No trees, short grass – Stonehenge in the middle of the nineteenth century.
You must be so good as to tell me my road, and if there is anything in my way worth stopping to see – I mean literally to see: for I do not love guessing whether a bump in the ground is Danish, British or Saxon.
Horace Walpole to the Reverend William Mason, 6 July 1772
In April 2009, the MPs’ expenses scandal erupted across the front page of the Daily Telegraph, echoing through the high Gothic halls of the Palace of Westminster.
Most memorable of the victims were Sir Peter Viggers, Tory MP for Gosport, who claimed £1,645 for an ornamental duck house, and Douglas Hogg, Viscount Hailsham, MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham, who claimed £2,115 to have the moat cleared around his Victorian house in Lincolnshire. The idea of a moat chimed with all the clichés about landed knights of the shires and Tory grandees.
To devotees of the English landscape, the curious thing about Douglas Hogg’s moat was its location – in Lincolnshire. Lincolnshire just isn’t great moat territory.
Good moat country is dictated, like most landscape details of Britain, by climate, geography and history. Or I should say England, which has the lion’s share of moats, with 5,000 of them; Scotland has only thirty-one.
Different counties are variously equipped for moat-digging. The Lincolnshire soil isn’t suited to it; unlike England’s most moat-friendly counties, Essex, with 770 moats, and Suffolk, with around 740.
East Anglia as a whole has about a quarter of all the moats in England and Wales, because it’s flat, with clay soil – ideal moat conditions. That East Anglian clay was deposited by glaciers moving over the landscape, dropping stones, boulders, sand and mud as they went.
You don’t get too many moats on hills; it’s harder to keep the water in. And, as soon as a landscape starts to run short on water-retaining clay, the moats start to run out, too. Moats built on the edges of clay soil tend to fail – like the medieval ones in West Stow and Hengrave in Suffolk, near Bury St Edmunds. They were later filled in, because the water kept on leaking away.
Moats dug out of clay can survive where the house they once encircled no longer does; moats and fish ponds often mark the sites of long-disappeared granges, religious houses and manor houses.
Peak moat-digging time in England was from 1150 until 1325, reaching a high point in the middle of the thirteenth century.1 Although the period was also rich in castle-building, moats weren’t built for defensive purposes – they were too shallow for that. Because barns were usually built outside the moat, a besieged, moated house would be cut off from its food supply. The moat platform – the area within the moat – was also usually too small to store large livestock or enough supplies to survive a siege.
Since moats weren’t used for military reasons – most of them can be waded through, even by the average, overladen knight – there were no restrictions imposed on moat size; unlike in France, where there were depth limitations to prevent owners building invulnerable fortifications.
There were no restrictions on the size of the moat platform either. At the moat in Up End, North Crawley, Buckinghamshire (another flattish, moat-friendly county, with 170 identified examples), the platform is big enough to accommodate several fish ponds.
In medieval England, moats were really status symbols. The bigger the moat platform, the grander you were. A half-acre platform was for inferior freemen and clergy; an acre platform, like Douglas Hogg’s, signified a lord of the manor. Hogg’s moat, though, still isn’t quite in the first division, partly because it’s one of the square moats built after the first wave of round-moat building.
Moats are idiosyncratic, prominent things, but more day-to-day features in the landscape also respond to the precise soil conditions of England.
So, the majority of England’s 400 vineyards like light soil over south-facing chalk. Around 10 per cent of the 1,000 English hectares under vine are at the Denbies vineyard in Surrey’s North Downs – England’s biggest vineyard, where the chalk structure of the soil is ideal for wine-making; the same soil as the Champagne region in France. (Chablis, incidentally, is made from grapes grown 100 miles south-east of Paris, in Kimmeridgian clay – named after Kimmeridge, the Dorset village which sits on the same belt of Upper Jurassic limestone, formed by compacted oyster shells.)
The structure of the soil sometimes works against, not with, man. In June 2009, fifteen months after its disastrous opening, Heathrow’s Terminal Five faced further problems. The £4.3bn building was hit by ‘heave’, a kind of reverse subsidence that’s gradually pushing the terminal upwards. Heave is caused by swelling of the London clay on which the terminal is built.
