Field and Hedgerow in North Somerset

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IT is surely a saving salt for man or woman to have in reserve, behind the many material concerns of daily life, a rooted affection for natural things easily accessible, of no material value, perhaps, yet, though their value cannot be weighed or measured, far from valueless. And, mercifully, most of us have such affections more or less. Did not Scott use to say that he would die if he did not see the heather moors once a year? Men of Scott’s kidney are, of course, not so easy to kill as all that; but those who have attachments of the kind understand what Scott meant, and know that, in the sense in which he meant them, his words were true. Fortunately, quite ordinary people have their deep-seated attachments to common things — some to one thing, some to another.

I don’t know about heather moors. I ought to love moors and heather, and do, for they are in my blood. Quite apart from its association with grouse, a square mile of heather in August is a thing by itself.

But, for my part, much as I love the heather in all its kinds and colors, there are displays of nature which give me, I confess, a more poignant delight than even a wilderness of heather. I think, perhaps, speaking for myself, that the sight without which life, for me, would be less vital than it is — the sight of sights — is a wood of hyacinths in May; though in the matter of woods and hyacinths, I am, possibly, not altogether easy to please. The wood must be a wood (not a mere copse or spinney), and an oak wood for choice, with generous breadths of the flower unrolling their web of color under the oaks, breadth after breadth, one breadth unfolding as the other disappears with the receding trees. And the hyacinths must be blue: not a light blue either; not that anæmic porcelain shade you sometimes see in the flower, but the purple-blue of the sea at its bluest. Nor must there be any mixture of colors — no flowers that are not blue, sporadic pinks or whites being an oflense. Also, the flowers must not be the sleepy, heavy-headed things that hyacinths sometimes are when they grow in a wood-bottom, where the soil is overrich; and still less must there be any strain of that stodgy, upright campanulate flower, sometimes called Spanish, which is seen so often in gardens — which, for that matter, may be seen in my own. The flower must be the real nutans, the true nodding hyacinth of the woods — a tall, slender, high-stepping, well-arched flower, with its bells set lightly on the stem.

Such at least is my conception of the flower, which, as May comes round, I desire to see in myriads under the trees. To most people, even of those who love their gardens best, there comes, I suppose (at least there comes to me), in the spring of the year, early or late, but late rather than early, a time when one feels ‘fed up’ with garden flowers, pampered darlings which (so, in our haste, we think) cost more in backache than they are worth. For which unamiable mood, the cure — or, if not the cure, the anodyne — is to get away beyond our garden gate, among the spontaneous things of nature, and, if possible, among those particular wild things which, like the heather in Scott’s case, it is vital to see once a year, as their season recurs.

In some such stale mood I must myself have been on that afternoon in mid-May when a ‘spirit in my feet’ moved me to go and seek out the hyacinths in Carabas Wood, where I had not been since the previous February, in which frosty month a like impulse drove me in the same direction, to see the trees in their naked winter ‘twiggery.’ Our village of SuttonAbbas (a hamlet of not sufficient importance for a place on the county map, but ancient, nevertheless, as such places go, and quaint even among the immemorial villages of England, with raised sidewalks of ‘crazy’ slab-work, massive stone roofs to the houses, mullioned casements, an old church, manor farm, and dovecot, with, also, for its crowning distinction, a fourteenth-century inn of more than local fame) is within comfortable walking distance of Carabas, the country house of my friend and neighbor, Baron d’Yvetot.

Anyone who wishes to go a reasonable walking distance, in any direction, from our village will be well advised not, on any account, to go by the turnpike roads.

Not that we have not good turnpikes in North Somerset. We have. Two notable highways of the kind cross at right angles in the middle of our village, just by the old George Inn, each several arm leading, at the end of a few miles, to a town of respectable size. But, for my part, I eschew highways on principle, and invariably get over the first convenient stile that promises to lead me where I wish to go.

To Carabas, of all places, it would be folly to go by road, seeing that, a few steps from the village, there are so many gates and stiles (rickety, perhaps, but easily negotiable) which invite you to pleasant pathways, through fields, by hedgerows and hazel alleys, with an occasional interlude of brook, it may be, or bog, and all of them a tangle of such wild-flowers as prefer the conditions of soil, sun, shade, and moisture which these various features severally supply.

