The disappearing buttercup

or the lost words of the natural world and how to replace them.

A young woman this week told me that the word ‘buttercup’ had been lost from the Oxford Junior Dictionary along with ‘acorn’ and ‘conker’, replaced with ‘chat room’, ‘broadband’ and ‘analogue’. We were working alongside each other in a light-filled room just off Hadrian’s wall, making prints from the native grasses and wildflowers we’d just collected. …