After 50 years of looking at British nature, I conclude that the most entrancing of its parts is a flower-rich meadow. Once England had 4m acres of them; now 1% remains, like these at the southern edge of the Peak District national park.
They slope away on both sides of the road that runs into Grindon village. The left has a horizon of gold where meadow buttercups and yellow-rattle dominate. On the right there are swathes of ragged robin, higher spikes of marsh thistle where bumblebees are clustered and, all along the track sloping from the eye, yellow bands of bird’s-foot trefoil. Beyond both sets of pasture are the folded limestone reefs of this Carboniferous landscape, now all steeped in far summer green and pasted emerald where ash and sycamore canopies are spread.
Part of the health-giving psychological effects of meadows is that they exist simultaneously on two separate yet indivisible scales. There is the macro-landscape of the whole field, with its pleasing aggregate hue and the way the shadow from passing cloud plays across the sense of space. Then there is the micro-universe of the flowers at your feet. Take even a moment to peer into this entangled bank and you are overwhelmed by its complexity. Language breaks down. Words simply will not be winnowed, or hoed, or riddled fine enough to get at the endless detail: the cilia on the stems of a mouse-ear hawkweed; the exact glaze on a buttercup’s inner petal, or the curvature to that comma-like tip to antennae on small heath butterflies. To all the pleasures of the scents, the linnet- and bee-song and all this diversity, you can add the exquisite feeling of being the first on Earth to enter speechless into precisely this wilderness.
There is a last gild to this colour and vibrancy, which is that in a world so damaged by us, there is a wonderful sense of hope entailed in flower-rich pastures. For they are a collaborative landscape in which our own species has played a key role. They restore to us just how creative, in terms of other life and biodiversity, we can be.
