Country Mouse Giles Wood
Mary and I have written a book which, like the proverbial curate’s egg, is good in parts.
The part I like best is the blurb on the jacket written by a third party, possibly a Polish intern at publishing HQ:
‘Giles is a countryman who relishes solitude. His wife Mary thrives in company and enjoys frequent escapes to London.’
But, while the cat’s away, the mice will play at Citizen Science. As the slow agricultural years roll by, they present splendid opportunities for the meditative observation of nature on my one-acre estate, in the tradition of Francis Kilvert and Gilbert White and, more recently, of the pony-tailed Gardeners’ Question Time green guru, Bob Flowerdew.
‘I regard my garden as my laboratory,’ says Flowerdew. ‘I water everything and harvest what’s ready. Then I walk around monitoring progress.
‘I have literally hundreds of ongoing experiments. It’s an observation of nature from which I can then draw conclusions. There’s something to be learned almost every day.’
I met the fellow once. He was ‘golden brown’, the expression used by the nature writer Richard Jefferies to describe the skin colour of hop-pickers in Kent. His homespun advice stayed with me – particularly his cavil against my giving away my scarce, hard-won, organic produce. Instead, he suggested, ‘Invite a friend to share your harvest. That way, you can guarantee to harvest a bottle of wine into the bargain.’
Flowerdew’s observations in his own garden have shown him there is more to attracting butterflies than simply growing more wildflowers. Instead, we must provide the specific plants that can feed their respective larvae. Caterpillars are fussy eaters, which is why gardens seldom support the rarer butterflies.
In qua non est aliud quam eius corruptio est subsidy. This is my homespun aphorism: ‘Where there is subsidy, there is corruption.’ Here in Wilts, we have fields of unwanted, inedible, wildlife-unfriendly maize grown effectively only for the local bio-digester. Well-informed countrymen (or, as Mary calls us, ‘people with time on their hands’) will have read the Soil Association pamphlet Runaway Maize – Subsidised Soil Destruction. Maize is up from 8,000 hectares in 1973 to 183,000 in 2014.
Perverse subsidies create distortions and imbalance, and local observers know that nature, as well as abhorring a vacuum, also abhors monoculture. Badgers, with no predators other than man (and now a protected species), are, in effect, another monoculture and, since they predate hedgehogs, the latter are now rarely seen.
Bird-feeders, ironically, present another form of artificial subsidy, also to blame for a list of unintended consequences. Rats, grey squirrels and overweight tits are gorging, year round, on fatballs, peanuts and sunflower hearts. This summer, my smallholding neighbour, five miles away, found that great spotted woodpeckers are now doing so well with bird-feeder supplements to their previous diet of grubs from deadwood, that they were also targeting her house martin chicks.
Sparrowhawks, however, are the main unintended beneficiaries of the ubiquitous bird-feeder. To see them off and decrease their larder of smaller birds, fill the feeders with tiny Nyjer seeds instead. You will thereby attract only goldfinches and bullfinches and leave the rats and robins and others to fend for themselves, as nature intended.
Today’s scientists are trained in the particular, not the general. We live in the age of the specialist, not the generalist. Only a few of us embedded observers can see the wood for the trees – aka the bigger picture. But, for box-ticking reasons, without letters after our name or a degree in life sciences from Bangor University, the countryman’s opinions count for nothing.
Yet we are also on hand to observe how even dark clouds can have silver linings. Ecologists wring their hands about that monster of suburbia, the Leyland Cypress. But this triffid has been integrating into Britain’s fauna and flora.
In my sister’s Oxfordshire garden, one specimen even has native elder bushes growing round its base and peeping out like children from a nursemaid’s apron. Troglodytic wrens adore its stygian gloom, house sparrows resort to it for safety from hawks, and pigeons in their millions roost in these suburban safety nets. Indeed, so many pigeons roost in Leylandii that a Kentish farmer friend has diversified into the lucrative pet food business by shooting them by the ton!
An observation of the animal tracks through my wood has inspired me to stick to a thrice-daily beating of my own bounds. It has kept the grass down as efficiently as a herd of oxen and removes the necessity to replace my old Honda petrol mower.
Let’s hope that any new deal for the post-brexit countryside will put the countryman at the heart of the decisionmaking process; with accountability, consultation and rewards based on the principle of payment for results. Environmental results, that is, not crops, or acreage owned. Gove must place a Dad’s Army in the spokes of the hitherto far too cosy relationship between landowner and the Rural Payments Agency.
‘The Diary of Two Nobodies’, by Giles Wood and Mary Killen, is published by Virgin Books (£14.99)