That clay, a marine mud deposit, is full of sulphide minerals which, when exposed to air, oxidize and expand. As a result, tiles have had to be repaired on the south side of the terminal, and the problem may continue – London clay goes on swelling for several decades.
The depth of soil over the rocks below isn’t normally as volatile as that. But depth does vary extremely over the country. In the village of Cranborne, Dorset, there are only three or four inches of topsoil over the solid chalk. Thin soil like this is ideal for wildflowers, and for slow-growing grass – at Cranborne, there’s only one late grass cut a year, in September.
Soil can be so deep that it masks the relief of the rocks beneath, and the landscape is almost completely defined by the earth.
The Luftwaffe bomb that just missed the west front of St Paul’s Cathedral on 12 September 1940 burrowed right down through the foundations, dozens of feet into the earth below. The soldier who dug it out, Lieutenant Robert Davies (later imprisoned for thieving during the Blitz), had to dig down through the mud, sand and clay soil for three days, to get to the bomb – ‘a vast hog’, as he described it.
Of German bombs dropped on Britain during the war, 69 per cent penetrated less than 15 feet into the earth; 1 per cent, like the St Paul’s bomb, were buried more than 30 feet below the surface. The deepest ever burrowed down 62 feet into the ground.2
You can have combinations of soils, too, with a fertile layer laid over an infertile one. The alluvium, a loose combination of soil and sediments, on top of the Wealden clay of Kent, produced the right growing conditions for the rich orchards of the Garden of England.
Not that the whole of Kent is such a fertile garden. While the Thanet Sands in the north-west of the county produce fertile, loamy soils for fruit-growing, the stiffer clays of Blean Woods, just outside Canterbury, are harder to cultivate; that’s why they’ve survived as ancient woodland.
The poor soils and hilly country of the Pennines meant they became grouse moors, reservoirs and sheep pastures. The Millstone Grit rock beneath that poor soil is responsible for the fine soft waters in the reservoirs. It also produces good growing conditions for the heather fed on by the grouse.
Soil and stone work in concert. The more fertile limestone areas of the Pennines produce fescue pastures for the sheep, as well as dramatic rock formations for the tourists. The poorness of the soil and the wildness of those hills also meant the southern Pennines were undeveloped enough to form the first national park, the Peak District, in 1951.
Like the stones of England that so influence the landscape, English soils are many and varied – and are in fact often dictated by the geological make-up of the rocks beneath. Like the stones, too, soils change over short distances – another reason for the country’s multicoloured, patchwork look.
Different plants – even closely related ones – will choose different soils in which to lodge their roots. The sessile oak, which thrives on sandstone and limestone soils, encourages open woodland with grassy undergrowth. The pedunculate oak does better on heavy clays, leading to a thicker, more impenetrable woodland floor.
In the light, acidic sand of Berkshire, you’ll find gorse, camellias, pines and rhododendrons. Twenty miles away, across the Hampshire border, the alkaline soil is good for flowering shrubs, hazel coppices and beech trees.
Further south, in the village of Exbury, also in Hampshire, another belt of sandy acidic loam was ideal for creating the garden of Lionel Rothschild (1882–1942). By his own admission ‘a banker by hobby, a gardener by profession’, he developed more than a thousand new rhododendron and azalea hybrids – a feat only possible in that acidic soil.
Despite its relatively small size, England was subject to many different types of soil creation. A single county might have several different earth-creating forces at work; both glacial and geological.
East Anglia consists almost entirely of layers of material deposited by Ice Age glaciers, covering the rock and stone beneath. The first glaciers drifted across East Anglia, laying loamy, fertile soils across the north-east, around Yarmouth, Sheringham and Norwich.
Another glacier, the Great Eastern glacier, moved across south Norfolk and Suffolk, depositing a 150ft-thick layer of chalky boulder clay mixed with chunks of chalk and pebbles. The resulting lakes, with their clay and loam beds, produced the modern corn prairies of East Anglia – the bread basket of England. Where that same glacier left belts of sand and gravel, the land is that much less fertile.
