Chapter Four

PERSONAL PILGRIMAGE

MY OWN PILGRIMAGE which led to the realisation of the forest garden concept started in a rather primitive wooden bungalow raised on stilts above one of the smallest of the Norfolk Broads. It could be regarded as a descendant of the prehistoric Swiss lakeside dwellings. Running beneath its entire length, except for the verandah, was the boathouse, and when some of the supporting piles were found to be rotten and needed renewing, a giant Norfolk wherry was piloted into the boathouse by a local giant, Nat Bircham the odd-job-man, and the whole bungalow was raised while the work of sinking new piles went ahead. My mother laid out the garden on Japanese lines, with purple Iris kaempferi surrounding a sculptured figure known as the Alder Girl. A hump-backed Japanese wooden bridge made by a local craftsman linked the garden to a small marshy wood, known in Norfolk as a ‘carr’, with a path leading to a summerhouse, also on stilts, overlooking the large neighbouring broad. The garden, wood, broads and river teemed with wildlife: wild yellow iris, marsh orchids, flowering rushes, electric blue dragonflies, swallowtail butterflies, otters, herons, great crested grebes and bitterns, which kept us awake at night with their ‘booming’. In the winter the garden was usually under floodwater and I remember seeing my mother’s beloved crimson roses blooming beneath the ice. One of the principal local industries was reed-cutting, and our bungalow was roofed with reed-thatch. For the first time in my life I felt I was becoming an initiated member of a regional ecology.

In fact my first introduction to the study of ecology and organic growing came from reading a book by a member of an old Norfolk family, H. J. Massingham, the country writer whose prolific works are now enjoying a revival of interest. Following a near-fatal accident which led to his losing a leg and the use of an arm, he found solace during the Second World War by building up a garden behind his cottage in North Buckinghamshire, and by dedicating himself to self-sufficiency and wholeness of living. Described in his masterpiece This Plot of Earth, he regarded the garden as a model of a new civilised order, freed from the aberrations which lead to war and the destruction of the environment. Covering just one acre, it was an ordered jungle comprising a bewildering variety of fruit trees and bushes, vegetables, herbs and even two cereals, oats and maize, all interspersed with flowers and organically cultivated. Enjoying meals of home-grown produce throughout the year and mentally nourished by the ever-changing beauty of his environment, Massingham cured himself of chronic ailments, such as catarrh, which had formerly afflicted him, and found himself able to do twice the amount of intellectual labour he had done before his accident.

Fig. 1 Japanese bridge leading to alder carr

Norfolk was the first stage in the long process by which I, a Londoner born and bred, have gradually sunk ever deeper roots in the English countryside.

My forbears originated in beautiful and historic rural areas but all, for various reasons, converged on London. My father was of Lowland Scots and Spanish Basque descent. Robert Hart the First, my great-grandfather, was a steel engraver, a skilled craftsman, who came from Melrose in the well wooded Tweed valley, one of the cradles of Celtic Christianity, from which missionaries carried the Christian faith through much of Saxon England before the arrival of Augustine. I have one of Robert’s finest engravings: a portrait of John Evelyn, the ‘Seventeenth Century St. Barbe-Baker’, whose great work Silva led to the planting of millions of trees in an England denuded by the ‘great bravery of building’ and ship-building during the Tudor and early Stuart periods. Robert had a passion for history and, in particular, for the story of humankind’s agelong struggle for freedom. He named his two sons George Washington and John Hampden and his three daughters after ladies who had all met violent deaths in the cause of freedom: Boadicea, Lucretia and Virginia; the last being a Roman plebeian maiden who was slain by her father to prevent her from being raped by a patrician.

