Category Archives: History

Books Environmental politics History

Notes from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene

January 15, 2017 – 9:54 pm

p. 137 “This first farm of mine, the American one, was a splendid blend of mechanisation and old-time farming. I really cannot see why a version of this could not actually have survived. What happened is something like this: At the end of the war, the factories which had during the war exclusively been busy producing machines for the army turned back to producing tractors. They decided that the market to attack first was the area still occupied by small farms. … the farmers’ horses were in direct competition for the provision of power. So from about 1947 to 1955 advertisements and personal agents worked at selling the tractor-cum-horse farmers a little light tractor, to supplement his heavy one, to do the corn planting, corn cultivation and hay work instead of the last team These small tractors cost eight to ten times more than a team of horses and at least as much to keep up as a team…. The older horse machines were relatively cheap and simple … no tools left to use animal power.”

p. 139 “In the modern climate of opinion, where there is a strong undercurrent asserting the dullness and monotony of agriculture, there are always many people who readily accept the industrial idea that the less help needed, the better… there are fewer and fewer farmers themselves, and those who are left are forced to farm at a speed and a tension which leaves any hardship of the past simply nowhere… There have been almost no forum in which abstract questions could be raised about the value of the farmer’s work to himself… There are very good reasons for a smaller size of farm and the deeper personal attitudes that it invites. We have also seen in the 1980s a fearful decimation of farms simply because the price of land suddenly declined; and so did the farmers’ security with banks, who promptly foreclosed on them for debts incurred in the expansion of acreage and machinery, which, now on the books, they were unable to pay when the security was called in.”

p. 146 “Still the rhetoric continues, enforcing the conviction, now almost always acquired at second hand, that oil has saved them from drudgery. As though driving work animals was drudgery and driving the tractor was not; and caring for animals after the workday was drudgery, but filling the tractor or repairing it was not. Hobbies, sport and pets are of course the preferred forms of spending one’s activity and gaining pleasure. The delight in plowing and the partnership with animals in it is as old as Hesoid as he gives direction for the strength of the tree-formed plow ready to resist the power of the oxen as they struggle with a hard spot in the furrow, or in Aeschylus’s Prometheus, who gave man work-animals to be his substitute in the heaviest toils. It is there in Brueghel’s picture of the fall of Icarus as the plowman follows his mule with the little wheel in the plow in front of him already invented to hold the plow effortlessly in place at the depth desired. .. I remember about 35 years ago in Normandy watching a boy plowing with his black Pecherons, and walking alongside the horses that did not even have a rein. They were tied from bit to bit with a loose rope on the inside trace horse, which was used only when the boy was going to lead them home. When they came to the end of the furrow, he would tip up the plow … shout firm commands to his team, and round the horses would go….The beauty of those days of plowing was startling. I am thinking now particularly of the Wicklow farm. Out plowing was usually done in March or April, though sometimes also in fall or late winter, when the ground was not hard hard frozen. In a typically early spring day, one walked just fast enough to keep warm, and the gulls and rooks followed in the furrow to pick up the worms., and the sun would come breaking up the little touch of hoarfrost. I can still relive it and delight sharply, almost with pain at its loss, for I will never enjoy it again.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from The Lives of Tudor Women by Elizabeth Norton

January 15, 2017 – 8:53 pm

p. 97 “The London draper’s wife, Katherine Fenkyll, had her own views on the subordinate position of wives, which she made very plain. A few years after she was widowed, in 1499, her ‘familiar and old acquaintance’ Joanne Johnson, a wealthy widow, came to visit her on confidential business. It was, she admitted, a delicate matter, since she had agreed to marry a gentleman, Robert Long of Windridge, but there was the small matter of both her personal effects and her debts. She had, she believed, around £500 in goods, including furniture, plate, money and jewels, which Long was anxious to acquire as his own property on their wedding day. Nonetheless, the widow wanted to protect herself.  She agreed with Katherine, as well as two other friends, that they would hide away £300 of the goods, intending to ‘cloak and colour the same’ from her husband so that she ‘might give and have or otherwise bestow the same at her liberty and pleasure. Instead of acquiring his new wife’s fabulous jewels, Long therefore found himself liable for her existing debts of more than £200. This was a bad bargain, and he was furious, rushing to the courts … Joanna Johnson, however, as a wife, could not be sued in court independently of her husband.She got off scot free.”

