But all was not perfect. Increasingly, like an infection coming in from beyond the borders of the farm, we had been having a problem with ragwort. You have to pull it, one by one, and the result is a peculiar mixture of pleasure and pain. The pleasure is in doing it at all. Walking through the hay meadows, just a moment or two before they are to be cut, with the long distance of the Weald running away to the blue hills above Rye and what I always imagine is the brightness on the horizon there from the sunshine reflected off the Channel, the dirty, egg-yolk yellow of the ragwort flower-heads stands out here and there among the tan of the grasses.
Ragwort is the nastiest of all English weeds, a British native which our imperial past has exported to the rest of the world. When we sent our cattle to the colonies in the nineteenth century, feeding the beasts with hay in the holds of the sailing ships, there must have been ragwort seeds in amongst it. The cattle ate the seeds, walked out on to the pristine pastures of the new world and deposited them there in a beautifully fertilized pat, inviting the ragwort to flower on a new continent. If you look up ragwort on the Internet now, a low moan of despair comes back at you from those former colonies. In New Zealand and Western Australia, in Nova Scotia, Oregon and Washington State, ragwort is booming, threatening to overtake thousands of acres of pasture and with the prospect of doing real economic damage.
It is a killer. Even as you touch its tall and horribly vigorous stems, a kind of chemical, pollutant taste comes into your mouth, catching at your throat. No one could ever describe that smell as a scent; it is more of a sense-attack, the olfactory equivalent of a thistle, a spike-cocktail of sourness and unattraction. Don’t touch me, the airborne message communicates. Leave me alone, let me flower, let me thrive. I am not on your side.
Usually, unless they are particularly hard-pressed – which can happen in the spare, dry grazing of the western United States but only rarely in England – stock will not eat ragwort that is still green and growing. The real danger is if the ragwort is cut. Either dry in hay, or if mown off, or even bundled wet into silage, it becomes more palatable to the animals. But if it is a little tastier, it is no less poisonous and an animal that has been feeding on ragwort is in mortal danger. A cow or a horse which has been exposed to these toxins is a disturbing sight. Such animals lose their appetite and start to chew on fences. As it worsens, they begin to stagger, go blind, bump into obstacles and eat dirt. Hair falls out of the manes of horses and their hooves start to flake away. These are all the symptoms of liver damage which within two or three weeks, if they consume enough of the poison, can kill them. The damage to their livers is irreversible. The only thing a vet can do is shoot them.
We didn’t have that bad a problem with the infestation ourselves. Until about 2000, I don’t remember seeing a single ragwort on the place. Then there were one or two, which I pulled up and burned, and now the plants are appearing just here and there, little yellow spots of pointilliste horror scattered around the farm. I don’t like it. I walk around the fields pulling them up, tolerating the chemical taste that soon starts to feel raw and thick in the back of my throat because I know that to do this is at least ensuring that this year’s hay will be all right. By pulling them and then burning the bundle I have gathered, I can at least be sure that these plants won’t set seed. The horribly vibrant flower-cluster on each of them, a mountebank coarseness to it, like a carpet-bagger rolling into town and setting out his wares, can, I am told, produce 150,000 seeds, of which two-thirds are likely to germinate the following year. Unattended, it would not be long before the farm was awash with the things. In Oregon, damage done by ragwort to livestock in the 1980s was running at about 4 million dollars a year and whole counties were becoming unusable by graziers, a low flood of poison creeping across the productive landscape.
When you pull it, the plant comes smoothly and satisfyingly out of the ground, a big lump of root attached to its foot. It reminds me of that wonderful moment when you were a boy and at last a wobbly tooth would come oozing out of its socket and you were left with a strange fresh soft gap in your gum into which your tongue would dive as if into a pool.
