She lived on the margins, close to the river which latecomer humans called the Thames. She could be found just above the boggy land where the Tyburn floods into the larger river. That presence of marsh gave her one of the many names she acquired through time.

 She was not delicately pretty, like the speedwell. She did not reflect the sun in discs of polished gold, like the buttercup. Her seeds did not form parachuted globes, like dandelion clocks which humans could puff and disperse with a wish. She was wild and hardy, begetting progeny almost effortlessly. And unlike some of the grasses, which were tamed, bulged and subsumed into human territory, she was mostly left to herself by the people of Charing and other nearby settlements. The huge grunting pigs which belonged to their farms chose other plants to forage.

 But when people’s joints were aching, they called on her to soothe away their pains. When they were tired, they dissolved her leaves in boiled water, and as they drank they could feel her potency spread through their body. They carried her on journeys knowing that evil spirits and wild beasts would quail at her presence.

 When people were tormented by nightmares, they called on her aid. After they had diffused and ingested her, the knowledge that she was travelling with them through the night steered their sleep-journey away from monsters and tossing tempests, into dreams that flowed gently into each other like the lapping waters of a harbour.

 I say ‘she’. When I watch the gypsies smoking her, I might say ‘he’, although the smokers include women. As do those who use her to brew beer and those who drink, carouse and laugh, enjoying the appealingly bitter flavour provided by her leaves. I could say ‘he’ or ‘she’, or I might say ‘they’ because she is both, and multiple. This single shoot just showing above the earth is breathtakingly plural, the product of millions of forebears, holding her descendants in the 50,000 or more seeds produced by her tiny red-brown flowers.

 But I refuse to look at this vigorous life and use the term ‘it’. Because she is an emanation of God-energy, brought forth by sun and water, raised on earth that is star-dust and the fertile refuse of plant, animal and human history. She is part of a life-giving web of connectivity which extends into the cosmos. She sustains the fluttering life of moths and butterflies. She rides on the wind to survive and take a new form.

 Mugwort. A boggy name, rooted in the Norse muggi, or marsh.  Or perhaps a variant of mycg, the Old English word for midge, since she is said to repel certain insects. Also crone wort or gypsy tobacco. But these names are labels attached by humans: throat-sounds, ink-squiggles. They do not impinge on her green life.

 But the human city did impinge. It was advancing, re-ordering growing spaces to serve its hunger, its wars, even its aesthetic of pleasure. After huge time-spans of summer flowering and winter withering, human will colonised this water-meadow and its surrounding woods at a break-neck pace. First a king expelled the pigs and made the area spreading upwards from the river a park for his deer: he built a red-brick palace in the fields, on the site of a former leper hospital dedicated to St. James the Less. When humans construct these strange hierarchies, they never want to be associated with the ‘lower’, so the description ‘the Less’ disappeared from the palace’s name. The initials H.A. on one of chimney-pieces locate this moment in human time, recording his brief obsessive love for the wife he sent to the scaffold.

 One of his successors called James drained the fields and called the area a royal park, open to ordinary people. Plants of the bog like the Marybud, or marsh marigold, disappeared. But Mugwort liked her roots to be moist but not drenched, and she had already spread her seeds upward to the very edge of the woods. So this native being flourished, while foreign and tamed things were imported into the park. James introduced camels and elephants, crocodiles and exotic birds in a cage, which gave their name to a walkway. He imported a bed of tamed flowers that stood outside the palace, flowers which stood in stiff rows like sentries and seemed overblown, their colours modified from their wild counterparts as if tinged with human dyes. These humanoid blooms watched their cousins flowering and seeding in the field, just as the bright-feathered creatures, captured in a far country and reduced to objects, looked beyond the aviary bars and staring human faces to their kin flying free in the sky.

 The flowers of this field were living the God-spirit which was dispersed through the cosmos at the beginning of time. Instinctively, inevitably, they participated in the Creation-dance. At times they struggled to survive, but their existence was also a hymn of praise to a distant star. They transformed sun, earth and water into paper-thin sculptures of light, engaging in a subtle process of exchange with other beings such as birds of the air and underground fungi.

