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 One sunny July afternoon a few years ago, I met a Yorkshire farmer at a country show, and made the mistake of trying to engage him in smalltalk about the weather. “Lovely day,” I said.

“Not for me,” he said.

“Oh, I said. “Why’s that then?”

He looked at me, and then looked up to scowl disgustedly at the innocent, cloudless blue sky.

“Over hot for me,” he said. “To be honest,“ he leaned in conspiratorially, and came quite close to smiling - “I’d sooner have a frost.”

 It seemed a perverse preference at the time, but when I thought about it later, I realised he had a point. Landscapes might look good in the sunshine, but under frost they are sublime, glittering spectacles. Fresh snow is beautiful, but it obscures whereas the thin white ice-crusts gild. And frost creates what are by far the best conditions for walking; sounds ring clear in the air, hedgerow scents seem sharper, and the chill makes your face feel clean. This might sound ridiculous, but I particularly enjoy the feeling you get in the soles of your feet when you hobble over the iron-hard rutted mud in lanes and fields. The jabs from the frozen knobs of soil, the light chops from the hard ridges and the twistings as you misjudge the little slopes and hollows feel like the soil resisting after suffering us trampling and squashing it through the wet autumn months. True, your feet, ankles and knees might smart a little afterwards, but they will have had a good waking-up, and you will have felt the landscape more keenly than you ever will in boring old Spring or Summer.

 For those tempted to try a frost walk for the first time, a few quick words on details. In my opinion, the best time is first light in November or December. The ideal footwear is a Wellington boots with a flexible soles and wide leg, preferably a basic Argyll three-quarter knee. And if possible, take a flask of tea. A cup of hot, strong tea on a crisp white morning, watching the first crows wing across the pale pink sky – well, that is another delight all in itself.

 

First published in Modern Delight, a collection of writing on small delights by various authors, published by Waterstones & Faber Autumn 2009

You probably wouldn’t imagine that any sentence of the above length, let alone one that contains the word ‘meadow’ and sounds like a olde-worlde hey-nonny folk song, could prompt unpleasant feelings in anyone. But it does in me. To me, this innocent, pastoral enquiry is a nettle-and-thistle bouquet. When friends and strangers ask me this question – as they often do – I involuntarily blush, rub the side of my neck, avert my eyes, mumble and, finally, tell lies.

 “Fine!” I say. “We cut it back in the Spring, got rid of a lot of docks. When the ox-eye daisies came out at the end of June, it looked like a 1980s Timotei advert!” But although the daisies did grow, the truth is that they lasted about one week. The docks all grew back, stronger than before. My meadow is not fine at all - it is a small, green(ish) disaster area.

The story of the meadow really goes back to my childhood, which I spent on my family’s farm in Yorkshire. It was a small, crops-and-livestock, in-the-family-for-a-million-years-or-something farm, and as the eldest I should have taken it on, but as I was born with a Frank-Spencerish tendency to crash tractors and let animals escape, I was packed off to the city at 18. My younger brother stayed, but it got harder and harder to make money, and at the end of the 1990s they had to sell up – although, being luckier than most, they retained a bit of land with a shed on beside a lane.  I went back to help with the sale, and during that unsettling time I found myself somehow growing closer to my dad and brother than I had been before.

 Ours had not been an organic farm - indeed in the 1970s my dad was pulling out hedges and chucking pesticide on with all the gay abandon the Government was then encouraging with its intensification grants. However, what struck me when I went back were the practises which suddenly seemed terribly fashionable, but had always been followed because, not so very long ago at all, they just made good business sense. We fed the rotten potatoes and peelings to the pigs, the pigshit went on the fields, the fields grew more potatoes for us to eat. We butchered a pig and gave bits to neighbours, the neighbours gave us their spare garden fruit and veg. This wasn’t in the pre-mechanisation era or anything, it was in the time of home computers, the Cold War and house music, and when I talked to my dad about it all in the weeks after the sale, I realised how much he knew about what are now called sustainable methods, and how his generation had been encouraged to abandon the knowledge in the rush to produce cheap food after the war.

