Ancient-Timbered Oak: Nature Study in Primary Classical Education

Years ago an Irish friend and I were on a study trip near the ruins of old Tusculum, a Roman town perched on the picturesque ridge where Cicero’s villa once stood. One afternoon we set out on a walk. The paths we took were muddy, marred here and there by hoof and tusk. That day the springtime sun poured through a half-evergreen, half-budding canopy overhead. My friend’s face, too, radiated with what could only be described as sheer delight. He began to murmur something. It was, it turned out, from Virgil—not from his well-known epic, the Aeneid, but from one of his less-read pastoral works. I will admit that I cannot remember any of the lines my friend recited. If they were from the Georgics, then a few could have been these:

                                                           iubebo …
aestibus at mediis umbrosam exquirere vallem,
sicubi magna Iovis antiquo robore quercus
ingentis tendat ramos, aut sicubi nigrum
ilicibus crebris sacra nemus accubet umbra …

In other words, the poet counsels us to

seek at day’s hottest a shadowy vale,
where some vast ancient-timbered oak of Jove
spreads his huge branches, or where, ilex-thick,
a dark grove in holy shade reposes.

                 (Virgil, Georgics III, ll. 331–334, tr. Greenough modified)

Virgil’s love of the natural world is not the love of some abstract ‘Nature’. It is far more poetic, and therefore more concrete. The inhabitants matter. Thus, he tells of the kingfisher (alcyon) who makes the riverbanks echo with song, or the finch (acalanthis) who chirps in the brambles. He marvels at the boar (aper) and the lioness (leaena), the willow (salix), the swampgrass (ulva), the elm (ulmus), and the common and the holm oak (quercus and ilex).

In the Garden the first man was given a vocation to name things. Virgil, too, seems to delight in that Adamic legacy of naming. My Irish friend certainly does. That day near Tusculum, the woods were as alive to him as they were to the Roman bard. And they were alive with particular names and sounds—very nearly with faces.

In classical poetry, then, we find a love of nature textured and particularised. Yet it must be admitted that for hundreds of years nature study as such did not form a significant part of the classical curriculum. Overwhelmingly literary and mathematical, nineteenth-century public schools such as Arnold’s Rugby treated the study of the natural world at the margins or not at all. One memorable young character in Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) chafes at the lack of nature study by day. He therefore fills his extracurricular hours roaming the Warwickshire countryside and assembling a collection of plants, rocks, and animals, live or dead. His room—through which the plot carries the main character, at some risk to life and limb—is part museum, part zoo, and part chemistry laboratory. This eccentric but winsome boy doubtless benefited from his formation in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Yet even a passionate classicist cannot help but feel his frustration. His own passion for the natural world ought to have been fed, too. It was instead neglected and reduced to the position of a somewhat disreputable hobby, and, at any formal depth, deferred until his university years.

That historical neglect has several reasons. Divide the study of nature into two modes for a moment: empirical science (think of microscopes and taking measurements in laboratories), which then fed the growth of new theoretical sciences, and nature study (think of watching and listening to plants and animals, especially in the outdoors).

Empirical science is largely a modern phenomenon. It should be no surprise that it did not form part of the traditional curriculum or that it had to prove itself and to fight its way into (say) Rugby School. To be clear from the start: it is a good thing that it arrived there in the end. Lest there be any doubt, classical educators are for penicillin.

What I am calling ‘nature study’, however, is more basic and more ancient. It is a participation in the tradition of that Adamic act of naming: of patient observation and discriminate differentiation of things seen with the eye and heard with the ear. It is a tradition of listening and of watching, of gathering and of sketching. It means the habit of picking out, naming, describing, and knowing (say) a beech tree. It means knowing the beech as something different to the ash, or the kestrel to the sparrowhawk. This is nature study as a studium of—that is, keen attentiveness to—the world around us.

In contrast to the long lack of laboratory lessons, the absence of this kind of nature study from the old Rugby curriculum is probably only indirectly related to the rise of modern empirical science. One reason may have to do with the fact that, by definition, in non-industrial societies people live close to nature. If you were growing up in 1800, chances are good that would have spent plenty of time touching living plants and harvesting them. You would probably have touched a living animal almost every day, too, and even had to kill one every now and again. From your grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, siblings, and neighbours you would have learnt the kinds of livestock and beasts of your village or valley, the names of flowers and grasses and their virtues. These elders would have taught you which could be eaten and which were dangerous, when to plant what sorts of vegetables and fruits, what the various trees and hedge-brambles and mosses and mushrooms were and what they were good for—which wood was best for firewood or house framing, for instance. You would have felt an early frost underfoot and known what that meant for this year’s harvest and the next. You would have known which stars to expect overhead at Christmas or Easter, or how to find your way if compelled to wander at night.

Of course, some of the lore that clung to particular plants, animals, and natural phenomena was closer to superstition than to science. But even to have occasionally incorrect beliefs about these things you first need to be able to recognise them and differentiate one from another.

