Robert Macfarlane’s sensitivity to nature is immediately apparent as we start our interview walking through Emmanuel’s gardens. He delights in showing me the trees, making sure to stop off at the Japanese Plane. But the most striking stop on our tour is tucked away just behind the imposing plant – the Victorian swimming pool. Macfarlane smiles and wexplains that in the summer this is a place where “a kind of order starts to break down”, how any hierarchy between the years seems to disappear as they share a sunny day spent on the poolside. It is clear that Macfarlane’s interest in the outdoors extends beyond mere description, encompassing how human beings interact with the natural, how we respond to the outside and the words we use to describe it.

Entering his office, he warns me it is a room occupied by “a parody of an English fellow” and the space does not disappoint. Piled all over the floor are clusters of books and papers, including replies to his latest work, Landmarks, a book containing glossaries of local words for nature which are starting to fall out of use. He has already received responses from people all over the country with more words they want to see preserved. “People are interested in having a local language for specific places and what those specific places mean,” he explains, adding that he will collate their suggestions in a new glossary in the paperback edition.

His campaign to preserve language for the natural landscape has inspired “the kind of response I couldn’t have predicted”; nursery schools have started running programs getting children to use words for nature that have started falling out of use. However, he laments the example set by the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which recently removed words such as buttercup, dandelion and willow from its pages. I ask him what his vision is, what his ideal language would look like; “It seems to me uncontroversial that we should want a rich and diverse language for nature” he responds. He wants to “find and gather and aggregate these words”, to “catch and release” them into the imagination.

Macfarlane first became interested in this kind of language growing up “at the end of a country lane in Nottinghamshire” naming Hopkins, Hughes, Heany, Dillon Thomas and the Gawain-poet as influences. When he began writing in 2002 he was seeking the kind of language that could “pierce rotten diction”, something “precise but hefty.” “12 years on,” this has turned into “a larger desire to capture that language”. Losing a language for certain things and places means that we start to lose one of the most important ways we interact with those places. We not only make sense of the world through language, but it is one of the only ways we’re able to share that sense.

Macfarlane is currently working on another project, Underland, a book he says will take him about seven or eight years to write. It is distinctly different from his other works, but nevertheless one that follows a general “trajectory”, from mountaintops to underneath the earth.

“It’s a book about darkness where the others have been about light,” he says, “a book about enclosures where the others have been about freedom predominantly, and it’s a book about cities. I’ve spent 15 years coming closer and closer to cities – coming down from mountain tops to sort of city fringes which is where I’ve ended up.” He also labels it a book about death and politics. He pauses, and then, laughing, tells me that the others were actually about that as well.

“It’s very easy to become fluent in your own vernacular,” he answers when I ask why he feels the need for such a dramatic shift. “When you change terrain you have to change language as well.” Looking back over his writing, Macfarlane adds that he has begun to “notice patterns in retrospect”; in his work there are “strange forms of rhythm and recurrence.” Some of the objectives of Underland are not so new after all; he still wants to conduct a “retrieval and salvage of a sort of semi-buried language.” “Darkness is a weird experience,” he adds after a pause, “claustrophobia has an amazing, vicarious, affective power that touches people even more than vertigo”. Underneath cities is “where we dispose of things, bodies, memories, nuclear waste.” Yet it is also a place where we “retrieve precious things”, where Orpheus goes, where people make dangerous journeys to find lost things, “minerals, precious metals, language, the dead.” The metaphoric resonance of the underworld is huge. He wants to find out how to listen to it and part of this process has involved “literally making sound recordings”.

Macfarlane is also keen to tell me that he has also begun exploring new media. He is “finding [his] way into working with film”, having recently adapted the book Holloway into a short film that will appear on Vimeo. “I’m just about to start work on the script of screenplays for a big feature length documentary about oil and ice and polar bears and climate change”. He is trying not to use the words ‘climate change’ in the entire 90 minutes. Macfarlane has spent his career exploring the “communal mark making that we do as a species,” and as readers it is worth giving thought to the way we interact with nature: the stories we tell, the words we use, the responses we have and the ways we intend to look after and preserve the world around us.

Image by Chris Boland, www.chrisboland.com