p. 100 “At the end of the Tudor years, in 1604, the aristocratic Eleanor, Lady Fettiplace, compiled a book of more than 200 recipes, complete with her marginal notes and amendments indicating that she had tried and tasted them herself. Inexperienced housewives of sufficient means could also make use of published texts, with Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife being particularly influential in the early 17th century. He considered that the first step to gaining a profound understanding of cookery was to ‘have knowledge of all sorts of herbs belonging to the kitchen, whether they be for the pot, for salads, for sauces, for servings, or for any other seasonings, or adorning. This the young wife should learn through her own labour and experience. She must know what to sow in her garden, and when to sow it.”

p. 102 “In 1511, two years into the reign of King Henry VIII, the widow Dame Katherine Fenkyll arrived at the Guildhall in London, accompanied by a young man named Henry Lenton … she confirmed before witnesses that she had taken him on as an apprentice… Two years later, Katherine Fenkyll returned again to the Guildhall, this time with Raynold Love in tow, who had also come to learn a trade from her.”

p. 103 “There was normally nothing in the way of legality to stop women taking the Freedom too – but very few did. One draper who, in 1570, arrived in the company’s hall with a female apprentice, seeking her Freedom, was turned away…This case caused much murmuring, since many in the company suspected that the woman did indeed have the right to be enrolled – but it was not a trend they wanted to encourage. Indeed, only 73 women are known to have been enrolled as apprentices in 16th-century London, among the many thousands of men… Girls could sometimes have their apprenticeships secured by charitable institutions: the destitute Margaret Gyllam, for example, who had been a patient at London St Thomas’s Hospital, was sent after her discharge to learn needlework and button-making with one John Delow and his wife in 1564.

p. 118 “Many of the more modest buildings occupied a small area of just one small room, before rising precariously high above the street. At ground level, there was usually a shop of some kind; on the floor above a hall, and then sleeping quarters higher still. Those people who were lucky enough to have a small yard squeezed into their property’s tiny footprint could keep the privy a reasonable distance from the main living quarters. For others, with no outside space, there was only the attic, leaving residents with a long trek upstairs to answer the call of nature. The inhabitants of these poorer dwellings though, did have one advnatge over the residences of their social superiors: the single chimney stack running up through the house, like a spine, allowed fireplaces in every room. .. a well in the yard behind the house meant that the well-to-do had a private water supply, rather than relying on the nearest street pump or conduit.”

p. 320 “The London hospitals not only took in women: they were staffed, in many respects, by women. Elizabeth Collston, possibly the wife of St Bartholomew’s hospital porter, was employed for more than 25 years as its matron, from 1597. She held a position of some authority, being in charge of all the women and children, as well as overseeing most of the female staff. The matron also took delivery of necessaries brought to the hospital, such as blankets and clothing for the inmates. The role of matron seems to have attracted capable, dedicated women. The first known matron was a widow named Rose Fisher, first appointed as a ‘sister’ of the hospital in 1551.. She was a no-nonsense woman, prepared to get her hands dirty. In 1552, for example, an order was given that all the ‘very feeble and sick’ inmates should eat in her presence, ensuring that she could monitor their sustenance. She also supervised the making of bed coverings for patients and the interrogating of pregnant inmates as to the father of their children, as well as being entrusted with money, collecting in bequests from charitable benefactors.”

p. 321 “Some forms of paid work could be a form of charity in themselves, and in this respect elderly women were often employed by their parishes to undertake work such as nursing care. One Mistress Peirson was paid by the parish of St Botolph’s in London to oversee the maid’s gallery in the church: she remained in office for at least 20 years and even after she had become blind… Older women, too, could find employment in the parish as ‘searchers,’ who were deputed by the parish clerk to view the bodies of the newly dead and make an appraisal of the cause … readily known to be susceptible to bribery and induced with ale, making their judgements hazy.”