A lucky combination of glacial and geological forces produced ideal pasture for the undersung sculptor of the English countryside and the English village – the sheep. The motto of John Barton, a fifteenth-century wool merchant in Holme, Nottinghamshire, was ‘I thanke God and ever shall / It is the sheepe hath payed for all.’3 His motto could stand for much of southern England.
The historian Niall Ferguson has said of the English that ‘their one novel economic idea in the Middle Ages was selling wool to the Flemish’.4 It was a powerful economic idea, all the same, and one that made for some exceptionally rich humans; and rich humans build big buildings.
Despite the modern decline of our sheep-farming, Britain remains the seventh-largest wool producer in the world, with Australia, China and New Zealand the top three. But the wool industry is nothing to what it once was.
Sheep drove the English economy from the twelfth century until the Industrial Revolution, and opened it up to the world: in 1446, the Medicis opened their first bank in London, so that Florence could buy wool from the Cotswolds. By the end of the Middle Ages, there were three sheep for every person in the country.
In Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex, the fertile flatlands made for excellent sheep pasture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Suffolk and Norfolk also benefited from the flourishing cloth trade; Norfolk’s 600 medieval churches – more than any other county – were built on the back of wool and cloth. That East Anglian sheep boom spread into Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire and Kent – where the Perpendicular churches of Cranbrook, Maidstone and Tenterden were built on the back of it.
Churches built on those wool and cloth fortunes were as big as medieval churches got – in the tall, broad-windowed, Perpendicular, late-Gothic style; called ‘woolgothic’ in Gloucestershire. Counties like Wiltshire – with its uplands too barren for sheep – are correspondingly short on great Gothic churches.
In wool-rich villages, the churches often remain the biggest buildings in the village. Technology and engineering may have leapt forward in the last half-millennium; but, still, there has been no impetus to build anything bigger than a Perpendicular church since the medieval agricultural boom.
The Industrial Revolution may have blighted many towns and cities, but it preserved England’s villages. From the eighteenth century, industry moved from village to town. The workers followed, leaving behind them the classic English village, a frozen creation, largely of the Tudor to Georgian periods (barring, perhaps, an earlier church and patches of modern housing on the village’s fringes).
When you see a huge Perpendicular stone church like Stoke by Nayland in Suffolk, looming over the half-timbered guildhall, it’s hard to believe that the bigger, more sophisticated stone church is more than a hundred years older than the sixteenth-century wooden guildhall. Much more money was spent on the holy building, not least on getting the best stone for it – in a county that isn’t rich in stone.
Of the legacies that built medieval churches in Suffolk, well over 90 per cent were left between 1400 and 1555, during the Perpendicular Gothic period; three quarters of them in the century after 1450. Most of the legacies came from the new rich – members of the merchant class, their fortunes built on wool and cloth. Only a minority were from the aristocracy.
Sheep could destroy villages, too, as Thomas More wrote in Utopia.
The sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities.
One village, Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, which flourished between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, was deserted in the fifteenth century, thanks to sheep. The landowner, realizing that sheep were more profitable than peasants, cleared the area for grazing. A lone ancient church, like Wharram Percy’s, with barely any buildings alongside, is often the sign of a deserted medieval village; and any bumps in the neighbouring fields the remains of the ancient settlement.
With an eye on the bull-market periods when buildings went up in various counties, you can work out the peaks and troughs of the local economy. So, Herefordshire is rich in Norman buildings up until 1200. There’s not much construction in the thirteenth century. Then, from 1300, as local fortunes improved, there was a huge amount of rebuilding, enlarging and improving. New church windows were inserted with elaborate cusped lancets and Y-shaped tracery. Colossal churches – mini-cathedrals almost – pop up in small villages like Madley, in the Golden Valley. By the mid-fourteenth century, the boom construction years were over; Madley Church has remained the biggest building in the village ever since.
Sheep-farming had a considerable effect on English trading cities, too. When Dick Whittington was appointed Mayor of London in the late fourteenth century, he also became ‘the collector of the wool custom and subside in London’, accumulating a huge income from what looks like a clear conflict of interest.
The Spencer family built their ancestral home, Althorp House, Northamptonshire, on the back of sheep. In the late fifteenth century – peak of the English sheep boom years – John Spencer, a rich sheep farmer from Warwickshire, first took a lease on the manor on the site of Althorp.
