Monthly Archives: August 2021

Expect the Unexpected

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Walthamstow Wetlands – the weir

Dear Readers, I met up with a dear friend for a walk and a coffee at Walthamstow Wetlands yesterday. When we arrived at the main gate, it said that the main part of the wetlands was closed due to flooding. Gosh! Walthamstow was one of the areas badly flooded in the torrential rains last month, but there had been no rain overnight, so we were a bit taken aback. But fortunately, the other, smaller part of the wetlands was still open, so off we went to see what we could

One thing that you can definitely see is the extensive building at Blackhorse Road. I wonder how much of this is on the floodplain from the rivers around the wetlands? Hopefully none of it, as it seems to be on slightly higher ground, so fingers crossed. I’m hoping that at least some of these new flats and townhouses are ‘affordable’, though as affordability = 80% of the market price, they’ll still be out of the reach of most people.

There were lots of men with binoculars walking along the raised reservoir, so I made enquiries. Apparently there were two greenshank on the edge of the water on the other side. I hadn’t brought  my binoculars as a camera is distraction enough when you’re catching up with a friend, but here’s a photo of a greenshank so you can see what we missed.

Photo One by By Charles J. Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41975685

Greenshank (Tringa nebularia) (Photo One)

The edge of the reservoir is a haven for wildflowers, and many a Wednesday Weed has been discovered along this stretch of uninspiring-looking concrete.

Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria)

Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare)

Common toadflax (Linaria vulgaris)

Bladder campion (Silene vulgaris)

Common Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea)

But who else is here?

A fine collection of mute swans, all happily preening and dozing.

These are likely to be young birds or those not yet paired up and territorial – once a pair have a territory they will guard it zealously, as anyone unfortunate enough to accidentally disturb a mute swan on its nest will attest. I was once chased along a country lane for a hundred metres by an irritate bird after I almost fell over its nest.

Apparently mute swans are so-called because their wings make a whistling, humming sound in flight, which means that they don’t need to have a flight call like other swans. Who knew? Not me for sure.

Two swans were swimming in parallel. One would raise its head, then the other one followed suit. One would dip its head under the water, and then the other would do the same. I always wonder what strange and subtle signals birds send to one another that we can’t read. How close are you allowed to stand to one another if you’re not a pair? Do you preen synchronously too?

And so, although it wasn’t quite the morning we’d planned for, it was still a good walk, full of plants and animals and interesting Victorian architecture, like this water tower. Those Victorians didn’t do things by halves.

And as we headed back to Blackhorse Road tube station, I spotted this bush. It’s clearly some kind of vetch, but I’m puzzled by the way that the seedheads seem to have exploded. Can any of you gardeners out there a) identify the plant and b) tell me if the seedheads are supposed to look like that? All information gratefully received..

Mysterious yellow bean-plant

Seed capsules of mysterious yellow bean. Are they supposed to look like deflated balloons?

Photo Credits

Photo One By Charles J. Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41975685

 

Saturday Quiz – Family Favourites – The Answers!

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This is hemp agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum) from the Asteraceae or daisy family

Dear Readers,

Well, that was a great week! Claire, FEARN, Anne and Fran and Bobby Freelove all got 15 out of `15 on identifying the plant families correctly, so well done to everyone. For those who also tried to identify the plants, both Anne and Fran and Bobby got 13 out of the 15 plants correct, though with common names there is a bit of room for negotiation – for example, I had plant 1 as spear thistle rather than milk thistle, and plant 13 as goat’s rue rather than bird vetch. If you can convince me that this is how you know Cirsium vulgare and Galego officinalis I will give you your points back :-).

