Country Mouse Giles Wood
giles wood
Most country gardens are surrounded by countryside. Sensitivity to the locality, or
genius loci, is crucial to integrating a garden into the wider landscape and giving substance to it.
Of creating a new garden, William Robinson, one of the most influential writers in the history of gardening (and, incidentally, one of the first rewilders), wrote, in 1870, ‘The really artistic way is to have no preconceived idea of any style, but in all cases to be led by the ground itself and by the many things upon it.’
The challenge that faced me when I arrived in the Wiltshire prairies, thirty years ago, was the dearth of ecological clues to my own particular bio-region. The Vale of Pewsey was described by Richard Jefferies in 1879 as ‘appearing to consist of one vast forest instead of the innumerable meadows which were really there’. But an estimated one million magnificent hedgerow elms fell to Dutch elm disease in the 1970s and, with their disappearance, much of the character of the landscape was lost.
On the western front of my own single acre stretched a sea of wheat as far as the eye could see; wheat which was not waving as in a true prairie, but the new, short-strawed variety, standing stiff like the stubble of an agri-businessman. The village lies on the other fronts. How to unite cottage, garden and monoculture? Robinson’s ‘many things’ upon the ground included nettles, thistles, docks and brambles – all the results of an over-enriched environment, dosed with bag nitrogen which favours the thugs over the shrinking violets.
Yet, as I found, in spite of man, Nature continues to provide, since brambles and nettles prepare the soil for tree-planting with efficacy. At the squirearchical level, the English style is to merge the landowner’s park with his farmland. To the watercolourist, the result is best rendered by dipping the brush in pigment and dotting the coarse paper with agreeable blobs of innumerable round-headed trees.
But, for the yeoman like me, ‘The land is for the machine and not the machine for the land’, to quote the neo-luddite H J Massingham. He’s just one of the anti-mechanisation, anti-intensification country writers who rail against the wholesale trashing of the bedrock of England – the small, family-owned, mixed farm, based on good husbandry and time-honoured traditions which respect Nature’s own laws.
In February, I regretted having persuaded a visiting art dealer from London to take a short walk in the Prairie before lunch. ‘It’s very dirty out here, Giles,’ he griped, as we plodded through the clods. ‘And this field’s too big.’
Massingham wrote, ‘I have never, in all my wanderings for thirty years over the face of England, seen cornfields like those of 1944 in Wiltshire, one of the most progressive and highly mechanised counties in England. Here is an example, one of scores. The field was a large, hedgeless one and looked as though the troop of Bacchantes in Keats’s poem had charged madly into it, trampling down the straw, in the ecstasy of the vine, and biting off the ears. It is said that one advantage of a combined field is that it makes good cover for partridges; here, as one member of our party remarked, was good cover for a rhinoceros.’
Combines of 2017, regrettably, have evolved into behemoths which leave the landscape shorn like a squaddie’s haircut, with no cover even for seed-eating birds such as tree sparrows, yellowhammers, skylarks and game birds.
It would be churlish to deny that the scene has been somewhat improved by much subsidised hedge-planting, courtesy of our European friends. But it is the same bog-standard mix they use up and down the land from ‘sets’ grown in Holland, which take no account of local variation.
Restoring beauty to the landscape takes time, as I explain to Mary, who would prefer me to spend this time in gainful employment by brush or pen. I took my inspiration from the nearest thing I could recognise as proper countryside – that visibly ancient landscape, pockmarked with signs of early man, called the Downs.
Scrub encroachment is bird-sown; therefore Nature’s, not man’s choice. So yew, buckthorn, holly, juniper, spindle, guelder rose, wayfaring tree and dog rose have featured highly in my plantings. Instinct played its part. The wild damson, or bullace, grows well in downland generally. So does the wild pear, which chimes with my secret agenda to transform the Vale of Pewsey into a pastiche of the remote, unwrecked Saxon villages of southern Transylvania, where wood pasture and wildflower-rich hay meadows abound in an orgy of wildlifefriendly farming.
Was it a curious instinct that led me to plant marsh mallow in what I now call my wood meadow – to take a broad-brush interpretation of that classification?
It is one of several old medicinal plants that occur around Transylvanian villages, formerly used to treat coughs and sore throats. It will come in handy to soothe my chest from the adverse effects of agricultural sprays.
Giving substance to the view has been a hit-and-miss affair but now I have arrived at a nice balance between order and disarray. Needless to say, the disarray is not popular with the agriculturalists among our fellow villagers.
To quote Jefferies again: ‘Some cottages in summertime really approach something of that Arcadian beauty which is supposed to prevail in the country. Everything, of course, depends upon the character of the inmates.’