But even as I do this, I know I am not doing the right thing. My pulling of this year’s plants will, inevitably, leave small pieces of root in the ground and ragwort will resprout from any piece of root, however small. This is the quick and lazy way to do it. If I were not committed to an organic system which uses no chemical sprays, I could attack them with a herbicide called 2-4D. But I am, so I can’t. What can I do? One is told in this country that the only possible thing a landowner should do – and any of us with any ragwort whatsoever on our land can in theory be served clearance notices by the Ministry or the local authority – is to dig them out. Even those who have sprayed off the tops are told to dig out the roots.
That might, I think, be possible on our land, a slow and patient working through the fields, attacking the ragworts one by one: immensely slow, immensely old-fashioned, immensely expensive in terms of the labour required. But you have only to take a drive through England in the summer nowadays to see that the ragwort is out of control. Thousands of acres of scarcely used ground and motorway verge are thick with it. Ragwort is everywhere. It is rampant and almost totally unchecked. Is there any point in my trudging round with the dog at my heel, pulling out the weed on our few acres when the rest of the country was going to a form of toxic hell?
Of course, that has always been the big question hanging over Perch Hill. If the big systems are so wrong, is there any justification for making and protecting a little slice of delicious paradise here?
Sometimes I long for the techno-fix. If only, in one seamless sweep over the ninety acres of this farm, we could swish through with our weedkiller spray, ridding ourselves in one gesture of everything that hurts and troubles us. It would be heaven in a boom-sprayer.
The sow thistles, creeping thistles, docks, ragwort, nettles, brambles, dandelions and creeping buttercups would all meekly accept their fate, standing there mutely as the chemical rain fell about them, drinking it in, absorbing into their roots the substance that would do for them. I would never need worry about the weed problem again. Without anxiety I could take guests for a walk across the fields, without the detours through patches of woodland in order to avoid the worst and weediest patches of field.
But of course we couldn’t zap them because we were organic. And why were we organic? Because we were. As I wouldn’t have accepted that reply from my three-and six-year-old daughters when I asked them why they were painting the dog’s ears, I could hardly offer it up myself. Why don’t you tidy up with the best tool that modern technology can provide? people ask me. It is as if you were using a broom to sweep up the sitting room and refusing to use a hoover because to do so would consume valuable fossil fuels and add to global warming. It is eccentric to the point of lunacy.
Is it? Glyphosate, the world’s biggest-selling herbicide, is seductive. It leaves no harmful residue because its active chemical either clings to soil particles and is neutralized or degrades in the air. And because it hangs on to the soil, it doesn’t leach out into the watercourses. It does not harm people or animals because the mechanism by which it kills plants acts on a biologic al system (called the shikimic acid pathway, whatever that might be) which exists in plants but not in animals.
So, the chemical crew says, what is wrong with glyphosate? It’s the perfect killer. Why not go for the full zap? Use it with a machine called a weed-wiper. This ingenious mechanism is a roller on wheels which is towed behind a tractor. The weedkiller is spread along the roller by a series of little nozzles. The clever part is that the chemical-drenched roller rolls not along the ground but a foot or so above it. You put your sheep and cattle in the field. They graze away at the grasses (and wild flowers) but they leave the noxious weeds. After a few weeks, those weeds are left standing a good foot or so above the sward. Out with the animals, in with the weed-wiper, set at a height which will spread the herbicide only on those ta
ll plants it touches. Result: end of weeds, protection of everything else. What have you got to say to that?
There are some techno-answers to the techno-zap. Glyphosate reduces the amount of nitrogen which clover or beans can fix in the soil. This beautiful mechanism, by which a plant draws the nitrogenous goodness out of the air and stores it in little nodules on its roots, building up the fertility in the grass years which is then made use of in the arable years, is the hidden mechanism on which traditional and organic farming rely. If you start using glyphosate, you start eroding that all-important cycle. The other little things that inhabit the soil don’t like it much either: bacteria, fungi, yeasts and some invertebrates suffer in a glyphosated environment. The parasol mushrooms I had been picking up from Great Flemings in the autumn, and the extraordinary puffballs which proliferated everywhere on the farm since I kicked an old dead brown one around the fields one year, puffing out its brown smoke like the dust on chocolate truffles – none of that would thrive if I was happily weed-wiping away.
