I’ve been holding off writing this blog because the land it focuses on is not my land. Therefore what happens to it is, according to convention, none of my business. But I still feel the need to tell its story, because every time I walk past it I remember what is now lost.
You’ve probably heard this quote from Aldo Leopold:
‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.‘
This rings true for many of us. Painfully so. Yet, even though I know I’m not alone in feeling this way, somedays, and sometimes, it feels like I’m the only one paying attention to the miracle of non-human living things.
***
I stepped into the small, damp meadow just after dawn. It was awash with Cuckoo flowers, hundreds of them, all shining in the dew. Cuckoo flowers (Cardamine pratensis) are called this because their blooming once coincided with the arrival of the Cuckoo. But that doesn’t work round here any more because the Cuckoos never come. Once upon a time you could hear them all over the British Isles, but now they’re restricted to certain areas, and if you don’t live there or along their migration routes, chances are you won’t hear one now unless you travel elsewhere.
Conveniently, given the lack of Cuckoos nowadays, Cuckoo flowers do have some other common names. One is ‘Ladies smock’, which alludes, mostly, to their cup-shaped flowers. Another common name is ‘Milkmaids’.
At the top of a long stem, they have four-petaled flowers, ranging in colour from white through pink to lilac. Each petal has dark pink veins running through it. The centre of the flower is greenish yellow, and the leaves are pinnate, which means leaflets grow from each side of the stem. They’re members of the Brassica family, completely edible (with a pleasing flavour reminiscent of mustard) and were once eaten as a replacement for Watercress. This historical use is given away by the scientific name, with ‘Cardamine’ relating to members of the Bittercress family and ‘pratensis’ meaning meadow, so they are the ‘Cress of the meadow’.
As the early sunlight refracted around the meadow, I noticed a dew-dotted, Six-spotted ladybird on a blade of grass. There were also slugs, leafhoppers and a Tawny mining bee. The bee was peeping out of one of the flowers, having spent the night tucked up amongst its petals; slumbering like one of the faerie folk who hold Cuckoo flowers dear, so dear that they will curse anyone foolish enough to bring a Cuckoo flower indoors.
I thought of Orange-tips, those dainty springtime butterflies which flit by on sunny days. They lay their eggs on Cuckoo flowers, and I wondered how many eggs must be in this meadow, how many caterpillars it would support. But the day was getting on. Soon I would no longer be alone here, and land ownership dictates that I didn’t belong. Even though being among it brought me such a sense of joy, and even though I visit it more regularly than anyone else, including the owner, it is not my land. Slowly, I turned to leave, deciding to come back in the next few days to see what other plants and creatures where living in its shimmering heart.
But there was no return to the Cuckoo flowers. Instead, I returned to a mown ‘lawn’, the meadow reduced to an expanse of short grass with plants chopped in their prime.
I hold my tongue about this far too often, but I think the way the majority of people in the British Isles treat ‘their’ land is appalling. The concept of ownership compounds this because it allows one person’s whims to have more importance than a community (both human and non-human.) There was a whole ecosystem in that meadow; a living, flourishing world full of plants and insects which were following the deep rhythm of the universe. They were growing, feeding, mating, fighting, and communicating at a depth which we are only just starting to understand. But to this landowner, none of that mattered. What mattered to him was that his field conformed to society’s idea of ‘tidy’.
Right now, in the next field, a farmer is bashing in posts so that he can fence it in (and us out) and let his sheep feed. There are Cuckoo flowers there, but they too will soon be gone, eaten by the sheep. In the field adjacent to that, which has been ‘improved’, he has put a heard of cattle, and any Cuckoo flowers which grow there will also soon be gone. In the fields across the road, Cuckoo flowers no longer exist. They were ploughed up and reseeded with Rye grass long ago. See how it goes? Little by little, this cheery little flower, along with many others, is being erased, just like the bird from which it takes its name.
