Cathy Haynes can tell you what a marigold does at noon. She can tell you which stage of twilight makes it too dark to read but not yet dark enough to light a candle, and she can tell you, because her father told her, the schedule of trains that used to rattle through the fields where he worked, back when a farm worker couldn’t afford a watch that could survive the labour. 

The Fullness of Time – Marking the Day by Birdsong, Blooms, Shadows and Stars, her first book, moves much like her own attention: from twilight and clocks made of living flowers that fold up at predictable hours to medieval scratch sundials cut into church walls, then out into fields and city streets alongside the historians, astronomers, botanists and farmers who helped shape her understanding. The personal material, her parents especially, isn’t kept separate from any of it, but threaded straight through. The book is a study of how people once told time without clocks, and what’s been lost in a world that no longer needs to.

The project changed while she was writing it. Her parents died partway through, and the book she’d set out to write, something closer to cultural history, became, in places, something closer to an inheritance. She found herself standing in a field the way her father once stood, holding a flower the way her mother once did.

I met Haynes, a curator, writer, artist, and educator, and, by her own admission, an obsessive noticer of things to talk about how a piece of fairly obscure historical curiosity became a way of living, why she became, in her words “an expert in bothering experts”, what it means to pay attention as a form of presence rather than measurement, and what questions she now wishes she could ask someone standing in a meadow five hundred years ago.

What does the phrase ‘The Fullness of Time’ mean to you personally?

It’s a title that has different connotations for different people, religiously and philosophically. I haven’t invented it. It’s thousands of years old. For me, it stands for an alternative to my usual state, where I’m distracted from the present moment, increasingly by the screen in my hand, or by something I’m racing toward. It also relates to the act of telling time, because how we perform that feat shapes our perception. Most often, to know the time, I throw a half-conscious glance at a number machine. In contrast, the old ways of telling time direct all of your senses outward, to this great weave of signs around us: the slant of a sunbeam, the motion of a star, the opening of a flower, a bird’s voice in the early morning darkness.

I started out with what was really an academic interest, in how people used to mark the time of day without a clock, particularly in Europe. Since scientific timekeeping has been part of everyday life for so long here, I wondered how possible it was to find traces of other ways of marking times of day. It wasn’t easy, but there were wonderful methods to discover. To mention just a couple that were still being used in Britain in the early twentieth century: there are the beautiful work songs that people in the Hebrides sang to synchronise a task, and the basic sundials that itinerant shepherds on the South Downs made from sticks in the turf. Far too often, the big histories of timekeeping have neglected these rough and subjective practices that belonged to ordinary people. But I think the old ways should matter to us, because they represent forgotten ways of being and perceiving that could enrich us still. 

The more I discovered about the sensitivity people had to living rhythms, the more that started to shape my own awareness and help me feel far more immersed and connected to the world I’m in. It’s a lovely, joyful thing.

You write that the pursuit “slowly burgeoned into a way of life”. At what point did the project begin to change the way you lived?

It’s always hard to find an origin story for something that becomes consuming. But one early memory: growing an evening primrose in my backyard in London, twenty-odd years ago. I’d sit, sometimes my wife Rosie would join me, and watch it open a new flower toward the end of the day. It has this fascinating pregnant moment. The bud moves very slowly, then bursts suddenly. Watching the unfurling of these fresh petals each evening, and feeling that as a kind of beat marking the end of the day, seemed so much more ample than glancing at the digits on a clock and returning to my desk.

“This is about slowing down, but it’s also often about quickening your senses.”

While I was researching old ways of telling time, what caught me most was the alertness people had to events like the subtle stages of twilight. For example, the point when you could recognise someone in the street in the morning was a significant threshold in time. In medieval Paris, for instance, that test was used in a rule for when certain cloth workers should start work. And that kind of historical detail helped me grasp how much we’ve lost: especially the sensory textures of day and night, which were deeply felt as two separate states of being. The evening primrose was one of the early experiences that got me hooked on noticing how the world transforms as the day slips away.

When did you realise you were writing about more than timekeeping?

