A month in the life of a BRITISH MEADOW
MAY IS NAMED for Maia, the Roman goddess of growth. And the increasing heat of the sun does bring on life. The greening suddenly becomes unstoppable, overwhelming, deliciously frightening. By 3 May the grass in the meadow, in all of a rush, has reached a foot high, and if I lie on my elbows I am floating on a pea-green sea into which someone has thrown a confetti of blooms.
I let the cows out of their winter paddock, into Marsh Field, only two days after the traditional day for moving cattle on to summer pastures.
Quite taken with the mood of the moment, they run around throwing up divots. Dancing cow day we call it, this day when the cattle are released to munch their way through knee-high May-time flowers.
And the cowslips unfurl their Regency-bonneted heads in the meadow. As flowers they have benefited from a useful historical amnesia; the ‘slip’ in their name derives from the Old English cu-sloppe, meaning cow slop or cow shit. The charming, antique yellow Primula veris does indeed grow best in meadows where cows lift their tails.
The air screams. The swifts, on their mechanical bat wings, vortex around the house until it is time for bed. They arrived yesterday.
16 MAY Early murk, banished by an ascendant sun. Three trout lie like wooden clubs in Periscope Pool, faces upstream. They are the counterpoint to the frenzy of the rest of nature. From just after dawn, the chaffinches in Bank hedge have been feeding their four gape-mouthed hatchlings every two to three minutes. Green caterpillars are delivered in vice-beaks, borne by white-barred wings. So continuous is the activity that it becomes etched permanently on the side of the meadow scene.
When my Parry ancestors arrived in Herefordshire 900 years ago, and stood on the brow of the Black Mountains and looked out over England, what did they see? A land not unlike now. There were already emerald meadows between the trees; the next village over, Maescoed, is maes-y-coed, meaning field in the wood, and was so named as early as 1139. The Wain farm along the lane draws its title from the Welsh for meadow, gwaun, and not the Middle English wain, meaning wagon.
The oldest hedge on the farm is 800 years old; carved from the wildwood in the Middle Ages, the fields have hardly changed their shape since. The Georgian enclosures did not affect the Welsh Marches as permanent pasture did not follow the common three-field system of fallow/winter corn/spring corn.
My wild field catalogue of flowers
Grows in my rhymes as thick as showers
Tedious and long as they may be
To some, they never weary me.
John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar
The meadow buttercup, Ranunculus acris, is a serious inhabiter of pastureland and hay meadows, its abundance an index of the age of the grassland. Cattle usually avoid the plant because of its high ranunculin content, which inflames the digestive system if eaten raw, though it is trouble-free in hay. Beggars of yore used to blister their skin with buttercup juice to arouse the sympathy of passers-by, hence ‘blister plant’; country people name the meadow buttercup the crowflower, because of its acridity. And because the crow is always the omen of evil. When he was 80, William Parry of Longtown told the Victorian folklorist Ella Leather about a shepherd who was attacked on the mountain by two brothers. The shepherd told the brothers, ‘If you kill me, the very crows will cry out, and speak of it!’ The brothers ignored the warning. Thereafter, they could not go out without being mobbed by crows. Their nerves stressed and stretched, they unmasked themselves by blurting out their sin. And were hanged.
The meadow buttercup flowers from May to August, and the first gold heads are shining loud, so that the low, crouching vixen appears to be wearing an elaborate Cleopatran crown. A small number of rabbits have hopped through from the Grove and are nibbling at the grass by the anthills. My black Labrador, Edith, has already had one go at the rabbits, rushing them, but the alarm was signalled by one thumping on the ground and they bolted to the burrows on the bank.
All she has done since is lie like a sphinx in the flowery mead, and wait for the rabbits to come back. When one wanders too close, she explodes to snatch it by the neck. She is a pretty killer.
The grass shimmies, then bows its head in racing waves before the wind. Someone has sprinkled caster sugar on the hedge.
