Why we love a bit of Africa in our parkland by Matt Ridley

This was in The Times and it was a piece about Capability Brown (Lancelot to his mum) who was born nearly 300 years ago, and was commissioned by 280 landowners to design the aesthetically perfect landscape. He tore out walls, canals, avenues, topiary and terraces to bring open parkland, with grassy tree-topped hills and glimpses of sinuous, serpentine lakes, right up to the ha-has of country houses.

He was not the first, before him were Bridgeman (great name for a landscape designer) and William Kent, in copying pictures of Arcadia by Claude, using ideas of a perfect landscape before the Fall.

What is the landscape we find most attractive and why? Appleton, a geographer, in The Experience of Landscape (1975), suggested that humans have an "atavistic sensitivity" to landscapes which offer the best chances of survival in the wild. "Habitat theory simply suggests that human beings experience pleasure in and satisfaction with landscapes insofar as these landscapes are perceived to be conducive to the realization of their biological needs." (Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics and Planning  By J. Douglas Porteous)

Apparently we need to see without being seen, or find hiding places from any animal trying to hunt us. and we need to hide from the animals we are trying to hunt. So we like wide vistas, and clumps of leafy trees. We like crags, towers and viewpoints too, to get a good "prospect".

We also like to see water, green grass and a good supply of healthy animals (the larder).

Other experiments have established that of all landscapes, humans seems to prefer to look at the African Savannah, and that this is because we evolved and survived in this landscape first (although I'm not sure this is still believed as at this time the savannah was jungle I have been told).

So the English landscape garden is typically designed to be similar to the African savannah, and this style became popular in Europe and north American too, not only in garden/ parks but also public parks and golf courses and even cemeteries. (Mara Miller 1993; the Garden as an Art)

Emmet's Garden and Chiddingstone

Chiddingstone is a tiny village but medieval and owned by the National Trust.

A well-carved porch.

Yew tree, all awry

This is the original chiding stone, where (perhaps) folks went to be chided - it is an outcrop of sandstone.

 Emmet's Garden : this is not a good time of year for gardens. This garden did have an interesting system for redistributing water with a self-powered pump - a pump operated by the weight of the water in the pond. This is the pond, and the walk was very muddy.

Knole and Sissinghurst

At Knole we walked around the park, which is basically a mausoleum for trees. I can't begin to tell you haw annoyed I get with the National Trust's absurd determination to keep every scrap of dead tree in situ. It's just horrible. But it was a lovely bright day and not too muddy.

There are 800 deer at Knole, very tame. There are fallow deer and sika. The deer have to be culled every year.

At Sissinghurst I completely forgot to take any photos. There was not much open but we could go up the tower and were also able to do a circular walk, which took in the vegetable garden. The rhubarb is already growing!! and the posts supporting the raspberry canes are even more enormous than at Chartwell, like six foot tall telegraph poles, with wires under tension. There were some very decorative sprouts, purple, but not looking good enough to eat.

We went to Kent for some muddy walks

at this time we usually go to the Lake District but ha! we cannot so easily be predicted. The poor Lakes District is flooded and will be so boggy.  Better to go for 2 days to Kent - about 2 hours drive away to walk in the mud there and watch TV from the comfort of an enormous hotel bed. But I hated the hotel bed. It was very large and very hard and made me feel as though I was lying on a table for some kind of inspection.

So we went to Chartwell and there was not much to see but we looked at the vegetable garden, which is new, to see how they do their raspberries. In our allotment we planted 15 canes just before Christmas. We planted them in 2 lines. Clearly they are meant to be supported because a kind person had gone to the 2 original canes we planted (to make the plot look less empty) and hammered in a small log behind each. At Chartwell the supports were like fence posts and the wires were heavy gauge but not under tension.

We also saw Churchill's paintings in the studio, on a gloomy day with inadequate lighting, and I was slightly cross that the National Trust don't feel as though it would be in keeping to light the pictures properly. You can see there are pictures on shelves, but that's about all. But perhaps Churchill was right about them, perhaps they are not, most of them, very good? But they are very much to my taste.

Here is a tree at Chartwell, quite near the house, which was a really good unusual tree. I am afraid my pictures are blurred.

Cryptomeria Japonica

Cryptomeria

Genus

Cryptomeria is a monotypic genus of conifer in the cypress family Cupressaceae, formerly belonging to the family Taxodiaceae. It includes only one species, Cryptomeria japonica. It is endemic to Japan, where it is known as sugi. The tree is often called Japanese cedar in English, though the tree is not related to the true cedars.

Happy Boxing Day!

Boxing Day may be much nicer than Christmas Day as you don't need to eat so much food, and you can go out and do the things you like doing. There are fewer family games and quizzes. And yesterday we went for a short bedraggled walk in the rain, rather muddy and I had forgotten to take waterproof boots with me, but today looks gusty and bracing.

I got a great number of books for Christmas which is lovely. I received from F: Weeds, by R Mabey, which I will read with recourse to the internet because it doesn't have illustrations of all the weeds. I have Plants from Roots to Riches by K Willis and C Fry: which does have illustrations and (some of them I saw quite recently in a programme about the history of gardens with Monty Don which was very informative) and this book I can't wait to get to grips with. But first I must read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (1922) for the book group. I thought this would be awfully drippy because I saw a film of it recently in which the women were all equally gorgeous in their long, floppy dresses and the whole mood was very slushy. But the book is a better experience as it is quite slyly acerbic and as frank as it can be about sex without actually mentioning sex and women's attitudes to it. I think Elizabeth von Arnim is quite an amazing person. I am not surprised she had an affair with H.G. Wells; although he was appalling to his wives (bad point) he could cope with women who wanted to be open, honest and experimental with sex, which shows the courage of his convictions about feminism.