I dare say other counties have fields and hedges like ours. I do not say they have not. All the same, I cannot help thinking that ours have a character and distinction of their own.

On second thought, if I am to be as exact in my terminology as I should like to be, I cannot, properly speaking, call our pastures ‘fields.’ Grass, of course, they have in plenty, and clover ankle-deep; daisies, also, and cowslips, violets, lady’s-smocks, buttercups, and such things in abundance. Also, as fields generally are, they are enclosed by hedges; but hedges of such a heterogeneous sort, composed of such a variety of plants, of so many dissimilar genera and species, as no expert in hedges could possibly approve. To call by the name of ‘fields’ these narrow, oddly shaped enclosures would be too lax a use of language — green cloisters, rather, irregular geometric figures, unknown to Euclid, though possibly not unknown to the higher geometry; one shapeless polygon leading, by an isthmus of turf and flowers, to a second preposterous patch of pasture; and that, in turn, leading by what, if it would only open and shut, might be called a gate, into a third enclosure, like the others, yet different, more polygonous, more erratic, falling, on one side, down to a hazel-hidden brook, and on its various other sides rounding so many corners and running into so many bays that it would take you a summer’s afternoon to master their geography, to say nothing of the distracting diversity of their botany, and of their butterflies — brimstones, orange-tips, blues, coppers, fritillaries, cinnabars, and what not.

It is further characteristic of our fields — or what we call our fields — that they are never ploughed, — or rarely, — and that most of them seem to have no artificial drainage of any kind, nothing but the lie of the land to carry off superfluous water. Not that there is much surface-water in evidence, except at flood-times. Still, when one can trace a yellow rivulet of marsh marigold meandering its way through the length of a field, and here and there expanding into lakelets of water-plants, — marigold, ragged-robin, sedge, rush, and what not, — to debouch finally, at the lower end, into a well or water-hole, creamed over with water-ranunculus, it seems reasonable to infer a scarcity of drainage-pipes.

Our hedges, though not what a meticulous hedger would call well kept, seem to serve their purpose effectually, if it is the purpose of a hedge to keep in those who are in, and out those who are out; as you may easily discover, if you try to pass through one of those hedges from one field to another. What the staple hedge-plant is, it would be hard to say: hazel, I should say offhand, though it may be something else — hawthorn, perhaps. The truth is that the hedges hereabout are made up of every tree or shrub that comes handy: oak, beech, elm, blackthorn, hornbeam, maple, privet, elder, viburnum — anything, in short, that possesses the necessary power of resistance. They are always in extremes, our hedges, either overgrown and unkempt, or cut to the quick, with no superfluous branch or twig left. Allowed to go untrimmed for a year or two, the plants rush up to an undue height, leaving the lower parts undesirably bare. Then, every third or fourth winter there is a grand slashing with the bill-hook, the gaps and thin places being made good by what Baem calls ‘pleaching,’ and the Somerset hedger ‘ plashing ’: that is to say, the strong branches are half cut through and laid horizontally across the weak spot, to sprout up in due course and fill the gap.

For saunterers, more interested in wild flowers, birds, and insects than in economic farming, such hedges are more attractive, perhaps, than those carefully clipped affairs which one finds when labor is plentiful, inasmuch as the various species of tree or shrub which go to make them up are left for several years to bud, blossom, and fruit as they will, unchecked, until once more they are ripe for the bill-hook. It may be imagined, though it ought to be seen, how brilliant those tangled hedges can be in autumn, when hips, haws, the berries of the privet and the two briaries, and the berried wreaths of the deadly nightshade, hang upon them in their thousands. However, the autumn is one thing, and the spring another; and I doubt whether the appeal of the hedgerows is not equally strong in the spring, when things are, as yet, not come but coming; when tender buds are shooting, and not always readily recognizable, so that you stay every second step to ask yourself what is this, or this.

By such devious ways it was, through fields and by hedgerows, that I came to the hyacinths on the spring afternoon in question; and the zigzaggery of the route took time, so that, the sun was fairly low and the sunlight much aslant before I got to Carabas Wood. But all was right — the right day of the right month for the flowers, and the right hour of the twenty-four. The hyacinths were there in force, millions of them, and over them, from the slanting sun, such yellow lights and purple shadows as I cannot think I had ever seen before on land or sea.