That ability, that practiced knowledge, was precious. It must have made the world outside the door thick and real, vibrant and textured, layered and rich. Nor did it happen by accident. It was painstakingly developed over centuries and painstakingly transmitted from generation to generation.

Until, of course, it wasn’t. That ability, broadly speaking, is gone. Yes, there are occasional trickles of continuity in certain communities or in movements like the traditional Boy Scouts (or, indeed, in refreshingly anachronistic families like that of my Irish friend, where woodcraft and Latin poetry both enjoy pride of place). It looks like a fantastical superpower to those of us who do not have it.

For the most part, we have emptied ourselves out of the countryside. We are estranged from the land and from what lives on it. Life is urbanised or suburbanised. With children spending hours and hours on a screen every day at home, they have, or find, or make no time to engage with the natural world even if they should happen to have access to it. I am afraid that for most of us the real world of trees and plants and birds and mammals and insects is little more more than a desktop background or a three-dimensional screensaver that pops up between indoor screen sessions.

The best analogy I have for this comes from the conservationist movement of the mid-twentieth century, when Rachel Carson issued her dire prediction of an impending ‘silent spring’. She opened her eponymous book (from 1962) with a cautionary fable:

On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

… No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

Carson was warning about the effects of excessive pesticide use. Happily, efforts since then have kept alive plenty of species who still sing in the springtime. We have not, ultimately, killed off all the birds. Yet Carson’s words could just as well be describing another silent spring that ‘the people have done themselves’. Intentionally or not, our cultural and familial practices have all but killed off our senses, stopped our ears and blinded our eyes.

Thus, while the trees of the Tusculan hills could still sing to my bucolic Virgilian friend, who answered them in turn by their names, I regret to admit that the woods were to me a beautiful blur, and, for all the sunshine that day, they were mute and foggy by comparison. His walk was a concert. Mine was a silent spring.

Schools participated in this silencing. Books from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest that, alongside the rise of instruction in the empirical sciences, there was an appetite for a formal, schoolroom version of the traditional transmission of natural wisdom, one based on the identification and observation of species. But at some point the schoolroom interest in nature study seems to have evaporated. By the 1990s and early 2000s at the latest, mastery of the names and ways of being of local flora and fauna seem to have all but vanished from primary curricula. Perhaps unintentionally, the presentation of general processes (think of the water cycle, the cardiovascular or respiratory systems, and so on) replaced naming and knowing the concrete things in the world around us as we see them. It is not that those processes are not important. It is wonderful to know about molecules in the bloodstream and the subterranean phases of the water cycle, or the way physics and electricity chemistry and biology work at a level we cannot see with the naked eye. This side of science emphatically does have a place in a neo-classical curriculum. But such disciplines need not be rushed. If anything, pupils will go deeper in them if they have a foundation in the world they can see and touch. If it is a good thing to know about molecules, it would be a tragedy if that knowledge could only come at the cost of not knowing the roe from the muntjac, the maple from the chestnut.

The tragedy is not inevitable. In fact, it is a problem that classical education seeks to address. So what do school heads, teachers, home-educating parents, and other leaders in today’s neo-classical education movement do about our alienation from nature?

The classical approach to nature study is directly analogous to the classical approach to literary culture and mathematics. The classical pupil learns each discipline just as a blacksmith’s apprentice would have learned his trade long ago, or as musicians and athletes still do today. In the humanities, teachers aim not merely to put old stories and songs in front of young children, but to bequeath to them a literary, philosophical, artistic, and religious heritage in such a way that will be truly theirs for life: namely, by ensuring that, through practice, they commit much of it to long-term memory. Teachers aim not merely at the their pupils’ understanding of mathematical concepts, but at their fluency in those operations, and so they require of them daily practice until mastery is attained. They aim in geography not at a vague sense that there are countries out there in the world, but at the ready ability to find them on a map: the countries, their locations, their shapes and capitals, too, are memorised. And classical teachers and parents make the bold claim that, while some eventual specialisation is as inevitable as it is healthy, just as salutary, but far rarer, is that old ideal of the well-rounded lady or gentleman whose specialisation is built upon a robust general culture always ready to be called up to make sense of the world outside their heads.

The analogy, therefore, is this. If in our childhood we can memorise ancient Latin proverbs or verses of Scripture, if we can learn to spot a Rembrandt or pick out a melody of Beethoven’s, if we can become reliably proficient, at speed, in mental multiplication and long division, then surely we can use the same years to learn to tell a birch from an aspen or a lark from a swallow.

In nature studies, contemporary classical teachers tend first to feed children’s innate wonder at the beauty of the natural world, be the local environment one of woodlands or meadows, coast or mountains. As they do so, they also give children the tools they need to name what they see there, and so to make the landscape their own.

