Financial Times 1998

The Earthy Delights of Having a Dig by Anne Wareham

Well, it's nearly spring, and a middle-aged man's fancy may well turn to earthmoving. If you have an new garden to make there's nothing quite as dramatic as hiring a digger. By which I do not mean the kind of strapping young man that my fancy could turn to, but a big machine. You can apparently hire one now that will go through a three foot gap, which opens up the possibility of major landscaping even in those difficult town gardens with only a side entrance.

I think they're amazing, and I've hired them twice, both times, as it happens, with a strapping, if not young, man to wield the bucket. The first time was to have a large tree stump removed and a pond dug in its place. The trick here was to have somewhere to remove all that spare soil and the stump to. Round here people always cheerfully suggest dumping such things in "the forestry", which is the universal term for any areas of woodland, which usually are owned by the "Forestry Commission." In this case it was our woodland, so a bit of fly tipping was not such a good plan. I did have a place, but it was a little distance away. This was no problem to the man or machine, but it would be for me, afterwards. Having your earth moved is a little like having a tree cut down. The dramatic bit takes no time at all and is very impressive. The clearing up afterwards is horrendous and takes weeks. In the case of earth movers the problem is dealing with the mud churned up by their tracks. I lost half a lawn that first time.

The second time a different man came to level a path at the bottom of a slope. I got the path, and we could never have done it any other way, because apart from anything else there were several enormous boulders just below the surface of the path. You cannot rightly call yourself a horticulturalist (and who wants to be a boring old "gardener" these days?) until you have faced a machine with an enormous boulder in its mouth and a man, saying "where d'you want it, then?" This was the way we got ourselves an instant mini Stonehenge on our hillside. Do not think, by the way, that it is not possible for two relatively feeble people to play at Ancient Monuments by themselves. We have done it, with boulders only slightly smaller. Levers is the trick. You need someone a bit strong to operate the lever, and someone a bit feebler, but very brave, to put stones under the boulder as you raise it, to stop it falling back into its hole when you reposition the lever. The higher you manage to lever it, the more terrifying it is to disappear down the hole with your stones. A little bit of ambivalence on the part of the person with the lever, and the boulder could make a nice grave marker.

Autumn colour. © Charles Hawes

However, on this occasion a machine made it all look very easy, and it even roughly levelled the path for me. Just how rough such levelling is only really becomes apparent when you attempt afterwards to rake it flat in order to sow grass seed into it. It is not only actually very lumpy, but the lumps have been compressed by the weight of the machine until they seem pretty well as solid as the rocks which have been removed.

So, there are down sides to this instant landscaping, and it needs careful thought before being rushed into. And there is another reason for thought. Since I started making our garden ten years ago I have also spent a great deal of time studying the history of the landscape I am making the garden in. I started by investigating the history of our house. I suppose that we generally tend to think that it is buildings which are important historically, but I came to realise that the land had been intensively used in a variety of identifiable ways long before the house was built.

This is clearly true everywhere in this country, where all the land has been being used for thousands of years. Even a modern housing estate has a history worth investigating when you start focusing on the land rather than the buildings. And one of the things I discovered was just how much of the detail of the past is still there in the land, especially where earthmovers have not reared their buckets. We have a little corner of the garden sticking incongruously out into a field. I puzzled over how it came to be such a funny shape for a long time, and it took several old maps to make the picture. The land itself was the end of an old lane into the field. The reason it was sticking out was that the current field was once several, and the lane ran to the end of one of these old fields. Those fields had been the land belonging to a cottage, of which there are no visible remains. But once you have pieced it together from the map you can clearly see where someone's home and garden have left their mark in the land.

This land, which is ours for a time, has a little wood and a steep sided valley. From the Tithe Map we can see that it was all arable at that time - as a result of the Napoleonic Wars? That means all that incredibly undulating land would have been ploughed. When I dug up the shoe of a mule it became clear how my predecessors on the land had done that unlikely and very temporary ploughing. Elsewhere, an expert in woodland conservation pointed out to me that the trees which appear to be growing out of our walls actually predate the walls. They are the coppice trees which were in the wood before the land was cleared for cultivation. The bark of the coppice trees used to be used for tanning, and stripping the bark was a seasonal occupation for people living here. The wall builders had just incorporated the trees into the walls when they built them.

All this makes me want to be very gentle with the land, and leave these marks of other people's lives, along with my own. The danger with the earthmoving game is that suddenly the machine erases all marks of the past, and if I am not careful I am no better than the person grubbing up hedges and building houses and roads all over this very fragile countryside.

Published in Financial Times March 21st 1998

Autumn Colour. © Charles Hawes