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Books Environmental politics History Science

Notes from Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison

January 4, 2017 – 10:23 pm

p. 32 “One reaons we know how much rain has fallen where, and when is the British Rainfall Organisation: A quintessentially eccentric body and one of the first examples of what we now call ‘citizen science’. George James Symons, who began his working life in the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade, set up the Association in the middle of the 19th century in response to public concern that rainfall was decreasing across the British Isles. He recruited a small network of initial observers, then wrote to The Times in 1853 listing the further locations he wanted, calling for observers ‘of both sexes and all ages’ and offering to subsidise the cost of instruments. By 1867 he had 1,300 observers, nad had to leave his post at the Board of Trade; by his death in 1900 there were 3,408, drawn from ‘nearly every social grade from peer to peasant’… In 1916 the BRO was called upon to determine whether the use of artillery on the Western Front was somehow responsible for one of the wettest winters on record… the opinion given … was that there was no connection. The following winter would prove less wet, despite the artillery barrage of the Somme, but bitterly cold .. continued to publish its records until 1991.”

p. 55 “The aptly named George Merryweather displayed his storm forecaster, the ‘Tempest Prognosticator’ at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Looking not unlike a miniature merry-go-round, it consisted of a circle of 12 pint bottles, each containing a little rainwater and a single leech. His idea was that, on sensing electrical activity in the atmosphere, the leeches would crawl to the top of the bottles, triggering whalebone levers connected to a bell on the topmost dome; the more times the bell rang, the greater the likelihood of an approaching storm. … believed that it could easily be connected to the telegraph network in a way that the bell in St Paul’s, London, could be rung to signal an approaching storm. But then, he also believed that arranging the bottles in a circle would allow the leeches to see one another and not become lonely.”

p. 62 “Because they need their food to be over 50% water, rabbits like to feed at dawn and dusk when the dew is down.”

p. 75 Dartmoor “became a vital source of sphagnum moss during the First World War when it was gathered in great quantities, dried and sent off to be used as wound dressings due to its abosrbency and healing properties; its been shown to slow the growth of fungi and bacteria. Twelves species are found on Dartmoor, and all can hold eight times their own weight in rain.”

p. 82 “A recent study by the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, showed that one square metre of inrtensively improved grassland held just 47 litres of grassland compared to the 269 litres per square metre held by unimproved ‘rhos’ pasture with its naturally occurring purple moor grass and sharp.flowered rush.”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

September 20, 2016 – 10:12 pm

p. 16 “Tecla [elephant] was communicating. ‘The humans are getting between you and your baby; come and do something’… When an individual knows another’s relationship to a third – as Tecla knows who the baby’s mother is -it’s called ‘understanding third party relationships’. Primates understand third-party relationships too,and so do wolves, hyenas,dophines,birds of the crow family, and at least some parrots. A parrot, say, can act jealous of its keeper’s spouse. When the vervet monkeys that are common around camp here an infant’s distress call, they instantly look to the infant’s mother….When free-living dolphin mothers want young ones to stop interacting with humans, the mothers sometimes direct a tailslap at the human who has the baby’s attention… When the dawdling youngsters are interacting with dolphin researcher Denise Herzing’s graduate assistants, their mothers will ocasiionally direct these – what could we call them reprimands? -at Herzing herself. This shows that thedolphins understand that Dr Herzing is the leader of all the humans in the water. For free-living creatures to perceive rank order in humans – just astonishing.”

p. 22 “Honeybees will interrupt a colleague’s waggledance if they’ve experienced trouble at the same flower source, such as a brush with a predator like a spider. Honey bees subjected by researchers to simulated attack show, said researchers, ‘the same hallmarks of negative emotions that we find in humans’. Even more intriguingly, honeybee brains contain the same ‘thrill-seeker hormones that in human brains drive some people to consistently seek novelty. If those hormones deliver some tingle of pleasure or motivation to the bees, it means bees are conscious. Certain highly social wasps can recognize individuals by their faces, something previously believed the sole domain of a few elite mammals.”

