...good for my soul and maybe even good for nature...

I have done it. I’ve submitted my dissertation almost two weeks early. I know that sounds mad when I’ve been panicking so much over it and to be honest, I could have worked on it for another year had I another year to spare. The truth is though that there are two more big deadlines, both of which require some herculean effort given that I’ve not started either of them and couldn’t face starting them until this was done so it had to go.

When I handed it in, I thought it really doesn’t look like anything. Two copies of something 40 pages and 7000 words long, a DVD with the same content as the two hard copies and this hand-written book. What you can’t see in the paper is the month of crawling around on my hands and knees on Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor last August measuring things that most people trample over without even noticing they were there. You can’t see the endless hours entering all 30 measurements for each of 500 plants into a spreadsheet or the days-on-end typing their vital statistics into an online botanical key to find out exactly what it was I was measuring. You can’t see the hours of scratching my head trying to run statistical analysis and find meaningful output or yet more pulling out of hair battling with graphing tools from various sources (Mintab, Excel, SigmaPlot) to make my charts (oh sorry, you’re not allowed to call them charts if you are pretending to be a scientist, you have to call them figures) look as unexciting and as unintelligible as possible because that’s how the scientists like them. Or the agonising over the written report – what to say, how to say it, what to include, what to exclude, how few big words could I get away with. It shows not a jot of the angst of submitting my draft and waiting for my precious baby to be looked at by my project supervisor and then getting it back covered from word 1 to word n covered in purple ink! (To say I was crushed was an understatement.) There is no hint of the rewrite after rewrite or the reading through over and over again to find the bugs, the typos, the bad grammar, the clumsily constructed sentence or the over or under-claiming of the facts of the matter or even finding a pithy way to sum up what the hell it all meant. It just looked like two piles of paper, 40 pages long, a DVD and a book, which, despite it being my baby is all it will ever be to most. This is worth 52.5% of my dissertation mark – that’s more than 1/6 of my total final year’s mark.

The book is a hundred-page-long hand-written notebook detailing the minutiae of how I did it, what I did, where I did it, who I spoke to and what they replied. It documents meeting after meeting, email after email, maps of locations (you should see how badly drawn they were), photos of locations and plants. This is worth 15% of my dissertation mark, that’s not so “valuable” but in terms of providing me a cushion for doing badly elsewhere it could be very useful if I’ve done it well.

The little things that I spent a month of my life on my hands and knees measuring were Euphrasias. I think my supervisor would probably have the heeby-geebys about my use of the plural there but given that he probably won’t see this I am going to try to get away with the thing that’s tantamount to blasphemy in the eyes of a proper scientist. They are tiny flowers that are commonly known (I laughingly say as I doubt many have ever heard of this term) as eyebrights. The use of the term common is what’s laughable because they are anything but common. In fact Euphrasia vigursii, one of the five species I have measured is only found in a handful of places in Devon and Cornwall and NOWHERE ELSE ON EARTH. The handful of places is dwindling rapidly and it is desperately endangered. Even after measuring their every dimension for a whole month, there are still only two of five species that I would feel anything like confident about naming without the aid of my trusty botanical keys. They all look so alike it’s frightening. BUT when you get back into a place where you can access a key, they are distinguishable. The differences between them are subtle to say the least. I have learned a whole new world of botanical language that I never imagined existed. Does anyone other than a botanist ever use terms like “retrorse” or “glabrous”?

Out of everything that has come out of these months of blood – literally – the little so-and-sos live cheek-by-jowl with very prickly gorse, sweat – again literally, the weather on the moors was either blazing sunshine and I got sunburned or absolutely hideous rain, and tears – guess what? Yep, literally again…frustration, joy, relief at handing it in. Tears of blood. I have read about two hundred scientific papers over the course of the project (not just about Euphrasias, but about plants generally, endemic species, rare plants etc etc), and I came across a paper written in 1956 by a bloke called Yeo – a Euphrasia specialist and he described the locations where he had seen Euphrasia vigursii (you know, the one that’s rapidly becoming as rare as hens’ teeth) and guess what? He actually mentioned OUR HOUSE and said there was a patch of them opposite my very own home. Of course that was nearly 60 years ago and sadly the land has subsequently been fenced in and the owner is somewhat hostile towards me (for reasons I won’t go into) or I’d ask them if I could hop over the fence and see if they are still there.

OK – I know I’m only a puppy scientist but I am thrilled to bits to have done something that might, just might, help this little thing that is disappearing faster than you can say “Euphrasia vigursii” and it’s my own in as much as it’s a precious little part of my own landscape. When I was ill, I was determined that what I did next must matter. I didn’t want to end up in the same old cycle of making money for fat cats, I wanted to do something really important and with this dissertation project, I might just have achieved that, whether I achieve my aim of a first or not. I know that "really important" is a sweeping statement but believe me when there is barely another soul on the planet who gives the slightest flying whatnot about them it IS really important that one or two of us do.

If anyone "important" ever does read this, please forgive my committing the two cardinal sins of calling them Euphrasias and not putting the genus and the species in italics - pbase doesn't like italics!