20 MAY The hawthorn has turned the world an eye-catching white. This is the white time. White for hawthorn blossom heaped on the hedges, white for the stitchwort growing under the hedge.
A fox has left a territorial scat on the stone floor of the Bank gateway. I can see earth in it. Last night and the night before it rained, and was warm, and hundreds of worms were crawling over the grass. I counted 10 per metre. One of the foxes has made a meal of them, but the dirt in its stomach is indigestible, hence its appearance in the fox’s excrement.
24 MAY No, the field is not always beautiful: the dandelion flowers have been turned, by the passage of time, into seedy, pale clocks. The white time: the field has all the allure of dandruff on a school blazer.
Note scrawled on paper, 25 May: ‘While fixing some wire across gat in Marsh hedge I disturb a hedgehog suckling three young.’
A gat is dialect for a gap, and stringing a piece of barbed wire across it is only marginally more industrious than getting the dog to sit in the hole and keep the cows from pushing through.
But the heat was beating, the clay gone to iron, so that fixing in fence posts did not appeal. Herefordshire clay: it is either wet and sludgy, or hot and hard. There are about two days a year when you can work it sensibly. The heatwave has brought out the butterflies, and over the surface of the meadow there is now a constant interference of cabbage whites and meadow browns. I also see a blue butterfly I cannot identify, until I look it up in The Observer Book Of Butterflies, given to me by my parents when I was nine. A female common blue.
On the cow parsley that sprawls into the meadow from the thicket, there are also orange-tip butterflies. White saucer blossoms of Anthriscus sylvestris, their wings closed vertically above their backs, the orangetips are fantastically difficult to discern even though I am only inches away. The green-and-white mottling of their underwings is the acme of eyefooling camouflage.
The sight of the adult orange-tips nectaring prompts me to check the cuckoo flowers by the ditch to see if their caterpillars are there. After some searching, I find five green orange-tip larvae. Cuckoo flower, along with garlic mustard, is the primary food source for orange-tip young, along with each other.
The caterpillars are devout cannibals.
Meadowland: The Private Life Of An English Field, by John Lewis-Stempel, is published by Doubleday on 22 May, priced £14.99.
I let the cows out of their winter paddock, into Marsh Field, only two days after the traditional day for moving cattle on to summer pastures.
Quite taken with the mood of the moment, they run around throwing up divots. Dancing cow day we call it, this day when the cattle are released to munch their way through knee-high May-time flowers.
And the cowslips unfurl their Regency-bonneted heads in the meadow. As flowers they have benefited from a useful historical amnesia; the ‘slip’ in their name derives from the Old English cu-sloppe, meaning cow slop or cow shit. The charming, antique yellow Primula veris does indeed grow best in meadows where cows lift their tails.
The air screams. The swifts, on their mechanical bat wings, vortex around the house until it is time for bed. They arrived yesterday.
16 MAY Early murk, banished by an ascendant sun. Three trout lie like wooden clubs in Periscope Pool, faces upstream. They are the counterpoint to the frenzy of the rest of nature. From just after dawn, the chaffinches in Bank hedge have been feeding their four gape-mouthed hatchlings every two to three minutes. Green caterpillars are delivered in vice-beaks, borne by white-barred wings. So continuous is the activity that it becomes etched permanently on the side of the meadow scene.
When my Parry ancestors arrived in Herefordshire 900 years ago, and stood on the brow of the Black Mountains and looked out over England, what did they see? A land not unlike now. There were already emerald meadows between the trees; the next village over, Maescoed, is maes-y-coed, meaning field in the wood, and was so named as early as 1139. The Wain farm along the lane draws its title from the Welsh for meadow, gwaun, and not the Middle English wain, meaning wagon.
The oldest hedge on the farm is 800 years old; carved from the wildwood in the Middle Ages, the fields have hardly changed their shape since. The Georgian enclosures did not affect the Welsh Marches as permanent pasture did not follow the common three-field system of fallow/winter corn/spring corn.