Sheep also built the house in Brideshead Revisited; as recalled by Lord Marchmain on his deathbed, when he talked of ‘the fat days, the days of wool-shearing and the wide corn lands, the days of growth and building, when the marshes were drained and the waste land brought under the plough, when one built the house, his son added the dome, his son spread the wings and dammed the river.’
The infertility of certain soils has its own powerful effect on the landscape, too, and who chooses to live there.
So, the Lickey Hills, eleven miles south-west of Birmingham, have remained the city’s wild playground because of the poor soil. It’s not good enough for cultivation; and it’s just far enough from the city centre to escape development.
It’s only because of the sterile sands beneath the New Forest that it has remained forest; even if it has changed from a Norman oak forest, via beech plantations, to the Victorian stands of fir trees, surrounded by rhododendrons and gorse, that now dominate the landscape.
Because this heathland was infertile, it was sparsely inhabited through the Middle Ages. Bigger Dorset towns, like Poole, with its fishing industry and port, and Wimborne Minster, near the rich soil of Cranborne Chase, turned their faces away from the heath.
Beneath those sandy Dorset heaths, there’s a bed of chalk. Whenever it collapses, the sand is sucked away, leaving behind sinkholes as deep as 40 feet. Puddletown Heath, inspiration for Egdon Heath in Hardy’s The Return of the Native, is punctured with 370 of them.
Hardy’s Dorset heaths now retain just 15 per cent of their original heathland cover; but there’s still enough left to support four different types of heather, including the native Dorset Heath variety, reptiles such as the sand lizard and the smooth snake, and birds like the nightjar and Dartford warbler.
Before we weep for the loss of Hardy’s broad heaths, it’s worth remembering that they, too, like many English wildernesses, aren’t so wild; they were manmade, produced in the Bronze Age 4,000 years ago, when inferior woods, created by the poor, acidic soil, were cleared.
Elsewhere, heathland has been turned into fertile cornfields, notably in north Norfolk – thanks to the eighteenth-century farming reforms of Thomas Coke, whose descendant, the Earl of Leicester, still farms the land on the coast around his Palladian seat, Holkham Hall.
Coke dug out fertile marl from under the barren topsoil and spread it over the fields. He also fine-tuned the art of crop rotation. By 1800, two thirds of Norfolk land was under the plough, and the county was exporting more grain to Holland than all other English counties combined. On his Holkham estate, Coke’s rental income soared by 44 per cent between 1720 and 1760. This local boom explains the county’s rich collection of Georgian farmhouses, with one in practically every Norfolk village.
Another eighteenth-century agricultural improvement came with the seed drill, invented by Jethro Tull in 1701. It had a regimenting effect on the landscape: in Gainsborough’s portrait Mr and Mrs Andrews, painted in 1750 in Sudbury, Suffolk, you can clearly make out the long, straight rows of wheat planted with Tull’s drill.
It was the soil – or lack of it – that decided the look of Breckland, 370 square miles of sandy, dry heaths, stripped of vegetation, on the Norfolk–Suffolk border. ‘Brecks’ were temporary fields planted by farmers, which turned to wilderness after the soil had been exhausted and the heavier chalk, clay and limestone particles washed out of the earth. The resulting light, sandy soil was so thin and sparse that farmers, when asked whether their land was in Norfolk or Suffolk, would say, ‘It depends on which way the wind is blowing’.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landowners planted trees to stop the soil erosion, and engineers developed irrigation systems to draw water from beneath the chalk. In time, the fields and forests round Thetford, Norfolk, in the heart of Breckland, became some of the best farming and sporting estates in England.
Where the brecks weren’t re-energized, the Forestry Commission, in 1922, planted the biggest lowland coniferous forests in the country. As well as boosting red squirrel numbers, the conifers lent a strange north German feel to what is still one of the least populated areas of southern England.
Conifers aren’t necessarily an alien tree. It’s just that, where they’re introduced en masse, they can smother the landscape with their Teutonic uniformity, particularly when contrasted with our ever-changing, deciduous woodlands.5
To begin with, the Forestry Commission was obsessed with conifers. Shortly after the Commission was founded, it planted 74,000 acres of them on English heaths and bogs. Now the Commission is, slowly, reversing the process: since 2002, it has only restored 5,000 of the 57,000 acres of ancient deciduous woodland planted with conifers over the last century.