1)L) Asteraceae (Daisies) Spear Thistle (Cirsium vulgare)

2H) Primulaceae (Primulas)Yellow loosestrife (Lysimachia vulgaris)

3)F) Malvaceae (Mallows) Musk Mallow (Malva moscata)

4)M) Lamiaceae (Deadnettles) Hedge Woundwort (Stachys sylvatica)

5)G) Balsaminaceae (Balsams) Small balsam (Impatiens parviflora)

6)K) Scrophulaceae (Figworts) Buddleia (Buddleia davidii)

7)N) Dipsaceae (Teasels) Wild teasel (Dipsacus fullonum)

8I) Solanaceae (Nightshades) Bittersweet (Solanum dulcamara)

9)E) Onagraceae (Willowherbs) Evening Primrose (Oenothera glazioviana)

10)A) Crassulaceae (Stonecrops) Caucasian stonecrop (Sedum spurium)

11)O) Apiaceae (Carrots) Wild carrot (Daucus carota)

12)D) Geraniaceae (Cranesbills and storksbills) Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum)

13)B) Fabaceae (Peas, vetches and clovers) Goat’s Rue (Galego officinalis)

14)J) Plantaginaceae (Plantains) Ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata)

15)C) Hypericaceae (St John’s-worts) Perforate St John’s-wort (Hypericum perforatum)

Wainwright Prize – Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour

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Dear Readers, I tore through this book at the proverbial rate of knots, although I am not quite sure what it is. It’s true that one of the central characters is an orphaned magpie called Benzene, named after the film of oil on the puddles by the lockups where the bird is found. She  becomes integral to the life of the author, Charlie Gilmour, but there is such a cast of larger-than life characters, including Gilmour himself,  that it’s hard to call this a nature book.

Charlie Gilmour is the son of Heathcote Williams. Some of my more mature readers (ahem) might remember him from Whale Nation, an extended prose poem about whales and their exploitation by man. He always seemed like a man who was ahead of his time with his environmental concerns, and he seemed like a sensitive and caring soul. However, if you were one of his children, Williams seemed like a very different kind of man. He left his first partner and two children, wooed Gilmour’s mother (the author Polly Sansom), but then abandoned them when Charlie was a baby, leaving mother and child homeless. Much of the book is about Gilmour’s attempts to make contact with his father and to understand why Williams left so abruptly. He comes to a sort of peace by the end of the book, but in the meantime he suffers mental health issues, drug problems and is imprisoned after swinging from a flag pole on the Cenotaph in a drug-fuelled mania. It is telling that one of the presents that Williams sends him is a tiny model Cenotaph. Gilmour says:

“The last time I went chasing after his shadow, it led me to a breakdown of my own, and these days I have a terror of repetition. Sanity sometimes seems like a very thin membrane, through which it would be all too easy to fall again“.

What about Benzene, though? She is one helluva bird (though Gilmour and his wife Jana only realise that she’s female when she starts constructing a nest and paying special attention to Gilmour’s adopted father (Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd). As a chick, she quickly asserts her presence:

“It scrabbles energetically against the sides (of the box), insisting that I pick it up and allow it to explore the world of our bedroom with pattering steps and clumsy leaps. it runs top-heavy on its long, thin legs, seemingly in constant danger of over-balancing as it races to investigate alluring plug serpents and serpentine electricity cables. It defecates at will”

Yep, living with a magpie is no one’s idea of fun. Gilmour tries to make contact with his father again because of a strange coincidence – Williams too reared a corvid, a jackdaw in his case. He wrote a poem about it, and Gilmour hopes to make some kind of connection through this shared experience. But Williams is always a performer, talking at Gilmour rather than to him, running through a repertoire of magic tricks, anything to keep a distance. I think we all know someone like this, the life and soul of the party but deeply unhappy underneath, and incapable of having a proper relationship with another human being.

So, I found this a compelling book, but not for the reasons I’d expected. I wanted to see if Gilmour would be able to form a relationship with his father, whilst shaking my head in doubt all the way through. Later, the stakes are raised even further, when Gilmour realises that his wife wants a child (though why people don’t discuss this stuff before they get married or commit to one another I have no idea harrumph). Will he take the leap into fatherhood? Well, the clue is rather in the title, but I shall leave it to you to find out. It’s an interesting book, but it’s much more about humans and their complexities than it is about the natural world.

