Country Mouse
At last the year is turning and, despite the ceaseless rain since September, the horticultural year is advancing as ever.
The primroses seem almost refreshed by the downpours, although the flattened wayside daffodils are clearly embittered. Placing a bunch in a cheerful jug inside the cottage, I had a nasty surprise. Each flower trumpet contained a tiny mollusc called a keel slug, the legacy of its outdoor horizontal status.
If the sun breaks through, it is a case of carpe diem. So I rushed out to take a picture of my newly restored summerhouse before the scene becomes engulfed in spring foliage.
As I trudged across two flooded fields, the ground started to rise sufficiently for me to frame a postcard-style shot of the cottage, its pleasure gardens and the summerhouse converted from an ancient privy and washhouse. When I saw the curious illusion created on Mary’s ipad screen, I was prepared to believe my little estate was looking uncharacteristically covetable.
Something to do with visual compression and foreshortening had yielded, in the early-evening light, an idyllic image of a thatched dwelling situated amidst well-wooded, rolling countryside. The flattened perspective made the village church hover improbably above our roof and seem to be set in its own orchard, which it certainly is not. Above the church, there was a bosky wilderness of thickets – and all this below a tiny field which in reality is so extensive that a visiting London friend once claimed to be suffering from a bout of agoraphobia as he hurried through it.
In the image, the downs are shown pockmarked with a trace-work of ancient human and animal traffic. Next to them stands an elevated oakwood – this much is true – which in only a matter of weeks will teem with yellow archangel and trembling bluebells; serenaded, with luck, by a cuckoo, if it can escape the lines of gunshot as it flies here via Malta and Cyprus. And, through the wood, the hint of a phantom winding path. What is it that makes a winding path so visually satisfying?
I was, for once, pleased with the results of Mary’s digital camera, and pleased even by the slightly pixellated style that enlargement produced, redolent of the Divisionist style of painter Paul Signac.
The camera never lies – but, in this case, it has been economical with the truth. And another cliché springs to mind: distance lends enchantment.
But what entranced me was the complexity of the image when, in reality, as a Google Earth camera would show, our Anglo-saxon village is just one tiny piece of a jigsaw of giant pieces of arable monoculture.
No one has written about responses to landscape better than Richard Mabey. He suggests, in In a Green Shade (1983), that our favourite landscapes all contain an element of mystery where ‘more information is promised than is actually revealed’. Hence the attraction of the phantom winding path.
At the risk of entering Pseuds Corner, as a landscape artist I expect a landscape to ‘speak to me’, but so much of Wiltshire’s farmland instead shouts at me, especially when the oilseed rape disfigures it.
The look of the landscape is not all the fault of the Common Agricultural Policy. The gap in nature is partly due to Dutch elm disease. Elms were once so abundant they were dubbed ‘the Wiltshire weed’. I know what the downs should look like and they have mostly escaped the plough. I came here too late to see what the Vale should look like, with marshy, undrained areas where lapwing and curlew could hide amidst the rushes and sedges. While I wish not to diminish the efforts of individual landowners in improving the appearance of the farmland, the former complexity is not yet restored. And what hedges have been replanted are mechanically cut too low. ‘The power of living nature lies in sustainability through complexity,’ says E O Wilson, the 90-year-old American biologist. ‘Destabilise it by degrading it to a simple state, as we seem bent on doing, and the organisms most affected are likely to be the largest and most complex, including human beings.’
Last week, Mary returned from the dentist in Devizes courtesy of a taxpayersubsidised local bus. There were six passengers on board and the driver wove through the Vale of Pewsey, dropping each of them at a bespoke disembarkment point. Mary, who had been engrossed in her book, suddenly looked out to see unfamiliar territory, which she knew, logically, must be within seven miles of our own cottage, yet she had never clapped eyes on it before.
By chance, she had discovered what the Vale should look like – uncut hedges, rough lands for hunting owls, small, undulating fields, receding into the distance in a pleasing, Stanley Badminesque way, and lightning-struck trees remaining in situ. Standing dead wood, a prized habitat for nesting owls and woodpeckers, is now a rarity. But since the bus driver had stuck to no official route, like Augustin Meaulnes in Le Grand Meaulnes, we have since failed in our quest to find this magical Lost Domain again.
However, we know it exists. Moreover, if post-brexit agricultural subsidies cease to reward farmers for simplification and monoculture, and instead reward them for natural regeneration and the restoration of ecosystems, I am optimistic that we will see a return of the complexity in nature that all living things crave.