My wild field catalogue of flowers
Grows in my rhymes as thick as showers
Tedious and long as they may be
To some, they never weary me.
John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar
The meadow buttercup, Ranunculus acris, is a serious inhabiter of pastureland and hay meadows, its abundance an index of the age of the grassland. Cattle usually avoid the plant because of its high ranunculin content, which inflames the digestive system if eaten raw, though it is trouble-free in hay. Beggars of yore used to blister their skin with buttercup juice to arouse the sympathy of passers-by, hence ‘blister plant’; country people name the meadow buttercup the crowflower, because of its acridity. And because the crow is always the omen of evil. When he was 80, William Parry of Longtown told the Victorian folklorist Ella Leather about a shepherd who was attacked on the mountain by two brothers. The shepherd told the brothers, ‘If you kill me, the very crows will cry out, and speak of it!’ The brothers ignored the warning. Thereafter, they could not go out without being mobbed by crows. Their nerves stressed and stretched, they unmasked themselves by blurting out their sin. And were hanged.
The meadow buttercup flowers from May to August, and the first gold heads are shining loud, so that the low, crouching vixen appears to be wearing an elaborate Cleopatran crown. A small number of rabbits have hopped through from the Grove and are nibbling at the grass by the anthills. My black Labrador, Edith, has already had one go at the rabbits, rushing them, but the alarm was signalled by one thumping on the ground and they bolted to the burrows on the bank.
All she has done since is lie like a sphinx in the flowery mead, and wait for the rabbits to come back. When one wanders too close, she explodes to snatch it by the neck. She is a pretty killer.
The grass shimmies, then bows its head in racing waves before the wind. Someone has sprinkled caster sugar on the hedge.
20 MAY The hawthorn has turned the world an eye-catching white. This is the white time. White for hawthorn blossom heaped on the hedges, white for the stitchwort growing under the hedge.
A fox has left a territorial scat on the stone floor of the Bank gateway. I can see earth in it. Last night and the night before it rained, and was warm, and hundreds of worms were crawling over the grass. I counted 10 per metre. One of the foxes has made a meal of them, but the dirt in its stomach is indigestible, hence its appearance in the fox’s excrement.
24 MAY No, the field is not always beautiful: the dandelion flowers have been turned, by the passage of time, into seedy, pale clocks. The white time: the field has all the allure of dandruff on a school blazer.
Note scrawled on paper, 25 May: ‘While fixing some wire across gat in Marsh hedge I disturb a hedgehog suckling three young.’
A gat is dialect for a gap, and stringing a piece of barbed wire across it is only marginally more industrious than getting the dog to sit in the hole and keep the cows from pushing through.
But the heat was beating, the clay gone to iron, so that fixing in fence posts did not appeal. Herefordshire clay: it is either wet and sludgy, or hot and hard. There are about two days a year when you can work it sensibly. The heatwave has brought out the butterflies, and over the surface of the meadow there is now a constant interference of cabbage whites and meadow browns. I also see a blue butterfly I cannot identify, until I look it up in The Observer Book Of Butterflies, given to me by my parents when I was nine. A female common blue.
On the cow parsley that sprawls into the meadow from the thicket, there are also orange-tip butterflies. White saucer blossoms of Anthriscus sylvestris, their wings closed vertically above their backs, the orangetips are fantastically difficult to discern even though I am only inches away. The green-and-white mottling of their underwings is the acme of eyefooling camouflage.
The sight of the adult orange-tips nectaring prompts me to check the cuckoo flowers by the ditch to see if their caterpillars are there. After some searching, I find five green orange-tip larvae. Cuckoo flower, along with garlic mustard, is the primary food source for orange-tip young, along with each other.
The caterpillars are devout cannibals.
Meadowland: The Private Life Of An English Field, by John Lewis-Stempel, is published by Doubleday on 22 May, priced £14.99.