This month a column that has appeared for over thirty years in The Garden – the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society – has come to an end. It was written under the name Tradescant, and every month it produced a page that let slip small details of plant lore in a few paragraphs of elegant prose. It was evidently the work not only of a skilled gardener, but of a serious writer. The secret wasn’t well-kept, but now I know that Tradescant was Hugh Johnson.

Johnson at his best reminded me of the peerless Richard Jefferies, probably my favourite journalist and writer of English prose.

In case you haven’t encountered Jefferies before, this is the beginning of his finest essay Walks in the Wheat-fields:

If you will look at a grain of wheat you will see that it seems folded up: it has crossed its arms and rolled itself up in a cloak, a fold of which forms a groove, and so gone to sleep. If you look at it some time, as people in the old enchanted days used to look into a mirror, or the magic ink, until they saw living figures therein, you can almost trace a miniature human being in the oval of the grain. It is narrow at the top, where the head would be, and broad across the shoulders, and narrow again down towards the feet; a tiny man or woman has wrapped itself round about with a garment and settled to slumber.

Up in the far north, where the dead ice reigns, our arctic explorers used to roll themselves in a sleeping-bag like this, to keep the warmth in their bodies against the chilliness of the night. Down in the south, where the heated sands of Egypt never cool, there in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped and lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, in the hope, it may be, that spices and balm might retain within the sarcophagus some small fragment of human organism through endless ages, till at last the gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the mummy is folded in its cloth.

And I do not know really whether I might not say that these little grains of English corn do not hold within them the actual flesh and blood of man. Transubstantiation is a fact there.

Wrapped and lapped and wound – perfect. Appropriately enough, I first bought a Jefferies anthology from a second-hand bookshop in Cairo. Here is another beautifully composed section from that same essay, where Jefferies’ humanity and skill transforms the pastoral romanticism of the wheat harvest:

Never was such work. The wages were low in those days, and it is not long ago, either – I mean the all-year-round wages; the reaping was piecework at so much per acre – like solid gold to men and women who had lived on dry bones, as it were, through the winter. So they worked and slaved, and tore at the wheat as if they were seized with a frenzy; the heat, the aches, the illness, the sunstroke, always impending in the air – the stomach hungry again before the meal was over, it was nothing.

No song, no laugh, no stay – on from morn till night, possessed with a maddened desire to labour, for the more they could cut the larger the sum they would receive; and what is man’s heart and brain to money? So hard, you see, is the pressure of human life that these miserables would have prayed on their knees for permission to tear their arms from the socket, and to scorch and shrivel themselves to charred human brands in the furnace of the sun.

Does it not seem bitter that it should be so? Here was the wheat, the beauty of which I strive in vain to tell you, in the midst of the flowery summer, scourging them with the knot of necessity; that which should give life pulling the life out of them, rendering their existence below that of the cattle, so far as the pleasure of living goes.

Without doubt many a low mound in the churchyard – once visible, now level – was the sooner raised over the nameless dead because of that terrible strain in the few weeks of the gold fever. This is human life, real human life – no rest, no calm enjoyment of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly offered by the gods – the hard fist of necessity for ever battering man to a shapeless and hopeless fall.

Those paragraphs are as near perfection as any journalist or reporter could ever hope for. Jefferies died of tuberculosis in 1887, aged just 38. Does it not seem bitter that it should be so? You can read more of his work at Project Gutenberg, this essay is from Field and Hedgerow.