Эколог Фрэнк Эшвуд призывает читателей прикасаться к земле и знакомиться с жизнью под ногами

Frank Ashwood is a serious academic. He is a soil ecologist specialising in soil invertebrates. He is a lecturer in ecology and entomology at Lincoln University and has a PhD in earthworm ecology from the University of Lancashire. He is also a macrophotographer, which means he takes really quite beautiful pictures of really quite bizarre creatures that live beneath our feet and that we seldom see. We seldom contemplate their very existence. He really loves worms. Some people call him Dr Worm. Dr Worm is singing me a song. “‘There’s a worm at the bottom of my garden. And his name is Wiggly Woo.’ Do you know that?” I don’t know that. I am glad I now do. I say, delightedly, that I have never before had anyone sing me a song about a worm. He says, delightedly: “I’m pleased to be your first.” Touch the earth Here, in the introduction to his first book, The World Beneath Our Feet, is a suggestion: “In the spirit of appreciating soil, I invite you to do something after reading this final paragraph that my editors might prefer I didn’t. I don’t want you to turn the page to chapter one just yet, but instead, put this book down somewhere safe, go outside, and touch some soil. Maybe scoop a little up, and ask yourself some questions: what colour is it? What does it smell like? Close your eyes, and gently roll the soil around between your fingers. What textures do you feel? Is it sandy, silty or clayey? Is it dry and resistant to crushing, or soft and damp, smearing easily? What does this tell you about the soil? Open your eyes again and look at the soil in your hand and the hole in the earth you just created. Do you notice any signs of life, such as plant roots, or even a small invertebrate or two?” I went out into the garden and scooped up a trowel of soil. I sent him a picture. There was a worm in it. I was terribly excited. He was excited, too. I asked what he could tell me about my dirt. Oops. Dirt is a dirty word. He said: “Well, we don’t use the D word. We don’t use the D word because it’s kind of got a negative connotation. I gently encourage people to just say soil. If we want people to fall in love with dirt, with soil rather … Oh, I just did it.” He was impressed by my soil. “It was nice and dark. It looked like it had quite a decent organic content. There were some leaves scattered around it, I noticed. And the fact that you hit a worm straight away with that small sample is pretty good.” I could not have been more proud. My soil had the seal of approval from the soil man. He couldn’t tell from the picture whether my worm was an indigenous worm or one of the introduced European ones. Could I send another picture? Damn. I’d already released it back into the wild. I didn’t want to be guilty of cruelty to worms. Worms have feelings, too. Well, they might. Nobody really knows what the critters who live in the world beneath our feet really think about, or if they think. When I phoned him, his WhatsApp ID came up with a little ditty: “No lungs, don’t need them. I eat mud. Taste of freedom.” This is from his latest sort-of scientific discovery. It is a song by a British punk duo, Soft Play. “They’ve got a song called Worms on Tarmac and I discovered it a couple of days ago. It’s brilliant. It’s nice to finally have a song about an earthworm that’s not written for kids. It’s a quite aggressive punk song written from an earthworm’s perspective and the guy who wrote it did a deep dive on earthworm ecology to make sure it was all scientifically accurate.” Have a listen. You will never regard a worm in the same way. It is a punky rage about how humans have changed habitats. Worms now have to navigate tarmac and gravel and stone ‒ all things that are not friendly to worms. The thing I like about Dr Worm, and I really like him and his book, is that he almost effortlessly achieves what he set out to do: make you fall in love with soil and with the critters that live in it. You learn really interesting stuff – and new songs about worms – without even realising you are being taught really interesting stuff. You’re just listening to, and reading, an ever revealing story about the world you live above and about what lives below you. “I didn’t want it to be just another soil textbook because, you know, there’s enough of those out there. I tried to write it so it would be full of interesting facts, and kind of write that passion into it. We all have that childlike familiarity with soil, so it’s just reconnecting with that. “My hope is that soil gets a bit more love after the book. It’s a love letter to soil, I guess.” He sees poetry in soil. “Yeah, I think so. I like its mystery. I suppose I like that it guards its secrets very closely, and it takes quite a lot of effort to draw them out. You’ve got to put some work in, and then you get the rewards.” Can I tell him my favourite of his book’s weird facts? “Please do.” It is about woodlice which in the Netherlands are called “pissebeds”, likely owing to the strong smell large groups of woodlice give off. (An alternative origin for the name suggests kids were fed woodlice as a traditional Dutch cure for bed-wetting.) Myth or fact, does he reckon? “Oh, I don’t have any evidence that it happened. I don’t know. I can’t speak to Dutch parenting.” I said I