Tag: farming

Desertification and Horticultural Imperialism

Spring 2020 has seen an awful lot of fields round here go unploughed and unplanted. Whether this is connected to the global pandemic, I’m not sure. Twenty years ago, a good number of fields were left to grass as government-subsidised “set aside” land, but I don’t think there’s a payment scheme at present encouraging non-cultivation.

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At least, I hope not, as some of these fields have been so heavily and repeatedly sprayed with herbicide they are now ecological deserts. The spray (probably including glyphosate judging from the distorted and curled up stems and foliage of broad-leaved plants that got in the way) has drifted across verges and footpaths, decimating wild food plants such as raspberry, nettle, hogweed and roses that local people forage. It was probably sprayed on one of the many windy days, and/or the tank residues emptied onto the verges. I won’t presume to tell farmers what to do in their fields here, but that is a no-no.

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It’s interesting to see that the spear thistles, presumably a prime target of the desertifiers, are remarkably resistant – except where the dose looks to have been doubled.

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Garden owners with too much time on their hands during lockdown have been at it too. Every garden hedge not yet ripped out in favour of a fence has a bare strip of brown, dead vegetation at its base. Weedkiller run off from precious driveways, in which nothing must be permitted to root, oozes onto formerly quite pretty road verges and banks. I do understand the temptation, really I do. The patch of 6×2 concrete slabs mis-called a patio here can come to resemble an untended flowerbed in no time, and yes, I do half-heartedly remove the “weeds” when I can be bothered.

It gets to me, however, when garden owners start speculating beyond their own boundaries. Just as agricultural spray drift and chemical dumping on publicly-used land is bad practice and breaches all pesticide regulations, so spraying, strimming, mowing, “prettifying” or planting with rhododendrons the verges, banks and roadsides near, but not part of, a property is offensive to me.

Very offensive. What people do with their own verges is up to them, whether I think it desirable or deplorable. It’s none of my business. When they inflict their personal idea of what’s attractive – and their personal conceit of themselves as above nature – on land that has absolutely nothing to do with them, that stinks. It is so weird that so many people with money jingling in their pockets buy up property in the countryside and then occupy and worry themselves non-stop trying to make it look like a posh city suburb.

A friend of mine coined a good term for this – Horticultural Imperialism. Yet another form of imperialism we need to grow out of, reject and set aside as a species.

 

Feral Berries

These fields, which now yawn under the predictable rotation of wheat, barley, potatoes and the occasion excitement of peas or beans, were all berry fields once. It was the biggest and best-known of five plantations around here, where canvas tinker villages sprouted annually at harvest time, and the needs of the workforce were met in this now silent, gone-to-work, wee town by a wealth of grocers, bakers, butchers, innkeepers, tailors and shoemakers. At least five surgeons lived here in case of accident or emergency. The berries that weren’t eaten on the spot or smuggled home by the pickers all went south, on the new branch line connected to the village for the purpose, to become jam on well-to-do breakfast tables.

Now in the quiet forgetfulness of displaced industry and commuter inertia, tangled woods wrap themselves round the margins of large exposed fields. The old track takes you past the farmhouse that is no longer a farm, the steading that is no longer a steading, and wanders aimlessly north, between the remnants of its hedgerows. Long ago, it was the only road north, save for an older track across the moss.

Here and there, a narrow change in fencing or a wooden post marks where one of the many footpaths to and from the berry fields used to run. A curious right of way plummets through someone’s back garden and still has legal status. Patches of No Man’s Land persist, and where they do, the ghosts of the berry fields haunt and echo.

feral berries 1In the dense shade of a triumphant elder spinney, a smattering of redcurrant bushes blooms and fruits, scant rich redness catching the eye as the berries ripen. They are small and sour, yet somehow incandescently flavoursome. Where the track narrows to a muddy path, wild gooseberries make a wee thicket. Their fruits are also tiny, and round. Are they genuinely wild?

Or the depleted progeny of an old cultivar, maybe Scottish Chieftain or Lord Elcho, prized a century ago, now nearly forgotten?

But the raspberries, they are everywhere; an abundance that makes cultivation seem a frivolous and needless expenditure of time. They spring from lawns and borders in untidy local gardens, in numbers that cannot be put down to the activities of a large and hungry population of blackbirds. They line the hedges that border the track, they rise lushly above the willow herb and tall grasses of woodland clearings. They are bountiful enough to gather for the freezer, but, more often, they make a wayside breakfast for people out with their dogs on sunny summer mornings, staring vacantly into the trees, popping raspberries like pills.

In one small hedge remnant, the raspberries go unseen and untried by strangers. TheseIMG_20190727_093257760 diminutive rasps are a pale golden yellow. They hide behind fiercely protective stands of nettle, and amid the jaggy stems of the hawthorn. These are the sweetest, most succulent of the feral berries. They melt in the mouth and almost dissolve in the hand. Any attempts to gather a large quantity fail; they are nought but juice by the time they get home. Those who know about them keep a close eye, and say nothing, then give the game away when it’s picking time by beating narrow paths through the grass and nettles to get at this choice fruit.

All in the past now, the Auchtergaven and Bankfoot berry fields. The history of a place often speaks through its plants, and may have something to say about its present..