The Easternmost House, page 8
To make it worse, I gather the seeds, mixing them into what Dame Miriam Rothschild called Farmers’ Nightmare (an idea initiated by HRH The Prince of Wales in the early days at Highgrove), and spread the pretty weeds, or wildflowers, still further, because they add beauty and they help the bees. Self-seeding foxgloves and feverfew seem worthy of the herbaceous borders of a grand country house yet are considered weeds by some. Poppies begin to appear on the clifftop, and as I have left much of the so-called lawn to grow, a patchwork of tiny flowers has appeared.
You know your farming is ‘extensive’ when there’s birdsfoot trefoil growing in the middle of the farm tracks. And there is. At night the poppies and tiny flowers fold their petals in the fading light, a process I have discovered is called nycinasty. ‘Nycinasty’ is one of those words, like ‘triglyph’ or ‘guttae’ in architecture, which is not particularly useful in real life since nearly all of us don’t know what it means without looking it up. I only know about ‘nycinasty’ because I googled flowers seeming to shut down and go to bed at night but am glad such words exist.
Some time ago, there was a single wild yellow lupin bush teetering on the edge of the cliff, which I rescued and planted in our so-called garden, which I have subjected to a programme of ‘managed rewilding’ with a controlled let-it-grow policy in certain areas. The wild yellow lupin thrived and tiny baby yellow lupin plants popped up around its feet. Each of these was nurtured with the care of a mother hen nurturing her yellow chicks, with the result that now we have wild yellow lupins all over our part of the cliff, flowering in May and lasting for most of the summer.
The ‘managed rewilding’ also extended to the brambles, which were higher than my head and covered a large area amounting to about half the so-called garden when we were first here. By hand, with my parrot clippers, I chopped the brambles up into tiny pieces, which took several days. I left a thick hedge of high brambles at the boundary with the barley field behind us and behind the brick outbuilding, to act as cover for the songbirds, pheasants and hedgehogs I hoped might appreciate it and also to stop Chuffy running away into the wide blue yonder, as greyhounds are inclined to do.
Now, the former bramble patch is a carpet of blue flowers in May, a type of large forget-me-not, which must have been lying dormant in the soil, unable to see the sun or compete with the brambles. Essentially, I act as an intelligent grazing animal, strimming paths here and there, but leaving the wildflowers that I choose. I also allowed about twenty self-seeded tree saplings to grow into proper trees, cutting off the lower branches to channel their energy and make a good tree shape rather than a bush, in contrast to our high, bushy hedges left shaggy for the birds. After ten or so years, my pet saplings are now handsome young trees several metres tall, so it is startling to suddenly be reminded that they will end up in the sea before they reach the end of their natural life.
The effect of all this ‘managed rewilding’ on insect life, and therefore bird life, is remarkable to observe. It has definitely made a difference and helped a tiny patch of nature. If I had done genuine hands-off rewilding and done nothing at all, rather than pretending to be an intelligent grazing animal, the benefits to nature overall would be (are) measurably less. We know this because we have the ‘before’ as a control to the experiment. Suffolk has been a cultivated landscape for so many centuries that it does not seem cut out for a return to the rewilding purists’ Serengeti of woolly mammoths, wolves and lynxes that it once sustained, but with a ‘Wilderness Reserve’ of four thousand acres, nature reserves, estuaries, wetlands, abandoned wartime airfields, rough coastal edges and reedbeds, it still tries its best to be hospitable to wildlife.
In early spring, perhaps March or April so as to be in England for the blossom and cow parsley in May, we sometimes go to Venice. One such time, already knowing Venice well and having explored all the obvious places around the lagoon, from Torcello to Choggia, we alighted on the farming island of Sant’ Erasmo, a large island that tourists almost never visit, just to see what it was like. Exactly like Suffolk, is what it was like. Apart from the farming of artichokes, whereas Suffolk goes rather more in for asparagus in that sort of high-value-crop arena, the watery landscapes of the Venetian lagoon and the Blyth estuary have much in common.
