I exert incredible amounts of energy in trying to see things from their own point of view rather than the human point of view.'

'This might seem like the river Harbourne but it's really a weird abstract alien stuff called water. She once spent time trying to learn the names of stars but realised that having named them, she stopped looking at them. Naming becomes a form of 'conquering a place' once it is named, you don't look at it any more. That's what I am working against.'Įven the idea of mapping a landscape has become a suspect impulse, she argues. That spreads very quickly into the whole of your life and you then can begin to lead a kind of inert life of colonizing other people – colonizing everything. We're turning it into something human rather than what it is for itself. What irritates Oswald is that when we use a word such as 'pretty' to describe it, we strip nature of its independence. It is a kind of day-long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well.' We are in the most extraordinary moment and we cannot afford to be complacent. 'You say I'm fierce but I think you have to be. A walk with Oswald is never going to be peaceful – she says she's allergic to the word. Seen through Oswald's eyes, this gently rolling Devon countryside is a battleground for survival: each plant fighting for light in the crowded hedgerow the trees whose roots cling to the river bank engaged in an epic struggle for life. I have this exercise where I force myself to look out from the flower's point of view at these great walloping humans coming down the path, and try, just try and feel it from their point of view because it's a different world to them, a fascinating hard one.' The most extraordinary colours, but I have to force my eye behind the flower. 'Yes, we were walking through stitchwort, wild garlic, campion, blue bells and buttercups. There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. And I am trying to enquire of the landscape itself what it feels about itself rather than bringing in advertising skills. 'I'm continually smashing down the nostalgia in my head.

Dart by Alice Oswald