 

Wednesday Weed – Musk Mallow

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Musk mallow (Malva moschata)

Dear Readers, what a delicate and pretty plant this is! I’ve seen it twice in the past few weeks, once on Hampstead Heath and at the weekend in the woodland grave area of St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, where I suspect it’s been planted as part of a wildflower mix. You can distinguish it from Common Mallow (Malva sylvestris) by its pale pink petals and very fine, feathery leaves. Common mallow is much darker in colour (it can often look almost purple) with dark-coloured veins.

Common mallow (Malva sylvestris)

Musk mallow is so-called because it is perfumed, though you can smell it much more strongly in an enclosed space. The plant is native to Europe and south-west Asia, and is said to have been used by the Ancient Greeks to decorate the graves of their friends. The Anglo-Saxons also planted it on graves, and in Austria it still seems to be a favourite graveyard plant.

All parts of the plant are said to be edible, and in Egypt you can eat Melokhia, or Mallow Soup, made from the young leaves (see here for a recipe). I suspect, though, that the leaves of this species are rather too fine and delicate to eat in anything other than a salad, along with a sprinkling of the flowers. The seedheads of musk mallow turn into little round ‘cheeses’, which are added to many Russian dishes, including borscht.

Musk mallow is also known as St Simeon’s herb, and it has a long association with eye health – St Simeon is said to have cured his blindness by bathing his eyes in a solution made from the plant, and credited it with enabling him to recognise the baby Jesus as the Messiah. It’s said that if you dig up a mallow root on St Simeon’s Day (October 8th) before sunrise, you can use it as an amulet against eye disease, or make a tincture to cure blindness or cataracts.

In the Middle Ages it was also said to be a test for fertility and, conversely, for virginity. The woman in question peed on a mallow. If it dried up in three days, she was either infertile or no longer a virgin. If the plant survived the dousing, the maiden was either, well, a maiden or capable of bearing children (or presumably both). Being a woman in the Middle Ages was clearly fraught with peril.

Like all mallows, musk mallow is rather mucilaginous, and as such its medicinal uses include many ways to soothe. It’s an ingredient in many recipes for cough medicine, and was historically used to soften boils (indeed the word mallow comes from the Greek malakos, meaning ‘soft’). No wonder then that in Christian symbolism the plant came to represent forgiveness, the softening of the heart towards a hardened soul. Galen also considered it to be anaphrodisiac, a plant that cooled the passions.

In the Victorian Language of Flowers, musk mallow is said to represent being consumed by love, persuasion and weakness, so be careful if you pop it into a bouquet for your loved one.

And finally, a poem. I love this, of course I do. Wherever I look, people seem to be losing their loved ones, one way or another. This is for you, brothers and sisters.

Joy
by Ann Gray

When I let the chickens out, I hurl mixed corn
in a golden arc across the frosted ground.
I know it’s junk, they shouldn’t have it, they don’t
need it, but everyone deserves joy somewhere.
I’ve been looking for something I once had and miss
and want again. I meet him in the beach café.
He has soup. I sip tea. He has over-wintered
vegetables on his allotment. I see it on his hands.
I imagine all that soil on my body. Sometimes
you know what’s bad for you, might be good.
I phone my mother every morning to start her day
– the way she knows it’s me, the way she says,
hello dear, before I’m speaking. She needs someone
to complain to. A mother is a precious thing. I know that
now I’m sure to lose her. She’s losing nouns and I have
to rummage in my brain to help her find them. I tell her
yesterday I thought I’d lost a dog and lost my voice calling.
I found her back at home, shaking, not sure if coming home
was good or bad, or neither, or both. There’s no reward
for coming home if no-one’s there, no one you love, no-one
to put out a hand, or smile to see you. My mother knows
and tries to hold me in her voice. Mothers do what they can.
Sometimes they don’t get much to work with. She knows
I’ll chase that golden arc, hoping for the joy in it.
I hope so much, hope the wine, the food, will taste
as it’s supposed to, hope that friends will stay,
their elbows on the table, The Low Anthem singing
To Ohio across the garden, where all those flowers
I fell in love with will be just a promised on their packets:
night scented stock, musk mallow, lunaria, pale phlox.
In this falling dark, when hens shuffle on their perches,
I hold my breath, listen to the sound of my loud heart.