On the Basque side my ancestor Nicasio María Serafín de Jauralde was a freedom fighter himself. The son of a Pyrenean landowner, he became caught up in the siege of Saragossa during the Peninsular War and later took part in an abortive revolution against a reactionary king, Ferdinand VII, to be taken prisoner by the king’s French allies. After escaping from a French prison camp, Nicasio made his way to London, where he maintained himself by teaching the guitar – then a fashionable instrument – and married one of his pupils. On the accession of a more liberal monarch, he returned to Spain, only to be caught up in a civil war and again forced to flee. His wife carried their baby on mule-back across the Pyrenees. Eventually he settled in London as head of a Spanish financial delegation, to be succeeded by his son, another Nicasio, who served in the Spanish government service for the phenomenal period of seventy-two years, retiring at the age of eighty-eight.

Among my mother’s ancestors were a family named Lacon, who were first recorded as living in a village of the same name in North Shropshire in the 12th century. In the Tudor and Stuart periods they seem to have been great foresters as one of their estates, Kinlet, close to Wyre Forest, was once famous for its trees, and another, Willey, still has some magnificent trees which may well be 400 years old, as well as a remnant of the royal forest of Shirlett, part of the primaeval woodland which once covered most of South Shropshire. In the tower of Willey Old Hall is a priest’s hole leading to a vast underground vault which might well have housed the whole local population of Roman Catholics at times of religious persecution, as the Lacons were ardent Catholics. Another of my mother’s ancestors was Thomas Pear of Spalding, Lincolnshire, one of the engineers who drained the Fens.

Fig. 2 Swallowtail butterfly

After leaving Norfolk we spent over two years house-hunting from bases in Sussex and the Hardy country. The most attractive of our temporary homes was an old mill-house in a village between Sherborne and the great Iron Age hill-fort of Cadbury Castle, reputed to be Arthur’s Camelot. I found that Cadbury Castle, among the first of many hill-forts around which I have since roamed, exuded an overwhelming ‘atmosphere’. One of the essential factors in the process of sinking spiritual roots in the countryside is the development of sensitivity to the spirit of place. I would define ‘atmosphere’ as a sense of communion with the human beings whose emotions have left an imprint on the area where they lived and loved and suffered. In many historical sites I have felt a warm sense of kinship with the men and women who strove to survive in the frontier conditions of Celtic Britain and Saxon England. I felt an intense desire to reconstruct their way of life – at any rate in my mind – and it occurred to me that we in the twentieth century have much to learn from them. Above all, the tight-knit comradeship of men and women living in forest-clearings, their villages stockaded to keep out wild animals and human marauders, was far preferable to the ‘couldn’t-care-less’ individualism which prevails in our urban and suburban non-communities.

Studying landscape archaeology, I learned to recognise indications of the structures both of the Celtic civilisation which was presided over by the acropolis of the hill-fort and of the Saxon village community. In both ways of life, self-sufficiency was the keynote. Trade routes, following leylines, packhorse tracks or ridgeways, were practically the only contact with the outside world, bringing the few necessities, such as salt, which the villagers could not produce themselves. The later Saxon village community, when situated in an undulating area, was a three-tier structure with summer grazings on the hill-tops, open cornfields on the slopes and meadows for hay, calf-rearing and winter keep in the valleys. The most important building in most villages after the church was the mill. This could be either a windmill or a watermill. Most often it was used for grinding corn, but, in more recent times, it might be a ‘waulking’ mill for fulling cloth, or a sawmill, or it might be used to drive a machine such as a triphammer. A watermill often involved an elaborate system of leats, weirs and ponds, the maintenance of which was the responsibility of the whole village. These waterworks played an important part in the control of flooding.

An indispensable part of the village community system was the patch of wild woodland, which was carefully maintained on a sustainable basis for the supply of timber and fuel, the trees being coppiced or pollarded. The wood, hedgerows and wastelands were also valued for their wild foods and medicines. It is obvious that our forbears of the Saxon and mediaeval periods had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the properties of wild plants, comparable to that of the forest and desert Indians of the more remote parts of the Americas today. Remnants of this knowledge can be found in such books as Food for Free and Plants with a Purpose by Richard Mabey, as well as in many modern herbals. This vast fund of traditional knowledge bore fruit in the works of the famous school of English herbalists in Tudor and Stuart times, from William Turner, the ‘Father of English Botany’, to Culpeper and Coles.

