A strange reversal, when the edges of a field are richer in
plant life than the field itself. I noticed vetch, clover and greater
periwinkle on top of the stone wall bordering this local field, plus a white
flower I couldn’t identify. The field itself looked bare, presumably waiting
for its crop to grow. It’s tempting to lament the monoculture and pesticides
which have led to this situation, but it would be hypocritical, given that I
had just returned from the weekly market with a rucksack full of giant, cheap
fruit and vegetables – enormous shiny red peppers, large apples and leeks –
local, but probably grown as pesticide-garnished monocultures under the plastic
sheeting which covers large areas of ground around here, especially towards the
coast.
When do borders become the richest things in human lives? I
couldn’t help thinking of Thoreau’s statement in Walden, his chronicle of years spent living simply, ‘I love a
broad margin to my life’. What might this broad margin be? Leisure, weekends?
Time to think, create or play? Time which is undirected, not farmed to the last
inch, so that it invites a higgledy-piggledy collection of tenants? Thoreau
talks of his days which were not ‘minced into hours and fretted by the ticking
of a clock’.
Coming back to the real field, I wondered if those borders
could be allowed to encroach a bit more – do we not have the technology to
intensively farm some bits of land and leave increasing parts to be rewilded,
as George Monbiot recommends in his book Feral?
Perhaps together with reduced consumption, so that less of the food we buy is
thrown away – the charity WRAP (the Waste and Resources Action Programme)
estimates that an astonishing quarter of the food bought in the UK each year is
wasted, mostly by households and food manufacturers, although only 60% of this wastage
is avoidable. I will eat those red peppers.
P.S. A friend tells me that the white flower is Allium, or wild garlic, of which there are more than 40
species in this part of the country.
