SOME years ago, I decided to re-create an old-fashioned cornfield, the sort of poppy-resplendent arable scene you seldom find these days outside the frame of a Constable painting. I had two principle guides for this experiment in retro-farming. One was my own boyhood memory from the early 1970s of a rustling wheat field embroidered with wildflowers (weeds, if you will). My greater guide, however, was a chance reading of Walks in the Wheat-fields by Victorian countryside writer Richard Jefferies. One particular picture-in-words arrested my heart:
‘Let your hand touch the ears lightly as you walk… There are hares