p. 85 “African elephants have one particular alarm call that appears to be their word for ‘Bees!’. They run from the sound of buzzing bees, shaking their head as thye go. Elephants also run away shaking their heads if they merelyhear a recording of elephants calling as they run from bees. They don’t head-shake when plated recorded voices of people… Zoo elephants in the United States who’ve never been swarmed by African honeybees do not respond to the sound of bees. Older elephants in Africa respond directly, while young ones look to their elders and copy their response… A friend of mine saw impalas run away when they heard elephants scream at a pack of wild dogs; her guide said impalas never run when elephants are screaming at people or each other. If true, that means that elephants say specific things that impala understand.”

p. 89 “Herman, who studied captive dolphins in Hawaii, found that dolphins understood the difference between ‘Get the ring from John and give it to Susan’ and ‘Get the ring from Susan and give it to John.’ They understand syntax. What most other animals don’t have – and I think we can be pretty sure of this – is complex syntax. Complex syntax characterizes human language. Dolphins mayuse some simple syntax of their own in the wild. Some apes — especially bonobos — can learn to use human syntax. That means something very striking: it means that these creatures have the capacities to mentally manipulate parts of human syntax and respond appropriately … It would make no sense …if it didn’t use syntax with others of its species or with itself.”

p. 102 “The Masai do not eat wild meat; the wild ones are considered ‘God’s cattle’… the Maasai did not tolerate poachers from outside and frequently blew their cover. Thus the Maasai kept poaching in check and Amboseli’s elephants relatively safe – and relatively free to move – compared to elephants in many places. .. Wildlife populations shrank and shrivelled as Europeans took land and shot the animals. Then emerging European pressure to conserve wildlife focused on Maasai lands, which held the highest concentration of free-living animals in Kenya. … They believe that only humans and elephants have souls… Traditionally,when the Maasai encounter the bones of a human or an elephant, they place grass on them to signal respect. This they do with no other animals.”

p. 109 “In the 1960s, Iain Douglas-Hamilton found, in deep forest, a trail smoothly beaten down and at least 12 feet wide. It might have been thousands of years old. Elephant roads once connected the continent, water source to water source. When humans arose, we followed roads made by elephants across Africa, and when the time came for us to venture beyond, we probably traveled out, too, on elephant roads. Now most such ancient roads have fallen silent. Where elephants survive, they cling to islands of habitat cut off from other populations. For centuries now, they’ve been under siege. At the dawn of the Roman Empire, elephants thoroughly inhabited Africa. From Mediterranean shores to the Cape of Good Hope and from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, except for the bleakest lozenge of the Sahara, elephants trod… By a thousand years ago, elephants had already been wiped from North Africa. During the 1800s, southern Africa’s elephants were splintered and isolated… East Africa’s coastal elephants were swiped too… By 1900, the animal that never forgets was forgotten by most children born in West Africa. The 1970s and 80s brought the perfect storm of rising human densities, increasingly deadly weapons,escalating ivory prices, widening international markets, and worsening governments…. Since Roman times,humans have reduced Africa’s elephant population by perhaps 99 percent. Africa’s elephants are gone from 90 percent of the lands they roamed as recently as 1800, when, despite earlier losses, an estimated 26 million elephants still trod the continent. Now they number perhaps 400,000.”

p. 192 “wolf kills often attract ravens  by the dozens. Yet if humans put out elk carcasses, ravens generally ignore them. Ravens don’t trust humans. The memory of the poisoned carcasses must still be a lesson in the raven educational curriculum. In Yellowstone…they’ve taught themselves something new, how to unzip hikers’packs. The relative size of their forebrain – the ‘thinking part’ – in ravens andtheir relatives is significantly larger than in other birds, with the exception of some parrots.  A raven’s brain is the same size, relative to its bodyweight, as a chimpanzee’s.”

p. 224″we’re still uncovering dogs’ hidden abilities. At least one border collie responds to an unfamiliar word by choosing an unfamiliar object. Asked to ‘Get the dax!’ the dog apparently reasons along these lines: ‘There’s a ball here but she didn’t ask for a ball. ‘Dax’ must mean this other thing that I’ve never seen before’. Such skills of inference, scientists write, ‘have only been demonstrated previously for language learning in human children’.

