Words
I came across a neighbour the other day as I was walking up the lane. We stopped to talk and he complained about the roadside verges, saying that the council ‘don’t come along and cut the rubbish any more’.
This started me thinking about how the way we use words can mislead us, or reveal how we have been misled.
One of my favourites is ‘scrub’. This word suggests that there is a hierarchy of trees. At the bottom are the hawthorn and the blackthorn. Two of our most useful trees throughout the history of farming, when planted in straight lines and kept in order, hedging our fields. (Someone else’s fields, usually). These were the working class trees. When not working for the farmer, forming hedges and behaving themselves, they were likely to be called scrub, and criticised for being scrubby, just as in the past villagers not neatly working for the farmer might have been classed as vagrants or paupers. These trees are the opposite of the majestic, virile oak, the most male and also the most aristocratic of trees in the popular imagination, thrusting upwards, hard, strong, tall (OK Richard, that’s quite enough of the phallic imagery), prized in the past for building the navies that enabled us to roam the world nicking other people’s stuff. By contrast hawthorn is weedy, narrow, scruffy, possibly undernourished, and often hangs around bramble bushes, also undesirable loiterers. If you want nature to be trained and tidy, used as a money-making resource, not wild in any way, then hawthorn is not acceptable except when trained and disciplined into hedges, with its thorns pressed into service to keep animals in their places. The EU is pretty strong on this, and land that was seen on Google maps to be ‘scrubbed up’ was liable to have its subsidy cut.
Moccas Deer Park in Herefordshire is as near as you may get to a vision of Arcadia, though if you trespass there with your shepherdess or swain with arcadian delights in mind you may get a rude surprise. English Nature may manage it on your behalf, but that doesn’t mean you can go in and enjoy it. For many years it was mainly valued by naturalists because of the Moccas Beetle, Hypaebius flavipes. Many nature reserves started life as the haunts of Victorian coleopterists, beetle enthusiasts, and the Moccas beetle was very exciting because it was not known to exist anywhere else in the world. It spends its formative years burrowing in the red-rotten wood of ancient oak pollards like those at Moccas, and also, we now know, in the wood pastures or ‘hagar’ that are still found on farms in southern Sweden.
Moccas Park got another boost when the Hereford Ornithological Club discovered that it was also a haunt of Pied Flycatchers. The Club morphed into the Herefordshire Nature Trust, and somehow Moccas Park started to attract the interest of bodies like English Nature, and at some point– the exact chronology doesn’t matter to this particular story – it was decided that it would be improved if the ‘scrub’ was got rid of. The Moccas Beetle emerges as an adult in the month of May from its tunnelling in the ancient oaks, and while it flies around with its own Arcadian delights in mind it is fuelled by the nectar of the Hawthorn, and it times its emergence to coincide with the Hawthorn blossom. The idea that Hawthorn is scrub and therefore rubbish nearly did for one of the rarest beetles in the world, although the setting was a nature reserve being managed by people who ought to have known that everything is interlinked and there is no class system in nature. Thinking of this stupidity in naturalists makes me think more tolerantly of my neighbour calling the flowering plants growing along his lane ‘rubbish’, which is as well because he’s dead now and I’d rather not think ill of him.
Another favourite is ‘unimproved grassland’. It must somehow have become accepted as a scientific classification, but that doesn’t stop me frothing at the mouth when I hear naturalists use the expression. For what is meant are the hay meadows which were once the ecological glory of our countryside, visually up there with wheat fields ablaze with poppies and corn cockle. At the end of the war there was a campaign to get rid of these meadows, an almost military campaign, revved up by a wartime fear of food insecurity and the repurposing of the wartime explosives and nerve-gas factories to produce chemicals to revolutionise farming. Using the term ‘unimproved grassland’ was to turn the tools of military propaganda onto the countryside, using a phrase that clearly expressed that to be progressive you had to convert the hay meadows into ryegrass monocultures, or destroy them with fertilisers and weedkillers. Naturalists now have to call hay-meadows ‘wildflower meadows’ in a kind of reversal of that propaganda, to remind those of us who can’t remember them that hay meadows were once full of flowers and insects, full, in fact, of life, but they still use the phrase ‘unimproved grassland’ when they think it makes them sound scientific.
