Pastoral Gardens
We experience landscape as much in our heads as in our senses. Geology, water and plants form the structure, but we colour it with our memories and associations – places where we learnt to swim, or were scared by Grimm fairy tales, or met our matches. And it fills every sense from smell and touch to sound and light. We taste the air, see the ghosts and feel tremors deep below our feet. It is our relationship with the world.
So reading the landscape is wonderfully complex and personal as well as universal and instinctively simple. It starts with millions of years of geology scrubbed to fluid patterns by water and erosion. Covering those bones is a thin layer of organic material and microbial life which determines what will grow and how we eat. That topsoil filters and stores water, determines the balance of carbon and oxygen in the air and clothes the surface of the earth.
The first thing therefore is to look at topography. The contours tell us pretty much everything: the steepness or shallowness of the slopes, how the valleys have formed, where the water flows, how far above sea level you are, what you can see from where. Combine this with geology and soil maps and you have a good idea of the character of the land. The acidity or alkalinity of the soil overlaid with the direction the land faces gives you a good sense of the micro climate and what will grow – just from a couple of maps. The Ordnance Survey maps are a joy. It is like reading music. On top of the contours, rivers, roads and towns, there are cryptic symbols that guide you over the surface of the land. At a glance you can tell whether the ground is marshy, arable or pasture; whether the woodland is deciduous, coniferous or scrubby; where to find pubs, post offices or tumuli. And then there is the delight of the 1840s tithe maps, beautifully hand-drawn and often water-coloured. They are usually accompanied by a text that gives the field names and agricultural description of every holding. The maps were used by the church to establish the amount they were owed in tithes from the landowners and tenants. It is a snapshot not only of what the countryside looked like, but how it was managed by the community that lived there. It is a record of the relationship between humans and land; a base for the stories and memories associated with each hedge, brook and cross-roads.
For those stories, England has a literature that stretches from Beowulf (c1,000AD) and Spencer’s Faeirie Queene (1590) to Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Ronald Blythe (1922-2023), capturing the spirit and emotion of the landscape. There are paintings and music too, but somehow the written word taps into the imagination more powerfully. It allows the pictures to form in your own head, rather than short cut to a visual image. When read with local parish histories and personal diaries you can build a vivid picture of the landscape through generations of experience.
In England human settlement has been forming, sculpting and cultivating the land for over 6,000 years. Many lives come before us and their stories determine how we – and those who come next – perceive and live in the place. Reading and working with that landscape is therefore partly geology, hydrology and climate, partly history and narrative and partly understanding the directions and priorities of people alive right now. When nearly 85 per cent of the population lives in towns and cities, and yet cover less than 10 per cent of the country, how are those priorities determined? Is the landscape read as a recreation and wildlife resource or as a bedrock of food security? Reading the soil – and how it has been managed or mismanaged – is key to what the landscape means. In her novel Possession, A.S. Byatt has a passage that perfectly describes the nuances of that understanding:
‘The valleys are deep and narrow, some wooded, some grassy, some ploughed. The ridges run sharply across the sky, always bare. The rest of the large, sleepy county is marsh or fen or flat farmed plain. These slightly rolling hills appear to be folded out of the earth, but that is not the case; they are part of the dissected tableland. The villages are buried in the valleys, at the end of blind funnels…… Roland who was urban, noted colours: dark ploughed earth, with white chalk in the furrows; a pewter sky with chalk white clouds. Maud noticed good rides and unmended gates, and badly crunched hedgerows, gnashed by machine-teeth.’
With your head full of maps, stories and images, the next step is to venture out into the landscape. The sounds and smells assault you. The angle of the light – or the rain – determine what you can see. The twilight shadows, especially at this Far Northern latitude, reveal subtle changes in the surface of the land. The struggle up steep slopes or the protection of sheltered valleys make it comfortable or invigorating and influence your mood. The landscape becomes very personal and physical. Reading it on your skin is perhaps more powerful than snapping it on your iPhone.
In all this I have largely been describing countryside. Urban landscapes are a whole other genre, although many of the physical and narrative filters still apply. You are just much more aware of people and speed. The structures tend to be mineral rather than vegetable and the narrative chronology changes faster and is more quickly obscured. Nevertheless, understanding the way that cities have evolved helps to guide their future. Discovering buried rivers, remembering the role of flood meadows and reconnecting old pilgrim routes can tie a town back to the logic of its growth and make it a good place to live. Replanning settlements with continuous open spaces that run with the natural flow of water is good for pedestrians, practical for managing flooding and excellent for wildlife. Similarly reading the historic logic of the countryside can show where hedgerows have been lost, how continuous woodlands on steep slopes used to frame and protect fields and how wildlife corridors, marginal land and gentler management combined to make best use of the land and encourage the multiple layers of life that create biodiversity.