I never wanted to rely on the techno-answer. Instead, we top our weeds, year after year, three or four times a year, with a tractor-mounted topper, just cutting them down whenever they perk up. Fred Groombridge used to do it, and then Peter Pilbeam, whose brother Colin had come to work in the garden. It is most important to do it in the autumn, sorting the place out so that it doesn’t look stubbled for the long winter months to come. That involves allowing the weeds to grow so that we can then chop them back. You have to contemplate what is wrong for a few weeks before doing anything about it. But that is precisely what is good about doing it this way. Topping is not a final solution. It doesn’t zap for ever something which you find unattractive. It is part of a continuing process, not a sterilizing or eradicating but a managing and an accommodating.
After the chaotic beginning, described in the earlier chapters, we started topping effectively in 1996. It never seemed to do that much. I remember one year walking across the fields with Christopher Lloyd, who had come over from Great Dixter on a summer evening. He and Sarah had talked about the new way of gardening, large and bold, no reticence, no sanctified sweetness, everything demonstrative and large, the deep bloody soaked-in colour of the dahlias, banana plants where Lutyens had made a rose garden, his thinking of a garden not as a place of reticence and delicacy but designed for flamboyance, grandeur and imposition, as big a presence in your life as a power station. Watercolours were so passé; this was opera.
I loved him for all of that, his twinkly, often rather cruel naughtiness, his knowledge that we were creaking along on scarcely enough money, his unstoppable truth-telling. So I loved it when he said how beautiful the fields were at Perch Hill, their long blue slide to the distance, their Sussexness. I loved it as much as when someone said how lovely my children were. And I knew that Christo would not lie about such a thing.
All the fields here, hedged or ploughed, grazed or not, are all, to a stranger, or to anyone who is indifferent, pretty much of a piece and pretty much the same as other fields on other farms where sheep and cattle graze, where the oaks grow, hedges are cut each sodden March and the hay made each burning July. They are part of what strangers call a ‘landscape’, that distant word no one ever applies to a place they know but which drapes the convenience of singularity over every local reality. Landscape; prospect; scenery; view: synonyms for ignorance.
Those words dissolve when you know a place. Landscape-with-knowledge becomes its constituent parts, breaks up into farms and woods, tracks and rough, damp places where rushes grow and where, after rain, water collects in little grass-drowning pools. That is the level at which I know this place. I know what every notched corner looks like at any time of year. I have in my mind a houseful of seasons for every cranny: the future presence of a splash of garlic by the fallen oak on the sunny edge of the bluebell wood; the future presence of those bluebells collapsed and flowerless, as though a passing flood had flattened and drowned them; the future rattle of the acorns sprayed by autumn winds and beating through the trunks of the chestnuts or hazels beneath them; the future absence of any single thing to lift the spirit in the deep and rain-soaked blackness of the winter trees. The whole year co-exists in a known place.
These layered changes in the seasons, this mixture of fragmentary preservation and partial erasure, comes near the heart of a place’s significance. Each place, each evolving corner, is a form of current memorial, a marriage of life and permanence, halfway between now and then, between the made and the given, the local and the abstract, beautiful, in Ivor Gurney’s word, for their ‘usualty’. That is why I didn’t want to poison it.
So when Christo said, ‘The only trouble is the thistles, isn’t it, Adam?’, looking up into my face, like a small boy saying something rude and true like ‘Your breath smells’, it was like a dagger in my heart. For all the look of Perch Hill, its landscapy virtues, the underlying truth was in the thistles, that terrible crunchiness underfoot, the inability on a summer evening to lie down in the grass because the grass wasn’t comfy. I explained to him what we were doing, the repeated topping, the year-in, year-out nailing of the thistles, their year-in, year-out return like the most reliable of crops, but the sceptical look didn’t leave his face. ‘Chemicals, Adam?’ he said.
