In the Mountains Green – Review
In the Mountains Green: Harvest to Harvest in the Southern Wilds, The Diary of a Country Parson, by Peter Owen Jones, April 2024. Clairview Books, ISBN: 978-1-912992-58-4, 120 pages. RRP: £12.99 (paperback)
I suspect that most of us reading this magazine would want to identify as being in one way or another climate activists. But what is it that most deeply motivates us? What essentially prompts these various forms of action which we feel so strongly to be required? Peter Owen Jones shares in this slim volume simply his abiding love of the countryside. The book is a collection of articles originally written for the magazine Sussex Life. Reflections arranged according to the twelve months of the year take us through the changing seasons. Owen Jones’ sharp eye, humour, and well informed but slightly quirky take on things kept me turning the pages.
What also drew me in was that the area he describes is the West Sussex where I also grew up. He was lucky enough to be able to return – as a Church of England parish priest – to the place where he had once been a farm boy. Each monthly reflection in this collection reveals his love of place and love of nature. The studied beauty of his prose conveys that love. So he describes midsummer day, as “a liminal time; the time when the boundaries between the worlds soften, when enchantment can seep through into human reality. And maybe for two or three nights … the air stills, the warmth holds into the evening and this damp land turns lush. It is as if everything loosens, relaxes; the leaves lilt on the trees, the air holds every echo …”
Even something as common as the cow parsley growing prolifically along the roadside verges Owen Jones notices and writes lovingly about. Amusedly he describes himself stumbling home late at night wondering if this is “when cow parsley becomes almost magical. Maybe it’s the Rioja or the moonlight, or maybe it’s both?” But he feels the magic, “… the stems are hidden in the dark and the white flower heads seem almost luminous. They hover there at the side of the path casting their spell.”
At its core is an awareness of the climate and biodiversity crisis and this informs Owen Jones’ monthly reflections, with a note of lamentation running deep throughout his book. Maybe for many of us the root from which grew our concern for the environment and now feeds our activism was an equally simple love of nature? Yet perhaps with all our busy planning, campaigning and protesting, we also need opportunities to refresh and renew that love? If so, this little book has some good things to share. For do we not share his belief that “to be the species that honours and cares for other species, says a great deal about being human”?
Andrew Norman
Green Christian Chaplain
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