Beginnings..................

It’s midsummer, a warm day humming its own tune. Flowers and grasses are moving to and fro in the breeze like tipsy revellers waving their arms at a festival - multitudes of insects crowd-surfing, clinging on for the ride. Butterflies drift up from my feet as I walk the mown path that curves through the meadow. The wildflowers press against the crisply cut margin on every side, crowds and crowds of them - yellows, purples, whites, creams - and grasses all shades of tan and green - who knew there were so many types of grass and how beautiful and distinctive they all are? At the corner of the meadow where it meets one of the ditches that bound it from the farmland beyond, in the small willow grove we planted with the wildflowers, each tree is bending gracefully from its waist like a ballroom of debutantes, silvery leaves flickering against the blue and white sky. I turn and gaze across the meadow and wonder for the hundredth time how it all got this way?

The practical answer is that, a few years ago, with neighbours, we pooled our savings and bought six acres of agricultural land at the back of our cottages in a small village on the Suffolk/Cambs border. Over a bottle of fizz to celebrate the purchase we gingerly sounded each other out about our intentions for the land. We had purchased one and a half acres and our neighbours four and a half. We each expected that the other would have visions of ponies, pigs, sheep, chickens - some sort of small-holding menagerie. What a relief to find that we were of one mind on how to manage the space. By not managing it - or minimally managing it. We planted a year’s worth of rye grass to impoverish the soil - best for wildflowers we were told - and a year later, sowed a wildflower mix over almost the entire acreage. Setting aside one section for the Worker Bee’s large veg garden (more of him and it later). We planted a few fruit and shade trees here and there - and our willow grove. Then we stood back and did nothing. Apart from mowing it once in early September, haying the resultant fallen mass of flowers and grass and burning or composting them, we do nothing but watch as nature takes its course. And it needs no second invitation! In this blog I hope to share some of the lessons we’ve learnt and the characters we share the land with - in fact they share it with us. After nine years we feel that we are incidental to the meadow - irrelevant almost. It would get on fine without us and its denizens care nothing for us and do not even know we exist.

Luckily, we like it that way........