While staying in the Sussex village of Bosham near Chichester I heard a series of BBC talks by John Seymour, the well-known writer and organic pioneer, known as the ‘Guru of Self-Sufficiency’, in which he described how he and his wife Sally had carved a miniature organic farm out of five acres of remote Suffolk heathland. I was badly bitten by the self-sufficiency bug. Lifting up my eyes to the South Downs, I resolved to look for a small upland farm where I could strive to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency myself. After extensive searching I found what I was looking for: a beautiful old red sandstone farmhouse in a secluded West Somerset backwater on the lower slopes of the Brendon Hills west of Lydeard St. Lawrence.

The area had been eloquently described by H.J. Massingham in Wisdom of the Fields after his stay on one of the small family farms characteristic of the area during the momentous months following D-Day 1944. For Massingham the contrast between the carnage in France and the peace of this remote corner of rural England was overwhelming. For him this peace was not a mere absence of strife in an idyllic landscape but a positive sense of secure and harmonious living, rooted in the earth and maintained by all-round human development and the co-operative ethos – co-operation not only between human beings but also between people and nature. ‘This is a home for the family farmer,’ he wrote. ‘Of such a life as he leads among the tossing foothills self-sufficiency is the structure and neighbourliness the buttress… The interchange of voluntary labour occurs at the peak periods throughout the year – above all at harvest time.’

For Massingham, the special significance of the Lydeard St Lawrence experience lay in the fact that he saw in its farmers the spiritual descendants of the yeomen who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had been regarded as the backbone of England: sturdy, freedom-loving and hard-working with wives as industrious as themselves, skilled in the arts and crafts of self-sufficiency. The archetypal yeoman was William Cobbett who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, waged a lone rearguard action in his writings and speeches as Member of Parliament against the forces let loose by the Industrial Revolution, which he saw striking at the root of the ecological agricultural system and way of life.

My own small farm was approached by a steep, narrow lane with high banks on both sides, so that in summertime, when the hedges on top of the banks were in full growth, it practically became a tunnel. The farm comprised an almost precipitous pasture field of five acres, from the top of which one could gain a distant view of the Bristol Channel, and three acres of orchards and soft fruit. Having let the field to a local farmer for grazing, I concentrated on the fruit as well as on sowing vegetables. Intent on following the organic system, one of my first actions was to build seventeen compost heaps at strategic points, the largest of which I named ‘Dungery Beacon’, after Dunkery Beacon, the highest point of nearby Exmoor.

My main cash crop was blackcurrants, which I manured with seaweed from Dunster Beach. After harvesting them I took the currants on my trailer across the Quantocks to a jam factory at Bridgwater. Some of the bushes had been interplanted with plums, which I learned was a traditional association in the South-West, as both sets of plants were believed to encourage each others’ growth and neutralise each others’ pests and diseases. This was my first introduction to the lore and science of plant symbiosis.

Throughout my career on the land, I have been fortunate in my contacts with old-fashioned country workers, from whom I have learnt more about the true arts of growing plants and tending livestock than I could ever have learnt at a horticultural or agricultural college. As some of the old craftsmen knew, the best way to learn skills is simply to watch a skilled and experienced craftsman at work and imbibe the feel of his actions. So when my gardener Mr White earthed up two rows of cauliflowers with a mattock – a tool which is a Somerset speciality and known locally as a ‘biskey’ – I felt I was being initiated into a new realm of rhythm and of plant care. The mattock is perhaps the most ancient of all tools, going back to the Stone Age, and, though it is largely obsolete in Britain, it is still used throughout Africa. When wielded by an experienced hand it becomes an invaluable multi-purpose tool for breaking up stiff ground, planting, hoeing, weeding, earthing-up and, as I learned later, for irrigating.

