The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began

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The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began

The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began

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My eureka moment of believing we had done the right thing,” says Forbes Adam, “was when Meg Abu Hamdan, who records butterflies here, told me: ‘When I walk through the gate of Three Hagges, I step into my 25 acres of hope.’ And also when I held my first pygmy shrew, came across wood anemone flowering and saw my first marbled white butterfly.” Forbes Adam has since created a charity, the Woodmeadow Trust, which is advising more than a dozen other community groups and landowners on woodmeadow projects, from Yorkshire to London. “It’s really exciting that we are starting to inspire other people,” says Forbes Adam. “Our aspiration is a woodmeadow in every parish.” I have a hypothesis that the book is narrated entirely by an abstracted version of James Galvin. Maybe this is obvious to others and I’m late to the party, but I found myself struggling to figure out who was talking to me and how/why they were involved. Even Trevor Dines, Plantlife’s botanical specialist, was taken by surprise when he created his own meadow on a small field he bought near his home in north Wales in 2015. The field had been what farmers traditionally describe as “improved” – its grass fertilised and grazed so intensively that delicate wildflowers disappeared. The field had about 20 species of plant. (Many intensively farmed grass fields are now sown with just one rye-grass species.) Dines stripped off this sward to expose the soil and spread fresh hay containing local wildflower seeds from a flower-rich meadow six miles away. This “natural seeding” technique has been a key principle of the coronation meadows, of which his is one. Finally, Taber’s world is a remarkably honorable life however this doesn’t mean I wish to read every last minutiae of her and Jill waxing their furniture each Spring. It was deeply moving to learn how much Taber exponentially appreciates the beauty of nature and all living creatures aside from cows strangely enough. I too live a simple, often mundane life as she did therefore I don’t care to read humdrum details about it. While there are moments the book was quite charming in warmth of heart, all in all it wasn’t the type of bookcraft to swoon me. It would be desirable if all the more wondrous descriptions in her publications could be extracted into a single volume so one wouldn’t have to muddle through as it were.

That apple tree, if it still exists, has seen many more seasons. But here I am, two decades later, drawing again from the inner wealth of that chapter in my life. And as I read Gladys Taber today, I am once again entranced. Her nature descriptions are so evocative, so joyful. She tosses in her simple love for mankind, her kindly hopes for peace on earth (this particular book was written shortly after the end of WWII). James Galvin works magic with The Meadow, and he successfully weaves together multiple strands of family history. This book is technically a novel, but it pulses with a frictionless reality. Consider the relationships between environment and man, man and animal, man and man, animal and environment. Consider tools and how men employ them as an intermediary in their relationship with the environment. Consider the passage of time. Consider how time washes over man, how brief our time here is. Consider the immutability of the environment, but how man's relationship with the environment mutates over time. Consider the struggle of life. This is a quiet, thoughtful read for those of us who have a strong heart connection with the high sagebrush country of the inter-mountain West. It follows about a century's-worth of people's doin's in a mountain meadow at 8,500 feet in southern Wyoming. The life requires great hardiness and ingenuity to withstand the isolation and trials of snow, wind, fire, hunger, disease, and financial uncertainty.Lilacs make their own purple dusk all day, or lift dreamy clusters of pure pearl. Their scent is cool and mysterious. It is surely one of the most romantic smells—it reminds me of old deserted gardens where long-vanished ladies come again to walk in the moonlight.

Taber has a positive, generous soul that reaches for light. She writes, "…I sometimes think that when people reach the day in which they see no good in anything different and new, on that day they begin to die. The will to live and the will to grow are the two foundation stones on which humanity is built. During all difficult days, I am determined to keep new interests going, lest I bog down in worry and anxiety. We need to use our time constructively, creatively, if possible" (209). Sound advice in this troubled spring. The book is beautifully and heartfully written, but be forewarned. It's essentially plotless, and non-linear in the extreme.I’m disappointed because I was hoping to love this publication; henceforth I doubt I’ll be reading anymore of her books. Beautifully illustrated with photographs specially taken by Jim Holden, Meadow is not only an insightful guide that helps to reveal the secret life of the flora and fauna of our classic hay meadows, but it also acts as a long-overdue celebration of the people behind these enigmatic grasslands. If you don’t have a garden, join local groups (or your parish council) that manage parks, playing fields, church yards or school grounds. Encourage them to create pollinator strips or allow areas of long grass in summer. Many people still see long grass as untidy, but will be won over if it is filled with flowers and framed by short grass or mown paths. The surviving hay meadows of the British Isles are an intrinsic part of our cultural heritage, representing a natural equivalent to our great churches, castles, and ancient standing stones. Those that remain provide a tantalising glimpse into the past to a time long before chemical fertilisers and herbicides robbed our grasslands of all their treasures; they are biodiversity hotspots, offering home and sanctuary to flora and fauna.

Most meadow-makers buy wildflower seeds for the initial creation. However, Baczkowska explains, commercially produced seed is grown to be harvested on the same day, so new knapweed flowers, for instance, will flower together and go to seed in the same week. Hand-collecting local seed – as Norfolk Wildlife Trust does in partnership with Norfolk Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, a charity run by farmers – gives meadows a much longer flowering season, making them more useful to pollinators, and more beautiful. “Keeping local seed types going will give you this resilience to climate change. It’s not just the diversity of species; diversity of genetics is really important,” says Baczkowska. A poem. A song. An ode. To be read slowly. Savor the language. Savor how the short chapters - some just a sentence long - feel like an aperture that slowly opens, takes in the view whole, then closes. Then repositions itself and repeats. The simple farm woman guise that Gladys wears so naturally is actually quite deceptive. Underneath, she is a very literary woman whose skillful pen continues to sow love into the heart of her readers forty years after her death.That being said, this was a magically lazy-river type of book. It takes you through the year by month starting in November when the family moved into an old homestead in Connecticut that was built in 1690. The charm and character of the place outside and in is beautifully described. Her thoughts are often poetic in nature. She tells fantastically of the nature around her. Any lawn or verge can be rewilded. Some remove turf and top-soil before sowing. Or just scuff up existing sward with a spade and a rake to make space for new seed. I use Emorsgate Seeds for native wildflowers, but if you can find a local seed source, that is even better. A favorite passage appears early: He built miles of fences, yards of homemade wooden pipe, a house, barns, sheds, corrals. He put up hay with horses and got down to scythe among the willows where the mower couldn't go. He never quit from the last star to first, proving that the price of independence is slavery. (p. 11).



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