Vale of tares

‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nature writing used to be a subject for ridicule.

‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’ Nature writing used to be a subject for ridicule. Evelyn Waugh, the arch sneerer, might have found it harder to parody the modern breed of literary naturalists.

Richard Mabey is perhaps the best known English author of recent fashionable books about the natural world. He belongs to a group of new naturalists which includes Robert Macfarlane the Cambridge don, Kathleen Jamie the poet, and the late Roger Deakin. They are all intellectuals, whose pitch is more observant and scientific than romantic. Wordsworth inspires them less than John Clare, whom Macfarlane once described as ‘a hider-away, a lane-haunter, a birds’-nester, a field-farer’. Unlike Clare, they are not labourers, but walkers and observers, and Mabey is so observant that he often resorts to a microscope to inspect a plant.

‘Context, Mabey says, ‘is everything’. We have ideas about where things should be — a sort of horticultural class system. Americans visiting my garden one year failed to share my enthusiasm for a single plant of Mertensia virginica. ‘Back home,’ they said, ‘that’s a weed’. Over time, as well as space, the definition of what is welcome and what is not has also changed. Mabey is excellent on the history of weeds. The one that makes most gardeners despair is ground elder, which the Romans cultivated to eat and as a cure for gout.

For Japanese knotweed we have to blame the Victorians who introduced it to our gardens. William Robinson, the wild garden innovator, loved this exotic, which it is now illegal to grow and almost impossible to eradicate. Trials of an insect predator which started this year may be the answer, but no one yet knows what else it will eat.