My tutor in bee-keeping, Mr Rowe, was an indomitably cheerful little man who drove a horse-drawn cart and led an arduous life cultivating three and a half acres of precipitous, terraced hillside, every square inch of which was covered with a wide variety of fruit, vegetables and foddercrops, providing sustenance for himself, his wife, a flock of goats and poultry. I couldn’t have had a better introduction to traditional self-sufficiency.

Fig. 3 The mattock, an ancient multi-purpose tool

Somerset was a brief interlude in my quest for self-sufficiency. The farmhouse proved too large and inconvenient for my mother to manage, so regretfully we sold Dean’s Farm and resumed our searches for a more suitable home. One day we found ourselves looking down on a small stone cottage nestling in a fold of Wenlock Edge, the heavily wooded limestone ridge which runs for some 20 miles across South Shropshire, and we felt we had reached our final destination. I had been drawn towards the quiet and – in places – wild Welsh border countryside of Shropshire, with its strong Celtic atmosphere, ever since reading the poems of A E Housman and the novels of Mary Webb shortly after leaving school. I can’t help feeling also that my Lacon ancestors had exerted some sort of magnetic pull. They had once been a potent force in the very neighbourhood where we decided to settle, owning an estate called Wilderhope in Hopedale and a reputedly haunted, moated manor-house called Thonglands in Corvedale, both a few miles from our new home.

The cottage occupies what is obviously a very ancient inhabited site. It stands by a spring of deliciously pure water, which would obviously have been a focus for settlement for early colonists, seeking homes in the Long Forest which once covered a wide area from Hopedale to the Stiperstones. It also stands at the meeting-point of three ancient causeways: a prehistoric packhorse track, passing along a ‘hollow-way’ at places up to 40 feet deep and leading to a packhorse bridge in the village at the bottom of the hill; a track leading to a remote shrunken village called Middlehope in Hopedale, which once boasted a Norman castle, and a Roman road, part of whose surface we uncovered. This seems to have been part of the line of advance of a Roman army based at a fort called Wall Town near Cleobury Mortimer, when attacking the forces of Caractacus, the British leader, whose headquarters were at the great hill-fort named after him, Caer Caradoc, whose top I can just glimpse above a line of hills to the west. ‘My’ Roman road, it seems, was later extended to join Watling Street, the road which runs from London to Viroconium, known as the ‘Birmingham of Roman Britain’, and then turns south-west to end at the Roman fort of Kenchester, near Hereford. In Corvedale, it seems ‘my’ road passed by a Roman quarry at Bouldon which once supplied green roofing tiles for Viroconium.

In a paddock above the cottage is a circular earthwork. Shortly after arrival, I invited a horticultural adviser from the Ministry of Agriculture to help me to lay out the farm which runs to just over 20 acres. Standing on the vantage-point of the earthwork, the adviser suddenly remarked, ‘This area shows the outline of a motte-and-bailey.’ This is a kind of fortification erected by the Normans of which many remains can be seen in this much-fought-over frontier land. The motte is a circular mound which was surmounted by a wooden keep and the bailey a rectangular enclosure, originally stockaded, adjacent to it. In the adviser’s opinion, the circular enclosure would have contained the motte, while the bailey stretched from the cottage in the form of a long rectangular patch of about an acre, which had obviously been artificially raised. Later, however, a visiting archaeologist suggested that the circular mound had been the site of a Celtic monastery – a ring of log-huts with a a small chapel in the middle – while a depression to the south of the ‘bailey’ might have been a monastic fishpond, fed by two streams which now disappear into a sump.

