I was devastated to find Pound Hill has been mown again, just as buttercups were covering the grass with their gorgeous golden flowers. The only places the buttercups were saved is where daffodils, non-wild plants, have been planted as the daffodils’ dying leaves have been carefully cut around. The buttercups that happened to be growing amongst them live on…

We have gained so many tools to keep things tidy without much effort. Without realising, our tidiness is destroying something fundamentally precious…

In my first post I mentioned that ‘buttercup’ has been taken out of the Junior Oxford Dictionary. Too few children now use the word to justify it having a place. Concern at the loss of words such as this was so great that fundraising campaigns bought every primary school a copy of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s ‘Lost Words’. This book celebrates nature such as ‘buttercups’, ‘acorns’, and ‘otter’ that are being lost from children’s vocabulary – and worlds. How ironic people raised money to get this book into primary schools, while money continues to be spent cutting down the flowers we are so concerned children no longer know the name of.

I hope we have a rethink about how we want our world to be…