Thanks a bunch
There is no such thing as a free bunch. Primroses, wood anemones, violets: they all cost money. For weeks and weeks people here in the wood have been sawing, slicing and chopping the coppice to get these constellations of flowers to shine like the stars they are.
Retired VAT men, engineers, airline pilots still work as hard as they ever did; but now they have the added bonus of getting wet and spending on petrol to get here twice a week. Would it be more satisfying getting 300 people safely across the Atlantic in six hours, or seeing 300 wood anemones alive and well after six months of work?
Thing is, you wouldn't fly an airliner for nothing; but you will a wind-flower. It is priceless. This old coppice wood around my home has 300 different kinds of flowers: 45 different breeding birds, 28 different butterflies, 600 different insects. All of them priceless on the face of this ever-impoverished planet.
These 40 acres of old hazel bushes, planted centuries ago, were once cut every seven years to make wattles and hurdles, for house building and sheep farming. Every parish had hundreds of acres of the stuff to keep itself alive.
Maybe they didn't give a damn about the flowers except for herbal remedies. They certainly didn't need to worry about pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies. All those big insects came under the name of butter-coloured flies. Only the odd gentleman like old Moses Harris in his black hat and blue velvet jacket and saffron breeches and silver buckled shoes wasted their time on that sort of nonsense.
As for birds: you ate them. It didn't really matter because there were so many of them. They helped to feed people just as the rain forests were feeding thousands of indigenous tribes on the great continents.
After our oak rain forests were cut down 5,000 years ago. I suppose you could say the hazel/hornbeam/chestnut coppice with oak standards became Britain's next rain forest. The Romans knew how useful it was. With its regular cutting, a whole range of native plants grew to love the glades, the hotspots, the rest periods, the leaf mould, insects followed, birds followed them.
Soon the coppice system covered the country. A huge garden of delights for wildlife had been opened up. At last the Victorians began to appreciate what had been made judging by all the paintings of bluebell woods.
That was another flower promoted by all the sawing, slicing and chopping that was going on all over southern Britain. And to think of it: hardly anybody cared how rich the business was, any more than rainforest Indians knew how biologically rich and vital to the planet their habitat was.
The cost in human endeavour of a bunch of wind flowers/bluebells/primroses/orchids today is inestimable if you think how long it took to make it all. Centuries sometimes. The horror is that most of it has gone now. The bits that are left are unloved so uncut. Straggly coppice all over Sussex has lost its bluebells, birds, and butterflies. The bits like West Dean Woods managed by Sussex Wildlife Trust need more volunteers each winter.
Now: I am giving your readers six months to think about volunteering then next October I am going to ask you again to step forward and join the pilots, housewives, shopkeepers and engineers to help free all these bunches of flowers from their seven year sleep.
But you will have to bring your own lunch.
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 13 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 29 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 12 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: West
