A Field of Lush Green Verbiage
It is a prevailing piece of conventional wisdom that we should all take time to smell the roses. I agree, but it is easier said than done. The pressures of work are a problem, but so are the competing aromas of smog, traffic and the fumy dust of bulldozers leveling the nearby hills.
To get in a rose-smelling frame of mind, I have to time-travel to the green hills of Upstate New York, where wild roses still make unexpected appearances along rural roads. And I have to think also of the days when my journalistic chores took me deep into the English countryside, where hedgerows centuries old divide the gentle hills into green patchwork quilts.
A colleague from my London days has improved on the rose-smelling idea by several times. For the last seven years, Anne Denny Angus has been observing--and I mean observing--the life of a half-mile of hedgerows that line a country lane near her home in West Wales.
It takes a five-page appendix just to list the hundreds of plant and animal species she has studied in her half-mile alfresco laboratory. The names, a lot of them, ring as British as Chaucer.
There are chaffinches, magpies, jackdaws and pied wagtails among the birds; voles and stoats among the mammals; chickweed, creeping cinquefoil, dog roses, field roses and self-heal ( Prunella vulgaris ) among the plants and grasses; earwigs and fever-flies among the insects.
Toting a magnifying glass, binoculars and a notebook, Annie has been out in icy gray winter dawns and steaming summer afternoons noting the teeming life that transpires in what must look to a passing car like a rather unkempt stretch of weedy foliage.
But it’s a jungle in there, a miniaturized ecosystem that she calls “a place of quick metabolisms, of much food quickly eaten, many lives quickly lived and nothing going to waste.”
“Hedgerow” (London: Partridge Press, 1987) has as yet found no American publisher and it may not--a melancholy surprise in view of the semi-books and non-books that find their way to print each year. The flora and fauna have been serenely illustrated in water colors and pencil (I judge) by Michael Woods.
It is a beautiful book; it is also, gently enough, an angry book. Along with so many other things in nature, hedgerows too appear to be endangered. Amazingly, there are thought to be 400,000 miles of hedgerows in Britain, constituting some 300,000 acres of refuge.
But they are being destroyed at the rate of 4,000 miles a year and the rate seems likely to accelerate. Britain is moving swiftly toward agribusinesses: grain-growing operations whose machineries are impatient with hedges.
Historically, the hedgerows were not only fences, created in part by the carving of roads and lanes, they were sources of firewood and timber. Now they are ruthlessly pruned to maximize the tillable acreages.
“As the land is farmed with increasing intensity, otters and a heronry have vanished,” Angus writes. “Rooks have had to spread out over the fields instead of making large rookeries. Badgers are rare, and hedgehogs are seldom seen except dead.”
Anne Denny grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, which helps to explain her affinity for the out-of-doors. She became a magazine reporter in New York, which explains her meticulous note-taking and the exhaustive bibliography “Hedgerow” contains.
She went briefly to work at the Life office in London, met and married a BBC writer-producer named Arch Angus and became an editor of a fine new weekly of the social sciences called The New Society. (The magazine perished only recently, a casualty of costs.)
Several years ago, the Anguses decided on rural Wales as a saner place to raise their children (it is not unlike parts of rural Pennsylvania), and in Carmarthenshire she found the avocation that became a calling. Angus has joined that invaluable tradition of the amateur naturalist who enriches the body of scientific knowledge by the steady application of intelligence, patient observation and love.
She is already at work on another book, a somewhat larger-frame look at the ecological implications of social change, and whether there will still be roses to smell when we finally get around to it.
