Amy-Jane Beer

Amy-Jane Beer (born 1970) is a British naturalist, nature writer, journalist, and biologist. Her book The Flow: Rivers, Water and Wildness (2022, Bloomsbury Publishing) won the 2023 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.

Quotes

• 19^TH JULY
  SACRED GROVES
  Ancient Rome
  The Roman term lucus (plural luci) referes to a class of woodland with special religious significance. Luci took the form of sacred groves or clearings, often featuring special trees and springs. They were places of celebration, communion and ritual offering. Well-documented examples include Lucus Feroniae in Etruria (now Capena in Lazio) and Lucus Pisaurensis (now the Adriatic city of Pesaro). The festival of Lucaria was celebrated within such groves on 19th and 20th July.
  • A Tree A Day. Batsford Books. 2021. ISBN 9781849947411.  (368 pages)

• We speak of geological time as if rock were the epitome of durability. It isn’t. Where rock meets water, it is water that wins in time, every time, and there are few places in England where this is more obviously true than the Yorkshire Dales. Hollowness is ubiquitous here; a limestone landscape riddled with caves and pots and channels. You can even watch them forming in many rivers and becks, where below most drops, you can find circular dishings in the rock, some shallow, some deep, some containing pebbles conscripted to the river’s work; swirling and scouring, day and night. ...
  It’s not necessarily the speed, volume or power of a river that wins, but its relentlessness. It needs no breath, no sleep, no pause to stretch or shake. And in time, without fuss or ceremony, it will take heat from flesh, life from limb, tree from bank, rock from channel, mountain from continent. It will hollow the land. And it demands total respect.
  • Book excerpt from The Flow (2022). Bloomsbury Publishing.

• Water reveals how small our lives are in time as well as space. Less than 0.025% of the water on our planet exists in all the world’s rivers, lakes, marshes and biological organisms combined. A river is water’s chance to flicker and dance under the sun before it returns to the deep, dark ocean, is frozen in ice or stored away underground, sometimes for hundreds of millennia. Flowing water moves mountains, it hollows and builds land. It provides the medium in which the chemistry of life recycles and reorganises energy and matter.
  • (9 August 2022) "Rivers brought me heart-shattering loss — then gave me a home". The Guardian.

• ... "wild service" ... is an ethos ... giving back to nature — but also, obviously, it's the name of one of our wonderful, native trees. ... it's, after all, the tree of generosity and hospitality that used to be grown on the grounds of pubs, because beer was brewed and flavoured with the berries ... called "chequers". So when you see a pub called "The Chequers", it's named for this wonderful wild service tree ...
  • (November 29, 2024) "Writing Trees: With Amy-Jane Beer & Wyl Menmuir". The Tree Council, YouTube. (quote at 40:58 of 1:05:19 in video)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Amy-Jane Beer on Wikipedia