Tag: wild landcapes

One swallow doesn’t make a summer

One lonely cornflower

And neither does one cornflower make a wildflower meadow whatever the salespeople of wildflower seed mix may say. We saw a similar attempt by the local council to achieve pollinator paradise on the flood terraces in front of the old Avon Street car park – possibly the previous holder of the ugliest building ever allowed in Bath but an accolade now about to be seized – you couldn’t make this up – by the new police station. Anyway, someone thought it would be a good thing to cheer the riverside up with some pretty wildflowers and it did, for a single season, after which the original occupants reasserted their ancient rights and crowded out the pretty newcomers. I’ll come back to the original occupants

Let’s be clear, I love wildflowers and they do make excellent pollinator plants, but you can’t just chuck a few seeds on a patch of any old soil and expect them to thrive. Plants, like the rest of us, have their firm preferences about where they make a home for themselves, because they’ve all evolved to grow in their particular places. Any deviation from a plant’s usual preference regarding sunlight and shade, rich soil or poor, drought or frost, acid or alkaline soil and the right kind of neighbours, can prevent it from setting seed and reproducing itself because many plants and pollinators have extremely specific needs in the rumpy pumpy department. Some plants have found it so difficult that they pollinate themselves and to hell with the consequences (field botanists having breakdowns). Founding a pollinator paradise takes a lot of expertise and preparation not to mention a great deal of patience. As nature takes on the gardening work we move into a different and much slower timescale.

Ironically, now that Bath has developed the ambition to build a wildlife corridor across the city, following the river Avon, it’s become clear that earlier generations of councillors, architects and property developers have already demolished some important but ugly areas, like the old gasworks which – because it was so heavily polluted – was off limits until the means of remediating them was better understood. So after decades of standing derelict, during which all manner of wildlife and plants created a true nature reserve, the councillors and their mates demolished the lot to build highly profitable but unaffordable homes and then offered to build a wildlife corridor on a the only narrow strip of riverbank they hadn’t already destroyed and turn it into a promised land for wildlife, and dogs, and pedestrians and cyclists and sow it with a kind of modified birdseed so that we’d all be grateful for the chance to immerse ourselves in the countryside. All ten feet of it – until an otter makes a meal of a swimming dog when nature may well be declared dangerous and shut down.

The other thing we need to take into account is that in many circumstances the local weeds – in spite of being a bit, well, meh – are excellent pollinator plants already. Think of the common as muck buddleia tree and the creeping thistle. Making thriving communities of wildflowers needs more than a handful of imported debutants shivering in the frosty air. They need unusually high resilience and adaptability and a mountain of good luck before they make it into their second year. Cornflowers have been around in this country since the Iron Age and for most of that time they were a pestilential nuisance in arable fields. With the advent of farm industrialisation, almost overnight the means of controlling cornflowers – killing them actually – using herbicides, turned the renegades into rarities and the great wheel of fortune brought them into the sunlight again. Sadly I’d bet my pension that none of them will be around by next season, and we’ll be searching for the lovely white comfrey which has now been strimmed out just below our flat. There’s enough greater burdock growing now on the Avon Street part of the corridor to start brewing dandelion and burdock once again, like Bowlers did before the factory was demolished to build the car park. Fortunately you can still go and look at Bowler’s bottling machinery in the Museum of Work – which, to be fair, is a brilliant afternoon visit. I was lucky enough to see it all in situ when I helped photograph the old works after it closed – I was only the bag-man to be fair.

My preferred option would be for us all to fall back in love with what we’ve already got before we wallpaper the riverbank with William Morris imitations. I love the muscular weeds, the fistsized birdcages of the wild carrots in late summer, the bizarrely improbable wild lettuces down by the bus station, the willowherbs (how many kinds can you spot?) and the bafflingly similar dandelion lookalikes. Our neighbour spotted comma butterflies taking nectar from the buddleias down near Green Park today. How many bramble varieties can you spot? There are hundreds of them and goodness knows how many in Bath. Mallows, mulleins, gypsywort, soapwort and beggarticks are all there on the canal waiting for a hello and the waterlilies in the river would love a wave from you (clonking pun intended!) and with all these plants, the closer you look the more stunning they are; the simplest walk becomes a festival of beauty and what’s more, it’s constantly changing. Just noticing that the landscape is constantly evolving is exciting. The waterside flora is in constant flux throughout the year like a never-ending flower show. You’ve probably heard of the slow food movement and perhaps we should explore the wildlife corridor with a slow walking movement, (which will totally annoy the cyclists and runners but hey!). There are phone apps that will help you identify the plants you’ve photographed very accurately. Flora Incognita is very good as are Obsidentify and iNaturalist -all of them free – and if birds are your thing Merlin is very good and fun to use and bear in mind that many birds feed and rely on seeds to get through the winter.