At the outer reaches of Sant’ Erasmo, there was a bee-farmer selling honey and a chicken farmer selling eggs, on a small nature-friendly scale, reminiscent of Suffolk’s thriving roadside honesty-box culture, of which we are quite proud (of the honesty as much as the enterprising spirit). There was also a mysterious dam made of branches and twigs, with some kind of trap on the bank of the dyke which was dammed. The dam looked man-made, and the trap was a small wire cage, of the sort possibly intended to catch some kind of mustolid predator, perhaps a mink or a stoat, that the Sant’ Erasmans considered a threat to the local fish or water voles. But it seems unlikely that a mink or a stoat would ever have found its way to an island in the first place. I have no idea what the cage trap might have been for, but it was an incongruously rural scene to find in Venice.
Mysterious dark arts have always been part of country life, legally and illegally. There used to be a gruesome tree on an abandoned airfield near Metfield in Suffolk. The tree was hung like a Christmas tree with dead predators and ‘vermin’ of many kinds and I only saw it because I was on a horse, off-roading in that remote spot. If the mobile-phone-camera had been invented at the time, I might have taken a photograph, for historical posterity, and so that later generations could contemplate progress made in our relationship with native wildlife. The ‘vermin tree’ may still be there, like that. Moles are still hung along fences in some places, the traditional mole-catcher’s ‘invoice’, so that he can be paid per mole but cannot present the same mole to another farmer and be paid twice. Old-school mole-catchers bemoan the lost art of mole-catching, which used to be done with a device made of horsehair and willow, instead of a skill-less modern trap. And modern sensibilities tend to condemn the word ‘vermin’ altogether, another almost-redundant rural word, like ‘varmint’.
In a perfect world, wild animals would live happily into their old age surrounded by their grandchildren and cherished memories, like the old lady at the end of Titanic. The suffering of wild animals being naturally predated, injured or starved must be immense. In addition, since wounded or weak animals are the ones targeted by predators, evolution has taught these poor creatures to hide their suffering with stoicism, just to survive. On the plus side, you never see a fox or a stoat or a rabbit or a rat staring blankly out to sea with dementia.
Back to Sant’ Erasmo impersonating Suffolk, nearby on the water was a flat-bottomed punt, of the kind used for wildfowling. Certainly, people in the Venetian lagoon go wildfowling and have done for centuries. There is a picture of a painting by Pietro Longhi (1701-1785), ‘Hunting wild ducks with bows and arrows’, depicting duck shooting in the valli da pesca in the Venetian lagoon, in my copy of Francesco’s Kitchen, a book about the food of Venice by Francesco da Mosto. This painting is a reminder of the difficulty of the task our forbears faced catching their food, trying to shoot a moving small target with a bow and arrow from a wobbly boat, skilful as it still would be even with a gun. An article in The Field (Feb 2017) ‘Just One Mallardo’ (typical British Italiano which does no justice to the scholarly content) gives a detailed account of early-morning wildfowling for wigeon in Venice, including a potted history of wildfowling in the lagoon going back to 1268, when it was decreed that the Doge had to give ducks to the Great Council who had elected him. On the island of Mazzorbo there is a place called Ai Cacciatori, which offers local seafood and wild game on the menu when in season. Cacciatori being ‘hunters’.
While tramping round Saint Erasmo, I thought of how far our relationship with the catching of our food goes back, lost in the mists of time. Fishermen and wildfowlers must have been out at dawn and dusk in the Venetian lagoon and in the Blyth estuary, hoping to bag a fish or a duck for the pot, with bow and arrow, net, spear, rod or gun, for as long as we have been human.
We have much in common with the Venetians, as they too live at the mercy of the sea.