 It all got to me a bit, and that’s how I decided to make a little wildflower meadow near that remaining shed. I wanted it to be a small, personal monument to a way of life that was disappearing, and I determined to do it organically, so as to use the stuff my dad knew about pre-pesticide weed control. 

 This, of course, was my first mistake.  I was drawing on a dodgy, modern, urban idea of “nature” rather than anything based on what might actually happen. The idea I mean is the one promulgated by some environmentalists and taken to heart by well-meaning urbanites, that vaguely suggests the earth, left to its own natural devices, will bring forth good things if you work “in harmony” with it. The trouble with this theory is that it ignores the fact that some plant species – generally  inedible and unattractive ones – are, like some animals, aggressively predatorial. Sure, wild mushrooms or handsome foxgloves might flourish in undisturbed hedgerows, but once most ground has been disturbed in some way  it’s up for grabs, and only frequent human intervention will sort it out.

 My patch of ground was covered in goosegrass, thistle, ironweed, groundsel and docks, all the nasty predatorial plants that take over this sort of soil like property developers taking over inner cities. I said I’d dig them out. My dad, as bemused as you would be if you’d spent your teens hoeing weeds in turnip fields only to have your aching back muscles saved by ICI’s agri-chemicals, pointed out that it would be a lot easier to spray them off. I dug. It took a day to do about five square yards; in the end, he put a digger bucket on the front of a forklife and, and scraped the top layer of soil off. I knew there would be weed-seeds left in there, but thought that a thick sowing of his meadow mixture would out-compete them.

 When it came to choosing the seeds, I went to the seed merchant in the local market town to ask them to make up a mixture I had in mind. Unfortunately, the bloke explained, they didn’t clean and mix their own seeds now; EU regs had made it too expensive, so now they just sold pre-packaged mixtures you from a global corporation whose HQ is in Canada. He gave me their glossy catalogue, which I took away and threw in the bin when I got home. In the end I found a wildflower farm near Nottingham, and began with a meadow mixture of standard proportions (80% grasses to 20% flowers), but using species that do well on chalky soil. Lots of wild flower species, such ox-eye daisies, ragged robin and bird’s foot trefoil, will grow almost anywhere, but many tend to thrive in certain conditions; woodland flowers like native bluebells, for example, seem to do better in acidy soils while those which like drier, well-drained soils (agrimony, for example) prefer chalk. The basic calcerous-soil mix had about five varieties of grass, and it is worth reciting their names: sheeps fescue, browntop bent, chewings fescue, creeping red fescue and crested dogtail. In addition to that there were about fifteen varieties of flower, including birdsfoot trefoil, corn poppy, cowslip, lady’s bedstraw, salad burnet, self-heal, wild carrot, marjoram, musk mallow and meadow buttercup.

 To this mix I added a selection of seeds bought separately. These were species likely to do ok, and that either were favourites of my family, or that had names I liked, such as speedwell, foxglove, and heartsease. The common names of wild flowers, with their rough lyricism and local variations seemed bound up with the sort of rural traditions that were worth keeping to me, so choosing them on this basis seemed to make some sort of sense.

When my dad and I sowed the mix of grass and wildflower seeds together later that day, at a rate of an ounce to every ten square yards, I imagined what it would all look like in eight months time, it felt to my naïve mind like a small, symbolic act of faith.

 Of course, what it actually looked like in eight months time was a carpet of dull green and mustard-coloured groundsel with thistles and dock spears sticking up in it. If anything there were less wildflowers in it than there had been to begin with. The only positive point was that, bizarrely, a small clump of clover had flourished down one side, which would be good for the soil. Even my friend who worked in nature conservation told me to spray the weeds off this time, but I thought maybe if I dug down deeper this time it might help. I went to see my dad’s friend Mal, a morose, bearded, heavy-browed stereotype of a Yorkshire farmer who I knew owned a mechanical garden rotavator. Mal and I had always got along quite well, because of - rather than despite - my lack of practical abilities. The misery that my clumsiness used to cause in me somehow chimed with the misery that life in general seemed to induce in Mal, so there was a kind of bond between us, although he had thought staying on at school at 16 had given me some funny ideas. He clearly saw my interest in the rotavator as being one of them.

