How the Literature of Empire Shaped My View of the Natural World

This is Non-Native Species, a column by Jessica J. Lee on plants, people, and their intertwined migration stories.

I was six the first time my parents took me to Britain, where my father had grown up. I remember little of the trip, but there is an image—more of a color, really—that stayed with me. A slate sky smudged into mauve ground, a floral carpet rolling into the distance. We were on horseback, on a tourist trek across Dartmoor. My young cousins were crying because they were afraid of ponies. Muck squelched around the ponies’ hooves. But amid all of it, I felt delight: I was in a landscape I’d only ever known from books. I was entranced by the purple fields of heather.

Back home in Canada, I spent my days with Nanny and Bampy, my paternal grandparents from Wales. Bampy would pick me up from nursery, then Nan and I would read, paint, and play all afternoon. While Bampy painted with oils, Nanny taught me to create watercolor landscapes like hers: purple fields and tousled cottage gardens. We did paint-by-numbers that she’d brought from Britain, and painted from old photographs and calendars. Through these paintings, I came to know what British plants were: hollyhocks, hawthorn, gorse, gooseberries.

They gave me picture books: Beatrix Potter stories with farmers’ fields, Roald Dahl books with fantastical forests and fruits, and a handful of stories about badgers. I read avidly, but most often gazed at the pictures, the scenery behind the woodland creatures in clothes. In my suburban childhood, where the most wilderness we encountered was among the pines in our backyard, these fictional and painted places were the first I came to know and love.

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Calluna vulgaris, commonly called heather or ling, is a species of shrub that thrives on acidic, free-draining soil, like moor and heathlands. Such landscapes across the UK and northern Europe are swathed in heather’s purple-pink glow: In winter and spring, the related Erica genus of heaths bloom, and in summer and autumn heather itself comes into flower. The name Calluna comes from Greek, meaning “to sweep;” it was commonly used in brooms.

Aside from high mountains and raw coastlines, most of its habitats are classified as “semi-natural.” The Highlands of Scotland or the English moors in the north and southwest. Heather provides fodder for livestock and grouse, as well as other bird species who shelter in its scrubby growth. It thrives in a delicate balance: If overgrazed, it dies back. If the growth of scrub is not abated, it gives way to forest. Needing careful maintenance, these habitats are anthropogenic places, kept in relative stasis through the measured use of fire.

Before that day on Dartmoor, I had never seen heather grow in the wild. In the years after, I came to know it instead through the lens of literature we were assigned in high school: In Jane Eyre, where on the moor “heather grows deep and wild,” and in Wuthering Heights, where Cathy longed to be free and wild upon the land: “I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather of these hills.” In the Brontës, women roamed sublime, stony landscapes that were carved out by cold winds. Heather was ever-present.

I did not need to understand the workings of empire for it to shape me profoundly. Simply through repetition, through their representation in the storybooks and novels deemed classics of literature, these British landscapes came to signify for me wildness, romance, an ideal in nature. I paid no attention to flora outside my window, beyond the suburbs where I grew up—in a flat land of canola and corn, where forests were built of sugar maples and pines. I read so little of these plants: Though such books certainly exist, few were included in my school’s curriculum. It took me years before I realized that I’d built my notions of beauty from the stories of a distant land.

I did not need to understand the workings of empire for it to shape me profoundly. 

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When I was eighteen, I moved to Halifax on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia for university. I took to walking the wind-battered shore, breathing in rain and salt air. The ground here was rocky, grey, and studded with lupins. Standing at the tip of Point Pleasant Park, I imagined I could draw a line to Britain, thousands of miles across the sea, and the landscapes I still found myself longing for.

In L. M. Montgomery’s 1915 novel Anne of the Island, while studying in Nova Scotia, Anne and her friends visit a place analogous to Point Pleasant:

“Speaking of romance,” said Priscilla, “we’ve been looking for heather—but, of course, we couldn’t find any. It’s too late in the season, I suppose.”

“Heather!” exclaimed Anne. “Heather doesn’t grow in America, does it?”

“There are just two patches of it in the whole continent,” said Phil, “one right here in the park, and one somewhere else in Nova Scotia, I forget where. The famous Highland Regiment, the Black Watch, camped here one year, and, when the men shook out the straw of their beds in the spring, some seeds of heather took root.”

Heather in Point Pleasant was documented in 1875. Shrubs of Calluna vulgaris had likewise been found in Massachusetts, Newfoundland, and elsewhere in Nova Scotia. Botanists argued over whether it should be classed as “native” or “introduced” to the continent, where it had failed to take hold, but by the 1890s, there was consensus. Montgomery repeats this scientific literature almost verbatim: It was brought by Highland soldiers in bedding or brooms. Of all the many species in the Ericaceae family, botanists could identify Calluna vulgaris by its leaves arranged at right angles along the stem, by late-summer flowers along a single shoot, ending with a flower. But beyond botany, Montgomery reveals an emotional taxonomy by which heather was understood: as romantic, joyful, and longed-for.