Hand-sized flashcards or larger posters presented one at a time make a good start. So, too, do recordings of birdsong. The teacher may first introduce the picture or the sound of animal or plant accompanied by oral descriptions of distinguishing marks and habits. Periodic checks for recognition will help: present a picture or sound and watch the hands go up as they try to identify it correctly. (Kids really do have fun with this sort of thing. There is a reason the game Memory is such a perennial classic!)

Depending on the creature in question and the outdoor possibilities near their schools or homes, pupils may be set tasks collecting, observing, listening to, watching, and drawing real specimens—leaves, insects, tracks, birds, the odd mammal remains, and so on. A school may organise an astronomy night or advise parents on how to do find constellations while stargazing at home. Having them keep a nature journal with blank pages for careful sketching is an excellent gift for life, imparting as it does both the skill of drawing, a knowledge of nature, and the habit of sustained attentiveness.

In the span of a few years a neo-classically educated child will make hundreds of friends in the natural world. A walk in the woods or the meadows, Ordinance Survey map in hand or no, will not be just a beautiful blur, but a rich Virgilian poem: a tapestry of bright and variegated colours, or a polyphonic chorus sounding in all its grandeur, now briefly discordant, now suddenly resolving again into lush harmonies. And when the pupil does go on to the more laboratory-oriented empirical and theoretical sciences, that new knowledge will be grounded in this firm, vivid, living foundation, rather than floating like a crystalline abstraction in an ethereal, intangible and placeless void.

Our distant forebears, participating in Adam’s vocation, gave us names for the concrete things that populate the world around us. Where those names have been forgotten by recent generations in and out of school, today’s revival of classical education offers us a way to pronounce them once more, and so to call them to life again.

*  *  *

A note on the Memoria curriculum and field guides to the flora & fauna of Britain

Memoria Press encourages nature studies of plants, mammals, insects, and birds. The basic texts in Memoria’s science curriculum explain what they look like, how they live, how their bodies work, and what sorts of environments they inhabit. Flashcards such as those for insects can be a great help. More of this sort of thing is available in, for instance, our sets on trees and birds. 

Those basic introductions are, in substance, as valid in Britain and Europe as they are in North America (though some of the illustrations include American species not found in Europe). The stars overhead will vary somewhat at the edges of the night skies, but again, for the most part, astronomy is largely the same.

Some of the volumes in the Memoria science curriculum are field guides to the flora and fauna of North America. These are supplements to the textbooks. They are handy introductions and helpful for taking what’s learned in the classroom into the great outdoors. But those currently available from Memoria are based on North American species and will therefore be less suitable for the British pupil.

Fortunately there are plenty of excellent field guides to the flora and fauna of Britain and Northern Europe, too. Recent editions suggest that the natural human interest in plants and animals hasn’t disappeared, but only been neglected by mainstream school curricula. Many titles are suitable for children.

We have therefore put together a non-exhaustive list specific to the natural environment on this side of the Atlantic. If you are looking for a place to start with your own nature studies teaching, we hope it may be of help some. 

Please note that the editions listed below tend to be the newest, and so are both readily available and often lavishly illustrated with photographs. But if you can find earlier second-hand editions (for instance, the older Collins Gem Guides), you may find that the beautiful hand-drawn illustrations of fifty or a hundred years ago capture something that the photos do not.

We are always grateful to friends, teachers and home-educating parents for suggestions. For nature studies we are especially grateful to Eleanor Field, to whom we owe most of the titles listed here:

• Out and About Tree Explorer: A Children’s Guide to 60 Different Trees, by Emma Young (Nosy Crow, 2024)
• RSPB First Book of Trees, by Derek Neimann (A&C Black, 2012)
• The Collins Gem Guide to Trees, by Alastair Fitter (Collins, 2012)
• Out and About Bird Spotter: A Children’s Guide to over 100 Different Birds, by Robyn Swift (Nosy Crow, 2019)
• A Field Guide to Spring: Play and Learn in Nature, by Gabby Dawnay (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2024)
• Our Garden Birds: A Stunning Illustrative Guide to Birdlife of the British Isles, by Matt Sewell (Edbury Press, 2012)
• RSPB Bird Tales: Traditional Stories, Folklore and Activities, by Dawn Casey (Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2024)
• RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch Activity Book, by Amy Zhing (Bloomsbury Wildlfie, 2023)
• The Collins Gem Guide to Birds, by Jim Flegg (Collins, 2006)
• The Observer’s Book of Birds, by S. Vere Benson (Frederick Warne Books, 1960)
• The Collins Gem Guide to Insects, by Michael Chinery (Collins, 2012)
• Wild Animals of Britain and Europe, by Helga Hofmann (Collins, 2008)
• The Wayland Book of Common British Mammals: A Photographic Guide, by Shirley Thompson (Hodder Wayland, 1998)
• RSPB Nature Spotter: Wildlife: A Children’s Sticker Guidebook to over 60 Birds, Bugs, Mammals and More, by Catherine Brereton (Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2025)
• A Little Guide to Wild Flowers, by Charlotte Voake (Eden Children’s Books, 2007)