What Remains: The Sussex Coast in July

There is a particular kind of heat that arrives on the South Downs in July that feels almost Mediterranean — dry, still, smelling of chalk dust and warm grass and something faintly resinous that I have never been able to name precisely but that I associate entirely with this landscape in high summer. The sea on still days is almost improbably blue. The cliffs are white and absolute. The sky above them is the kind of sky that makes you stop walking and simply look upward for a moment, which is its own form of medicine.

July on the Sussex coast is the month of fullness. Everything that was becoming in June has now become. The plants are at their height, their seeds beginning to form, their roots drawing down resources for the long descent into autumn. There is a quality of completion in the landscape that is both beautiful and, if you pay attention to it, quietly instructive.

The cliff edge in July

On the chalk grassland above the cliffs, July is the month of the downland herbs. Marjoram (Origanum vulgare) grows in warm, sheltered pockets along the cliff path, its small pink-purple flowers visited constantly by bees and hoverflies, its scent released in concentrated waves when the sun is at its highest. This is the same plant that grows in Italian hillsides, in Greek herb gardens, in the dried bundles hanging in farmhouse kitchens across southern Europe. Here it grows wild, unremarkable-looking, easily walked past — and yet it is one of the most powerfully antimicrobial plants in the British flora. A warming, drying, deeply aromatic herb with a particular affinity for the respiratory and digestive systems.

I gather it carefully in July, small amounts, cutting above the node so the plant can continue flowering. The act of gathering medicinal plants in the landscape where they actually grow — rather than ordering them dried in a bag from a supplier — changes your relationship to them entirely. You know where they grew. You know what the weather had been. You know the particular angle of the cliff and the way the chalk reflected the heat back upward through the roots. That knowledge becomes part of the medicine.

Closer to the cliff edge, where the turf is thinner and the wind more insistent, eyebright (Euphrasia officinalis) dots the grassland in tiny white flowers with their distinctive yellow and purple markings. It is a small, easily missed plant — semi-parasitic on grass roots, growing only in ancient, unimproved grassland, a reliable indicator that this particular piece of ground has not been ploughed or fertilised within living memory. In herbal medicine it has a long tradition of use for the eyes and upper respiratory mucous membranes. But in July on a chalk cliff, it is first and foremost a sign of something rare and worth protecting: a piece of England that has been left alone long enough to become itself.

On the shingle in July

Down on the beach, the shingle in July is a different world — heat-absorbing, reflective, almost brutal in the middle of the day. But the plants that grow there are extraordinary precisely because of what they have had to become to survive it. Yellow horned poppy (Glaucium flavum) is in full flower now, its large, crumpled, intensely yellow blooms sitting incongruously on the grey stone, followed by the extraordinarily long curved seed pods that give it its name. It is a striking, somewhat alien-looking plant — not one for foraging or medicine-making, and mildly toxic if consumed — but important in another sense. It is a reminder that adaptation is not compromise. This plant did not settle for the shingle. It became magnificent on it.

This is something the coastal landscape returns to again and again in July, if you are walking slowly enough to notice. The conditions that look inhospitable from the outside are precisely the conditions that produced something singular. The chalk that holds so little water. The salt wind that desiccates and strips. The shingle that offers no anchorage. And yet: wild thyme, sea kale, sea rocket, yellow horned poppy, eyebright on the cliff above.

The medicine of fullness

July is not a month for seeking or striving. It is a month for being present to what is already there. The landscape is generous and it does not require anything of you except attention.

In clinical terms I think of July as the season of the solar plexus — confidence, warmth, digestion in its widest sense. The capacity to take things in and process them. The herbs of July — warming, aromatic, sun-loving — support exactly this. But the landscape itself does it too, if you give it the chance.

Walk slowly. Sit on the chalk. Let the heat settle into your back.

The sea is not going anywhere.