Then, over two or three summers, from about 2003 to about 2006, and in a process that is still not quite complete, something extraordinary happened: the thistles disappeared. In field after field, the grass became a picture of what grass is meant to be. All through Jim’s Field and Great Flemings, in Beech Meadow and Rosie’s Field, a pure, smooth sward appeared, made largely of grass, a lot of buttercups and large amounts of sorrel and red and white clover. Why? Was it because we had been bashing away at the thistles with the topper for years and they had finally succumbed? Or the way we had grazed it some winters very tight because we didn’t have quite enough grass for the stock? Or was it, as some people suggested, a new thistle disease which had come into the country from Canada and was slowly eradicating them, first turning them pale where they grew among the grasses and then killing them off entirely? I had certainly seen quite a few strangely pale thistles like blanched asparagus standing in the grass.
Whatever the reason – and it was probably a mix of all three – it felt and still feels like a miracle. Our hay is now prickle-free and the cattle in the winter can plunge their noses into it without any of that hesitation with which they approach prickly hay. The surface of the fields, when grazed, is a smooth, shorn carpet like short, well-washed hair. And when we shut up one or two fields in the summer to grow hay for the animals’ winter food, the flowery grass is thistle-free, an unbroken expanse, eleven acres in the Way Field, fourteen in Great Flemings, of what we wanted to be there. I cannot tell you how deep the pleasure of that now is to me, walking through the long grass, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t find the thistles there, lurking in the camouflage of buttercup and sorrel. They never are. There is no reason, Angie Wilkins says, they should ever return again.
What is more, we have done this without chemical poisons. We have done it by looking after it, by managing it as it needed to be managed. I never thought it would work, but it has. And that, mysteriously, turns out to be one of the consolations of time passing here. I think somewhere deep in my preconceptions was the idea that things will decline, that as the world turns it slows down, that what will come can never be more than a sad and diminished version of what came before. That all you can do is hope to recover some of the glory of things that are largely gone, that at Perch Hill there might be a fragment of the world which is still good and whole. That climbing part of the way back up the slope is the best you can hope for.
But here was something that flew in the face of that nostalgic gloom. In the deepest possible way, in the deep networks of the fields’ ecosystems here, we had made things better, not in some flash, applied solution but in the reality of this place’s nature. I still cannot quite believe it. We haven’t brought anything int
o these fields, nor built anything. But we have somehow allowed them to become themselves. We have allowed them to shrug off the thistle burden which probably came here in an attempt to make them more productive in the 1960s or ’70s. The thistle seed might have been mixed in with the seed of the new rye-grasses that were drilled here then. We don’t know what it was but now it has gone and the fields of summer grass look well nowadays, with a smile on their face, as if the farm has been made good again.
Feeding the Sensuous Memory
IN EARLY 2004, my father fell ill, suffering from what turned out to be his last illness. We went to live with him, at Sissinghurst, in the house I had grown up in thirty years before. There had always been a strange parallelism in the relationship of Perch Hill to Sissinghurst. They were not that far from each other, a little more than 15 miles, one just in Sussex, the other just in Kent. The geography is pretty much the same in both places. Perch Hill’s bit of Sussex is a little rougher and woollier, the hills are steeper and the valleys sharper.
In essentials, or in the kind of essentials a boy would know about, the places are the same. The clay is just as sticky, the streams run similarly in deeply cut and deeply shaded runnels through the woods and out into the fields, where on burning days they become beautiful cool trenches between the parched crops on either side. Kingfishers fly the length of them in both counties. The pattern of fields is the same, the bocage which makes each corner into an individualized world. And above all the woods are the same, still coppiced in both places, still with their beautiful oak standards remaining from cycle to cycle as the underwood is cut from around them. All this was what I loved more than anything else about home when I was a boy. Much of it is what I had responded to when coming to Perch Hill.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 28