You can often see where Forestry Commission land begins. Its stands of fir trees on the Lancashire moors have squared-off edges to them – commerce, unlike nature, adores a straight line. The contrast shows up sharply in Herefordshire, between neat stands of Forestry Commission conifers on the hills near Radnor and the ragbag of Arthur Rackhamesque oaks, tangled up with undergrowth, strung along the River Wye from Ross, in Herefordshire, to Monmouthshire.
At the end of the Ice Age, our native trees moved through a cycle – first came birch, then pine, followed by mixed oak trees, now held up as the quintessentially English trees. Scots pines are native to the Scottish Highlands, but were introduced into England. There are fewer pine trees in England now than at the end of the Ice Age; the Continent has many more than we do.
Our rarest native tree is now the black poplar, with only 6,750 counted in 2001 in England, half of them in the Vale of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. There is still, satisfyingly, an ageing black poplar hanging on in Poplar, east London, which took its name from the tree. Black poplars frame the scene in Constable’s The Hay Wain; if the tree disappeared, it would be a tragedy to rank with the near-disappearance of another of Constable’s favourite subjects – the elm.
Dutch elm disease has killed 25–30 million elms since a new strain of the disease arrived in around 1967. They live on in some disease-free outposts, like the Scilly Isles. A pair of 200-year-old elms survive in Moreton-in-Marsh, and there are more in Brighton, where a cordon sanitaire was established at the height of the outbreak. Some elms have crept back but otherwise the English landscape is utterly changed by their disappearance. Seven Sisters in Holloway, north London, was named for the seven elms that once stood there; now only the name survives.
The birches haven’t gone – they’re still often the first tree to move on to land that’s just been opened up, by railways and in forest clearings. Their ancient presence is reflected in place names, like Birkenhead, Cheshire, ‘the headland covered with birch’. Ash trees, another native species, can also be spotted in place names, such as Knotty Ash in Lancashire, Askrigg in Yorkshire and Ashby de la Launde in Lincolnshire. Water-loving alders, another native, do well in the damper parts of England, in the north and west; in the drier south and east, they crop up in marshes and on riversides. They echo through place names, too: like Aldercar, Derbyshire, and Aldershot and Alresford, Hampshire.
But, while the place names remain, the trees that inspired them have often disappeared. Woodland now covers only around 7 per cent of England. No wonder we have to import 85 per cent of our timber and wood products.
More than three quarters of our trees are less than a hundred years old; but the 5 per cent that are ancient are unusually well looked after – a reflection of the English reverence for the historical. Country house parks and patches of old royal hunting forests – such as Savernake Forest, Wiltshire, or Hatfield Forest, Essex, both rich in ancient trees – have been preserved for centuries. In the Middle Ages, a forest meant a place to keep deer rather than a place expressly for trees; so they were carefully tended as valuable game reserves.
Ancient trees are certainly better looked after here than on the Continent: you could walk from Athens to Boulogne without seeing a single tree that’s more than a century old.6 The English are often accused of preferring animals to humans; they are also indulgent of their old trees. And perhaps for a shared reason: an awkward, isolated, cold, northern race finds animals and trees easier to get along with than their fellow human beings.
When Lord Cobham created the Elysian Fields at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, in the early eighteenth century, he breezily flattened a whole medieval village, but he preserved the 500-year-old common yew that survives today. And when Capability Brown stripped country-house parks to produce his trademark ‘improved’ look several decades later, he removed hedgerows without compunction, but left the old trees alone.
Ancient woods are usually found in hard-to-cultivate places: on infertile land that can still accommodate trees, and on relatively inaccessible hills. They are often rich in woodland hawthorn and lime (Tilia cordata) trees.