“Even dogs have perceptual gaps though. Non-human great apes are good at inferring the location of hidden food by, for instance, noticing that one board is lying flat and another is tilted up, indicating that there is something under it. Dogs are terrible at that (that’s a visual clue; dogs excell at searching by smell. Ravens … are able to figure out which os several crossed strings is connected to the treat. Primates do such tasks easily. Dogs are terrible at this, too (again, it’s purely visual.)

p.270 “Years ago, while doing research that involved tagging migrating falcons, I lured the falcons to my net with tethered live starlings. The frightened starlings did not enjoy this; nor did I. So I put a stuffed starling, wings in flight position, behind the net. Of course, in nature, absolutely everyhing that looks like a bird and is covered with feathers and has a gleaming eye and moves up and down is a bird. Yet the stuffed bird never fooled one single falcon. They all sized it up, at a glance, as somehow not real and ignored it. That is impressive. Other animals are exceptionally good at identifying and reacting to predators, rivals and friends. They never act as if they believe that rivers or trees are inhabited by spirits who are watching. … other animals continually demonstrate their working knowledge that they live in a world brimming with other minds, as well as knowledge of those minds’ boundaries. Their understanding seems more acute, pragmatic, and, frankly, better than ours at distinguishing real from fake….Perhaps believing false things comes bundled with our peculair, oddly brilliant ability to envision what is not yet … No one has explained where creativity arises, but some human minds lurch along sparking new ideas like a train with a stuck wheel. It’s not rationality that’s uniquely human; it’s irrationality. It’s the crucial ability to envision what is not, and to pursue unreasonable ideas.”

p. 276 “Somehow the mirror test became the standard for determining whether an animal ‘has self-awareness’. That’s silly … A creature lacking self-concept would be unable to differentiate itself from anything … a mobile creature unable to differentiate itself from anything could hardly exist. I could not navigate the real world, escape, mate, or survive…. Maybe dogs know that the reflection in mirror is themselves and don’tmuch care. Dogs don’t mistake mirror images for other dogs; they don’t try to greet or attack them, as many birds do. Maybe dogs simply aren’t interested in examining themselves visually, because they’re so smell-oriented. … dogs can recognise images … recognise photographs of dogs, regardless of breed, as all being in the category ‘dogs’, distinct from other species.”

p.306 “Killer whales used to be thought of as one worldwide species. Not it appears that eight or so ‘types’, with differing food specialisations, are likely different species…. some of the largest undiscovered species on Earth have been hiding in plain sight.”

p. 311 “Killer whales maintain a social structure more complex than chimpanzees. And more peaceful. For all their heft and dental weaponry, when they find themselves in close proximity they either socialise or leave… Some native peoples do believe that they are people. Perhaps they intuit that killer whales’ stable, tiered, culturally self-defined groups parallel human society.”

p. 313 “At anywhere between one month and two years, bottlenose, Atlantic spotted, and other dolphins, develop their own distinctive, individual ‘signature whistles’. Signature whistles are a name they create for themselves. The sound is distinctive, and the dolphin doesn’t change it, ever. They use it to announce themselves. … Female bottlenose dolphins stay in their mothers’ groups for life. They develop signature whistles quite different from their mother’s, and thus are easy to tell apart as they travel together. Male youngsters – who will leave their birth group – develop signatures similar to moms’.

“Researchers have recently realised that various bat species, too, sing songs that include individualised calls. For instance, the European bat known as Nathusius’s pipistrelle has a song with several parts: it says, in human terms: ‘Hear ye, I am a Pipistrellus nathusii, specifically male 17. I am of this community, and we share a social identity; please land here.”

p. 338 “In 1979, Dr Diana Reiss starting working with a captive bottlenose dolphin named Circe. When Circe did the behavior thatReiss was looking for, Circe got verbal praise and some fish. When she didn’t she got a ‘time-out’, in which Reiss stepped back or turned away to indicate that Circe had not performed ‘correctly’… Circe didn’t like tail fins left on her mackerel, and by spitting out the pieces with tails, she essentially trained Reiss to cut them off. One day … Reiss absentmindedly gave Circe an untrimmed tail section. Circe waved her head from side to side they way we might indicate ‘No’, spat out the fish, swam to the other side of the pool, positioned herself upright, and just looked at Reiss for a short time. Then she came back. Circe the dolphin had given Reiss the human a time-out. … she had conceptualised the time-out as a way of communicating the idea ‘That’s not what I’ve asked for’ and used it to correct her human friend.”