My friend Eddie Thomas of Kynaston had a mature orchard on his farm planted with cider apples, cookers, and Blenheim Oranges, the best apples in the world, known round here as Blemmins. Eddie kept the cows in this orchard all year round, and the ‘keep’ never failed even in the driest summers. Eddie said it was the best field on his farm. He did nothing to it – he did not need to improve it – but he knew that when he left the farm the next farmer would grub up the trees and plough the sward, and use weed-killer and fertiliser to turn it into a mediocre field, aiming to ‘improve’ it. Eddie did not know what complex interactions of fungi and microbes and dung-beetles and other soil organisms made this field so superb, but he wasn’t about to wreck what was working so well by spreading chemicals on it. I’m not convinced that we yet understand all that goes on in unpolluted hay meadows any more than Eddie understood exactly what was going on to make his orchard so good, but we can now recognise that the relative value of wildflower meadows and ryegrass monocultures does not lie in a comparison of the nutrition or dry-matter that they produce to the acre, just as you cannot put a figure on the sight of a wheat field brilliant with scarlet poppies or the calls of curlews along the estuary. We need to recognise all the possible social, spiritual and ecological values that our land can produce, as well as its value to the farmer, so that the private landowner cannot rob us and the planet of our birth right in the hope of making a few more bob.
Which brings me to my next word, weeds. To some, simply plants in the wrong place. To others, a suite of plants that evolved to make use of the soil laid bare when a tree in the forest is blown over, which they did by having seeds that could be dormant for years and come to life when conditions were right. But as with trees, there is no hierarchy or class system among plants. Nettles, for instance, are host plants to around 40 species of insects including four of our favourite butterflies (the Red Admiral, the Small Tortoiseshell, the Comma and the Painted Lady).
I am not going to argue that weeds are not sometimes a problem for farmers, who have been managing them for centuries using fallows and rotations and hand weeding or hoeing. But I would argue that they can be a vital food source for our vanishing farmland birds, like the Turtle Dove; that they can contribute by protecting the soil from rainfall and by bringing nutrients to the surface; that they may often host beneficial insects that prey on crop pests; and that we eradicate species at our peril when we do not fully understand their roles. Modern farming makes use of chemicals like glyphosate to kill weeds before they have even germinated, and fields of cereal can be sprayed with mixtures containing glyphosate, the active ingredient of ‘Roundup’, maybe six times in a season. Roundup is a highly questionable chemical, and for years its manufacturers have been fighting a rear-guard action against the mounting evidence that it is harmful to a wide range of creatures as well as being carcinogenic. It will, I am sure, eventually be banned, just like DDT or organophosphates or neonicotinoids and all the other chemicals, wave after wave, that flood our environments, are fiercely defended by their manufacturers, and are eventually found to be dangerous to humans and to the environment and banned just as a replacement comes on the market. The whole concept is deeply flawed. There are ways of reducing weed impact that do not involve poisoning the world, and if our regulators, such as we have, were not so credulous in the face of pesticide industry misinformation, and instead demanded alternative strategies, there might be more incentives to devise new methods of living with ‘weeds’ instead of annihilating them.
Many weed problems are actually caused by farmers. Blackgrass in wheat arose because farmers abandoned traditional rotations which would have discouraged blackgrass, and then sprayed it so heavily that it developed resistance. The ability to use weed killers not only encourages overuse and abandonment of more subtle ways of farming, it has also led to the notion that it is possible to have what farmers call entirely ‘clean’ crops. If you spray often enough, you can have fields with nothing in them except your crop. No poppies in the corn. No heartsease on the headland, no fat hen in the stubble to feed the finches and the buntings. No thistles to feed the goldfinches. No cuckoos, no lapwings, no swallows. When I go out I mostly see blackbirds, crows and pigeons. I nearly burst into tears the other day when I heard a curlew. Partly because I know that the few we have left are only still here because they are relatively long lived, although they have long since ceased to be able to produce enough young to sustain the population. Partly because the beauty of the call of the curlew is beyond price, the product of millions of years of evolution of an extraordinary creature that can be wiped out so a few farmers can ‘improve’ a moor or a meadow.