It was always there, to a degree. I had already made participative art projects in urban London, where we tuned our senses to the living rhythms that would have shaped the day for past generations. But when it came to writing the book, partly out of nervousness, at first I focused too heavily on book and archive research. The confidence to fully immerse myself, and hopefully the reader, in sensory experience came largely from conversations with my editors, Jasmine Horsey at Bloomsbury and Courtney Young at Riverhead Books. Jasmine, as lead editor, encouraged me to describe my experiences of listening to the skylark rising in the meadow at first light, say, or joining the Baker Street Irregular Astronomers to trace the stars glinting above the city. The beauty and intensity of those experiences brought home to me just how much I had been missing, and how this is as much about the art of perception as it is timekeeping.   

Before this project, what did you overlook every day that now seems impossible to miss?

I just walked into your garden and immediately thought, “he’s got two kinds of oxalis”. Where I might once have appreciated a park for its green vistas and fancy flowerbeds, now I’m genuinely interested in what the ordinary daisies and dandelions are doing in the turf. I also used to be completely unaware of how the sun moved around a house. Now I walk into a home and I’m imagining the light, and how much you can see of the stars in the backyard. Too often, my habitat, and its connection to the cosmos, used to be a blur. Now it isn’t.

After spending years studying time, does time now feel slower, faster, or simply fuller?

Fuller. Filling your senses with detail can create a sense of things slowing down, and when you look back, your memories are richer. But it isn’t only about slowing down. A lot of the time you have to be quick. Quick to notice that was a wren, not a falling leaf, quick to tune into a pattern of birdsong. And I have to race to get to sunset on time, which is, funnily enough, a clock habit. I set an alarm to make sure I leave my desk in time to watch it. So there’s a tension. This is about slowing down, but it’s also often about quickening your senses. The two go hand in hand. 

How did the deaths of your parents change the meaning of the book while you were writing it?

We lost them both during the project, and most of the writing came together afterwards. Dad was a farmer, Mum a fabulous gardener who also worked the farm with him, both very attuned to their surroundings. Little habits you don’t notice enough until they’re gone: Mum leaning against a gate in the evening to watch the sunset, the clouds over the Midlands filling with colour, us leaning beside her, chatting. I later learned people used to pause exactly in that early phase of twilight, too dark to keep working, not dark enough for a candle, and be together. Maybe it’s some ancient rhythm we just happened to fall into.

“When you lose someone, you start to inhabit them a bit more.”

I miss that so much, and there’s so much I want to ask them. This hasn’t just been about staying connected to the world I live in now. It’s about staying connected to them and earlier generations, to the people who taught us beautiful things, and to valuing the world they knew.

They come across almost like characters in the book, you find yourself following what they’re doing, what they’ll say next. Is the book about remembering your parents, or about learning to see the way they did?

Yes, both. Trying to perceive the world a little more like they did is also my way of remembering and honouring them. And the process hasn’t been entirely conscious. After they died, I’d catch myself poised like Dad had when he was studying the fields, or like Mum when she looked closely at a flower and drew in its scent. When you lose someone, you start to inhabit them a bit more, or maybe you just notice you’re already doing it. 

You’ve said you sometimes catch yourself standing the way your father stood. Do we inherit attention more faithfully than we inherit belief?

Definitely. That’s a brilliant question. We take on beliefs and process them consciously through our different lives, but I think we also take on bodily stances, habits of attention, and they stay with us. After someone’s gone, you really feel their presence through that.

It was a leap of faith to put personal stories in the book. But my editors encouraged it. There’s a story about Dad working the fields in the ‘40s and ‘50s: wristwatches were too vulnerable for farm work, so they’d tell when to take a break by the rhythm of trains coming through the district. Eight decades later, he could still recite the timetable by heart. People love that story, but to him it was just a story. He didn’t find it especially significant. To me, it was a connection to something that might never have been written down. And it makes me wonder how many other practices like that vanished unrecorded. 

Mum and Dad were better at seeing than I am. But I definitely inherited that habit of close attention from them, and took it into my own life in the art world in London. In the city, though, my awareness fell away of the living rhythms I grew up with, and I wanted to reconnect. 

Rosie appears throughout the book not simply as a companion but as another pair of eyes. Did the project change the way the two of you learned to notice the world together?

Completely, though it wasn’t just the project; we’ve been together twenty-nine years. I’ll get absorbed in something like medieval scratch sundials, these overlooked, roughly made objects still found on church walls. Rosie would rather go on a long walk in the hills, but she lets me look, and then she’s the one who actually finds it. She has eagle eyes and, from her musical training, amazing ears. I bring the nerdery, she brings the true alertness.

