When Andy Garnett and his wife, the writer Polly Devlin, bought a dilapidated Somerset farmhouse with land attached it started a love for wildflower meadows that has become a grand passion. Here they describe the fight to rescue their land from the depredation of modern farming methods and turn it into a thriving oasis.
The chronicle of the past 50 years of farming is a catalogue of devastation. To take just one county, the county where we live: Natural England, the conservationist organisation, now knows of fewer than 20 wildflower-rich meadows in Somerset, when there were said to be well over 700 in 1984. For years these wonderful fields were designated as 'unimproved' - there's newspeak for you.
Now, the thing to know is that a healthy living landscape is not a green landscape. That field that you walk past, or see from your car window, so emerald green, so smoothly uniform, is a desert, composed of a few strains of highly bred grasses and supporting little or no insect or wildlife...
The Telegraph Magazine 2007.
The photograph shows heath spotted orchid, along with ribwort plantain, meadow buttercup and cocksfoot.
From 'A Year in the Life of an English Meadow' (Frances Lincoln) by Andy Garnett and Polly Devlin.
For the complete article please follow this link.
Polly Devlin will be reading the introduction and the epilogue from "A Year in the Life of an English Meadow" on Sunday 26th August 2007, 4.02pm on Radio Ulster. Please click here for further information.
The garden at Cannwood in Somerset reflects the ebullient personalities of its owners. The writer Polly Devlin and the inventor and engineer Andy Garnett have a wide circle of creative friends from whom they have commissioned bridges, follies, arbours and sculpture that combine function and fun.
Cannwood Farm belongs to Andy and Polly Garnett and he and the designer Julian
Bannerman have created a great grotto, constructed from burr elm, which makes
an amazing natural gargoyle. It looks rather like an enormous, scruffy and
overgrown tree stump in a sort of round room-shape, with new trees growing
within the structure.
Inside are flints and ammonites and there is actually a stove with a little
chimney, so you feel you have just entered fairy wonderland.