Counting the flowers

At Flea Barn, now into the third year of Stewardship, we are trying to assess our natural capital - or in layman's terms 'seeing if it was all worth the candle...'

I throw the square out into the sward. Four lengths of hazel wand, each one a metre in length, bound together by multiple wraps of Gorilla tape. It lands at a jaunty angle, held up at one corner by the sandpaper leaves of some Bristly Ox-tongue. The dog-bile yellow flowers nod at the intrusion. I crouch down and feel like I am kneeling in the soft sand of a shoreline, as the thatch of grasses bend and bow under my weight. I fiddle for my notebook and pencil in the map pocket of my baggy combat trousers and begin to list the plants within the square. It is the fifth time I have done so in this meadow; I will kneel and count five times more before I am done.

The heading at the top of the page reads ‘Field No 2926’. We don’t call it ‘Field 2926’; we call it Car Park Field, because it’s where we park our vehicles on shoot days. However, the Rural Payments Agency like field numbers; they have no time for the vagaries and foibles of how farm fields derive their monikers. ‘Ribwort Plantain’, ‘Meadow Buttercup’, ‘Yarrow’, ‘White Clover’, ‘Knapweed’. Resting the book on my knee, the blunt pencil gives my handwriting a child-like quality. ‘Cow Parsley’. I tap the pencil against my bottom incisors. What is the bloody name for the small hazy pink flower I can see forcing its way through the tangle of grass? I know I know it. I become cross at my forgetfulness, then give in and use my phone camera to take a snapshot. An app tells me what I thought I knew: ‘Fumaria officinalis’. Bloody Latin. My father would tell me how the prefix Fumaria helps the identification process, indicating the smoky appearance of the flower head. But I hate Latin: a dead language for deadhead scientists. I have developed an academic bias about academics of late. I had argued with an Oxford University Doctor on Twitter some months before; the memory still seethes within me irrationally. He described my hedgelaying as “scorched earth”. I have vowed never to forgive him. Petty? Maybe - but never insult a man’s wife, dog or hedge.

Writing in my notebook ‘Common Fumitory’ feels like an act of vengeance against him, and other such men of desks and gowns and Latin. “That’s more like it, isn’t it Mabel?” My spaniel looks up from her snuffling nearby and wags her stump of a tail. She appears to appreciate my outbursts, rhetorical questions and enquiries as to what she is doing. It’s attention, and cockers crave attention; plus I get a freepass at talking to myself. ‘Common Vetch’, Field Buttercup’ ‘Pink Campion’. Now some yellow thing. My teeth receive another pencil battue: I know this one too. The flower looks like gorse, but it’s not gorse; I know gorse. The leaves look akin to thyme, but it’s not thyme; I know thyme. As larks sing overhead in a sky that is as cloudless and empty as my mind, I ask the dog for help. She wanders over, head lowered, tail wagging again and nudges my hand for me to stroke her, sending the pad and pencil tumbling into the thatch of green. The notebook is caught by the fronds; the pencil, pilfered from my son’s school bag, disappears in a trice. “Eggs and Bacon”, I tell her with delight.

My memory in middle age is a curious thing. It is as if I have to leaf through an encyclopaedia; slower than Google, but so much more rewarding when I find the answer to a question unaided. I see the glint of the chewed metal pencil end and extract it from the midst of some Cocksfoot, then scribble down ‘Bird’s-foot Trefoil’. “Thank you, Mabel.” The little dog’s head is covered in small green spheres that stick like glue to the wispy mohican she sports above her eyes. Botanists would call them ‘Galium aparine’; I call them ‘Cleavers’, and in the book they go.

“Ha,” I say to the dog, the bees, the hoverflies and skylarks; “one up for the hedgelayers.” Mabel has already wandered off and is lying down panting. She only comes back to lie beside me when I roll onto my back for a nap, staring up into the blue, framed by the waving fronds of this rich and vibrant sward.