It was while waiting for my partner, Anna,to complete her annual clothes shop that I bought 'Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm' by Isabella Tree. A modest shopper, Anna bought one T shirt.
The book tells the story of a large Sussex estate that was run as a traditional mixed farm, which then specialised in dairying, before then consolidating its dairy farms into one big efficient unit, to shedding the dairy cows, to going to an arable-only estate. But, in a story similar to much of Britain's ever modernising, intensifying agriculture, searching for the pot of gold at the bottom of a crop sprayer tank, it still haemorrhaged money and the land was dying.
Around the turn of the millennium, the owners set about returning all 3,500 acres back to nature with apparently astounding results.
I suspect that my relatively open farming mind will be challenged by this book but I also suspect that I shall find much common ground within it.
I begab reading the book in somewhat fitting surrounds, in that sun-dappled chamber of light and shadow: Landrace bakery. A small patch of south west England that does incredible, incredible things with heritage grains, plunders delightful tidbits from nature's larder and makes my mind race with sensational flat white upon sensational flat white.
Here before you you see the book a top my haul of wonderful loaves; feet trembling with caffeine.
If my eco book-learning carries on apace then I shall soon lose the brogues and will be wearing handwoven wicker clogs, my feet at Zen with the cabbage tea that will be flowing through their veins.
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