In the Quarry field, tight by the road, once more, our wild pink orchids bloom. This makes me as giddy as a kid in a sweetshop. This is Christmas, and Hannukah, and the all Ireland championship and a Monster Truck rally all rolled up into one for me. There are drifts of Ragged Robin too. Herb Robert. Flag Iris with blowsy flower tips that are as tall as a shoulder height. But it;s the orchid that enthralls me. It’s irrational. But I feel I’m farming well when it’s pink flowers begin to dot about the pasture.
There are wild places here on Hawthorn Hill Farm. Places we have let to the happy fertile run of nature. Unplanted self seeded copses of things that create a wild corridor through the heart of the farm. Red squirrels use this deciduous highway. A line of trees that connect the commercial forestry we were surrounded by on two sides with the small copses of deciduous trees the farm has at it’s heart. Pine martens hunt here too. We see the flattened beds of deer in the chest high grass.
There’s a two thick copses of across the farm. Alder is a riverside tree. It needs water. Lots of it. It thrives in the NorthWest of Ireland, if let. There’s willow here too and ash that spring up from the shelter of the ditch banks and the stone walls. Some are old trees, by our standards, of some fifty years. There are tough Holly trees too reaching for their share of the sun. There are fruiting hazel that the squirrels flense of nuts before we can get to them. Tall poplar that burst into welcome leaf in early spring. Thick pockets of blackthorn and hawthorn that provide protection for the thrushes and blackbirds. We make our slow vodka, gin and jam from here, careful to leave a glut for the wild things that feed here. There is Wild Primrose, Bluebell, and Speedwell. Stitchwort, Ragwort, Lousewort.There are rushes, Buttercups and bright splashes of tumbling Marsh Marigold. There are white winged butterflies with green tracery outlined on their underwings feasting on the flowers. There is the spotted and striped wonder of small magpie moths. There is the sound of the cuckoo and the woodpecker in the woods.
I walk a path, picking between the wild animal tracks that criss cross the closed in woods. I walk in the sunken footprints of deer. A badger or a fox has excavated an insect nest. Further in we have planted white beam, hazel, birch and oak. Connecting this copse with the burgeoning line of ash and holly that rings the field margin.
We will plant a double line of hawthorn, with plum and hazel in it in the backfield this year. Perhaps elder too. Fence it off. The margins of the new hedge, like all margins here, will throng with wildflowers. They too, by a vicarious route, will connect with these copses, and extended network of wildlife highway that will buzz and throng and bristle with life.
The work of farming is the work of managing to make from the land what it is capable of giving you in such a way that it remains capable of that giving indefinitely. The life of the farmer and of the flock are not divisible from the life of what we share our land with. The health of the soil, the water, the air and the land are not divisible fro the health of those who farm and feed from it. It is one and the same.
