the wild-flower dictionary

The wild-flower dictionary enters Harold Fry's life in Exeter, where he purchases it second-hand along with a visitor's guide to Great Britain. He keeps both in his plastic carrier bag, alongside the two presents he is carrying for Queenie Hennessy, replenished supplies of water and biscuits, and a tube of petroleum jelly for his feet bought on a chemist's advice. The book is a modest, practical purchase, yet it quietly becomes one of the most significant objects of his entire pilgrimage — a tool that reshapes how he sees the world and, ultimately, a thing he learns to give away.

A Book That Teaches Seeing

In the stretch between Tiverton and Taunton, a period Harold later remembers as full of anger and pain, the dictionary proves its worth. He had wanted more than he could physically give, and his walk had become a battle against himself in which he had failed. Now, following gentle stretching exercises each morning and evening and resting every two hours, he treats his blisters before they become infected and carries fresh water. Taking out his wild-plant book again, he identifies hedgerow flowers and their uses: which bear fruit, culinary, poisonous or otherwise, and which have leaves with medicinal powers. Wild garlic fills the air with its sweet pungency. Once more, it surprises him how much is at his feet, if only he had known to look. The dictionary transforms walking from mere endurance into a mode of attention, giving him a reason to stop, to kneel, to examine what he would otherwise have passed without a glance.

The book also deepens his sense of being part of something larger than himself. In the open land, Harold had felt himself to be part of something bigger than simply Harold, comfortable in the security of open land and sky where everything took its place. The dictionary extends this feeling into the smallest details of the roadside, teaching him that the natural world is layered with meaning and use — that even a common hedgerow flower carries knowledge of what can be eaten, what can heal, and what must be avoided. It is a form of literacy that the city, with its short-range sight and glass-fronted shopping outlets, could never offer him.

The Gift of Letting Go

By the time Harold reaches Cheltenham, the dictionary has served its purpose so thoroughly that he knows it by heart. This mastery becomes the precondition for one of his most significant acts of renunciation. Passing a bewildered German couple who are lost near Cleeve Hill, he hands them the guide to Britain and, since he knows the plant dictionary by heart, he suggests they might like that too. The book is given away not because it has worn out its usefulness, but precisely because its contents have been fully absorbed into Harold's mind — it has done its work, and can now serve someone else.

This act belongs to a larger pattern of shedding that defines Harold's middle journey. In Cheltenham he donates his washing powder to a student going into a laundrette, offers his wind-up torch to a woman from Prestbury who cannot find her key in her bag, gives his plasters and antiseptic cream to the mother of a distressed child with a bleeding knee, and hands over his comb by way of distraction. He rewraps the gifts for Queenie — the pot of honey, the rose quartz, the glittering paperweight, the Roman key ring and the wool hat — and parcels up the recent souvenirs for Maureen, taking them to a post office. The compass and the rucksack he keeps, because they are not his to give away. The dictionary, by contrast, is fully his to release, and its giving marks the moment when Harold understands that receiving is as much a gift as giving, requiring both courage and humility.

A Measure of Transformation

The dictionary's journey from purchase to gift traces Harold's own transformation from a man who hoards and clings to one who can let go. When he first sets out, he is a figure of vulnerability — a single man without his mobile phone, startled by a cracking of branches that turns out to be only a pigeon regaining its balance in a tree. The book is part of the small store of possessions he carries for comfort and security. By the time he gives it away, he has learned to sleep outside, to wash in public lavatories, fountains and streams, and to rinse his clothes where no one is watching. He has become someone who can say, as he does to Mick, that he does not push and does not hang about — that if he just keeps putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason he is going to get there.

The dictionary also connects to the deeper work of Harold's pilgrimage: the unleashing of the past he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid. In walking, he measures distance not in miles but with his remembering, and the book's patient, observational practice mirrors the way he begins to examine his own life — identifying what is poisonous, what is medicinal, what can be kept and what must be released. When he finally arrives at St Bernadine's Hospice, eighty-seven days after setting out to post a letter, having walked six hundred and twenty-seven miles including mistakes and diversions, the dictionary is long gone — given away to strangers who needed it more. Its absence is itself a kind of testimony to how far he has come.