ON the wall of my office hangs a soil map for the entire country. When I first saw it as a student, I was bowled over by how many familiar areas of the country I could pick out—Dartmoor, the South Downs, the Fens and more. When I ran a consultancy advising government agencies about managing the landscape, it was this map that so often told me whether land in question might be used for forestry, arable, pasture, horticulture and so on, and even what crops would thrive in that part of the country.
‘“Forced” rhubarb, harvested by candlelight, is sweeter than main-crop stems’
Of course, there are influences beyond the soil’s limitations and opportunities—for example, the emergence of West Yorkshire