As the much missed Whole Earth Catalogue said on its cover – “We can’t put it together – it is together” – and it will only stay together if we understand and treasure what we’ve already got!

Orange balsam on the river today.

Good days and bad ones

But first, an extraordinarily heartwarming conversation with my eight year old grandson. We were in Dyrham Park, walking along the edge of Whitefield – a stunning wildflower meadow which we haven’t managed to see for two years because of Covid. The grandchildren had all been dosed with antihistamine because their mum knew they’d be rolling around in the grass at some point during the day. It happens that their sister is given the drug as a liquid, orally and to save time the other two also got it from a small syringe this time. So oldest grandson and me were chatting about all this and we wandered into the topic of words that sound the same but are spelt differently and have different meanings. Orally and aurally came up of course – and then he said to me quite unexpectedly – “they’re called homophones”. I could have cried with joy at him even knowing the word, and -in the way that children are – he was a bit surprised (but rather pleased) at how thrilled I was. High fives all round. I love going for walks with him because he’s so eager to learn. Each time we go out I teach him the names of different flowers, plants and trees, and tell him their stories. It lights up the day for both of us.

But at the very top of this page – the one that comes up every time – there’s a photo of the same grandson walking down an avenue of limes, holding hands with his uncle Jonah’s hand. Sadly the avenue of trees no longer looks the same – and it’s for the oddest reason.

The aspect of the landscape in that particular shot caught my eye, not so much for its natural beauty, but because in reality it is so artificial. The lower leaves in the regular avenue of limes is – or rather was – clipped to such an even height above the ground it reminded me of the famous Marienbad film setting. But this wasn’t achieved by platoons of gardeners but by a wild herd of roe deer which has lived there for a couple of hundred years. Sadly the herd was all slaughtered during the Covid outbreak because of a persistent outbreak of bovine TB. It was all very hush hush in the way it happened; probably in anticipation of a fiercely negative response from the thousands of visitors who’ve grown to love them. If you live in the UK you’ll already know about the furore that’s arisen over the slaughter of a single llama for the same reason. However it’s done now and we’re promised the deer herd will be replaced as soon as possible. I simply don’t know whether the vaccines that exist for farm cattle would work for deer, but if they do I’d be saddened by the fact they weren’t used. There may be other reasons, though. Some visitors had no idea how to treat the deer as wild animals, and one ranger told me they’d had to intervene when a large group of visitors tried to corral a section of the flock in order to take photos! Deer, like all wild animals, respond badly to stress and I’ve long wondered whether TB isn’t a symptomatic disease of stressed animals.

The upshot of all this is that the grassland character is rapidly altering, with rank grasses taking over; and the lime avenue is looking distinctly ragged now. It’s amazing how quickly this has happened. The countryside as expressed in the great English parks is about as artificial as it gets; and it’s easy to see, particularly at the higher level of the park – the scrub will very soon take over when it’s no longer grazed by the deer. Eco purists and some rewilders might think this is a good idea; but I’m not so sure. All landscapes are artificial in one way or another, depending on the management strategies in place. Wildflower meadows are no more “natural” than municipal parks if by natural you mean left completely to their own devices. Each type of landscape – even (or especially) abandoned industrial sites – develops its own unique ecology. Maintaining peat bogs requires minute attention to water levels, for instance. So diversity is best maintained by deliberate management. I just don’t see how Dyrham Park can be maintained as it was – without its deer herd.

But finally, the bad news is that the badgers on the allotment eventually found a way past our barriers and finished off the sweetcorn. The video at the top was probably the marauder himself leaving the scene of the crime. And so, the fencing will be strengthened even more next year. Luckily we had a least a few feeds, and although we could wish they hadn’t broken in; we wouldn’t want to see them disappear altogether. Once again, maintaining ecological balance has its pluses and minuses. A couple of days ago I lamented the fact that there are no hedgehogs on the site, but of course badgers are one of the main predators of hedgehogs. Whenever we intervene in nature, however worthy our intentions, the results are often full of unintended consequences.

Farming, gardening, house building and transport infrastructure – to name just four of many possibilities – are all loaded with ecological consequences and ethical choices. Even a visit to a National Trust attraction involves ethical choices. The earth is a place for moral grown-ups; or at least it is if we want to save our place in it. Occasionally, on my bleaker days, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to leave it to the plants and animals who got here first; but usually I just think – better get on with it then.