LNHS Talks – Bird Census Methods for Gardens – A Thirty Year Study by Dave Dawson

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Dear Readers, those of us who have dipped our toes into the world of citizen science, by participating in the The Great Garden Birdwatch or Butterfly Conservation’s Butterfly Count often wonder what else we should be doing. There are national bird counts, to be sure, but can we sensibly do anything in our own back gardens? Dave Dawson has recorded the birds that he’s seen in his South London garden for the past thirty years, and he would reply with a resounding yes.

Dawson gave a number of reasons for recording the birds in your garden. Firstly there’s the delight of discovery, like the the time that he saw a raven flying over, being mobbed by crows. Then there’s the fact that quantitative information can be extremely useful, both at the time and for posterity. He posited the case of kangaroo numbers in Australia – there are many diary entries that say useful things like ‘we saw lots of kangaroos today but not as many as yesterday’. If only someone had thought to jot down some numbers! Then there’s the importance of documenting things as they actually change – Dawson could never have anticipated that there would be quite so many ring-necked parakeets in London, but neither could he have foreseen that house martin numbers would drop to zero.

Furthermore, counting birds is easily and conveniently done – Dawson remarks that he can do his count in the time that it takes him to brew up his Turkish coffee in the morning. Everyone now agrees that getting out into nature is good for you. And finally, Dawson’s method works – it will enable the user to actually record trends and to gather useful information.

Dawson agrees that to actually record a bird, you need three things – acuity, concentration and knowledge. However, all three can be accumulated by regular observation! He notes that, for himself, he wasn’t sure if the presence of cataracts and his gradual hearing loss impacted on his recording, though on balance I think he concluded that, although without his hearing aids in he ‘lost’ some species, like goldfinches, it didn’t impact on his figures overall. Because, as we’ll see, the recording sessions are so short it shouldn’t be difficult to concentrate. And knowledge of how the different species look and sound can be developed with the aid of field guides and mentors.

So, how does Dawson recommend going about observing and recording the birds in your garden?

  1. Choose a point in your garden to use for observation. Anything within a 25 metre radius of this point counts as a ‘near’ bird, anything further than this (including birds flying over) count as ‘far’. (You can count birds that you see and those that you hear, if you are reasonably confident about bird song (Bug Woman))
  2. Choose a routine that is easy and not too punishing. Most birds can be seen and heard between 8 and 10 a.m. so you won’t gain much by springing up at the crack of dawn.
  3. Choose a point which is ‘sensible’ i.e. with a good view of the garden.
  4. Choose a convenient counting frequency (i.e. a couple of times a week rather than every single day)
  5. Use binoculars
  6. Avoid winds of more than Force 4 or heavy rain
  7. Use a clipboard and a form – you will definitely want to record the date, time and how many birds of each species you saw, but Dawson also records temperature, wind speed, precipitation, cloud cover, and who actually did the count. Much depends on what you are personally interested in.
  8. Count all species – don’t go missing out the feral pigeons, for example,  because chances are you’ll suddenly want to find out something about them.
  9. Count any birds that scatter on your arrival
  10. Count for five minutes
  11. Record the birds that you see within your 25 metres and the ‘far’ birds separately.

So, what sort of information can be produced, and why do this instead of (or as well as) some of the national recording schemes? Dawson found that his results for some species mapped very nicely onto the British Trust for Ornithology’s Breeding Bird survey, but for some his personal records were very different. Although there has been a precipitous decline in house sparrow numbers, for example, the species has disappeared from Dawson’s garden altogether, probably the result of his particular colony dying out. He has also recorded a dramatic fall in the number of blue tits, although they’ve stayed more or less stable in the country as a whole.

Dawson also mentioned another survey that was done in the London Borough of Sutton in 1989. There was a push locally for more high density housing, and Dawson was asked to survey the birds in low, medium and high density areas of the borough to see what the possible impact might be. The study was conducted in a similar way to Dawson’s garden survey, with different areas of similar sizes being compared for their species richness. The only species that favoured the close-packed terraced houses were house sparrows and starlings, but thirteen species were found much less often in such sites, and overall, twenty species were disadvantaged by high-density developments. So, bird counts can reveal a lot of information that can’t be extracted from anecdotal accounts alone. We need quantitative data to make sense of the world sometimes, and Dawson has an infectious love of statistics, honed over nearly sixty years of working in the field. I thoroughly enjoyed his talk, and if you want to watch the whole thing, you can find it here.

