This is the view from home to the Nuclear Power Stations at Heysham over Morecambe Bay. I wonder what Wordsworth and Ruskin would say.
New Year's Resolution - to try and make the garden more in harmony with nature without it becoming a chaotic jungle (though there is something in that idea)(will not be compatible with a control freak like me?).
I am reading John Lewis-Stempel's book, The Running Hare. The area where he lives in the Welsh Borders is very familiar as our daughter and her family live high on Orcop Hill. He bemoans the dreadful disaster that farming is inflicting on the natural world - I think too many people no longer living in harmony with their surroundings but exploiting it to its severe detriment.
Bird numbers in the rural environment have plummeted and the cities do not fare much better. Vast edgeless fields are empty of animal and insect life let along wild plants.
So you say why a scruffy photo of a field with molehills?
Well moles mean worms and worms mean a healthy pasture. This field is where a nearby farmer keeps sheep and cattle - so it is well fertilised - not only that he treats it with the muck-spreader once a year.
Pesticides and herbicides are lavished on crops - they are so safe that farmers who are spraying have to be in sealed tractor cabs!
And the chemicals enter the soil, wash off into the ditches, to the rivers and finally pollute the oceans.
We are gradually polluting and poisoning the world.
In the garden we encourage birds despite the predators - cats and grey squirrels etc - we have our pond, leave areas wild, make compost, have a lawn full of weeds like creeping buttercup. But we are a small, not quite two acre, patch in a world of factory farming.
I have a dream - I win the lottery and buy up farms, let some of the land go wild and then put in a farmer to cultivate in the old ways - that word harmony again.
And so to George Monbiot and his wilding - introducing lynx, beavers and wolves is irrelevant when what we need to do is live in harmony with the world about us.
It is time for Chris Packham and the tribe to spend a series in the middle of a giant Norfolk wheat field and report almost nothing. (Apart from being sprayed with chemicals.)
Rant ended for now - a poem - or two -
THERE IS NO ROOM
There is no room for the wild,
we crowd it out. The bees die -
no seed sets, no grain grows.
We wrap the world with our
insidious greed, plunder its riches.
We are too many. Beyond our streets
the country is prey to geometric
habitation, block on block,
tar margined concrete plaque,
reaching up as if to grasp the sky.
Is this now the time when politicians
should mention population,
realise a plague is here and we are it,
that in this war - election
and extinction versus common sense -
the winner will lose, we will all lose.
When fuel crops replace food, millions starve
but still drive their cars to supermarkets
for unhealthy goods they can’t afford to buy.
We were born with legs to walk
not to press accelerators, brakes -
with mouths to talk, to shout.
And if we do nothing - we will be gone,
for the balance will be restored.
With or without us Earth will turn.
DISEASE
It has rained, roofs are moonlight.
Geese wedge west, tug at the heart.
At the back of a blackthorn hedge
badgers half bark, half cough. Owls trade claims.
Rubbish is stacked by the gate, waits for the six a.m. wagon.
The world should be at ease but the drone of the traffic
drowns the peace, street lights, reflected from scattered clouds,
snuff stars, cast amber shadows on the tar.
A farm dog on a night out rips black plastic, spreads waste.
It has rained, drains are blocked, chemicals flood
from stinking fields, geese choke, owls are silent,
there is no lichen on the blackthorn bark,
It took ten thousand years and an Ice Age.
Man is gone. Now there are only scars and archaeology.
Blackthorn are heavy with sloes, owls hunt the scrub,
there are badgers in the woods.
From the mound of fresh earth at a sett’s mouth
a shred of black protrudes - the remnant of a bin bag.
To the west geese skein in to tide-washed turf,
apes forage in the rushes.
On the windowsill in my room the potato on a bottle is doing okay but what happens if the roots inside the bottle start to grow tubers I hate to think. The small book of poems was a father's day present from my daughter. One of the poems is by Henry Constable and I have a book of his poetry by Joan Grundy who lived just across the field from us when she retired and was a patient of mine. (Ten Poems about Gardens introduced by Monty Don, Candlestick Press.)
More white, so important - the unpruned cut-leaved elder is enormous and the Philadephus loaded with flowers and scent. Up on the top banking the patch of white rosebay gets ever larger. As age creeps on if we can have much of the garden looking good with ground cover and minimum effort the good.
My son C bought me an insect nesting box but I do not think the many wasps scraping away at our green oak beams will be interested. I have not found the nest yet (nor the rabbit hole where the many bunnies come from to eat the garden.) But things change - the lack of swallows and house martins - and some things never change - weeds and growing grass, ungerminated seed in the veg beds, slugs, snails and blackbirds eating all the currants.
