Domei · A letter from Devon
Something has gone quiet
between us and the living world.
You can feel it.
The biologist E.O. Wilson had a name for it. He called it the Eremocene — the Age of Loneliness. Not the loneliness of being without people, but something older and stranger: the felt absence of the other-than-human world.
We move through it daily. Parks, hedgerows, gardens, the weed in a pavement crack. We are surrounded by life and barely register it.
Domei is a practice of sustained attention to plants. Not identification. Not study. Just returning to the same patch of ground, again and again, until the place stops being scenery and starts being a neighbourhood.
In the last 12 months we had a series of family health issues and 2 deaths and I lost my connection to the outdoors. This morning I was doing my usual walk in the fields with my dogs and what you were saying clicked. I had been walking the fields without taking in what is around me. I stopped, closed my eyes and listened. The beautiful bird song, children playing, horses in the fields. I opened my eyes and found bluebells coming up. Walking further I realised the sloe bushes are starting to bloom along with hawthorns. I found a deer skull. I realised for the last few months I have been walking round in a daze. A huge thank you for the reality check.
— Carl T.
The Domei letter arrives once a week. Essays from 35 years of attending to the living world in Devon. No wellness language. No promises. Only what sustained attention has actually shown me.
- Essays on plant attention, place-based knowing, and what we’ve forgotten
- Occasional provocation – the Eremocene, object-thinking, the cost of not paying attention
- Written from the field, not from a desk
They always give me something to think about and they change the way I see and experience things.
— Arianna R.
These short pieces you offer, my goodness how beautifully and perfectly they land in me.
— Nicola N.
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About Robin Harford
Robin Harford is an ethnobotanical researcher, forager, and independent publisher based in Devon. He has spent thirty-five years in field research across Britain, Europe, South-East Asia, and India, and is the founder of Eatweeds – the UK’s leading wild food and foraging education platform.
Domei is the other side of that work. Where Eatweeds is about practical knowledge – what to find, how to prepare it, what it’s good for – Domei is about the quality of attention that makes that knowledge mean something. The practice developed slowly, out of decades of sitting with plants rather than just identifying them.
He writes, teaches in-person courses across Devon, and co-hosts a webinars on plants and herbal medicine with medical herbalist Simon Mills.
You can find the foraging work at eatweeds.co.uk.