A wood that has been regularly coppiced for a long time will also have a variety of plants used to ancient cycles of shade and sunlight: particularly oxlips, anemones and primroses. Woodland has long memories: in the woods of Grovely Ridge, Salisbury, phosphate-loving plants are still living off the bones and burnt wood of long-vanished, 1,600-year-old Romano-British villages.7
Older woods may have a zig-zagging edge, where sharp corners have been carved into the wood’s border by later fields. If an ancient wood’s corners survive these invasions, they are often marked with mounds; and its sides are lined with substantial banks. Later woods – planned during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the landscape was chopped up in straight lines under the Enclosure Acts – have straighter edges, marked with flimsy banks topped with thin hawthorn hedges.
In recent years, England has become increasingly wooded. Over the last two decades, the country’s woodland acreage has grown by more than three times the size of Greater London. So much new forest is being planted that some areas could even reach the level recorded by the Domesday Book in 1086, when 15 per cent of the country was covered in trees.
England’s deforestation began a long time before then. Stonehenge’s original astronomical use depended not just on having no trees around it, but also on a horizon uninterrupted by long grass, so that the precise alignment of stones could be ensured.8
Even at the time Stonehenge was being built, in around 2400–2200 BC, much of England had been deforested. It’s thought that, by the second millennium BC, half of England was no longer wooded; by the end of the Roman period, the English wildwood had long gone.9
No trees, short grass – Stonehenge in the middle of the nineteenth century.
When the Saxons arrived in the fifth century AD, only about 30 per cent of England was wooded; late-Saxon farming reduced that to around 15 per cent. Tiny traces of pre-Saxon forest survive in a few places, like the Hertfordshire villages of Hadham, Widford and Sawbridgeworth. The Black Death in 1348 marked the first significant halt to the stripping of England – woods that survived until then often lasted for another half a millennium.10
Deforestation came late to some parts of England. Lancashire was densely forested in the Middle Ages – most of Manchester consisted largely of half-timbered houses until the Georgian period. Sussex was once so impenetrably dense with trees that it was the last southern county to accept Christianity. By 1700, that tree cover had largely gone: 300-year-old farmhouses in Sussex often shelter in the lee of windbreaks – useful stands of trees that were allowed to remain while all around was stripped bare.
The extent of British woodland was last thought to be at today’s levels in 1750 – when forests were replenished after the agricultural revolution, before they were stripped again to build ships ahead of the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the Napoleonic Wars.
Over the next century and a half, forest cover dropped to below 5 per cent, before new growth turned things around from the 1940s onwards. The recent boom was largely helped by private buyers, encouraged by tax breaks. Private landowners now provide almost half of British tree cover.
All these things mean there are now 5,500 woods in the UK, covering 8,500 square miles. That’s 9 per cent of the total land area, admittedly still one of the lowest percentages in Europe, where the average woodland cover is 44 per cent – forest covers 32 per cent of Germany and 29 per cent of France.
England’s hospitable climate, its lack of mountains and really impenetrable wildernesses, and its limited size had their drawbacks as far as the survival of woodland was concerned – from early on in the Middle Ages, you could go practically anywhere in the country, with an axe under your arm, and get chopping.
We can, though, lay claim to one green record: Sheffield has the highest number of trees per head of any city in Europe. Our countryside may be more denuded than the Continent; but English cities remain exceptionally green, London among them.
In the rebuilding of Shanghai over the past twenty years, no new substantial parks have been built, and the few surviving city trees are in a terrible state. London is 40 per cent parkland; Shanghai 4 per cent. Even as the English have become more and more urban creatures, less than 8 per cent of British land is covered by urban development.
Because England has been so heavily cultivated for so long – because even its supposedly wild bits are in fact fairly tame – most of the country still has some agricultural use. Sheep and cattle graze the wild parts of Britain: the Welsh hills, the Cumbrian fells, the Scottish Highlands.
The total acreage of the UK is roughly 60 million acres.11 Around three quarters of that is agricultural land. And, of that agricultural land, just under a quarter is arable. Arable farming likes it dry – from 15 to 35 inches of rain a year. So it tends to be concentrated on the drier, eastern side of the country; some parts of eastern England are technically classified as semi-arid. The relative flatness of the east is also better suited to the combine harvesters used on arable crops.