May
Food in season and local ‘sea state’ update
Veg
Asparagus season begins, broad beans, spinach, sorrel,elderflower
Game
Muntjac, legal all year round
Meat
Spring lamb
Fish
Spring lobster, haddock, prawns, salmon, trout
Mayfly hatchings in chalk streams, ‘evening rise’ hatchlings rise to surface for brown trout
Distance from cliff
22 metres
Change since last month
No change, either visually or in measured land loss
A Night on the Dune
These are the things I prize
And hold of dearest worth:
Light of sapphire skies,
Peace of the silent hills,
Shelter of forests, comfort of the grass
Music of birds, murmur of little rills,
Shadows of cloud that swiftly pass,
And, after showers,
The smell of flowers
And of the good brown earth.
And best of all, along the way, friendship and mirth.
God of the Open Air
Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)
6
JUNE
In the early morning, when the scent is low, you can smell the line of a fox as surely as if you had been born a foxhound. It is a strange epiphany to have these nano-seconds of insight, momentarily to sense the world as the wild animals and our own half-wild dogs must sense it all the time, an ordinary hedgeline suddenly transformed into an overwhelming multi-sensory experience, a conduit of useful information. The beach must be an ongoing canine soap opera, every washed-up object a frenzied canine Twitter. The line of the early morning fox-scent is clear only for a fleeting moment, because smell is such an ephemeral, uncatchable sense that almost as soon as it is perceived, it melts away into the landscape.
This particular fox is a playful soul and on one occasion he, or she, played a kind of peek-a-boo hide-and-seek game round the scruffy little barn, actually a World War 2 radar station of some kind, which sits in ruined isolation half way up the farm track leading south. The rural fox in general and this fox in particular, usually avoids human contact, easily scenting my presence from hundreds of paces away, so it is difficult not to read his deliberately interactive behaviour as the fox having fun, teasing me, almost playing. It might have been some kind of practice exercise for hunting his quarry and prey, but the fox seemed to actively enjoy the game. He could easily have run away, but instead he crept stealthily round the base of the little wartime barn, in the manner of a predator stalking his prey, while I crept round in the opposite direction to meet him. He looked me straight in the eye for at least ten seconds, almost with a twinkle, then scampered off, leaping over the tall grasses, in an attitude of triumph. I warm to this fox, even though I have gone to considerable architectural trouble to thwart his devices and desires to kill our chickens.
People always say that smell is the sense most evocative of memory and that hearing is the last sense to go in the hour of our death (although how the living can know this is another of life’s mysteries). The smell of mown grass or hay is often cited as the scent cliché most evocative of childhood, even though traffic and warm tarmac and air-borne junk food smells must be components in the scent-scene of the collective memory now.
One of many strange things about cities is that the air smells of their food combined with their architecture: London smells of sausages and solid stone, Venice of fritto misto and wet walls, Barcelona of garlic and Gaudi. The smell of a city is not very noticeable when you live there all the time but becomes vastly exaggerated once you return to your rural roots, give up smoking and live on a sea-breezy clifftop for much of the time. The smells of London are overwhelming on first arrival after the clean air of the cliff, but here, the still small smells of the cliff are quite discernible too, if you train your senses to ‘listen’ for them. It is quite telling that we don’t have an accurate word for the mental equivalent of humans actively listening, but for smells not sounds, as a dog scents the air. Sniffing is not quite it. Nor do we have a word for a smelltrack as distinct from a soundtrack. We can talk easily about the soundtrack to our lives and childhoods, but we neglect the smelltrack which is undoubtedly there.
Typically for a certain kind of Englishness in manners and mannerisms, as children we were somehow imperceptibly indoctrinated to call scent in a bottle ‘scent’, not perfume or fragrance and to call smells in the air ‘smells’, not odours or aromas. The words used reflect attitudes to different kinds of smells: healthy, wholesome, real, shameless, natural. No euphemisms. No French. No Franglais. Our familiar smells were those of a typically threadbare English country life: mothballs and furniture polish, flowers and fires, cobwebs and crumpets, pony books and guinea pigs, all competing against a continual background hint of damp and dogs and cold air. As a child, I wanted to spray my bedroom with the combined scent of pony and stable and saddle soap and tack and I still believe someone could make an olfactory fortune from bottled Eau de Poney pour les jeunes filles.
