Meadowland (19 page)

ALL BIRDSONG HAS
stopped; the noise of the field is a low insectoid drone.

I take a survey of the grasses: common bent; perennial rye grass; crested dog’s tail; meadow foxtail; sweet vernal; quaking grass; red fescue; cock’s foot; timothy; rough meadow grass. Where there has historically been grazing only: tufted hair-grass. A good deal of the grass has gone past seed, to leave empty purses. The hay would be better as fodder if it was headed, but cutting when the wildflowers have set seed means those wildflowers have a chance to reproduce because their seed is cast as a by-action of the mowing process.

2 J
ULY
The morning mist is shattered by five green woodpeckers, a family party, exploding out of the promontory. One of the flying jewels laughs madly as it goes. Green woodpeckers feed upon worms and ground insects; the sparse light-deprived grass under the alders is pitted by the marks of their bills.

Like everyone who works the land I see auguries in
living things. The green woodpecker is the ‘rain bird’ of British folklore; in France it is still called
pic de la pluie
and its mocking cry known to herald the storm:

Lorsque le pivert crie

According to the ornithologist Edward Allworthy Armstrong the green woodpecker was once the subject of a Neolithic cult, with woodpecker worship being superseded by other religions and eventually Christianity. Some trace element lingered on in the minds of men, for stories about the green woodpecker going against God’s commandments are widespread. One German folk tale tells how the
Picus viridis
refused God’s command to dig a well because it would spoil his gorgeous green-and-red plumage. As punishment, the bird was forbidden to ever drink from a pool or stream. Instead the green woodpecker must endlessly call for rain and fly into the air to receive the slaking drops.

Later: a thunderstorm. Doubtless whipped up by the green woodpeckers.

3 J
ULY
The six-spot burnet moths are hatching. What urge persuaded the caterpillars back in spring to crawl up grass stems, spin papyrus cocoons around themselves, and assume there would be time in which to take wing? While I ponder the ineffability of it all, a
metamorphosed creature crawls from its Expressionist cabinet in the sward; it is a decrepit black being, and impossible to relate to the chubby yellow caterpillar that entered pupation. The afternoon sun makes the moth beautiful, its wings dry and expand, and the crimson spots that give this day-flying moth its name become visible. Except that the spots are not exactly crimson; the spots are more scarlet, the scarlet of
Cabaret
and Berlin brothels. The red lights on the moth’s wings are not just a come-on to other burnets, they advertise the being’s inedibility. Burnet moth caterpillars absorb hydrogen cyanide (HCN) from the glucosides in their principal food plant, bird’s-foot trefoil. The HCN is retained during pupation into adulthood. The moth’s gaudy dress warns that it is unpalatable, maybe downright deadly. (In the jargon, this warning coloration is ‘aposematism’.) As the six-spot burnets emerge into this blissful afternoon of boundless hope, so do the flowers of their beloved thistles reach their purple peak; bird’s-foot trefoil for their forthcoming young is already in bloom in the bottom of the sward. Everything is in perfect, synchronized order.

The meadow does a good line in thistles, though I try to restrict them to a five-foot-wide stand along the north end of Marsh Field hedge. Thistles have distinct Lebensraum inclinations. Dotted around the
meadow, especially in the finger and by the newt ditch, is marsh thistle, a biennial which is hard to ignore: it grows to a metre and a half in height. A particularly splendid example is drenched in cabbage whites, which fuel themselves on nectar before floating off dreamily in search of a mate.

There are so many thistles in the gateway to Marsh Field I doubt I’ll be able to open it. I have waited until now to chop them down with a hook, because the most ancient rule of British farming is this:

Cut thistles in May

They grow in a day

Cut them in June

That is too soon;

Cut them in July,

Then they will die.

9 J
ULY
I take Edith with me to shoot wood pigeons on a glistening, curiously electric afternoon rising out of a sodden morning. The high wet grass uncomfortably soaks my jeans above my wellingtons. Patrolling the field edge under the sheltering twin oaks, Edith, bedraggled to her neck, suddenly stops, with her hackles springing cartoonishly upright. She’s spotted one of the fox cubs – well a juvenile, now – fast asleep,
nose tucked into brush, on a parched ledge between the roots of the oaks. A fluffy carmine cushion.