I have also rather dodged the concept of gardens. The title of this book, Pastoral Gardens, is an engaging contradiction in terms. Grazed pasture and gardens might seem to be mutually exclusive, but as with so much of English culture, the perverse contradiction works. It fits the traditions of careful stewardship. Living with animals integrated with tending crops, vegetables, beehives and carp ponds is a highly efficient circular agricultural economy. The distinction between farm and garden is blurred. The ha-ha – so quintessentially English – allows us to leap between the two. Food is grown on both sides of the fence and plants are selected and patterned with equal determination, whether they are rose beds or coppice woodland. It all comes down to how you work the land and what you work it for. Food or decoration? The English Landscape Movement celebrated the growing of food – and particularly the tending of flocks – as beautiful in its own right. The animated prospect – cattle, sheep and deer grazing right up to the house – brought the place alive and connected to an idyll of a calm, natural life with no separation from the surrounding countryside. It is also the key to nature recovery, biodiversity and nutritious food, working with natural systems rather than chemicals and pesticides.
It is a tradition that has deeply affected me. From the Palaeolithic burial mounds to the manipulation of ridge and furrow, assarts and hedgerows, the practical and sacred stewardship of land is where I start. This is how I read and understand the landscape. Growing food well in perpetually fertile soil connects directly to Virgil and the Augustan poets of the first century BC. The vision of a simple pastoral existence speaks to a philosophical and cultural taproot. Its origins are in Greece and Rome rather than Persia and Paris. Living a good and harmonious life in stewardship of nature is the basis. It loses its philosophical core when it becomes purely decorative as a Jardin Anglais, Englischer Garten or Giardino all’inglese. A practical, productive landscape full of life – wild and human – feels like a solid foundation for a fragile world.
Kim Wilkie
Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and our memories.
VS Naipaul, The Enigma of ArrivalPastoral Gardens
We experience landscape as much in our heads as in our senses. Geology, water and plants form the structure, but we colour it with our memories and associations – places where we learnt to swim, or were scared by Grimm fairy tales, or met our matches. And it fills every sense from smell and touch to sound and light. We taste the air, see the ghosts and feel tremors deep below our feet. It is our relationship with the world.
So reading the landscape is wonderfully complex and personal as well as universal and instinctively simple. It starts with millions of years of geology scrubbed to fluid patterns by water and erosion. Covering those bones is a thin layer of organic material and microbial life which determines what will grow and how we eat. That topsoil filters and stores water, determines the balance of carbon and oxygen in the air and clothes the surface of the earth.
The first thing therefore is to look at topography. The contours tell us pretty much everything: the steepness or shallowness of the slopes, how the valleys have formed, where the water flows, how far above sea level you are, what you can see from where. Combine this with geology and soil maps and you have a good idea of the character of the land. The acidity or alkalinity of the soil overlaid with the direction the land faces gives you a good sense of the micro climate and what will grow – just from a couple of maps. The Ordnance Survey maps are a joy. It is like reading music. On top of the contours, rivers, roads and towns, there are cryptic symbols that guide you over the surface of the land. At a glance you can tell whether the ground is marshy, arable or pasture; whether the woodland is deciduous, coniferous or scrubby; where to find pubs, post offices or tumuli. And then there is the delight of the 1840s tithe maps, beautifully hand-drawn and often water-coloured. They are usually accompanied by a text that gives the field names and agricultural description of every holding. The maps were used by the church to establish the amount they were owed in tithes from the landowners and tenants. It is a snapshot not only of what the countryside looked like, but how it was managed by the community that lived there. It is a record of the relationship between humans and land; a base for the stories and memories associated with each hedge, brook and cross-roads.
For those stories, England has a literature that stretches from Beowulf (c1,000AD) and Spencer’s Faeirie Queene (1590) to Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Ronald Blythe (1922-2023), capturing the spirit and emotion of the landscape. There are paintings and music too, but somehow the written word taps into the imagination more powerfully. It allows the pictures to form in your own head, rather than short cut to a visual image. When read with local parish histories and personal diaries you can build a vivid picture of the landscape through generations of experience.