I know the usual argument, if you don’t cut or graze a meadow it will cease to be a meadow. But it will cease to be a meadow if you cut and graze it too often, too. And if every patch of land is cut, grazed or ploughed before the caterpillars can grow and the flowers reach seed how, then, does that affect the turning of things? I don’t mean to demonise ruminants; they have their place – but I’m concerned that so little of our landscape is given space to breathe. We dictate that it must be either ‘productive’ or ‘tidy’. It’s an ideology that permeates everything nowadays, even the running of our own lives. We’ve been collectively convinced that if we’re not being productive then we have no place in society. And look what it’s doing to people. Mental health is deteriorating. Anxiety and depression continues to rise. You’d think the overall wellbeing of an affluent nation would be good, yet this is not the case.
But if you follow the money, you see that much of it goes into the hands of people who own and abuse the land. The land is sick, and consequently so are the people. We’ve been removed from the land and told to live in a way which ignores our natural rhythms. But ignoring our need for periods of rest goes against the very flow of life. Nothing in nature is productive all the time. Animals sleep, insects hibernate, trees drop their leaves. Everything needs to rest, and this includes the land. Once we knew this, so we left areas fallow. Now we cheat. We use caffeine and sugar on ourselves, and fertilisers and herbicides on the soil.
All winter we wait, wait for the flowers to awaken from their rest. Yet as soon as the flowers return too many people rush to take them away. Lawnmowers chug and strimmers buzz. The Cuckoo flowers in the meadow had their place. So did the Daisies, Dandelions, Common dog-violets, Bugle, Lesser celandines and Primroses which were all also removed. They had an important part to play. Yet we treat non-human life as if it has no meaning; hack, cut and slice as if there’s no pain there at all. But there is. I know this because I feel it, as all sensitive people do, feel it like a kick in the gut. I wonder about the Tawny mining bee. Where will it sleep now? Did the Ladybird avoid the blades? And how many Orange-tip eggs were lost when the man with the mower came? And what happened to the smaller creatures, those which were too small for me to see?
Perhaps you think it doesn’t matter. It was just one field, after all. But this field is a microcosm of the British landscape as a whole. This statistic gets repeated a lot, but 97% of our wildflower meadows have gone. Gone. People used to look after the meadows because the meadows, in turn, fed their animals. Then silage came along, and monocultures were encouraged, and meadows, for all their vitality, were seen as unproductive, messy places with no importance in the world.
***
Do you ever watch livestock, and watch what they eat? Cattle will often browse the Cow Parsley growing along a hedgerow before they eat the grass in an ‘improved’ field. They also eat Nettles, and Docks. Thankfully, there is one field locally which is still managed as a wildflower meadow. Walking through it last year, I noticed how the Friesian cattle which were grazing there had dung which was a completely different consistency to the Friesians grazing in the ‘improved’ fields. It was more solid, and looked more like the dung of wild ruminants. I suspect this is because the mixture of plants in the meadow was beneficial to their biome. The liquid dung of the other cows, forced to eat only a handful of grasses, signifies a problem with their diet.
If someone harms somebody you love, you feel anger, sadness, rage, and nobody denies your emotions. And the grief you feel when a loved one dies is understood by all. But when a landowner harms the land you love and a non-human community, what then? Is the grief you feel any less valid? I don’t think so. To try to limit love to something which only passes between humans is erroneous. People love their pets. Some of us love inanimate objects (try telling me a three-year-old does not love their favourite teddy bear.) It is not only a person to person emotion, it transcends barriers, and time. So you see, to expect a person to not care about a place because they don’t own it overlooks the fundamentals of human nature. We don’t behave like that. We care deeply about certain places, especially when we spend time there, and want them to be treated with respect.
And this is why I feel the need to tell the story of the meadow which has been cut, because I cared about it, and the creatures which lived in it, and in my bones I know that something has gone very wrong when a society allows landowners to mistreat the land. It means we have swallowed the lie that we do not belong, and that non-human life doesn’t matter; and nothing could be further from the truth.
P.S. If you liked reading this, and agree with the sentiment, please consider clicking on the button below and making a donation to my Kofi page. I don’t like asking, but it helps me very much, and every donation gives me a little more courage to write from my heart. Thank you.