky-blue temple. There is a striking unity in some flowers between the shape of the pollen grain and that of the calix and corolla. The open chicory flower and the pollen grain are both polygonal and rayed from the centre. The pollen grain of the passion flower - like a round filigree box with a lid - is almost exactly the same in construction as the centre of the flower with its enamelled cut-work of stamen, stigma and filament.

From The Spring of Joy by Mary Webb, originally published by J. M. Dent and Sons, 1917, reprinted by Wildwood House, London, 1982, pp. 94-95.
In CAP Newsletter (1995) 18(3):17

In the sea there are mysterious comings and goings, both in space and time: the movements of migratory species, the strange phenomenon of succession by which, in one and the same area, one species appears in profusion, flourishes for a time, and then dies out, only to have its place taken by another and then another, like actors in a pageant passing before our eyes. And there are other mysteries. The phenomenon of "red tides" has been known from early days, recurring again and again down to the present time - a phenomenon in which the sea becomes discoloured because of the extraordinary multiplication of some minute form, often a dinoflagellate, and in which there are disastrous side effects in the shape of mass mortalities among fish and some of the invertebrates. Then there is the problem of curious and seemingly erratic movements of fish, into or away from certain areas, often with sharp economic consequences. ...

In the discovery of the biological role played by the sea water and all it contains, we may be about to reach an understanding of these old mysteries. For now it is clear that in the sea nothing lives to itself. The very water is altered, in its chemical nature and in its capacity for influencing life processes, by the fact that certain forms have lived within it and have passed on to it new substances capable of inducing far-reaching effects. So the present is linked with the past and future, and each living thing with all that surrounds it.

From The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1952).
In CAP Newsletter (1998) 21(2):29

On the eastern shore of Admiralty Bay, at Cape Hennequin, there is a fossil forest: 16-million-year-old fossil impressions of plants embedded in ripple-marked and aqueous tuffs. These include leaves of several species of Nothofagus (tinged brownish as if they had just fallen in the autumn wind), of the gymnosperm genus Araucaria, of ferns, and of several unnamed flowering trees that drifted into a fast-flowing stream and were rapidly smothered by sediments. My fossil, which so eloquently depicts seasonality in its stone rings, is from this epoch, when Admiralty Bay had a climate and flora nearly identical to those of Patagonia today. Imagine: flowing rivers and warm, halcyon summers. Did the leaves of this tree flutter in a wind that blew off a temperate sea? Did birds forage in its boughs by day; did marsupials snuffle in its leaf litter by night? Was its pollen dispersed by wind, or was it pollinated by long-vanished insects?