Dog walks are a useful time to cogitate. Not much happens apart from the occasional good morning to fellow walkers or Taz and Inky making the odd dash into the forest after mythical rabbits. Yesterday I was idly pondering on some of the pro’s and con’s of our first ten years in Westdean. The improvements we’ve made to the house, I decided, was an obvious success. Convincing the recalcitrant locals that we should open the garden for charity was a mini-triumph. Rescuing the village pond from the jungle of nettles, brambles, reeds and willows counted as a battle only half-won as nature is fighting back. But my attempts to persuade the village that the verges should be discretely maintained and perhaps planted with naturalising daffodils and that the flint walls should be cleared of the destructive ravages of ivy were definite failures. Why, I mused? (That’s the trouble with dog walks, too much time to think.)
The fault lies with Isabella Tree I concluded. She of rewilding. Sadly too many people think rewilding means doing nothing, letting nature do what it likes. A bit like letting a six year old having free rein over their toy box…before you know what’s happening there’s stuff all over the floor that someone has, in the end, to clear up. Usually Mum. The same with the countryside: neglect it and it’ll become a mess. And uninhabitable. Rewilding, proper rewilding, is large scale, expensive and has to be managed to be successful. And land management is of course the key to looking after any size of plot. Here’s a couple of examples in Westdean of what can happen if you don’t:
We’re quite pleased with our own bit of land management and I thought my Loyal Readers might like to see what we’ve done. Before we moved in to The Long House the area at the back of the house was mowed within an inch of its life. Only the occasional brave dandelion dared show its face. Now, after sowing a perennial mix of wild flower seeds, planting hundreds of bulbs and tending it carefully, this is how our meadow unfolds throughout the year:
And this is what we find in our toy box: all the result of what’s called, misogynistically, good husbandry. But worth the effort, whatever it’s labelled.