Yields climbed through the twentieth century, with greater use of fertilizer and pesticides, the introduction of those combine harvesters in the 1930s and the passing of the 1947 Agricultural Act. Under the Act, arable farmers were protected against the uncertainties of the market by subsidies in the form of guaranteed minimum payments, giving them the confidence to plan ahead. In the 1960s, wheat yields in particular grew, when the Government’s Plant Breeding Institute developed a dwarf variety that could withstand bad weather better, and had more fertile ears.
The wide-open prairies of East Anglia – opened up even more over the last half-century for the combines, with hundreds of miles of hedges grubbed up – are still given over to traditional crops, like wheat, barley, mustard and peas. Colman’s Mustard is grown in Carrow, Norfolk; malting barley in north Norfolk.
In among the wheat and the grass, there are more stretches of bright colour appearing across the country. The Scilly Isles, warmed by the Gulf Stream, turn daffodil-yellow in the spring; much of Hampshire goes flax-blue; purple lavender and borage are grown in Norfolk and Kent, home to the bulk of the twenty-six English commercial lavender farmers; while delphiniums are grown in Worcestershire to provide wedding confetti. The 120-acre field of tulips in Narborough, Norfolk, is the biggest tulip field in England.
Different vegetables thrive in different counties: more than 80 per cent of British tomatoes come from Sussex; Lincolnshire and East Anglia specialize in carrots; Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire are rich in Brussels sprouts, celery and potatoes; rhubarb is popular in the old mining areas north of Sheffield.
Even if farming still dominates the English landscape, as it has for the last 2,000 years, the type of farming has changed enormously in recent decades.
In 1997, Britain provided three quarters of its own food; in 2010, that dropped to 60 per cent, and the figure is falling by 1 per cent a year. EU set-aside laws – from 1988 to 2008, up to 15 per cent of farming land was left uncultivated – made their contribution to that decline.
Among the biggest changes is the near-disappearance of British orchards, down by three quarters since 1950. In Cambridgeshire alone, the number of orchard acres has shrunk from 10,000 to 2,100 over the past half-century. The Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire remains apple, pear, plum and asparagus country, but big patches of fruit-bearing trees have been grubbed up in recent decades.
The national collection of apple varieties – growing ever since Julius Caesar brought the apple tree with him to Britain in 55 BC – is still more than 2,000 strong. But the British apple has been living on borrowed time since the sixties invasion of cheaper South African, New Zealand and Australian apples – fruit grown from tree varieties that we exported across the Commonwealth in the first place.
Heavy grain subsidies from the EU in the seventies meant labour-intensive orchards were grubbed up and replaced by wheatfields, with their lower overheads. Imports of exotic fruit have also increased vastly over the last half-century, as the English diet diversifies: the apple has fallen way behind the banana in popularity.
Our orchards are just consolidating after half a century of decline, with efforts made to preserve older apple varieties like Howgate Wonder, a red, stripy cooker, propagated on the Isle of Wight in 1915, and the Blenheim Orange, propagated near Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1770. In the seven counties of Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Hertfordshire, Essex, Lincolnshire, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire alone, there are still 250 varieties of apple, pear, plum and cherry tree.
Other declines are even steeper: just before the First World War, there were 7,000 acres of cobnuts under cultivation in England, mostly in Kent; by 1990, Kent was down to just 250 acres. The county had 46,600 acres of hop fields in the 1870s; it now has 1,000. The Garden of England now looks a little less varied than it used to.
Farm animals still determine the look of Britain, but they, too, are in decline. The pig population has fallen by nearly half over the last twenty years. Sheep numbers have fallen from 18.2 million to 15.4 million; even if Britain is still the largest producer of sheep meat in Europe, and very nearly self-sufficient in it.
Arable land still gives way in the west, and in the hills, to grass: the dairy heartlands of England run from Lancashire down through Cheshire to Shropshire; and, from the Vale of Gloucester, south to Cornwall.
But our historic landscape connection with dairy farming is winding down: over the last twenty years, the number of British cows has dropped by nearly a quarter. In 2008, Britain was self-sufficient in milk; by 2010, it was importing 1.5 million litres a day.
Much of England used to be milk country – the wet, temperate climate and fertile soils are ideal for grass-growing – but less and less so. The Chinese still say us Westerners smell of milk; but for how much longer?