Wild flower meadows.

Over thirty years ago, I remember at about this time of year, I stood in a lush green paddock looking at racehorse mares and foals. I was somewhere in Berkshire. The weather was sunny and the grass long and along one side of the paddock was an immense hedgerow. Unflailed, with the trees in blossom some forty feet high maybe and in all it's Spring glory, I promised myself that one day I would own one. I hoped that an adjoining field might be mine as well but it was the hedge I wanted most. To be in that lucky position of being able to own real land without having to make every square yard pay for itself with crops or stock. To let things really grow. I knew, even then, what a privileged position that would be.

This afternoon I walked down, slowly pushing through 3 and a half hectares of meadow, dogs racing ahead and grass up to my waist, toward my hedgerow. The lower shrubs and trees of hawthorn, sloe and bramble give way to an alder hedge. Planted alongside a small stream that dries up in high summer, the alder goes for maybe 500metres along the boundary of our land. Its roots help keep the stream banks from falling in, quite able as they are to stay exposed and wet for much of the year. It would have been coppiced at one point many years ago but now sends perfectly straight trunks skyward from it's stock, maybe seven or eight from each tree, and reaching up some fifty feet or more. The leaf canopy offers shade and cool and secret hiding places to the deer and foxes and boar.

Turn your back on the hedgerow and you walk back into the meadow which is a farmer's nightmare but a dream to the rest of us. I make sure it's left ungrazed for much of the year so the variety of wildflowers is legion. Or so it seems to me. The usual suspects are there of course. Daisy and buttercup, white and red clover, vetches, meadow sweet, the magenta fluff of sorrel flowers, bedstraw, ajuga and at least three species of orchid. The bee-orchid still making me stop and wonder. But there are many others I don't recognize and then there's the butterflies and insects and snakes and skylarks... Right now, in the middle of May, it is heaven on earth.

In about three weeks Jean-Claude will come to cut the meadow for hay. He will start, as usual, with the adjoining six hectares that he rents from us. Six hectares of fine, tall, thick, green grass that will feed his cattle through the winter. Maybe 250 round bales, maybe a few less. Then he will bring his tractor through the electric fence at the bottom of the fields and cut about two hectares that I have left ungrazed. Ungrazed, unfertilised, unmanaged. He will patiently cut it and turn it and then bale it. Driving his tractor slowly up and down the field just like he has over his six hectares. And I will have maybe 5, maybe 10 big bales. When he has finished, he will pop in to say hello and ask me if I would like my bales brought up to the house in a week or two after they have spent a couple of weeks in the field to ensure they are properly dry and not at risk of spontaneous combustion. He will apologise unnecessarily for the fact that I have so few bales and offer me a couple of his so the horses won't go short over the winter. And he will smile. And I will know why he's smiling.

But he didn't go walking through the meadow this afternoon, deafened by the drone of bees, the scraping of crickets, sending a skylark up a few feet ahead, watching the feeding of an unidentifiable butterfly, sitting in the grass to look into the face of a bee-orchid. He has cattle to feed.