Meadows make livestock

It’s more a case of April flowers, rather than showers, as John Lewis-Stempel gets down on his knees in an attempt to add floral richness to a rough-grazed field

- Philip Bannister

THIS is a story of April flowers. A field we rent is in a wood, all by itself. It is a place at once curious and lovely. When you think ‘field’, you think of England’s familiar open patchwork landscape, where fields adjoin each other, separated by hedge or stock fence. But England’s first fields were hacked from the wildwood by the Stone Agers wherever was easy. Such as a pre-existing glade. Agriculture was not a continuous creeping frontier, but done here and there, in bits and pieces. Our first farmland was inside woodland. Like Mr. Geary’s field.

Going into Mr. Geary’s field, then, is to take a long step back into time. That is why his square, three-acre paddock is odd. The beauty of the place is its birdsong, especially on a rose-glow April evening such as this. The birds perform evensong on all sides, to make four walls of sound. The star performer tonight is the recently arrived blackcap. I can hear why, in its polyphonic song, it is sometimes called the Nightingale of the North, and so inspired that most cerebral and sensitive of French operatic composers, Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen accorded the blackcap the ultimate bird-lover’s tribute, the accompaniment to St Francis of Assisi in his opera of that name.

Anyway, to the flowers. When we took over the rental two years ago, Mr. Geary apologised for the field’s state, saying: ‘It is a bit overgrown.’ Having moved to the Big Smoke decades ago, he keeps the field as a remote souvenir of his roots. True enough, without husbandry, the field had gone rampant to moss and ryegrass, and little but. Brambles from the wood had extended their tentacles 10 yards in. There were assertive little sprigs of oak everywhere.