Footnotes

'THE BLACKBIRD STRONG, THE LINTWHITE CLEAR, THE MAVIS MILD AND MELLOW' - BURNS'S PLEA ON BEHALF OF INANIMATE NATURE, and what would now be termed biodiversity. In the late summer of 1787 Burns set off on a series of tours, one undertaken in response to an invitation from John, fourth Duke of Atholl, to stay at Blair Castle. He was advised by the Duke to visit a local beauty spot on his way, a group of waterfalls known as Bruar Water. In common with other visitors, he thought Atholl picturesque and beautiful, but 'much impaired by want of trees and shrubs'. It is this that prompted the present poem, which Germaine Greer has placed in a modern context: 'The publication of Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in April of 1787 had brought Burns great celebrity; this he put to work for Scottish nature by writing a poem in the persona of Bruar Water itself, begging the duke to revegetate the treeless hillsides. It is possibly the first time that any poet ventriloquised for inanimate nature ... Though both the duke's and the poet's posterity may wish to believe that his lordship leapt to the task, it took him a good 10 years to begin revegetating, by which time Burns was dead. The duke ignored Burns's good advice, planting 120,000 Scots pine and larch... Burns was a countryman, and his advice is to grow the native woodland mix, fir, ash and birch, with hawthorn and dog rose to provide habitat. "The sober lav'rock, warbling wild,/ Shall to the skies aspire;/ The gowdspink, Music's gayest child,/ Shall sweetly join the choir;/ The blackbird strong, the lintwhite clear,/ The mavis mild and mellow;/ The robin pensive Autumn cheer,/ In all her locks of yellow". "Laverock" is the Scots name for the lark, "gowdspink" for the goldfinch, "lintwhite" for the linnet, "mavis" for the songthrush. The word "biodiversity" had not been coined in Burns's time, but he certainly knew what it was... The Duke of Atholl's reafforestation, which eventually amounted to 15 million trees and brought him the sobriquet of ''Planter John'', did not start a fashion... We can only wonder now whether it was the close planting of larches that has led to the development of the disease that is now killing larches in Britain... The solution to loss of habitat is, as Burns understood, not to plant huge numbers of a very few species, some of them exotic, all of them probably much too close together, but to restore the endemic woodland mix. Planting trees is not enough; woodland requires management at least until it has reached maturity, in some cases forever. As those good people now buying up woodland are realising, in the 21st century trees cannot be left to take care of themselves' ('Bruar Water: Robert Burns's petition in verse was fruitless', in the Daily Telegraph, 27 Sep 2013).

Although Professor Greer describes this as 'possibly the least known' of Burns's poems, the manuscript record shows that he, at least, held it in some affection. It was first printed in The Edinburgh Magazine for November 1789, and collected in Poems (1793). James Kingsley, in The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (1968), records five other autograph manuscripts. Three are at the Burns Cottage Museum, one of these being a fragment of eleven lines which possibly served as the printer's copy for Poems (1793). Two are at the Huntingdon, while a transcript in the hand of an amanuensis, annotated by Burns, is included in the Glenriddell Manuscript held by the National Library of Scotland. Our manuscript appears to be hitherto unrecorded.