 The next Book Club book is called Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. A man called Tom suggested this as I said I would like to read a serious book. Tom is one of two men at the book club and he seems extremely well-read and well-informed.

The book that's driving me mad at the moment is Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name. I have read it all out of order because I kept skipping ahead because it's so long and wordy, but I must read it  again properly to make sure I haven't missed anything so I can't really say I have finished it, but I sort of hate it because the protagonist is making such dangerous decisions and one feels menaced. I have part three of this series to read as well. Italian torture!

I have also had an interesting understanding about Virginia Woolf. I read all her pieces of memoir writing in a book called Moments of Being, and I loved her style and her calm air of understanding what went on about her, then the tragedies, and how she felt about them, her judgements and her love for those she lost. I read it all twice. And in tandem with this, I read Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, which I am nowhere near the end of. It gives you quite a shock to realised that Mrs W. was an unreliable narrator, because she left out the fact that she herself was often very ill physically, in pain and unable to eat, and that during periods of her life she was insane, psychotic or otherwise mentally ill - was violent to Leonard, who had huge strength of character in taking her on (quite the reverse of his tiny physicality). Mrs W doesn't mention what a pain in the neck she had been to Vanessa during their adolescence, and to her sister Stella who had charge of her during her first madness, and how people said: "It's very bad for Stella to have Ginny with her all the time." I imagine she had a doleful intensity that could make anyone feel depressed. From the standpoint of her own memoir, Virginia is a rock of sense! I imagine when she read this out to the Memoir club*, Vanessa was sitting in a corner either laughing quietly to herself or shaking her head and rolling her eyes, sketching or designing something all the while: Vanessa went to listen but always kept her hands busy. Vanessa was a remarkable person in herself, and Virginia could have done nothing, I think, if Vanessa had not been so staunchly determined to be an artist and to be a Bohemian, because Virginia was too weak to do all that without her.

We gave the daughter a pair of Clarks stout leather boots for Xmas, (although she was faintly tempted by Doc Martens), also party clothes and ridiculous shoes (for nightclubs), a jumper, a purse, a scarf - oh, many things, it was fun to get her so many things!

*A Bloomsbury thing: Lytton, Morgan, Maynard, Leonard, Duncan, Clive, Virginia and Vanessa, maybe some others.

Post Paris: The Greens are disappointed by the government's Energy Bill

Caroline Lucas, M.P. for the Greens, says:

 

"It’s difficult to think of a piece of legislation that is less fit-for-purpose, if the Government were serious about turning warm words in the Paris climate agreement into action.

Perhaps it’s little wonder that the Government decided to delay the Bill’s second reading in the Commons until after the Paris climate talks were over. 

 

Yes, the UK’s coal fired power stations must be phased out – but they must be replaced with renewable energy - not gas. That means rethinking the raft of mind-bogglingly backward policy decisions we’ve seen since the election – reversing solar subsidy cuts and reinstating the zero carbon homes policy for starters.

 

That should be the focus of any Energy Bill in 2016. The Paris climate agreement provides an even stronger case for MPs to refuse to give the Bill a second reading, reject it in its entirety, and demand the Government goes back to the drawing board.

 

Looking ahead to 2016, we’ve got some big fights to come. The climate movement will have a key role to play in holding politicians to account.

 

The Paris climate talks failed in part because of the influence of fossil fuel corporations over government. Those same oil and gas companies have a death grip on the UK’s democratic decision making too. Nowhere is this more obvious than the trade deals being struck, which threaten to undermine efforts to cut carbon emissions as well as our democracy.

 

But the strength and breadth of the mobilisation across civil society we are seeing is more powerful than corporations and their friends in Government realise.

 

Unusually, a similar sentiment was to be found in the Economist, with their verdict on Paris concluding:

 “Genuine concern about the climate, public opinion and international pressure produced the pledges that were made for Paris. The hope is that similar bottom-up processes, rather than unenforceable UN mandates, will drive up the level of action in decades to come.”

Green World Edition 90: letter about staying in the European Union

Asking why the Greens support staying in Europe - a good point by Harold Immanuel

"The punishment of both Greece and Syriza demonstrates that solidarity - social, economic or political - is not what the EU is fundamentally about. Rather, it is about the three pillars of free movement of capital, goods and labour. Supporting free movement of capital is not a sustainable position for a radical party. Nor do arguments about keeping the peace, free movement of people, social policy, taxation, subsidiarity and solidarity stand up to serious scrutiny. Within the EU, it's difficult to see how many of our policies could be implemented."

I like the idea of being in a group with other Europeans because of our shared history and values and actually, practical intelligence! (I mean, common sense not spying). I feel that with so many groups and leaders, one or two of them must have some good ideas. I mean, put into practice,  good for the people of Europe, and indeed, the rest of the world. But I am absolutely repelled by the idea of TTIP and how it is being discussed in secret. What is going on in the EU?? Some failure of basic democratic principles.