The artists and hippies are re-wilding their land, which is to say doing nothing at all to it and watching it fill up with brambles.
The builder boyfriend and I are un-wilding our land, which is to say pulling out every bramble we can find and cutting back the overhanging tree branches.
‘Seven hundred trees,’ she said, sipping her fresh mint tea, her artisanal walking crook propped against the wall
We have nothing in common with the hippy English blow-ins who come to West Cork, of course. However, I have made friends with a few of the local lefties, including a very nice lady who lives down the lane whom I cannot help but like since she brought me honey from her bees.
She is an artist and deplores hunting and shooting, but in such a melodramatic way – ‘Darling, I cannot bear death!’ – as to make it entirely endearing. So I keep my mouth shut while she is holding forth about the savagery of farming and the barbarity of pest control because she is such good value.
We go to art gallery cafés on the edges of peninsulas where we drink organic tea and admire place mats adorned with wildlife. Mugs and coasters with cuddly squirrels and friendly foxes on them are for sale in these craft-shop cafés. It’s wondrous escapism.
My friend wears a Ukrainian lapel badge but it could be worse. She’s not waving a huge Palestinian flag while caterwauling ‘From the river to the sea’ like most of the English women around here.
I told her I couldn’t be doing with that, to mark her cards, because if she did start warbling about Gaza then we would have to fall out. But to my delight she said: ‘Darling, I so agree. These regimes…’ And she made her ‘I can’t bear death’ face.
We were sitting in a gallery café having a lovely chinwag about nature one morning when she suddenly declared: ‘I planted 700 trees during lockdown.’
I gulped my Earl Grey hard to stop myself choking on it. ‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘You planted what?’
‘Trees, darling – 700 trees.’
My hearing is going, I thought. This lady has a few acres of land around her cottage. I asked her to say it again. ‘Seven hundred trees,’ she said, sipping her fresh mint tea, her artisanal walking crook propped against the wall beside her.
I continued to shake my head. But no matter how many times I got her to say it, she had, or believed she had, planted 700 trees.
I came home and walked around our bottom paddock where the thoroughbred and pony were grazing, and I surveyed the brambles around the perimeter.
I went and fetched the BB, telling him to bring his gardening tools and we began cutting the undergrowth back. It was a satisfying job pulling out thorny tendrils and exposing bare earth that would green up. The BB has already tackled more than half the overgrown boundaries, pruning and clearing.
As I pulled at the brambles with my gloved hands, I kept thinking: ‘Where on earth has she put 700 trees?’
I know the left have a love affair with trees that knows no bounds, and 700 of them planted by one person could know no boundaries either.
Blimey, I thought, I hope she hasn’t gone around planting trees just anywhere. While our house was unoccupied she might have sneaked a few in here. Maybe she chucked a dozen saplings over the hedge. It made my chest tight to think of it.
When I imagine 700 trees all I can think of is the amount of cutting back involved. This is how I know I’m not a lefty. I see a tree and I see branches that need pollarding.
The left have never been able to grasp that a tree is something that needs maintenance, and not just in order to look nice, but to thrive. In the same way, they seem incapable of grasping that without the cultivation known as farming there are no green fields. Green is not what nature looks like if you leave it to itself. Green is not what nature looks like if you leave it to lefties.
My friend has a paddock that is one -tangled impenetrable brown mass of thorny thicket. Down the lane from her lives another blow-in, an Australian chap whose half an acre is covered in a giant white polytunnel.
He walks by our house on sunny days and lets his young daughters stick their tiny hands through the farm gate to push grass into our horse’s mouths. So far the cobs have not bitten their fingers off but the BB said it was only a matter of time. We had to put a disclaimer notice up.
It quotes an Irish law indemnifying farms by warning people not to come in. I wish it said: ‘No lefties past this point, unless by arrangement.’
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