‘Our hedgerows are our single biggest Nature reserve’

IT is now, unbelievably, eight years since I was first invited to be Guest Editor of this magazine. On that occasion, I was asked to include a favourite painting and chose a huge landscape by Rex Vicat Cole created in 1929. It is a view of Wharfedale on the Bolton Abbey estate in the Yorkshire Dales. In the foreground, tall trees frame a lush meadow, beyond which sit farm buildings and dark hills that brood beneath a sky heavy with clouds laden with rain. The light shifts constantly across the scene in an exceptional piece of observation by a master craftsman. It is a beguiling image that transfixes me every time I see it, just as the landscape itself does—a landscape that depends more than we think on those trees that frame the view.

In 1929, Vicat Cole could have chosen 1,000 views of the British countryside that contained the same elements: large clusters of woodland; hedgerows criss-crossing the landscape; meadows that were safe havens for ground-nesting birds; and an abundance of wildflowers—all part of a mixed, diverse farming system that largely avoided chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Instead of growing one crop on a vast scale, fields reared a mixture of arable and livestock in a rotational system where the animals played a crucial role in managing soil fertility and where the health of streams and natural habitats was not destroyed