Above: Through Trees. Pishwanton. Mixed media on 20×30″ wood pane. Rose Strang 2026.
Adam and I visited the forest of Pishwanton this weekend for the first time in a few years. I’ve been there many times over a decade or so.
It was a truly beautiful day, silvery spring light on the birch trees and amidst the trees, buildings made of mostly natural, unchanged materials. The architecture working in harmony with the landscape.
Some details of my painting ..
It does feel special there, and it inspires you to find out who’s behind such a place.
I discovered that Dr Mary Colquhoun was the founder of Pishwanton and the Life Science Centre back in the 1990s. She studied biology through a Goethean lens, and was a pioneer of Goethean science in the UK.
More recently the Life Science Centre merged with The Ruskin Mill Centre for Research and is now part of the Ruskin Mill Trust group – working with principles grounded in Goethean Science and inspiration from John Ruskin, William Morris and Rudolf Steiner.
Steiner was inspired by Goethe, but is often described as a ‘pseudo-scientist’ (which I always find amusing – surely all the interesting folk are described as pseudoscientists!) I’m an artist – an observer and describer – not qualified to conclude anything scientific. It seems, though, that though Steiner went a little off-piste with Goethe’s original thesis, his ideas are still interesting to explore. His beliefs are part personal faith, and part inspired by Goethean ideas of observation. Contemplating plants, for example, over time.
It was interesting visiting Pishwanton this weekend for the first time in a few years. I’d remembered it as peaceful, but it’s better described as restorative, bringing peace through a sense of harmony, rather than the idea of actual quiet, since one of Scotland’s best known rookeries is there among the Scots Pines at the entrance, raucously guarding the way by announcing our arrival! We saw a large hare bounding off in surprise.
At first, you encounter the more workaday elements of the place as you wander further in, past the Scots Pines. There’s a very Shire-like, turf-covered workshop/ meeting building, vegetable plots, composting and woodwork areas nearby.
All the doors were shut, since it was a Sunday, though they’d kindly left the loos open, and little shelters for cats, or strays. I noticed how fresh and lovely the loos were (organic building material and absence of chemical nasties!)
As you wander over the hill though, you start to sense why this place was originally named Fairy Hill. It’s now called Fairhill (which may or may not be a classic case of Reformation re-naming, since the Reformation viewed anything to do with Pagan, country or folk reverence for nature as the work of the devil!)
Whether the name change was deliberate or simply practical, that attentiveness to the land persists here, or rather has had new life breathed into it by the Life Science Centre. (Fairhil had become a dumping ground before the Life Science Centre took it over).
We humans turn anything into pattern; knots in wood become faces, a piece of toast looks like someone famous. That phenomenon includes sounds – wind in trees can sound like voices. The forest at Fairhill sounds and feels so alive it’s easy to imagine the Goethean idea of Urpflanze – the original, primal form of plants, or their archetype.
Steiner later interpreted this as the spirit of the plant (dryad-like consciousness) but Goethe was careful to avoid the realms of the supernatural because, although he had an artist’s imagination, he also considered his observations as scientific. It’s true to say, though, that Goethe saw the phenomenon of Urpflanze as unexplainable – a primal force.
It’s a place of ambiguity, a way of thinking that feels comfortable to the creative mind, full of possibility, stimulating to the imagination. It’s also perhaps more honest in a way, since science shows us aspects of how things are made, how our world operates to some extent, but often it’s the principles or experiences that science can’t explain that are the more meaningful, or important to us, ultimately.
Goethe felt that this unexplainable life-force was only perceivable through long, patient observation. His way of exploring and observing led him to understand that boundaries, between fields of science and art, for example, limited our understanding.
All of which chimes with threads I’ve been following as an artist throughout my life. Explorations which started at art college with studies of Kant, Novalis and German Romanticism, through to more recent explorations of the medieval philosophers’ way of viewing, or contemplating the world.
I’ll explore more of that next week, but in the meantime, if you’re interested in medieval philosophy you can read a piece I wrote as part of the Traces project here.
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