 “Is tha sure, lad?” he said, doubtfully, after showing me how it worked.

“I should be alright, shouldn’t I?” I asked, unconvincingly. The rotavator was a lot heavier than I’d expected.

He just stared at me, quite kindly really, over his beard, and I said, “Are you worried I’ll break it?”

“Nay!” he said. “I’m worried it’ll break thee.”

It was his pity that killed me “This isn’t going to work is it, Mal?”

In the end, he put a big, tractor-mounted rotavator on the back of his chunky International XL 955 and came up lane to tackle it the modern way, with me on the footplate. “Why don’t tha just get some Round Up on the bastard?” he said, sizing up the groundsel.

“I wanted to do it without sprays if I could, just, er, a thing, you know.”

He looked at me in much the same way he looked at me 20 years ago when I said I was moving to London.

“Oh. So tha’s on o’ them is tha?”

“I suppose so.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Can you try to go round that clover?” I asked meekly.

“Thee and thy bloody… clover,” he said inexplicably, and lowered the spinning rotavator blades into the ground.

 Naturally the weeds all choked the second lot of seed as well, and that autumn I put on a hand-pumped knapsack sprayer, and let the sticky, thorny, creeping vinous little bastards have it, full on.  I felt like a rural version of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, and I understood in a new way what my dad had meant when he explained how the new pesticides had seemed like miracles when they came in after the war. He’d be the first to acknowledge the damage they’ve done, by the way, but still, I suppose you have to realise that ideas that someone like me has about getting closer to nature are in some ways a product of the technology that distanced us from it in the first place. There is little enjoyment or dignity in hoeing weeds from 10 acres of turnips if you have no other choice.

 In the end I sprayed it twice, and that tipped the balance. After the next lot of seed enough grasses came up to keep a lot of the docks and thistles back. You could even find the odd bit of speedwell and campion in there. By this time the book I’d written about my family and the farm had come out, and to my surprise my brother said that now he knew “what the fuck I was getting at with the flowers” he would help. He helped me mend an old lawnmower (by which I mean he did it while I passed him the spanners) and we mowed it together. Passers-by who’d read it would give me advice, although none of it worked except for the instruction to just keep pulling the weeds out which was given to me by an agronomist who himself was cultivating a meadow in his paddock.

 Every autumn and spring I and whoever else feels sorry for me will dig out patches of rubbish, and try to put down new seeds, or even transplant seedlings, and every summer a minuscule percentage of them make it. The daises and poppies dominated at first as is their wont, but the other species have come through; for brief periods when the flowers bloom it can look convincing, and when we mow it you get that lovely warm hay smell as the grass dries. Generally it looks less like a living, loving monument to a cherished past than a thwarted, well-meaning attempt at something. I could end the book with me and my dad sowing the seed, tidy and neat; unfortunately real life twists and tricks and rambles on like cornbine or goosegrass, and tends not to end up as tidily as stories do.

 But without trying to draw a Disneyish moral, I think I can paradoxically take a little bit of pleasure from all this. I disabused myself of some naïve ideas about the environment for a start. I enjoyed my afternoon riding on the tractor with Mal, and mending the mower with my brother. And as the failure gets ever more obvious, as the nettles soar and the docks thicken, I enjoy the adversarial, conspiratorial tones of the conversations I have with people with ruses for getting rid of them. I feel on the same side, us against… it. What I’ve really learned is not stuff about actual growing, but about people. When you’re involved with the natural environment around you, you inevitably get involved with the people around you as well; you slip outside that modern process whereby all settlements become more like gated suburban communities, and all work places are sealed-off and distant. You can learn that embarrassment and failure are not things that you suffer alone, isolated and lonely in a bedroom, but things that unite us with a common bond of humanity between us all. For this, humiliation is but a small price to pay.