The early days of summer seem to last forever on our cliff, as if a sunny seaside location can momentarily recapture the essence of 1976 in perpetuity. Faint sounds of children bucket-and-spading are carried on the air from the beach huts, visible in the far distance, yet a world away. In the spirit of trying to recapture a half-remembered or imagined magical sense of freedom and endless summer holidays, we sometimes create a little adventure and spend a night outside on the dune. Here, we can rediscover the elemental life: earth, air, fire and water, catching and cooking, the sound of the endless waves breaking on the beach and the infinity of the stars above us.
Rosemary bushes and tamarind trees thrive on our clifftop, lending it an unexpectedly Mediterranean air, an almost exotic hint of more glamorous locations and warmer climes. This effect is exaggerated and enhanced by the summer-evening sounds of crickets cricking merrily away all about us, filling the air with their chirruping and rendering this particular patch of Suffolk ‘below the cicada line’ as certainly as it is now within the ‘cooking-with-garlic’ and ‘wine-producing’ regions of the world. Whether these Mediterranean characteristics are due to post-war culinary cultural crossover, from Elizabeth David to Francesco da Mosto, and air travel, or by actual climate change, is unclear, but in the immediate moment, the combined warmth of the smells and sounds can transport us to an instant Suffolk approximation of Liguria.
The unofficial path along the clifftop towards the beach changes its position every year, because of the erosion. The path always seems to be the same, but it isn’t, as it carves its way through the waist-high wild flowers which grow along the cliff edge. When the vulnerable last five metres or so of edge-land is left unploughed, the secret seeds, long-embedded in the earth from forgotten ancient seasons many decades ago, suddenly spring to life. Within less than a year, the unploughed land thrums with busy insects and the scents of a thousand different native plants. Romantic rural names familiar to our great-great-grandparents are dusted off: sea milkwort, dumpy centaury, common valerian, wild angelica, fools’ parsley, frog orchid, hairy vetch, tufted vetch, bitter vetch. Yellow wild lupins spread and selfseed wherever they are left undisturbed, each tiny lupin plant becoming a large woody bush, and all of them descended from the tiny ‘last lupin’ I rescued from the edge of the cliff a few years ago. The entire cliff-edge becomes a poignant carpet of red poppies in June.
Each of these plants carries its own breezy scents and earthy smells. Even the relatively plain grasses are worth noticing. You could sketch a different type of grass seed head every day for a year, and from the grasses descends the farm’s principle crop: barley for the Adnams brewery, a traditional variety with short stems to survive the coastal winds, and a beautiful name, Maris Otter. At times, the whole of Southwold smells of beer and brewing, but really it is the smell of our barley, our fields of gold, our Maris Otter, which fills the air.
At the end of the flowering and seeding process, I collect seeds from the more attractive of these ‘weeds’, creating an inherently tough and mixture of native wild flowers known as Farmers’ Nightmare, an idea I attribute entirely to the late Dame Miriam Rothschild, of Rothschild Collection of Fleas fame. The Rothschild Collection of Fleas is an obvious target for easy mirth, the lazy comedian’s laughing stock, but it is also a genuinely great work of flea research and taxonomy, which I have had the honour of seeing in the flesh at the Linnaean Society, on the lefthand side of the entrance to the Royal Academy on Piccadilly. I first learnt of Farmers’ Nightmare from a book about restoring natural biodiversity to the estate and garden at Highgrove. The book shows a picture of an elegant old lady sitting outside in a chic wooden chair, surrounded by a froth of head-height cow parsley and plant life which obliterates any clear view of the country house visible behind her. The caption reads, ‘Dame Miriam Rothschild gave up gardening in the formal sense in the mid-1950s . . .’, and it describes her invention of, or introduction of, the idea of Farmers’ Nightmare. I feel I owe it to her to honour her memory by continuing her weed-seeding work, so I do. Self-seeding flowers are an under-rated treasure of nature for gardeners.