In England human settlement has been forming, sculpting and cultivating the land for over 6,000 years. Many lives come before us and their stories determine how we – and those who come next – perceive and live in the place. Reading and working with that landscape is therefore partly geology, hydrology and climate, partly history and narrative and partly understanding the directions and priorities of people alive right now. When nearly 85 per cent of the population lives in towns and cities, and yet cover less than 10 per cent of the country, how are those priorities determined? Is the landscape read as a recreation and wildlife resource or as a bedrock of food security? Reading the soil – and how it has been managed or mismanaged – is key to what the landscape means. In her novel Possession, A.S. Byatt has a passage that perfectly describes the nuances of that understanding:
‘The valleys are deep and narrow, some wooded, some grassy, some ploughed. The ridges run sharply across the sky, always bare. The rest of the large, sleepy county is marsh or fen or flat farmed plain. These slightly rolling hills appear to be folded out of the earth, but that is not the case; they are part of the dissected tableland. The villages are buried in the valleys, at the end of blind funnels…… Roland who was urban, noted colours: dark ploughed earth, with white chalk in the furrows; a pewter sky with chalk white clouds. Maud noticed good rides and unmended gates, and badly crunched hedgerows, gnashed by machine-teeth.’
With your head full of maps, stories and images, the next step is to venture out into the landscape. The sounds and smells assault you. The angle of the light – or the rain – determine what you can see. The twilight shadows, especially at this Far Northern latitude, reveal subtle changes in the surface of the land. The struggle up steep slopes or the protection of sheltered valleys make it comfortable or invigorating and influence your mood. The landscape becomes very personal and physical. Reading it on your skin is perhaps more powerful than snapping it on your iPhone.
In all this I have largely been describing countryside. Urban landscapes are a whole other genre, although many of the physical and narrative filters still apply. You are just much more aware of people and speed. The structures tend to be mineral rather than vegetable and the narrative chronology changes faster and is more quickly obscured. Nevertheless, understanding the way that cities have evolved helps to guide their future. Discovering buried rivers, remembering the role of flood meadows and reconnecting old pilgrim routes can tie a town back to the logic of its growth and make it a good place to live. Replanning settlements with continuous open spaces that run with the natural flow of water is good for pedestrians, practical for managing flooding and excellent for wildlife. Similarly reading the historic logic of the countryside can show where hedgerows have been lost, how continuous woodlands on steep slopes used to frame and protect fields and how wildlife corridors, marginal land and gentler management combined to make best use of the land and encourage the multiple layers of life that create biodiversity.
I have also rather dodged the concept of gardens. The title of this book, Pastoral Gardens, is an engaging contradiction in terms. Grazed pasture and gardens might seem to be mutually exclusive, but as with so much of English culture, the perverse contradiction works. It fits the traditions of careful stewardship. Living with animals integrated with tending crops, vegetables, beehives and carp ponds is a highly efficient circular agricultural economy. The distinction between farm and garden is blurred. The ha-ha – so quintessentially English – allows us to leap between the two. Food is grown on both sides of the fence and plants are selected and patterned with equal determination, whether they are rose beds or coppice woodland. It all comes down to how you work the land and what you work it for. Food or decoration? The English Landscape Movement celebrated the growing of food – and particularly the tending of flocks – as beautiful in its own right. The animated prospect – cattle, sheep and deer grazing right up to the house – brought the place alive and connected to an idyll of a calm, natural life with no separation from the surrounding countryside. It is also the key to nature recovery, biodiversity and nutritious food, working with natural systems rather than chemicals and pesticides.
It is a tradition that has deeply affected me. From the Palaeolithic burial mounds to the manipulation of ridge and furrow, assarts and hedgerows, the practical and sacred stewardship of land is where I start. This is how I read and understand the landscape. Growing food well in perpetually fertile soil connects directly to Virgil and the Augustan poets of the first century BC. The vision of a simple pastoral existence speaks to a philosophical and cultural taproot. Its origins are in Greece and Rome rather than Persia and Paris. Living a good and harmonious life in stewardship of nature is the basis. It loses its philosophical core when it becomes purely decorative as a Jardin Anglais, Englischer Garten or Giardino all’inglese. A practical, productive landscape full of life – wild and human – feels like a solid foundation for a fragile world.
Kim Wilkie