To Edith’s disappointment, we let sleeping foxes lie. The pigeons also turn out to be safe from harm; I don’t get within fifty yards before they clapper out of the copse.

12 J
ULY
High summer and one can hear the universe; so overwhelming is the accumulated sound of growing in the meadow and in hedges, of pollen being released, of particles moving in the heat, that all the minute motions together create a continuous hum: the sound of summer.

Meanwhile swifts tear the fabric of the sky on scything wings. The yarrow flowers are tall, the hawthorn flowers have turned to hard green haws. Blackfly fasten on the thistles, so too slender marmalade soldier beetles (
Rhagonycha fulva
) mating, tail to tail.

In the sitting room my son has left a pile of photos on the sofa; one shows him and his schoolfriends holding a daisy chain of prodigious length. Which makes my mind wander to flower culture.

Many field flowers used to be regarded by girls as love charms. Daisy petals were plucked to the rhyme ‘He loves me, he loves me not’. Picking the grains from
the rye grass was used for the rhyming verse designed to find the nature of your future husband: ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief . . .’ Field scabious (
Knautia arvensis
) buds were each given the name of a suitor, and the first to open was the man who would become your husband. Knapweed (
Centaurea nigra
) was stripped of its flowers, tucked between the breasts, and if in the morning it had regrown blossom your love was true.

Slightly more sophisticated, one feels, was
The Language of Flowers
, a guide to the means of communicating secret feelings through the sending of flowers. Published by Charlotte de la Tour in France in 1819, it was madly popular. Queen Victoria herself wore ivy leaves in her hair to symbolize fidelity to Albert.

There are girls’ names, of course: Daisy, Poppy, Primrose.

There are flower games, such as do you like butter? Shining a buttercup under the chin to determine whether the subject liked butter. A tall buttercup flower against one’s neck on the night of a full moon, or simply smelling the flower, causes insanity, hence the folk name ‘crazy’ or ‘crazy bet’.

Cleavers were stuck to the back of blazers.

And my favourite: a thick blade of grass between pressed thumbs so it forms a reed, which is blown by the mouth. The noise, depending on delicacy, is either
a raspberry, a curlewesque wail, or the tuba in Beethoven’s Fifth.

The deep veins on the leaves of the plantain have earned the species the name ‘ribwort’. Alternative names reflect the use of the stubby black flower head in a game akin to conkers, among them ‘soldiers’ and ‘fighters’. Yet other names refer to the fact that farmers used to judge whether a haystack would be likely to catch fire by feeling a leaf of ribwort plantain to see how much moisture was left in the hay. Thus ‘fire-leaf’ and ‘fire-weed’.

Pollen analysis has shown that ribwort plantain spread as Neolithic farming increased and the wild forest decreased. I cannot help but assume that Neolithic farmers found plantain as useful as I do in determining when to mow the grass for hay. When the plantain head is good enough to play soldiers the grass is good enough to cut. And after all, this is July, the month for which the medieval calendar advised ‘With my scythe my meads I mow’.

16 J
ULY
Under the hazels in the copse a fox (the vixen, I think) sits washing its front legs, a small red ember in the dying sun. Ten yards away a rabbit sits on top of an anthill, wholly in the view of the fox. The rabbit is also washing itself, paws to face. They ignore each
other. And the lion shall lie down with the lamb, the fox with the rabbit on this fantastic honeysuckled evening.

19 J
ULY
Flying Ant Day. Out of the nests in Lower Meadow and Bank Field thousands and thousands of winged meadow ants are pushed into the balmy afternoon. This is an orchestrated Republican revolution; despite being two hundred yards apart, the prole ants in both sets of nests eject the winged queens and their winged male consorts at almost exactly the same time, 5.15pm.

The tops of the mounds seethe with insects, which groggily take to the air in a nuptial flight whereby males chase the queens for sky-high mating. The 100 Metre Club. Soon the winged ants are rising in smoky plumes, and are flying and landing everywhere, in my hair, on my arms, and the more I brush away, the more they seem to land. The plumes dissipate to leave the drifting air over the meadow tinged with grey.