Jane Gillett wrote:
I keep getting the feeling that when people say they want wildlife they
mean a particular set. What grows when you leave land alone is wildlife
ie what survives by itself. If you want something particular you need to
control the land and condition ie farm it.
Just how I see it.

Which reminds me of a great article I read from this chap Richard
Benson 'To sow a Meadow' which first appeared in 'How to save the world

without really trying'. He tried to make a meadow against all the odds
and in an organic way, against the local farmers knowledge and their
criticisms, the huge task ahead. And after trying to avoid rotovating
the clover he said '...the weeds all chocked the second lot of seed as
well and that autumn I put on a hand pumped knapsack sparyer and let
the sticky thorny creeping vinous little *******s have it full on. I
felt like a rural version of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and I
understood in a new way what my dad had meant when he explained how the

new pesticides had seemed like miracles when they came in after the
war. He'd be the first to acknowledge the damage they've done, but
still I suppose you have to realise that ideas that someone like me has

about getting closer to nature are in some ways a product of the
technology that distanced us from it in the first place. There is
little enjoyment or dignity in hoeing weeds from 10 acres of turnips if

you have no other choice'.

He ended with ... 'I think I can paradoxically take a little bit of
pleasure from it. I disabused myself of osme naive ideas about the
environment for a start. And as the failure gets even more obvious, as
the nettles soar and the docks thicken, I enjoy the adversarial,
conspiratorial rones of the conversations I have with people who have
ruses for getting rid of them. I feel on the same side, us against ...
it.'

'What I've really learnt is not stuff about actual growing, but about
people; when you are involved with the natural environment around you,
you invevitably get involved with the people around you as well. You
slip outside that modern process whereby all settlements become more
like gated suburban communities and all workplaces are sealed off and
distant. You can learn that embarassement and failure are not things
that you suffer alone, isolated and lonely in a bedroom, but things
that unite us all, and form a common bond of humanity between us.'


I thought you'd enjoy this )