Just upriver from my home, there is a walk along the river. Quiet and unspoiled, it is known only to local people, and each of us knows it in a different way. Some have walked generations of their dogs here. Some run here, dodging winter’s puddles, ducking summer’s jagged, arching stems of dog rose. Someone once dumped a stolen car here, setting it alight, leaving a crisp halo of browned oak-leaves all around it, and a twisted hulk. At first I hated its intrusion. Now it is another landmark on the path, slowly being welcomed back by nature, early dog violets flowering from its chassis every year in March. The young lads of the village have made this wrecked car theirs, gathering round it in the balmy dusk of summer. Adding to the balm with words and weed. Do they, I wonder, hear the soulful peeping of the bullfinch which is always just nearby?
For my part, since I moved to my house almost thirteen years ago, I have walked the riverbank hundreds – thousands probably – of times. The more I walk it, the more intimately I know it, and the creatures which scurry, grow and sing along it. I can lead you straight to where wild strawberry grows alongside mouse-ear hawkweed and sweet vernal grass. I can tell you where to listen for lesser whitethroats in the spring, and which parts of the riverbank flood most deeply by late winter. I can tell you where a buzzard sits, spying on worms and rabbit kits. Where little owls nest in a crumbled barn. And where a nightingale once gave his rapturous song from a knot of blackthorn, years ago.
This is my way of knowing. Listening, watching, letting understanding drop like layers of silt through water, into my mind’s still, newt-haunted depths. Close – dare I say loving – knowing and attention are critical to nature conservation, I realise more and more. When we raise children, we come to know their every feeling, as it flickers on their faces. When we live with dogs, we learn to read their body language. Why would the business of bringing nature back across the landscape be any different? It is an act of love, of nurturing, requiring no less focus or affection than the raising of a child.
I am reminded of Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s team of wardens in the Broads. Years ago their predecessors banished encroaching alders from one of the last sites for fen orchids in the UK. Yearly – over winter – today’s volunteers and wardens cut the fen by hand to keep conditions perfect for these tiny, demanding flowers. And yearly – in spring – they count each orchid spike. Where once a dismal handful of these rare plants bloomed, now there are thousands. Thanks to the loving, attentive care of wild, marsh-haunting wardens.
I’m reminded, also, of our wardens in the Brecks. Thanks to their collaboration – over decades – with a neighbouring farming family, our Arable Plant Reserve is home to many of the UK’s rarest annual plants. For millennia, gentle cycles of organic agriculture – spring sowing behind an ox-or-horse-drawn harrow, summer harvesting and winter fallow – fed us, fed hordes of farmland birds, and favoured dozens of annual plants whose life cycles matched the barley, wheat and rye we cultivated for ourselves. In the twentieth century, farming radically changed. Chemical pesticides eradicated all but intended crops, nitrate fertilisers wrecked the nutrient balance of the soil and water, fallows were surrendered under winter cereals. A suite of wildflowers slipped – all but unheeded – from our ancient arable landscape, into obscurity and near extinction. With them went the long-loved poetry of their names: pheasant’s eye, fingered speedwell, prickly poppy, Venus’s looking glass, weasel’s snout and interrupted brome. Our Breckland Arable Plant Reserve, where many such species have thrived for fifty years, is testament to the loving care of farmers, wardens and botanists who were not prepared to let these fragile flowers – and their poetry – vanish altogether from our landscape and our lives.