While the ‘bailey’ was to become the main focus of my activities at Highwood Hill, for the early years I concentrated largely on livestock: poultry, goats, sheep and cattle, as well as nine hives of bees. My first cattle were a bunch of Ayrshire heifers, which I bought from Sam Mayall of Harmer Hill, North Shropshire, one of the leading organic farmers of the day. These I had artificially inseminated and sold after calving as dairy heifers at Shrewsbury Market. Later I switched to the Channel Island breeds. The Jersey makes the ideal house cow for the small farmer. Apart from giving the richest milk, she is small, neat, docile, intelligent and friendly and can be treated as a pet, though the Jersey bull can be bad-tempered and unreliable. However, I found the rearing of dairy heifers both too emotionally exacting and too time-consuming, and as I wanted to devote more time to fruit and vegetable growing, my last cattle were a small herd of single-suckling Welsh Blacks – the hardy, shaggy, long-horned breed which the ancient Britons drove into the fastnesses of Wales when retreating before the advancing Romans. I became very fond of these primitive denizens of the British countryside, and gave them all Welsh names such as Myfanwy, Arianwen and Melangell, the latter named after the Celtic patron saint of wildlife. As a very sturdy calf recently weaned by her mother at the age of nine months, Melangell, when suddenly startled – possibly by a wandering hen – made a dramatic leap over a fence and a water-tank. I can still see the startling spectacle of the hairy black doodlebug flying through the air.

As in Somerset, so at Highwood Hill I have been fortunate in securing help, advice and instruction from old-fashioned countrymen with a wealth of practical experience. When I first took up livestock rearing I had the assistance of three brothers, Harry, Victor and Geoff Tipton, whose grandfather, a famous local character named ‘Boney’ Higgins, had occupied my cottage when he was first married, and lived to be almost a hundred in another cottage which he built himself at the edge of a wood just above. ‘Boney’ was a mighty wielder of the scythe and two-handled saw and also a mighty consumer of cider made by his nephew, who was an itinerant cider-maker like the hero of Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders. He also helped to build the little railway which used to pass the bottom of my land and which his grandsons helped to demolish.

Geoff Tipton, who had started his farming career as a three-horse wagoner at the age of twelve, was once described as an ‘animal magician’ because of his seemingly miraculous powers of transforming undersized, sickly, unthrifty animals, whether calves, lambs or kittens, into beautiful beasts, with the gleam of life in their eyes and the gloss of health on their coats. I once bought six ‘cade’ (orphan) lambs from him which he had brought up on the bottle. They developed into enormous dignified ewes, which looked like grizzly bears when sitting on their backsides to be shorn, and which flatly refused to be ‘worked’ by my border collie, but stamped their feet at him.

I got great enjoyment from my animals. In general they seemed happy, contented and very healthy under my 100 per cent organic regime. Intimate, co-operative contact with another order of life, as in hand-milking or helping a calf into the world, is a profoundly satisfying and moving experience. This is attested by the beautiful milking-croons which Hebridean herd-girls used to sing to their ‘kyne’ to keep them still while milking and to promote the flow of milk. My first initiation into an ecological experience was gained when riding in a London park, when I discovered the possibility of telepathic communication with my horse via its deeply expressive ears, which seemed like radio antennae capable of being attuned to one’s unspoken thoughts. Such experiences immensely enrich one’s life. The ultimate ideal, in a more truly ecological society, would be for human beings generally to develop intimate relationships with animals leading entirely free and natural lives in the wild, like those between Joy Adamson and the lioness Elsa and between Horace Dobbs and his dolphin friends.

The humanitarian and economic arguments against exploiting animals for food and other products became, for me, inescapable. This realisation began to dawn when rearing dairy heifers. The separation of the newborn calf from its mother, which is an essential factor in commercial milk production, became a more and more unbearably pathetic experience. That is one reason why, though a vegetarian, I switched to single-suckling, even though the end-product of single-suckling is beef. Eventually I disposed of all my livestock. For me it was the only way. Because I was so fond of all my animals, even the hens, the prospect of their eventual slaughter became more and more intolerable. Moreover, at this time of widespread hunger and starvation in the Third World, the rearing of big livestock such as cattle is an unforgiveably wasteful form of land-use. The growing of crops, above all tree-crops, is a vastly more productive way of using agricultural resources which, in many countries, are rapidly diminishing in relation to the growth of populations.