had a stupid question for him: did he eat dirt as a kid? He said this was not a stupid question. “I’ve eaten dirt as an adult.” I am not altogether surprised to learn this. But why did he? “Well, accidentally. So, from my PhD supervisor I got given a book of earthworm recipes and I am a very curious person. We used to have a weird Christmas tradition in my family where we’d make a weird dish every Christmas. And I decided to make earthworm meatballs and see if everyone would give it a try. “Now, the thing with earthworms is that they’re full of soil, as you’ll appreciate, because that’s what they mostly eat. You need to leave them in a bucket of water for 24 hours to let them purge … But I didn’t leave them in long enough. I tried them and realised, actually, there was a lot of soil.” His family stopped asking him to contribute to the weird food tradition after his squirrel offering. “They drew the line at squirrels. We have the invasive grey squirrels in the UK. I knew someone who humanely killed them and gave me some squirrel legs to roast.” Rather predictably they were pretty disgusting. “Very gamey.” Might his family be a bit eccentric by any chance? “I’d say they’re probably a bit chaotic, which I think is the word I would use rather than eccentric. It was never quiet. I’ll put it that way.” After finishing his PhD in 2016, he worked as a soil ecologist for Forest Research. He and his wife, Helen Rees, a plant pathologist, left the UK three years ago and now live in Riccarton, Christchurch. Rees got a job lecturing at Lincoln University. He says he happily follows his wife around. They have a 9-month-old daughter, Elowyn. It is a very pretty name that means Elm Tree, a nice echo of Ashwood. Still, I’m surprised he didn’t name her after a soil critter. “Well, you know, some worm names were bandied around. But they were swiftly rejected. And I can blame my wife for that.” I wouldn’t put it past him to feed his daughter woodlice. “I’m not going to feed my daughter woodlice. Well, maybe that’s where the meatballs will make it onto the menu some day. But not woodlice. They’re probably not fine dining.” Running wild He grew up in Surrey, in the suburbs an hour from London. There was forest land nearby that he and his brothers would explore. They were “of that generation” of kids allowed to run pretty wild. “You were just chucked out of the house. You were expected back at dinner. We went and made our own fun in the forest, making dens in bracken and doing things we probably shouldn’t have been doing. It was all good fun. We probably never started a forest fire but there were definitely attempts to make fires and there was just running around having BB gun fights.” He is the youngest, by 12 years, of three brothers, from a “quite working-class background”. It was his mother, Janet, a draughtswoman, who introduced him to the natural world. She was a keen amateur entomologist. She liked lifting up rocks to see what lurked beneath. “She acquainted me with ants, earthworms, centipedes, woodlice and beetles … Now, whenever I rummage through soil and leaves in search of insects, I think of my mum and our miniature expeditions to the bottom of the garden.” She died when he was about 15. She had a strange condition that meant with each pregnancy she developed brain tumours. “She deteriorated mentally very quickly … when I was young, she had already started to slip.” She lived in a nursing home for five years before her death. His book is dedicated “in loving memory of my mother, Janet”; and to his brothers Karl and Kurt: “the rocks I sheltered under in my larval stage”. He loves his brothers, Karl and Kurt, who sheltered him, like a bug under the rock of a fractured family, maybe, after his mother died. His eldest brother, Karl, “took his own life” two years ago when he was in his 50s. His father is still alive, but he has no contact with him. “So he’s not in the acknowledgments.” A burning question: why are earth critters so bizarre? “They live under such different environmental conditions. I guess we see them as bizarre because they’re just dealing with a different set of problems from us. We can’t really anthropomorphise them easily.” Bug of the year He is a big fan of the Entomological Society of New Zealand’s Bug of the Year competition. He is ever hopeful that his favourite, the giant springtail, will win. “Holacanthella duospinosa,” he writes, is “the largest and most striking species of giant springtail. The [invertebrates’] bright-blue backs are covered in a dense arrangement of pointed bright-yellow spines …” Who could resist being enchanted? Certainly not him. He is about to turn 40 and retains, endearingly, the enthusiasm of that little boy who went on miniature expeditions with his mother to lift up rocks and discover the bizarre and beautiful creatures beneath them. I promised him I would vote for his favourite bug next year. But I have reneged on this promise. I am going nominate him for Bug of the Year, I told him. He sent a “laugh until you cry” emoji. I hope he wins. He deserves to. He signed off an email with the salutation: “Worm regards.” So I think I can get away with a reciprocal terrible pun and say he is a thoroughly good bug-ger. The World Beneath Our Feet: The Hidden Life of Soil and Why it Matters to Us All, by Frank Ashwood (Hachette, $39.99), is out now.