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When I was twenty-one, I moved to the UK to study, with little intention of ever returning home to Canada. I was studying landscape aesthetics, and had in mind a life of walking and writing in the places I’d long idealized. As much as it embarrasses me now, I was moving in search of beauty. But I wasn’t moving to the countryside.

From my London flat, the density of the city and its busyness were a shock. I missed open spaces and trees. A few months in, I moved nearer to the green I craved, by Hampstead Heath. Until that point, I hadn’t been to the Heath, but I’d heard of it from books and movies. I’d imagined a rugged, open land. What I found was no longer a “heath” so-to-speak: It was fields of rolling hillsides, overgrown hedgerows, and shaded woodland.

In her essay “Small Bodies of Water,” the New Zealander-born writer Nina Mingya Powles writes of moving to England: “I learn the names of trees that have featured in the pictures of stories I’ve read since childhood but never seen in real life. The words sound almost mythical to me now: alder, hazel, yew, ash.”

I knew this sensation, too: The day I first saw a hedge in bloom and put a name to it—hawthorn, a word I’d turned over in my mouth many times before. Common hawthorn grew plentifully in Canada—having been introduced by British settlers—but until I saw one in Britain, I did not know how to recognize it. I learned to pluck young leaves of sorrel, sour on the tongue, and pricked my fingers picking berries from brambles. The entire place seemed drawn from my imagination.

Hampstead Heath swallowed me up. I wrote a PhD about it and the ways in which such landscapes transcended materiality and became idealized. I came to understand where its heathland plants had gone. Until the mid-nineteenth century, heather and gorse grew in abundance. But with sand, gravel, and clay extraction—to build the city around it—these acidic grassland species suffered. With recreation and the end of grazing, heather gave way to woodland. Not once did I see heather grow wild on the Heath’s hills. Instead, as if to sate my longing, I had its shape tattooed on my skin, close to the ribs.

Then, at twenty-eight, I moved to Germany—to the flat terrain of Berlin. I spoke some German, but did not feel particularly at home. On weekends, I took to walking in the countryside, swimming in lakes hidden in a monotony of pine forests. Somehow, among those trees, I found something familiar. A trace of my childhood in the pines and heather in profusion. Between the red-green of the trees, the forest floor shone purple.

Perhaps it was living somewhere removed from the cultural frame of Britain and the Commonwealth: I came to love the land around Berlin and began to wonder how it was that I’d carried that single ideal of natural beauty so long. In my doctorate, I’d interrogated notions of British landscape, and I understood their potency and nationalistic inflections intellectually. But it was only once I’d moved away myself that I sensed how deeply embedded they were in me.

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In late 2019, I was invited to read on a nature writing panel in Yorkshire. Afterwards, I got to talking with another of the authors, the poet Zaffar Kunial. He was poet-in-residence at Haworth, once home of the Brontës, and invited me to visit the Brontë Museum with him the next morning.

But it was only once I’d moved away myself that I sensed how deeply embedded they were in me.

At 8:45, we boarded the “Brontë Bus,” which ferries tourists and locals across the moors between Hebden Bridge and Keighley. The bus drove swiftly, blurring damp hills outside the windows. Ramblers in rain gear climbed on and off at stops along the Pennine Way. We talked over the noise of it, naming plants that wove through our writing. Zaff told me about a laburnum tree in his childhood garden. I told him about my love of heather, and confessed that in recent years—as if to make up for the years I’d idealized it—I’d stopped writing about Britain. Since I’d moved away, Brexit had happened. Britishness was not a comfortable, cozy thing.

“It’s bound up with my questions about beauty,” I said, “how England takes up space in the cultural imagination even if you aren’t from here.” Underneath, I knew the discomfort we were pointing towards: words like empire, colony, or migrant. The bus jolted to a stop and we disembarked.

Haworth is built of greying stone—quarried from local valleys—with a cluster of cottages set along a steep hill. At the top sits the parsonage where the Brontës once lived and wrote. In the museum’s archive, the staff brought out rarely seen letters from Anne and Branwell, and books that had belonged to the sisters. We looked closely at each item. As a writer, I ought to have been overjoyed, but I wanted most of all to be outside, in the wind and rain. The archive was warm and cozy; the outside better suited the place I’d imagined.

After, we wandered into the fields where Emily once walked. A cold wind cut over the hills, so I zipped my jacket and wrapped my scarf doubly around me. Zaff wore his wool coat unbuttoned, as if immune to the weather. Frost on the grass crunched as I stepped to avoid puddles. We talked about the Brontës, of course, but mostly discussed his poetry, my books, wanting to write things and failing to. We talked about our hopes. At the end of our visit, Zaff said he’d stay there that day to write, feeling inspired again. I felt it too. Something between longing for a place and longing to write: I felt it so rarely.

I rode the bus back alone, staring out the window. Dark stones and reds and oranges dotted the slopes. The heather had turned to rust by then; it was too late in the season for purple. My worries about Britain echoed in my mind. But I asked myself then to look and keep looking. Was there not something here of vast beauty? I knew that somehow the heather in these hills had shaped me, though I’d never set foot here before.

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