An interviewer once asked what Rosie would say if she were doing the interview instead of me. She said she hadn’t realised quite how far I’d go to pin down one tiny historical detail, and that it’s been a huge amount of work, a lot of sacrifice for us both, but life-enhancing for both of us too.

If your parents could read the book now, what do you think would surprise them most?

It’s hard to imagine, honestly, a grief thing, since they didn’t get to read it. I think Dad would be surprised, maybe a bit embarrassed, to have his stories in there. Mum would be delighted, and I think she’d have loved something like the orientation of the centre of Milton Keynes city to midsummer sunrise. I can picture us going to look at it together. The grief runs through the whole book, beginning to end, because it came at a very tough time: losing one, and then, not long after, the other. 

Has modern time become a more private and isolating experience?

Potentially, yes, not least because the notion that our time is a commodity has spread so deeply into our private life. Take social media ‘timelines’, for example, where structurally we can’t really avoid comparing and quantifying our achievements, day and night. More broadly, many of us have lost the old sense of local, sun-given time that gave us a common rhythm with our neighbours, human and non-human. In my own experience, that detachment from the living world around us is isolating. 

Many commentators rightly critique our relationship with the clock. But I wanted to expand my sense of time, not just critique it.

One of the joys of this project has been expanding my community. Astronomers, historians, farmers, botanists, archaeologists, people with gorgeous insights. And also my sense of community with plants, insects, bats… being part of a communal life that’s more than human, part of the cosmos, right here, right now.

What surprised you most about becoming a writer, on a first book?

The enormous labour of fact-checking. Different experts have different opinions, and I was working across disciplines, so the same paragraph might need checking with two people. I said at the book launch that I’d basically become an expert in bothering experts. But people were far more generous than I’d dared imagine. And it’s been such a pleasure.

How did you preserve your own voice while allowing so many forms of knowledge into the book?

Because I come from gallery and museum education, and have written a lot of public-facing copy, I’m always asking: can people understand this? I try to put things in my own words, since I’m a non-scientist walking into other people’s fields. If I can understand it in my own terms, hopefully others will too. That’s been the real challenge. Constantly asking, do you mean this, do you mean that.

“I’d become an expert in bothering experts.”

Significant parts of the knowledge I’ve been seeking, like the motion of the stars or the shrinking of shadows, would have been obvious to ordinary people before we became so reliant on mechanical timepieces. In a way I was just asking experts for the basics, to build a fuller environmental understanding, which meant crossing disciplines. That intention stopped me spiralling into needing to know everything. I’d just tell myself, no, I only need this one more piece. 

Which method of telling time surprised you most during your research?

One surprise was the way people would grade twilight’s stages, which to me were a complete blur, by whether you could still read lettering, or recognise faces. Another was the idea that you might not go outside before cockcrow, because that was the signal that dispersed evil midnight spirits. These weren’t just workaday signs. They carried real meaning.

As the seasons themselves grow less predictable, will people have to invent new ways of reading them?

I think so, yes. Spring in the UK is happening a month earlier on average, and this year’s been chaotic: unprecedented heat in June, an incredible drought. My marigolds dried up, and when they did flower, the blooms were as small as a common daisy. That’s genuinely scary. One Elizabethan garden expert wrote that marigolds [Calendula] grew in most gardens all year round, and were called the ‘husbandman’s dial’, the cultivator’s sundial. They open in the morning, expand by noon, close again by sunset, marking the hours. You can’t rely on that now.

We are facing climate extremes we’ve never faced before. What kind of plant, animal and weather lore, what new ways of reading our environment, will we have to develop now? 

The book closes with the line, “There is so much we don’t ask”. What question are you still living with?

That line was directed at my parents. I’d love to have asked my mum more about my grandfather, who grew up in a remote part of the Yorkshire Dales, what his childhood was like. I find myself asking similar questions now of people who are still living and practising the old ways. That might lead to the next project.

Whether or not you start out with the right question, it’s often incidental knowledge or an unexpected anecdote that surprises you, like Dad’s story about the trains. One thing I’d genuinely love to know: how much people were using plants like the marigold as a cultivator’s clock before the age of the Linnaean floral clock, before the formal scientific accounts took over the story.

If I could transport myself back five hundred years into a meadow, my question would be simple: are you telling the time by the flowers here? How common is this?