p. 365 “whales leave us with questions so puzzling they are disturbing. Why would these beings declare unilateral peace with humans and not with smaller dolphins and seals, whom they attack and eat? Why would they single us out to give assistance? And why no grudge? Why, after the chronic harassment, capture, and disruption we’ve visited upno them, do they sho no learned and handed-down fears of humans such as wolves and ravens and even some dolphins seem to teach their young…. gigantic,mega-brained predators … who eat everything from sea otters to blue whales .. who wash seals off ice and curch porpoises and slurp swimming deer and moose – indeed seemingly any mammal they come across in the water, yet who have never so much as upended a single kayak and who appear -maybe – to bring lost dogs home.”

p. 373 “One foggy day, the biologist Maddalena Bearzi was taking notes on a familiar party of nine bottlenose dolphins who’d cleverly encircled a school of sardines near the Malibu pier. “Just after they began feeding,” she writes, “one of the dolphins in the group suddenly left the circle, swimming offshore at high speed. In less than an instant, the other dolphins left their prey to follow.” To abruptly stop feeding, that was pretty odd. Bearzi followed, too. “We were at least three miles offshore when the dolphins stopped suddenly, formed a large ring without exhibiting any specific behaviour.” That’s when Bearzi and her assistants spotted an inert human body with long, blond hair floating in the centre of the dolphin ring. “Her face was pale and her lips were blue as I pulled her fullly dressed and motionless body from the water.” Warmed with blankets and the researchers’ bodies, she began to respond. Later, in hospital, Bearzi learned that the 18-year-old had swum offshore to commit suicide. She survived. Such things are profound.”

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Books Environmental politics History

Notes from An Oakwoods Almanac by Gerry Loose

September 17, 2016 – 9:06 pm

p. 37 “the story is told of a fox trotting down the hillside here and along the road past the house over by. The man of the house sees the fox, bold as brass, and fearing for the hens, runs into the housefor maybe a gun, but comes out only with a hearth brush, which he lobs anyway at the fox.The fox, nonchalant, turns, throws a look, grabs the brush in his smirking teeth and trots on his way. When the farm is having a new shed built, two-three years later,a fallen trunk needs to be moved,in a den underneath, dry and in good condition, is the red hearth brush. I think it is in use to this day.”

p. 52 “the naming of animals can have unsettling effects. A ewe by here …. with black and white markings has only an unofficial descriptive name. To burst into the bar to announce’the badger’s had a lamb’ can be the occasion for some perplexed looks among tourists. Likewise, to encounter a man as it’s getting dark, slamming the door behind him and setting off down the road yelling ‘Whisky’ is something summer visitors find only too believable of west-Highland men. They don’t stop long enough to learn it’s his dog’s name.”

p.66 “Frances Pitt, writing in 1946, had seen the last nesting place of the sea eagle in Britain, the west cliffs of North Roe in Shetland. A pair nested there every year until 1908, when a local farmer shot the male. The female, a partial albino,returned each spring until 1918, after which she was seen no more….on Rum, sea eagles were reintroduced in 1975, breeding from 1985. … there’s still only about 200 individuals across the Small Isles, Mull and thereabouts.”

p.73 “At Ardoe, what I took to be a fish hatchery (it’s that too) turns out to be breeding sea urchines… The plan, with the aid of the millions of eggs these urchins produce, is to stock the waters around farmed salmon cages, where they will eat particles of fish food which escaped the salmon in such large quantities, that together with their excreta, make the seas murky for divers. The urchins will also be fed seaweed … bred specifically for the purpose. … the urchins(and seaweed) … can be eaten by us (and in harder times were) where mightthat leave the salmon and the farmers if we all took to eating them. How would Tesco market small purple spiny creatures and sea vegetables that would be pungent in a very short time from harvest?”