 

First published in The Idler, Autumn 2007

 

 

One bright blue, oven-hot afternoon in the summer of 1984, my friend Johnny and I were constructing the top layers of a vast strawstack in a field on the East Yorkshire Wolds. We were 18, working for a local farmer in our last school summer holiday. All our summers were spent like this, but for some reason I have a clear memory of this particular day or rather of a particular moment in it. It came as we finished unloading and tessellating a trailerload of bales. As the strawstack was close to a windbreak of larch, damson and apple trees, we pulled some apples from the branches, and sat on the straw to eat them. They were unripe, bitter-tasting Bramleys, but eating them up there in the sunshine felt good, and we felt one of those small stretches of serenity that always seem to come over you in the countryside when you are least expecting them. I remember that instead of insulting each other or arguing or talking about pop music, we just sat in a happy silence for about a quarter of an hour. It’s hard to explain more than that, except perhaps to say that it was as if in eating the apples, we had swallowed part of the glorious afternoon.

 When I think now of the fiften or so minutes we lay on top of the stack, I have a recollection of our surroundings that is quite disarmingly vivid. The faint wind, warm from the baking wolds, on my face; the leafy stir of trees around the stack; the slightly sour, earthy odour of barley straw, and the virile green scent of summer verges that one almost tastes. Apart from the nursery-blue sky with its infant thunder clouds, though, there is no meaningful visual element to this memory. I think this is telling, and I mention it here because I think it is easy to forget the powerful sensuality of the English countryside, and the impression it can make on us.

 Fortunately you do not have to lie on top of a straw stack to experience this. It suffices to simply walk down a green lane, stop, and close your eyes for a full minute. Listen, smell, feel, suck the air in, and the place enters into you in a way that it cannot when you merely stand admiring a view. Marvellous vistas are all very well, but looking at them can make you feel separate from the landscape; how often do you hear someone say that a view looks “unreal”, or that they “cannot take it in”?

 In contrast, although we may be barely conscious of what our other four senses are registering, it is often via these sensations that we viscerally cognize the countryside when we are in it. It may be true that culturally, country life and urban life are converging, but nevertheless when I am in a green lane, or atop a strawstack, or walking along a coastal cliffedge, I still feel different to the way I feel in a town or city. I don’t know if the English landscape can be said to be especially sensual, but it does have a distinctive ease and quiet luxuriance. It is generally moist, lush, and soft, with ample curves and sibilance; its weather does not generally punish with extremes; our wildlife is in the main pretty, timid and unthreatening. It has its celebrated all-time-classic sensations, such as the smell of fresh hay, the cawing of rooks and the feel of sea spray, but the dearest are likely to be personal.

 Those I would take to my boring, dry desert island would include the fragrance of peas being harvested on a summer evening, the foot-feel of frozen mud-ruts under your wellington boots in an early January morning, and the keening of an invisible light aircraft, pleasant because it points up the silence. I might also add the taste of wild fruit, chiefly in memory of that perfect moment from my late childhood. Talking about it years later, Johnny and I agreed that it was probably the first time we became fully aware the infinite, indifferent splendour of the countryside around us. This might seem strange, given that we had grown up there, but it isn’t really. Those most familiar with a place can be the slowest to understand it – particularly, perhaps, if they think too much about what it looks like.

 

First published in Icons of England, a collection of writing about the English Countryside published in association with the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. More information here

 

 

Like many people who grew up in a village and moved to a city, I used to have mixed feelings about the English countryside. While I appreciated the common sense and relative guilelesness of its inhabitants, I thought they ran a bit low on imagination; they seemed to take a smug delight in calling a spade a fucking shovel, whereas in cities you could find people discussing the meanings of an earth-shifting instrument and, in my misguided youth, I preferred the latter. But a few years ago I had to move back to the country for a while to help with a family crisis and, against my expectations, I found myself starting to enjoy life there. I particularly enjoyed talking to the older men and women about the weather and the plants and animals around us, and I think it was after a neighbour told me she called wild pansies “thugs” because their flowers resembled mean, squinting eyes, and they always ruined her garden, that I began to think there perhaps some kinds of poetic imagination are rather overlooked by educated people in towns.

