Being Nostalgic about the Natural World

It is not always possible to act rationally in our regard for the natural world. Nor is it desirable. If we were only to garden for practicality or farm for maximum yield without our love of the landscape then the world would be a much poorer place. Here I give 3 examples which I hope will give contrasting flavours of what I mean-

Offa’s Dyke

There are some places I feel instantly drawn to because of their natural beauty and I felt this with the fern carpeted woods and yellowing hayfields around the very well preserved bit of Offa’s dyke near Presteigne on the Herefordshire/ Powys border.

I don’t know why but it reminded me of Andy Dufrain’s description of the hayfield near Buxton in Southern USA where he made love to and proposed to his wife in the film Shawshank Redemption. This place had the same magical quality of making me nostalgic for it even though I had never been there before with its foxgloves,ferns and hay bales combined with the ancient structure of Offa’s dyke like a huge holloway ,dotted with hundred year old oaks, in the landscape. In addition to this is the often lyrically described Welsh hills as a perfect backdrop.

But in practical terms it was just another piece of forgotten about countryside. But like most people having watched South East England be carved up by roads, urban sprawl and railways I felt it was a landscape worth fighting for not least because it was in someway evocative of that dreamy piece of English countryside that seemingly only exists in dreams, drawings and Hollywood movies…

Anyway, I think it would be equally wonderful in the pouring rain and indeed the snow of winter such was the versatility of a landscape that graduated from the soft femininity of English farmland to the more masculine nature of the Welsh mountains further west.

The Blackcurrant

There is something rather special about a blackcurrant. Admittedly it is not the most tasty fruit raw because it is a little too tart for the sugar-loving human palate but a blackcurrant fool or posset is so delicious that when preceded with poached salmon, new potatoes and dill garnished cucumber it evokes nostalgia in me for the rare occurence of good, simple English cooking combined with a warm summer’s day.

I think Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall best used the idea of nostalgia to promote his television series when he went picking fruit with Ukranian students in the West country. After a hard days work(or something like that!) they gorged on Ukranian chicken borscht as one of them strummed on the guitar in front of the camp fire before Hugh F-W knocked up a very cosmopolitan dish of iles flottant with blackcurrant coulis in which he included the 6 blackcurrants from his own bushes which he produced from a tiny matchbox in his pocket. If there is anyone who is surely a graduate of the Chelsea charm school then it is Hugh F-W.

But the blackcurrant bushes themselves also have a trick of making you smell the future crop of blackcurrants( or perhaps what’s cooking in the kitchen so to speak…). This is because when you prune the plants in the autumn the smell given off by the branches is exactly the same as that of the ripe fruit so you can start salivating over that blackcurrant fool six months in advance.

Plants as Gifts

Nostalgia also plays a big part in how much trouble we take in trying to keep plants we should have chucked out years ago. A rose has double the sentimental value if it was given to us by a close friend who is no longer with us. This means that particularly Hydrangeas, minature roses and hyacinths which have been given as indoor gifts are then shoved into the bits of the borders that are unused- usually in the most unpromising spot I hasten to add….

This means that you often get a border filled with plants that should have been quietly taken to the compost bin for burial amongst the potato peelings to put them out of their misery years ago. This is totally understandable but sometimes we need to be a bit more Prussian in the way we view the plants in our garden especially, as in London, when space is at a premium.

My thoughts on plants as gifts need to be practical because I am a professional gardener but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it is rather lovely that people can form attachments to plants. This is because our subconscious and memory of childhood can give a glow to even the simplest windowbox of pansies just because our grandad used to grow them and that will beat the most productive, straight lined vegetable garden any day.