SOME years ago, I decided to re-create an old-fashioned cornfield, the sort of poppy-resplendent arable scene you seldom find these days outside the frame of a Constable painting. I had two principle guides for this experiment in retrofarming. One was my own boyhood memory from the early 1970s of a rustling wheat field embroidered with wildflowers (weeds, if you will). My greater guide, however, was a chance reading of Walks in the Wheat-fields by Victorian countryside writer Richard Jefferies. One particular picture-in-words arrested my heart:
'Let your hand touch the ears lightly as you walk... There are hares within, and many a brood of partridge chicks that cannot yet use their wings... Finches more numerous than the berries on the hedges... There are, then, the poppies, whose wild brilliance in July days is not surpassed by any hue of Spain. Wild charlock-a clear yellow-pink pimpernels, pink-streaked convolvulus, great white convolvulus, double-yellow toadflax, blue borage, broad rays of blue chicory, tall corncockles, azure corn-flowers, the great mallow, almost a bush, purple knapweed...'
Jefferies made 'no further catalogue' of the wildflowers growing in corn land, because it would take 'pages more. Before the coming of herbicides and pesticides in the 1950s, the arable fields of Britain vibrated with colour and life. Now? The wheat field has become a monotone, monochrome unit of production and flowers familiar to farmers since the Stone Age have become extinct. (RIP lamb succory, interrupted brome, stinking hawksbeard, (possibly) York groundsel.) Arable plants are our most critically threatened group of wild flora. They need saving.
Denne historien er fra May 31, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra May 31, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