Careful Does It….

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Dear Readers, today I decided to do a little bit of judicious pruning – my buddleias hang over the road a little, so I try to be a good neighbour and keep the pavement clear. Then, I noticed that some bindweed had infiltrated the hardy geraniums, and I finally paid attention to the elder that was trying to grow out of the wall. I chopped up all the bigger stems and was just about to go indoors when I noticed this shieldbug. My Facebook friends think it’s the last instar of a Hawthorn shieldbug, which makes a lot of sense what with me having a giant hawthorn tree in the garden.

And then these insects started to emerge – there were three of them in total, but they don’t hang around. I think this is probably a Southern Oak Bush-cricket (Meconema meridionale) – the ‘spike’ sticking out at the end shows that this individual is a female, and this is her ovipositor, for laying her eggs into rotten wood. Look at the length of those antennae!

All of the bush-crickets bounced away into the undergrowth. They can jump many times their own body-length, and just as well – being bright green they are far too conspicuous. You can tell this is a Southern Bush-cricket by the yellow dorsal stripe. This is another recent arrival, first recorded in Southern England in 2001. As the animal is flightless, it has probably been ‘hitching a lift’ in plant material that’s transported by vehicle. But here’s a thing – it is said to be a predator of the horse-chestnut leaf miner, the moth that is turning all the horse-chestnut leaves to crisps as we speak. It generally lives in trees, so I’m wondering if it is currently living in the whitebeam? Or was it hanging out in the buddleia, which is now the size of a small tree?

When I remove plant material from my pond, I always put it on the side for a couple of days to allow the little critters to wriggle back into the water, but I’ve always just plonked the lid onto my wheelie bin once I’ve done the pruning. It occurs to me that I should leave the lid open for a few hours, just to allow insects to escape as the vegetation starts to wilt. I’d already removed a two-spot ladybird and a very pregnant spider, so hopefully other creatures will also have a chance to escape.

So this is basically a plea for anyone who has their garden waste recycled, or who has a tightly-enclosed compost bin (like some of the plastic ones I’ve seen) to consider leaving the lid open for a little while, to avoid condemning invertebrates to death. It’s something I’d never thought of until all the action today, and I’d love to hear how you deal with such things.

In other news, the garden is a jungle. Once the angelica fell over and everything around it collapsed, it’s been a tangle of meadowsweet, hemp agrimony and greater willowherb. Chelsea Flower Show it ain’t, but how I love to watch all the pollinators, especially as the plants are at a very convenient height for observation.

The pond has water mint and figwort, with the bees and hoverflies being especially partial to the former.

Water mint

And the bumblebees continue to home in on the bittersweet.

It’s true that soon there will be some tidying to do, but I am just starting to realise how many species the garden supports. I will try to be sympathetic to what the creatures need, while also trying to keep my own sanity. Still, this is all a problem for September. For now, my tidying is done.

An August Walk in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery

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‘My’ swamp cypress

Dear Readers, I didn’t get to the cemetery last week because of the interminable rain, so it was a real pleasure to see what was going on this week. For a start, the swamp cypress was looking extremely fine. I know you’re not meant to have favourites, but this tree is very close to my heart.

But then, how about the trunk on this oak? It seems to have been much-lopped in its early years, and it’s covered in puckers and scars, but is no less characterful for its troubles. It reminds me of one of those many-breasted statues of Artemis that you can see in museums, and, like all oaks, this tree probably has been ‘mother’ to many, many other species. Or maybe it’s just me. See what you think

Photo One by Son of Groucho from Scotland, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Statue of Artemis from the Ephesus Museum (Photo One)

In other news, one of the cherry laurels has become a refuge for snails of all kinds. I guess that the waxy leaves provide an excellent protection against drying out, though the snails don’t appear to be eating them. This brown-lipped banded snail (Cepaea nemoralis) reminds me rather of a mint humbug.