 And then one night I was talking about plants to a middle-aged retired farm worker and his wife in a green lane, and the bloke said, “When we were kids we used to love cocksfoot grass, ‘cos look - ” he picked a stem of cock’sfoot grass and splayed its feathery tip against the back of his hand – “it looks like a cock’s foot!” And as we talked more about the wild flowers in the lane, I thought for the first time about their common names, and how they were given not by botanists or poets or biotech companies, but by ordinary people out walking in lanes - ordinary people who had had the language and ideas to think of those purple spears of foxglove flowers in the grass verge as a spotty vulpine mittens, or the sweet-scented yellow and pink flowers in the hedges as honeysuckle. Harebell, snowdrop, cuckoo-spit, thugs; the names were sometimes like fairytale-images and sometimes combinations of symbol, metaphor and metonymy, and always living links to a delight in words and images among people rarely credited with much poetic imagination.

 I have collected names and wild flowers – though not from the wild, since picking them has in some places led to their permanent disappearance - ever since that night. To be fair some of names such as St Johns’ wort (probably acquired when Christianity adopted a pagan festival at which the plant was burned) and dog rose (taken from Pliny’s account of a soldier curing himself of a poisonous dog’s bite with the root) do come from outside the British folk tradition. But most are so, um, rooted in it that they will     have at least a dozen regional variants in their names, many of which are still in use. Charlock, for instance, is brazzocks in the part of Yorkshire where I grew up, runch thirty miles to the west, and carlock by the time you get to Northampton, where John Clare wrote about it using that name in Pleasant Spots. Elsewhere it names that, as in most cases, move between symbolism, metonymy and Edward Lear-esque onomatopoeia – popple (Cumbria), calves’ feet (Gloucestershire) bread-and-marmalade (Somerset), skillogs (Donegal), wild turnips (another bit of Yorkshire.) Mysteriously, many of the regional variants are similar,  suggesting that the appearance of a plant could prompt roughly the same thought in say, a shepherd in Wales as it did in a cook in Kent. Travelling around the United Kingdom you will find heartsease, officially known as the wild pansy, described variously as love in vain, love and idle, and love in idleness, presumably because one of its three petals is a brighter colour than the other two, so the arrangement is redolent of a beauty with two suitors, one of whom will be eased and another destined to be idle. (In Lincolnshire it is also known as meet her in the entry kiss her in the buttery, which makes you wonder a) if there is something you don’t know about girls from Lincolnshire, and b) if “buttery” has a local dialect meaning that you neither know nor wish to find out).

 The lyricism and folklore can bowl you over a bit sometimes, and you realise  just how estranged we have become from our natural, native environment when you go back to some books and find plant references that on first reading seemed exotic or imagined, but in fact are merely quotes from the contemporary hedgerows. Remember the name of the flower Oberon squeezes on Titania’s eyes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? It is “purple with love’s wound” Oberon tells Puck, “And maidens call it Love In Idleness”. Hemlock, referenced perhaps most famously by Keats in Ode to a Nightingale, although away from Hampstead it may also be known as break your mother’s heart, devil’s blossom, scabby hands, lady’s lace, kakezie, and nosebleed. Chaucer’s “daye’s eye” is not his unique metaphor, but simply a current name which we have contracted to “daisy”. The great reference book collating the literary references, mythology and common names is Geofrey Grigson’s wonderful 1958 herbal The Englishman’s Flora, now out of print but usually available in paperback for about ten pounds from abebooks.com. The index alone is worth the money – among the highlights you will find Scrooby Grass (scurvy grass), Bastard Killer (Yew, once used to induce abortions), Cat’s Love (Valerian, because cats love the smell of its roots), Devil’s Guts (bindweed, notoriously tough) and pigs pettitoes (birdsfoot trefoil, goodness knows).

 I found myself thinking about all this again when Margaret Beckett approved Britain’s first GM crop back in the Spring. Is there a better indicator of our “progress” than the contrast between the public pleasure and identification nature that created these names, and the copyrighting of seeds by multinational chemical companies? If so I should like to know what it is. 

 The name of the approved crop, by the way, is Chardon LL, a sub-variety of a maize called T25. It is made by Bayer CropScience, a division of the German-based pharmaceutical company Bayer. In 1898 Bayer launched another product purporting benefit the world’s health – the rather more snappily-titled opiate painkiller “Heroin”.