Leggings – A Naturalist's end.

Leggings – A Naturalist's end.

Another Norfolk story: I don't recall who told me this one. It's old... although perhaps still in living memory.

This concerns the Naturist Brown. I knew him once long ago. He was a father figure, a man, stout in a tweed jacket and brown trousers. He was buoyant with ideas. Simply afloat with thoughts.

He got into a tizzy after we'd been out to see the world's largest, smelliest flower in Peru. He stood me on the leaf of the flower. He claimed that there was a shortage of the common thistle – the emblem of the house of Stewart. So we went out together to find some good examples of the species, so that I could carefully gather them. I was allowed to pick them, and he wasn't.

We spent weeks carefully gathering the seeds, and drying out the seed-pods – letting the seed drop into bags so that he could leave me the seeds for when I grew up. He felt that there would be none left if we didn't conserve.

The story goes that he fell down and died one day with the seeds in his pocket. He wasn't noticed, as lost, as he was often out gathering seeds or collating new species of this and that, animal, plant, mineral. He was as interested as Darwin had been in the area surrounding Mattishall.

I never saw a copy of his will, or knew if he left me the seeds. However the local story is that where he fell the seeds in his pocket germinated, and grew. Now they are making 6 foot high.

 I don't claim to know if the shops were built by him or by someone else I knew back then on the land where he fell. Now it's used as a Church, yet was supposed to be an answer for the village to adopt. How small an end to such a famous man! To be unburied, unloved, to lay down and die without even a marker to mark his contribution to our county.

Brown left one other memory, a legacy of naming – families named themselves after Birds, to denote their status and integrity to the group, or later in his honour to colours.

The cottage of yesterdays story - I keep on thinking Quagmire – whether a name or something to do with the area.... The land is different each time I look into the garden. Like a blanket slightly ruffed up... Eerie!