The National Trust’s new leaf
The National Trust’s rewilding programme is brilliant, imaginative and crucial to the survival of the British countryside, says Adam Nicolson
Iwas standing at the front gate at Sissinghurst the other day chatting to the woman who was taking visitors’ tickets for the National Trust, to which my father bequeathed it. The sun was shining, the people were pouring in, the tills were ringing in the shop, the restaurant and in the elegantly restored Old Dairy café-cum-plant shop. What could be a more perfect demonstration of the National Trust at work than this: a busily visited, comfortably funded, carefully tended, imaginatively managed slice of England which the entire country – and come to that most of the civilised world – loves and admires.
As Sylvia and I were chatting we were surrounded by a new experiment which the gardeners have tried out this year for the first time. Instead of the precisely mown and frankly dreary lawn that previous generations of gardeners had maintained outside the front gate, Troy Scott Smith, the relatively new head gardener, had decided to bring a very beautiful mix of brilliance and informality to the small areas on either side of the entrance arch. All summer long an evolving tapestry of what are essentially arable weeds have been allowed to grow and flower beside the main path, a beautiful, soft, nodding polychromatic trumpet blast, the opening to the garden like the welcoming first bars of a symphony.
Smiles all round until one rather old-fashioned, panama-hatted, linenjacketed gent – you might easily have mistaken him for Clive Aslet, ex-editor of
Country Life – paused at the gate and said to his companion: ‘Oh dear, I see even the Trust has been hit by the recession. They have clearly had to let this part go.’
Well, you can’t please all of the people all of the time and it so happens that Mr Aslet has decided to have a go at the Trust himself. As usual in these situations, he is in something of a muddle about what precisely is troubling him. Partly he doesn’t like the ‘Left-leaning’ principles of the two most recent directors-general of the Trust, which means apparently they don’t love country houses enough and can’t empathise with the slave-owning, women- and poorexploiting squires who built them; he doesn’t like the way Trust properties are more friendly to children than previously; ‘accessibility’, in quotes like that, is somehow anathema; and he doesn’t like the idea of re-wilding, with which they have started to experiment here and there.
I imagine Clive does speak for a certain kind of stuffy constituency, the people who liked National Trust houses when the guidebooks were stiff with impenetrable scholarship aimed by scholars only at other scholars; when so few people visited them that they stank of an elegant and melancholic decay; when the Trust, Lord forgive us, did not have four million members, none of them, my dear, understanding anything very much about the history of English furniture or the genealogy of its decaying families.
But he needs to get over it. Dressed up however you like it, this is really nothing but snobbery, and of an interesting kind, which manages to stir social, cultural and intellectual superiority into one fetid soup. Most of these places, which were for a few decades the preserve of the lily-in-thebuttonhole tweedies Aslet speaks for, became the property of the Trust in lieu of tax. Only because of an extraordinary arrangement with the Treasury were the owners who owed the tax allowed to continue to live in properties which, if they had been an office block or a multi-storey garage, would have passed clean out of their hands. These reserves of Englishness that the Trust now looks after belong to the people. They do not belong to Clive Aslet or any of his art-historical coterie of friends. And so on any political, cultural or moral grounds you might like to choose, the Trust has a duty to make them accessible. To put that word in quotes is really as dirty as an act of racism.
As to the question of re-wilding, poor Clive is simply wrong. The idea that land which is released from the burden of modern farming will revert to brambles and flowerlessness is no more than ignorance. The experiment which Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree have been running on 3,000 acres at Knepp in West Sussex for the past seventeen years or so has resulted not only in the continued survival and breeding of turtle doves, which are rapidly disappearing from the farmed landscape of the rest of the county, but also the greatest concentration of nightingales in England. An enormous and spreading breeding success of Purple Emperor Butterflies is happening there, too, in a world magically filled with untold numbers of bats, ants, orchids, newts and so on through all the trophic levels of creation.
The conventionally farmed landscape of the British Isles which Aslet and his kind want to keep hold of has presided over a catastrophic decline in birds, small mammals and invertebrates over the past fifty years. I know for a fact that the Trust is deeply interested in the game-changing successes at Knepp, and the fact that they are prepared to embrace those ideas in the face of the inevitable ‘death of rural England’ threnodies from Clive and his like is a sign at least that the organisation is alive and well and embracing the future. As for profitability and the working landscape, Knepp, for example, on which herds of red deer and longhorn cattle now roam free, browsing in the woodlands, opening glades and rides through the resurgent trees, now makes more money from meat production than it did when farmed in the old conventional way.
Examples could be multiplied across the country of places where the keeping of sheep and too many deer on uplands not only reduces the environment to a dreary, wet treeless desert but in farm after farm makes no money at all and where farmers have to live on those parts of the grant which don’t go to service their debts. Rewilding the uplands will not destroy a thriving rural scene; it will actually stimulate it.
In wide swathes of south-west Norway, for example, closely comparable to the Scottish Highlands in weather and rock, the area of woodland has doubled in the past twenty years. Those new trees are sequestrating an extra one million tons of carbon every year and the Norwegian hills are covered in willow, juniper and birch up to 15ft tall, up to 3,000 feet above sea level. Cattle graze in among them with elk and wild reindeer. Birds unknown to Scotland now live in the new woods: ring ouzel, bluethroat and redpoll, while the density of human population is two-and-a-half times as high as in the Scottish Highlands. The people there hunt deer and shoot grouse. This is the kind of productive wild landscape the British uplands could become. A diverse woodland economy, producing timber and game, thrives among the natural riches. The balanced landscape means that the impact of storms and floods is far lighter than in equivalent English landscapes. Of course Clive and co know nothing about any of this and claim that we are in for a future of brambles and ragwort. That is nonsense.
Finally, Clive likes to say that the Trust no longer pays any attention to history or scholarship. That is simply not my experience. At Sissinghurst, the plan to make the garden more like it was in its heyday of the early 1950s, when the spirit of its creators was still vividly present, has been long – four years’ research – and meticulous, both careful and imaginative in a way it would be difficult for any institution to improve on. In the face of this extraordinary attention to detail, blathering in a newspaper about ‘barmy agendas’ and an ‘increasingly bien pensant metropolitan mindset’ is really contemptible.