For me the idea of a system of land-use capable of supplying all basic human needs, consisting mainly of trees and other perennial plants with no livestock component, was a case of gradual evolution. While I was writing my first book, The Inviolable Hills, Eve Balfour, one of the pioneers of the organic movement and founder of the Soil Association, who wrote the preface, sent me an article which I found more exciting than any detective story. The author, James Sholto Douglas, described a new system of land use which he was operating in the Limpopo Valley of southern Africa, which I felt had worldwide implications. Called Three-Dimensional Forestry or Forest Farming, it was pioneered by a Japanese, Toyohiko Kagawa, who will surely come to be acknowledged as a universal genius on a par with Leonardo da Vinci. Christian evangelist, scientist, novelist, poet, linguist, political reformer, and one of the founders of the Japanese trade union movement, his concern with the total human condition was comparable with Gandhi’s. In the 1930s the focus of his concern switched to the plight of Japan’s mountain farmers, who were finding their livelihoods threatened by soil erosion caused by deforestation – a problem that has since spread to many other parts of the world. While studying at Princeton, Kagawa had come across J Russell Smith’s classic Tree Crops – A Permanent Agriculture, which emphasises the value of the tree as a multi-purpose organism, providing not only food and a host of other useful products, but also protection for soils and water supplies. Inspired by this book, Kagawa managed to persuade many of his country’s upland farmers that the solution to their erosion problem lay in widespread tree-planting, and that they could gain a bonus from this if they planted fodder-bearing trees, such as quick-matur-ing walnuts, which they could feed to their pigs. Thus the three ‘dimensions’ of his ‘3-D’ system were the trees as conservers of the soil and suppliers of food and the livestock which benefited from them.

Impressed by the vast potentialities of ‘3-D’, Sholto Douglas, after meeting Kagawa in Tokyo, carried out a number of experiments in various parts of southern and central Africa, in conjunction with UNESCO, to test the applicability of the system to different soils and climatic conditions. Among trees which he found particularly useful were several leguminous bean-bearing trees, especially the carob and algaroba, which fertilise the soil for the benefit of grass and other plants by the injection of nitrogen, as well as providing food for people and animals.

While collaborating with Sholto Douglas in the preparation of the book Forest Farming, which has been widely read around the world, I gave much thought to the possibilities of extending the system to temperate countries such as Britain. Observing the habits of my own cattle, it occurred to me that the traditional multi-species English hedgerow, which I saw being browsed throughout the year, even in the depths of winter, fulfilled some of the functions of Kagawa’s and Douglas’s fodder-bearing trees. Moreover, after reading Fertility Pastures by Newman Turner and Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable by Juliette de Bairacli-Levy, I realised the value of hedgerow and pasture herbs, not only as adding minerals and other nutrients to the animals’ diet, but also as agents for the prevention and cure of disease. Some traditional English farmers believed, I am sure correctly, that if a cow felt she was sickening for some disease, she would seek out the requisite healing herb.

On the basis of these findings, I developed my own ‘3-D’ system which I called ‘OPS’ - Organic Perennial Subsistence farming. That involved ‘cultivating’ my hedgerows by encouraging the growth of plants which contain substances particularly nourishing for cattle, such as the elder, wild rose and hazel, and sowing some of the many perennial pasture herbs recommended by Newman Turner, such as chicory, ribwort, yarrow and sheep’s parsley.

But my primary aim was self-sufficiency, so I extended my system beyond livestock farming to include trees and other plants – mainly perennial – which would contribute to the health and welfare of human beings. In time, after I had adopted a vegan diet and for other personal reasons, the plant component completely replaced the animal one, and, after making a study of companion planting, I renamed my system ‘Ecological Horticulture’ or ‘Ecocultivation’. I then discovered that other people were working on similar lines in other parts of the world and that the generally accepted generic term for all such systems was ‘Agroforestry’. So I adopted that term for my own.

 

Fig. 4 Plan of the author’s garden