A superb nature writer follows the spring as it moves north from Africa to Europe, with swallows as his guide
Between the winter and summer solstices, spring moves across Europe at about 50km per day. “We could call that four kilometres an hour for 12 hours each day,” Tim Dee writes in Greenery. “Spring, therefore, moves north at about walking pace.” The book tags along with that green edge as it advances from the Sahel, south of the Sahara, to Scandinavia between December and June. Other writers have followed a similar impulse – famously Edward Thomas in his pursuit of spring from London to the Quantocks in 1913 – but never on this scale. As the months and latitudes pass, it is clear that Dee’s journey is not just terrestrial but a bid “to live so as to avoid winter” – to outpace time itself. What’s miraculous about Greenery is that you finish it feeling he’s almost succeeded.
The citational tendency in nature writing can seem less about humility than insecurity, but Dee’s approach is that of the dinner-party host. His real-world travelling companions are frequently writers; here are Heaney, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Coleridge (who coined “greenery”) and Rilke – who, we are reminded, believed “most happenings are beyond expression”. At the head of the table, expressing everything, is DH Lawrence. “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move”, the first line of his great travel book Sea and Sardinia, might have been this one’s epigraph. Dee knows that migratory ache.
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