p. 89 “Juniper … In the 19th century it was so common here that sacks of berries were sent to market in Inverness and Abedeen, where they were bought by merchants to send to Holland to make their gin, jenever….This plant, to thrive, needs a certain lack of competition from heathers and grasses when seeds set; a controlled grazing provides that; but latterly the glens and corries have suffered from the sheep and are very much overgrazed, meaning the sheep (and deer) will eat the seedlings as soon as they appear. The fact that this has happened for more than one generation means that all the juniper is old and making little, if any seed. The future may only hold extinction; juniper might only be found in captivity – churchyards, botanic gardens.”

p.112 Brecht also wrote: You can’t write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
Fences are absentee policemen.

p. 142 oak trees seem now to need a great deal of light if they are to grow from acorns which fall from trees onto the woodland floor. Sometimes around 1900 there was an accidental introduction into Europe of American oak mildew, which spread to every deciduous oak in Europe. While not deadly in itself, its effect is to add to the burden of oak saplings attempting to grow under a heavy canopy; the combination of mildrew and absence of light does mean death to the saplings … Acorns carried by jays or squirrels outside the woodland, buried and forgotten, grow percectly well. Oaklings now grow happily anywhere except in oakwoods.”

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Books Environmental politics History Science

Notes from The Running Hare: The Secret of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel

September 5, 2016 – 10:42 pm

p. 25 All farms used to have an untidy corner where machinery went to die, and where thistles and nettles grew. Intensive farming has all but done away with these little no-man’s-land nature reserves; modern farms are as obsessively tidy as showroom Hygena kitchens.”

p. 26 “The Romans, who may well have introduced the hare to Britain, were keen hare-eaters. … Pliny the Elder advocated a diet of hare as a means of increasing sexual attractiveness…. Pliny’s ther proposition concerning hares was almost entirely contradictory: he declared the animals were hermaphrodites – a belief which eventually got worked into Christianity. Hares are a recurrent motif in British church architecture, standing for reproduction without loss of virginity .. p105 As with many animals sacred to older religions, medieval Christians changed the hair into an animal f ill-omen, saying witches shape-shifted into hare form to suck cows dry. Sailors considered hares so unlucky they could not be mentioned at sea. And not just sailors; country folk refused to call the hare by its name. p. 227 Hares have large hearts to enable them to achieve such speed. Up to 1.8% of body weight, compared to 0.3% for a rabbit.”

p. 56 “how ploughmen used to tell whether the earth was warm enough to sow (they’d drop their trousers and sit on the ground: if the bare bottom could bare the earth it was warm enough.”

p. 84 To walk behind a horse and harrow is to bring one into accord with all the ages. .. In harrowing half an acre Willow [Shetland pony] and I walk five miles. No one except kings and clergy was fat in the time of the horse… I am happy harrowing, an emotional state which may, according to scientists at the University of Bristol, be enhanced by soil itself. A specific soil bacterium, Mycobacteriyum vaccae, activates a set of serotonin-releasing neurons in the dorsal raphe nucles of the brain, the same ones targeted by Prozac. You can get an effective dose of Mycobacterim by walking in the wild, or gardening. “
p. 126 “The first wildflowers in my personal ploughland … are scarlet pimpernel, and common field speedwell, both delicate bejewelled creepers over ground, one red, the other blue. Their seed has been harboured safe in the earth for years: common field speedwell can germinate after 20 years. … as common on roadside verges as it is in arable fields, and travellers in years gone by sewed the flower into the lining of their coats as a charm.”

p. 137 Corn marigold is as old as British agriculture itself, since it was probably brought here by the Neolithic people. Arable farmers, however, have never warmed to its sunny splendour, since the fleshy leaves impeded the harvest reaping. Henry II issued an ordinance against “a certain plant called Gold”, requiring tenants t uproot it, which was probably the earliest enactment demanding the destruction of a weed. In A Boke of Husbandry, 1523, John Fitzherbert included ‘Gouldes’ in his blacklist of plants that ‘doe muche harme’.”
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