Not So Glorious

Walking onto Blacka this morning with sheep having returned and signs of farm vehicles and spraying of bracken felt like the end of something good, like going back to school after the summer holidays. The managers were back. A notice tells us not just that Asulox has been applied to bracken somewhere around here but that control is being applied just in case anybody got the mistaken idea that the place was important for what it looks like rather than for other mysterious priorities connected with that impenetrable obsession - the biodiversity target. So the twelfth may be glorious for some who love to go "bang bang!" but not for me this year. It had been good as summers go. July and August in England can be wet and midgy in the bracken but for once we have been able to satisfy ourselves with the beauty and surprises of the pasture land where nature showed us just what it can do to delight. And diversity was what we got, a simple, comprehensible and directly observable diversity: instead of dreary featureless grassland we had flowering clover and vetch and yarrow and sneezewort and orchid and innumerable other species and huge expanses of blue harebell, the Scottish bluebell. Never mind that it shouldn't really have happened or that it was all down to management failures or whatever - the official reason seems to be that there was no water in the stream (droughts in previous years do not seem to have caused difficulty).

The bracken spraying has come just after one of the colder nights when already some of the fronds were showing brown tips and edges. And the impact visually does not appeal. Bracken you can get used to in this situation ; its growth and decline are still gradual and day by day. The sudden flattening of shrubs with farm vehicles offends the eye.