Wilderness: Chapter 9

The Meadow Maker: In which we sew yellow rattle, fence, freeze and plant an orchard

This is the ninth chapter in Wilderness: In Search of Belonging, my nature memoir, which traces my journey growing up as a dual heritage child in a white family in predominantly white, rural Britain—a place where I never quite fit in, and my sense of belonging always felt out of reach.

Now, as an adult, with my husband and daughter, I have moved to a remote part of Somerset to begin a mini conservation project. This is my story of our rewilding adventure, an exploration of how nature can help us heal, and a deepening understanding of what it means to truly belong.

Trigger warning: There’s an upsetting scene at the end of this chapter.

Somerset - Autumn and Winter

A god is at the door. He seems to be Thor, the Norse God of thunder, lightning, storms, sacred trees and strength. He has shoulder-length blonde hair, a kind of khaki cape and shorts in spite of the cold. He looks as if he could hammer a fence post in with one hand.

Marc Preston, from Total Fencing, tells me he did indeed used to do this, but now he’s in his early forties, his body is packing up. I’d like to say we hired him because we were so impressed with the fence he’s created across Black Down, the inaccessible moorland on the peak of the Mendips. In reality, he was the only person willing and qualified to do the job.

Marc brings some impressive kit into the field - the one flattish, straightish stretch of fence will be bashed in by a SoloTrak Post Driver and a Rock Monster Auger, which, between them, can drill and drive in posts through the rock that is just below a thin skin of soil. Jaimie enjoys standing next to the vermillion and ladybird-black monster machinery after Marc and his employees have gone home, pretending he might jump in and start the beasts up.

It’s autumn and the leaves of the small leaved lime have turned a vivid yellow and fall like golden pennies around the men as they work. A week later we have a fence round half of Wild Pinebeck, which joins up with Jaimie’s cobbled-together fence, enclosing two fields and Lilac Wood. I ask Marc if he will come back and finish the rest of the fence in a few months, when the next furlough payment comes through.

‘No, mate,’ he says, shaking his blonde mane. It’s too hard on the body, he tells me. ‘I’m launching my own fashion business.’

I try not to look too surprised. Marc explains that he and his wife, a pilates instructor, are going to import clothes from New Zealand - tough outdoor gear, like the Bushbuck waterproof he’s wearing, that keep you warm and dry, no matter what the weather is like.

After he’s left, we inspect the fence - tough and sturdy - but the machinery has torn up the smaller field. The turf has been gouged away, leaving the earth exposed, and there are also scars and tractor tyre marks in the main field alongside the fence. Jaimie says it’s good - it’s like having wild boar rootle through the grass and we’ll have more wild flowers next year. I decide to take advantage of this disturbed ground and buy £100 worth of yellow rattle seeds.

Yellow rattle is sometimes known as the ‘meadow maker’. It’s a semi-parasitic plant that feeds off the roots of grass. It used to be an indicator of ‘poor’ pasture to farmers, a sign there would be little grass for livestock, but now it’s often used to help turn nutrient-rich fields into meadows. The flowers emerge from a pale green calyx (the sepals that protect flowers when they’re buds), swelling into a smooth bright yellow head with a lip, like an Alien baby. As the flowers fade, the calyx dries to a crisp brown: a little lantern stoked with seeds. Earlier that autumn I’d stood in a field full of flowers turning to seeds and in the gentle breeze, the whole field had a gentle throaty rattle.

I sow the seeds onto the bare soil and grass hoping that the coming cold of winter will shock the plants into germinating the following spring. By parasitising the grass, they will help reduce the rankest and lushest species, and allow other more delicate flowers to grow.

I imagine, as I scatter the yellow rattle, that this mini field, scalene triangle-shaped, set at an uneven angle, wedged below Lilac Wood, could be the perfect place to establish a micro-orchard. If this doesn’t sound very rewilding, it isn’t, at first glance. But I thought that by planting fruit trees in what we hoped would become a wildflower meadow, we would end up feeding field fares and jays, deer and dormice before, the orchard, one day gently merged with Lilac Wood.

We have lost so many of our orchards, particularly in Somerset - indeed, there had once been an orchard next to Wild Pinebeck. In Orchard: A Year in England’s Eden, Benedict Macdonald and Nicolas Gate, write:

‘Haunted by creatures that may soon become memories - hedgehogs and cuckoos; dormice and bats - [the] orchard’s diversity eclipses that of most nature reserves or designated wild places. It protects, within its boughs, an ark of animals now almost impossible to find living side by side elsewhere in our dying countryside.’

MacDonald and Gate, both writers and wildlife cameramen, spent a year in an ancient orchard in the Malverns, documenting the species they saw during the seasons. They describe how fossil evidence suggests that forests of wild fruit trees once spread throughout the UK, the fruit feeding aurochs, those 2 metre tall wild cattle, as well as wild horses, boar, bears, elk, red and roe deer. Near us is Salisbury plain, acres of rolling grassland, but which was once covered with wild apples, cherries, hawthorns and sloes. Avalon, the hill at Glastonbury with its famous tor, means ‘isle of apples’ and was once cloaked in crab apples.

Apple trees host a surprisingly high number of species - 93 according to MacDonald and Gate, including truebugs, flowerbugs, micromoths, beetles,  wasps, bees, plants and fungi. In a report for English Nature in 2006, which looked at just three orchards in the Wyre Forest, the researchers counted 1,868 species.