I think that this is probably a rather worn garden snail (Cornu aspersum). It looks like an elderly snail to me, battered by life but clinging on.

And this is another brown-lipped snail, though not quite as pristine as the first one. Isn’t it interesting how we (generally) view snails as small characters, rather lovable in their way, but don’t extend the same tolerance to slugs? Maybe the shells help to offset the general sliminess.

Late summer is already shading into autumn, with bountiful supplies of conkers…

Elderberries….

And rosehips….

But there are some new plants in flower as well, such as this musk mallow (Malva moschata)…

and these lovely common toadflax (Linaria vulgaris). I love this plant, with its lemon and orange flowers. In fact, I have a great fondness for all toadflaxes – they are often great for pollinators and their flowers just ask for a bee to land on them.

There has been a whole lot of strimming going on on the banks where I’ve seen green woodpeckers in the past, but at the moment the magpies are there, working over the dried grass for tasty insects.

We take a quick run around the field and have a look at the Himalayan balsam. This is such an attractive, showy plant. I can see why people planted it in the past – it’s like having a giant moth orchid in your back garden. What a shame it’s such a thug – the bees seem to love it.

I spot a sparrowhawk flying overhead. I also see a recently-fledged blackbird, looking very small and vulnerable. Fortunately I could hear at least one adult bird in the tree overhead, so I moved quickly on, keeping my fingers crossed that this little one would soon be fully equipped for life in the cemetery. At least there are very few cats.

This crow was pecking at a piece of cellophane that had been used to wrap flowers with great determination, and even tried to fly off with it when we approached.

We couldn’t see anything of food value, and so my husband put the cellophane back in the bin. I reminded him that experiments have shown that corvids don’t forget someone who has done them a disservice – it’s been shown that they can identify someone who has wronged them even if they change their clothes and wear a mask. Let’s hope that this act of kindness won’t be misinterpreted, or our walks in the cemetery are about to become much more ‘interesting’.

Photo Credit

Photo One by Son of Groucho from Scotland, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Saturday Quiz – Family Favourites!

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A pretty plant, but what family does it belong to?

Dear Readers, here’s a challenge for you. Below are photos of some plants. One point if you can say what family it belongs to from the list below, and a further point if you can name the species. The results will be posted next Friday (20th August), so you have until 5 p.m. on Thursday 19th August to pop your answers in the comments. I will ‘disappear’ your answers when I see them, but as usual write your answers down on a piece of paper if you are easily influenced (like me :-))Onwards!

Plant Families

A) Crassulaceae (Stonecrops)

B) Fabaceae (Peas, vetches and clovers)

C) Hypericaceae (St John’s-worts)

D) Geraniaceae (Cranesbills and storksbills)

E) Onagraceae (Willowherbs)

F) Malvaceae (Mallows)

G) Balsaminaceae (Balsams)

H) Primulaceae (Primulas)

I) Solanaceae (Nightshades)

J) Plantaginaceae (Plantains)

K) Scrophulaceae (Figworts)

L) Asteraceae (Daisies)

M) Lamiaceae (Deadnettles)

N) Dipsaceae (Teasels)

O) Apiaceae (Carrots)

So if you think the plant in photo 1 belongs to the Crassulaceae (stonecrop) family, your answer is 1) A).

Happy quizzing!

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Book Review – ‘English Pastoral – An Inheritance’ by James Rebank

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Dear Readers, there is a lot to love about this book. James Rebank is the third generation to have farmed an area in the Lake District, and he tells of the way that farming has changed in that time, from the mixed-use farm of his grandfather to the more intensive methods that were chosen by his father, and to the way that he is trying to balance the need to make enough money for the farm to survive with the urgency of preserving and enhancing the soil and the habitat. I’ve read many books about the way that the industrialisation of agriculture has impacted the countryside, but this one is deeply personal, and is written by someone who knows the Lake District, and observes it closely. Here’s a lovely description of the goldfinches feeding on the thistles that he’s scything, for example:

‘Twenty feet away a goldfinch swayed gently on the purple flower of a burr thistle, and rocked back and forth, its little gold wing-bars flashing in the sunshine as it plucked at the thistledown’. 