But now other fields in the country were being gashed by cannon-balls. Crows were feasting on human corpses. One icy January day, when Mugwort was resting under frost-hardened grass, the man who was king of the whole islanded land-mass walked out of St. James’s Palace heavily guarded, followed by a troop of drummers keeping a slow, ominous beat. One of his last wishes was to walk though St. James’s Park on his way to his execution at Whitehall.

 There followed a brief re-wilding, although no-one would have called it that at the time. The new leader made the palace into a barracks and announced that ordinary people could cut down any tree in the park for firewood. When an account states that the park ‘fell into disrepair’ and was ‘barren’, you can be sure that Mugwort and her wild friends flourished.

 Then a thrust of time that according to human reckoning was a few centuries, but which to Mugwort and other wild beings was one long experience of being hunted down, poisoned, forced into hiding. The expanse which had sounded with the cries of marsh birds was no longer a community of freely interacting beings. It became the brain-property of landscape-architects, a formal plan on a piece of paper, a notion of orderly recreation. These human concepts were translated into lawns of tamed grass and formal avenues of trees. Later the drainage canal became a lake with imported wildfowl and a cottage for a bird-keeper.

 The upper field was colonised by slabs and blocks of human-made materials which choked the ground and rose into the sky. Spreading out from an orderly den called St. James’s Square, the humans built their warrens. Some constructions, like the square and the spired building which rose above it, were neighboured by small patches of green. But the warren kept expanding as if it had a will of its own, and there were colonies known as slums where people were cooped together as if by a harsh gaoler determined to separate them from their green relatives. These were places of pale thin faces and fetid stinks. The river, which had once been described as ‘silver Thames’ was now brown with human excrement.

 Mugwort was too tall to lurk unnoticed at the edge of the park, or to peep between paving-stones like her friends the mosses. She could use the wind to escape. But if she landed in the human space known as a garden, she was prised from the earth by a heavy implement or doused in burning poison. She was cunning, able to take new forms. Sometimes the human was applying the deathly spray to her already retracting body while she was riding away on the wind in a thousand seeds. These seeds found places where she might survive: ground known as waste and the banks of railways. An exile, she lived on the margins.

Then came a war that uprooted and exterminated whole peoples. To survive, the islanded landmass had to produce food for its inhabitants. All over the country, wild land was ploughed and farmed. The paid gardeners had less time to weed, which meant that certain wild natives returned to the margins of ornamental parks, hidden under trees or by fences. The Directorate of Medical Supplies issued an extraordinary appeal to people living in or near London: for foxglove, male fern, stinging nettle, dandelion and coltsfoot, so-called weeds which had been eradicated from London parks and gardens while all the while these healing plants had been shipped into Britain from other countries.

In their extremity, the human dwellers seemed to be learning from their plant and animal cousins. The natural rhythm of waking and sleeping returned, because the night was no longer polluted by artificial light. Like some animals, humans learned to burrow away from danger. In a warren of tunnels known as Piccadilly Station, large and small humans would descend at night to sleep in safety underground, emerging at daybreak like wood mice hungry for light and food.

 Then, one autumn day, a machine far heavier than any crow flew high above the city. Right above the steepled building which crested the river-slope, it dropped several heavy objects. Rounded objects pointed at one end like seeds, falling, gathering speed. They exploded on the church and its attached house, bringing death, shattering a roof which was created in love centuries ago. Grief and a heart-rending awareness of loss continued to explode from that site.  

 The explosion bared the earth in the nave. It was poor soil, having been suffocated for centuries. All over London, human-made explosions were creating patches and chinks of new earth.

 Mugwort was flourishing in many waste places, but let us focus on one plant on a canal bank. And then focus on one of her thousands of seeds. Fellow-seeds had used water to travel. But in this seed, mugwort rode on a gust of wind, swirled and hovered, then powered forward in a wind-blast. She was soon riding above slate and brick and concrete, substances that spelt death to her. As she got closer to the heart of the city, a dangerous heat emanated from the huddle of buildings and press of people and above all from the gas-farting metallic monsters. Luckily this pushed her higher into the air in a hot curving current.

 When she dropped, it was into a tiny patch of blessedly cool earth in the centre of the bombed nave.