Lethargy seemed to have settled over the landscape after the harvest. There was barely enough wind to stir the thistledown and willowherb seeds around the field margin. On an uncomfortably humid afternoon that threatened a downpour, crows feeding in the stubble field rose as we passed but settled only a short glide away after a few desultory flaps of their wings.
When we crossed the stile into a field where a broad margin, perhaps 20 metres wide, had been allowed to lie fallow for birds and insects, we found ourselves walking into a late blooming of wild flowers.
A new burst of energy had sprung from the soil: a haze of blue forget-me-nots, a knee-high sap-green forest of petty spurge (Euphorbia peplus) and a tangle of fumitory (Fumaria officinalis) with its bright ferny foliage and strange tubular red flowers. Hereabouts, the old name for fumitory is wax dolls. When we looked at it closely it was not hard to see why. The smooth, rounded, nectary pouch was vaguely reminiscent of the bald head of a human infant, the pink petals might have been its swaddling robes, the purple tips its shiny shoes.
Such floral diversity as flourished in this small enclave was a faint echo of a time when crops were weeded by hand, not with herbicides, when broad flowery margins like this were commonplace. But the archaic, vernacular name of wax dolls was also a reminder of why the word biodiversity, coined by E.O.Wilson and often used today as biological stocktaking jargon to encompass the totality of wild species, is so inadequate in defining our relationship with nature.
Our ability to look at the flowers of crop fields – called arable weeds by some – and see an image of ourselves, implies a deeper, unquantifiable, empathy with the natural world, that which the writer E O Wilson calls biophilia.
Our reverie was broken when we turned to go to the field gate. A covey of partridges, lying low in the forest of fumitory until the last possible moment, rose from around our feet with an exhilarating explosion of whirring wings, sending our pulses racing.