Orchards, of course, were widely planted for cider-production but we have lost 81% of our traditional orchards since 1900 due to changes in farming and the spread of urbanisation, according to a 2022 survey by the National Trust. This equates to an area the size of the Isle of Wight and has meant a huge impact on the wildlife that depended on them. For instance, we’ve completely lost some species, such as the snake bird or wryneck and others have dramatically declined, including haw and bull finches, starlings, marsh tits, spotted flycatchers and cuckoos. Since 1970 we’ve lost three-quarters of our spotted woodpeckers.

The problem with tree planting is, again, money. I’ve applied unsuccessfully to many places for funding for tree planting, and specifically to recreate a mini orchard. One of the companies I applied to and I was sure would help - but didn’t - was Thatchers. Just 2 miles down the road from us, Thatchers is extraordinarily successful, producing 100 million litres of cider a year - but they would not help us buy a handful of trees.

Not long after Marc has left, I see a flash of scarlet in the garden. It’s a greater spotted woodpecker, a striking black and white, with a red cap set at a jaunty angle on the back of his head, and a flash of red on his undercarriage. It’s clinging to the mossy trunk of the old apple in the garden; the tree is so ancient and hasn’t been pruned for years, it’s a tangle of lichen-encrusted branches. In spring, it’s dense with pink and white flowers, and now it’s laden with tiny crimson apples, most of which are no larger than cherries and cracked with canker. Perhaps we could encourage some of the last quarter of the spotted woodpeckers to take up residence in our bijou orchard?

There’s a small amount of left from the furlough payment, so I buy 15 heritage fruit trees from our nearest tree nursery: Katy, Discovery, James Grieve, Cox’s Orange Pippin apple trees; Doyenne du Comice, Conference and William's pear, Victory and Opal plums, Merryweather damsons, Oullins Golden greengage, crab apples and a bird cherry.

It’s best to plant trees when it’s cold and the roots are dormant. We started planting in the Christmas holidays and the ground slowly froze, as if the frost was tide of ice slowly seeping through the valley. It took all three of us, Jaimie, Jasmine and me, working as a team - digging, manuring, planting, mulching, staking - to get the trees into what we decided to call, Jasmine Orchard.

The morning after we dig the last tree in, the frost finally reaches our new orchard. Every vein, every hair, every frilled edge, every stem has been outlined by ice, hard and sharp and silver in the dawn moonlight: grass transformed to swords, nettles to weapons, ferns to chainmail and creeping buttercup leaves to shields. I see frozen dewdrops for the first time, round and gleaming like pearls, that could be plucked from the leaves, dusted off the frost and would lie glistening in the palm of your hand for the briefest of moments.

---

It’s 1976, the hottest summer on record. My parents rent a small suburban house in Royal Leamington Spa while my step-father works at the polytechnic on a short contract and looks for work. My mum gives birth to my sister, Sheila, and my parents buy me a giant teddy I christen Leamington. Sheila will joke later that it was compensation for having a baby sister. Of course I’m pleased to have a sister, but I’m six years old and have just fled a war zone with only the clothes I was wearing, carrying three toys. After that, everything is precious, including Leamington. I sleep with my huge bear; he’s almost as big as me and each night my mum takes him out of the bed in case I suffocate.

I’m aware the neighbours don’t like me, but I don’t understand why, only that I have an uncomfortable feeling around them. I spend afternoons on the strip of patio out the back where there’s a slice of shade putting marbles in an egg box. I don’t know anyone, but after my experience at Exeter University when I was three, I know how to be very quiet.

One weekend, I overhear them talking. Fragments of the conversation drift through to me on the hot still air.

Half-caste.

Disgusting.

Thief.

Even at this age, I’m affronted to hear the neighbours telling my parents that I’ve been stealing their tomatoes. I don’t hear my parents protesting.

They never speak to me about the incident.

---

So far I’ve been raised by an Ayah in Pakistan, attended a nursery in Nigeria, a nursery in Exeter, a school in Nigeria, an all-Welsh speaking school in Wales, and now, aged six, I’m about to go to a new school. As usual, everyone will know each other. After my time in Wales, I’m acutely aware of my skin colour and it’s no surprise that I am the only non-white child.

Today, though, a girl looks at me with a gleam in her eyes and says she’ll look after me. I’m stupidly pleased, although a little wary. This isn’t what normally happens. I can tell, right away, that she is popular as she has a little posse of friends. She’s tall, much taller than me.

At break time she tells me to come with her and I and her little gang follow her. We go to the edge of the tarmac playground where there’s a small grassy mound. She leads me round the back of the mound and tells me to sit down in the long grass. My rib cage is squeezed tight. I’m frightened but also, grateful for the attention. Normally I sit on my own in the playground; I eat my packed lunch by myself; I never have any friends because I’ve never been anywhere long enough to make any. The other girls gather around, forming a ring. No one can see us here.

She tells me to take my clothes off. She stands and watches. Then she bends over me and yanks my white pants down. With one finger tip she strokes the soft skin of my vulva. She makes a kind of clicking noise of astonishment and nods to herself. She turns away, no longer interested, and she and the other girls run back to the playground.

I lie there, stunned, struggling not to cry. I feel utterly ashamed and humiliated. When we get home from school that afternoon, I tell my mum what happened. I don’t know what she will do, but I imagine her charging into school the next morning. She’ll speak to the teacher and the girl’s mum. It will never happen again. I wait for her to soothe my humiliation and shame.

She looks at me in exasperation and tells me they didn’t hurt me. Shame and humiliation floods through me again, and another feeling, a dawning realisation.

I am on my own.

That if my own mother won’t defend me, no one will.

Thank you so much for reading. Do let me know what you think.

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