Or his father, shooting one of the rooks who have been demolishing the barley crop:

‘A black speck, wings outstretched, moving slowly but so high it seemed tiny. He pulled the trigger gently. The gun recoil sent a shudder through him to me. The shot had gone, but he was still peering up the little sight on the top of the gun. The air smelt of cordite. Then, high above him, the bird crumpled into something smaller and fell from the sky. It landed about five feet from where we were crouching on the bone-hard ground with a feathery thud. All hell had broken loose. The crows knew that we were there now and had a shotgun. They fled like a kind of storm wind that sucked the air from the field’. 

But his grandfather is the last of a generation. The drive to modernise has come to this corner of the Lake District, with its pesticides, its fertilizers, its new crops and its new breeds of animals. Rebanks douses the thistles with herbicide, and they die without all the back-breaking work of scything them down. Is this the future? For a while it looks like it.

“And in place of an old patchwork landscape full of working people, diverse farm animals and crops, with lots of farmland wildlife, a blander, barer, simpler denatured and unpeopled landscape had emerged“.

But Rebanks’s father is never convinced. A local man, Henry, who farmed traditionally dies, and when his soil is tested, it’s found that it needs absolutely nothing added to it – the soil is alive, rich and fertile. Everything starts to look less like a revolution, and more like a disaster.

“A mile or two past Henry’s land my father pointed to a field being ploughed up by the roadside. A giant red tractor was pulling a huge blue plough. I could sense that he was alarmed by something. ‘Look’, he said, ‘there are no seagulls or crows following the plough’. This was a shocking thing to him. ‘There must be no worms in those fields.”

But the turning point for Rebanks is when he reads a copy of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’.

“The morning after I had sprayed my first field of thistles, I went down the lane to check on a robin’s nest that I’d found a few days earlier. It was close to where the thistles had curled over from the chemical spray. The chicks were dead in the nest, cold bundles of pink skin and bone and scruffy feather stubs. I knew this was my fault. A tiny voice inside me had said that it was wrong. I think I told myself that three or four chicks were a one-off cost to get a big problem sorted, that they might have been killed by us mowing thistles some other way. I’m not sure I believed it, because when I remembered those dead chicks, I felt ashamed. And now, after reading ‘Silent Spring’, I knew we had been sleepwalking”.

How Rebanks decides to try to farm in a more balanced way takes up the final third of the book, and it is full of  concern for both the environment and the community of the Lake District.  I loved the deeply personal stories and observation that Rebanks brings to this work, and you can feel his passion thrumming through every page. However, when the book moves away from the personal I feel that it’s less successful – I found myself turning the pages at speed at various points when the author starts to move away from the particulars of his story into the more general. I did learn a lot from this book (I had no idea, for example, that slurry was so much worse for the soil than the traditional aged manure and straw mixes that would have been spread), but there was a lot that I already knew, so maybe the problem is with the reader rather than the author.

Let me know what you think, if you’ve had a chance to read it! It’s on to ‘Featherhood’ by Charlie Gilmour next, which promises to be a very different kind of book….

 

 

A Trick of the Light

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Dear Readers, it’s easy to get so caught up in busy-ness and sorting things out and running around. But the rewards for stopping and looking are so great. Just look at these spiders’ webs in the garden this morning. For just a few moments the sun illuminates every single thread and turns it into a rainbow.

Sometimes things like this make me want to cry. We rush downhill in our lives, and yet look at this beauty. Everything is illuminated. It is heart-stopping. And in a few minutes, as the sun climbs higher in the sky, the moment is gone. Surely the spreadsheets and the laundry can wait? As my dear Dad used to say, you’re a long time dead.

There were four webs in just this tiny corner of the garden. Goodness knows how many there are in the whole place. It’s been so wet that I think they’re making up for lost time, as are the bees, who are all over the hemp agrimony. Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, because when I see the spiders I can almost smell the autumn leaves. Take a few minutes to stop and pay attention today, Readers. I promise that the rewards are bountiful, and surprising.