A Sting in the Tale (26 page)

The main house was a long, low, stone rectangle, with living accommodation on the ground floor and hay storage above. He lived in three small rooms, with only a stone sink to wash in – his loo was in an outside shed and consisted of a plank with a hole in it over a bucket. Poupard himself was a tiny, weather-beaten man in the ubiquitous blue overalls worn by all French farmers, with a flat cap pulled low over his eyes. He'd lived in the property all his life, but had clearly not maintained it. The window glass was mostly broken, with old fertiliser sacks nailed over the broken panes to keep the wind out. Successive generations of sacks had frayed and split in the wind, so he had nailed layer after layer on top over the decades. The front door was rotted away at the bottom, the gaps patched with flattened, rusty tin cans. The clay-tiled roof leaked so badly that there were pools of water on the floor – his old iron bed-frame was standing in an inch of fetid water. The house was surrounded by a collection of barns and outbuildings, most of which appeared to be in an even worse state of repair than the main house. The largest barn had holes in the tile roof through which an albatross could comfortably soar, and was clearly in imminent danger of collapse.

As we explored the upstairs of the main house, with Poupard taking care to steer us around the more rotten floorboards for fear we might fall straight through into the pool in his bedroom, we startled a barn owl from its roost on an old beam. I excitedly ran down the stairs and outside to watch as it circled the house; it eventually alighted in an oak tree next to the drive. I hadn't seen a barn owl in years. Poupard followed me out, looking at me rather curiously. He had obviously not expected me to be quite so interested in owls. Since we were outside, he pointed out the boundaries to the property – distant lines of oaks barely visible through the mist. The farm was situated in the midst of a sloping field which to me, someone who had never previously owned more than a quarter of an acre, seemed unimaginably vast.

I can't entirely explain why, but I was enchanted. I think the owl swung it. I guess the asking price had something to do with it, since it was of such a paltry magnitude that it wouldn't have been enough to buy a studio flat in Falkirk. My father did his level best to talk me out of it, and clearly thought that I had lost my marbles. He kept rubbing his head, which is a sure sign that he is worried. Undeterred, after sleeping on the decision, I offered the asking price the next day and Poupard accepted with alacrity. The legal formalities took a few months, and in February 2003 I drove back to sign the paperwork. After the signing I went to look over my new property, and I must admit that I began to have second thoughts. In the depths of winter it was colder, damper, and more formidably uninhabitable than ever it had appeared before. Icy rain was sheeting down from the west. Lara was with me, six months pregnant with our second boy Jedd, and she narrowly missed being savaged by the baying hound that threw itself towards her until violently pulled short by its chain. Finn, our eldest, was just a toddler and he backed away from the dog, tripped over on some rusting metal and fell in the mud, where he proceeded to burst into tears. Lara had not seen the property before and was, understandably, less than impressed.

I returned in March with my father for a ten-day blitz to make the place a little more habitable, and I have been slowly working on it whenever I get the chance ever since. My father often comes down with me to help out and, although his DIY skills are woeful, it is great to have the company. We now have, wonder of wonders, a flushing indoor toilet, sinks with hot running water, even a shower, and a roof that leaks only occasionally. Poupard would scarcely recognise it.

On those first trips down with my father we camped in the garden – much more pleasant than attempting to sleep in the house. For a toilet, we simply took a spade into the edge of the field and dug a hole – far more appealing than Poupard's external facilities. On one such occasion, late in the first summer after buying the property, I was squatting behind the hedge, surveying the rather splendid view across the fields, when I heard a distinctive high-pitched buzz. There were tall pink willowherbs in flower along the field margin, and there, foraging, I was delighted to see a shrill carder bumblebee. It was a rather beautiful male, with straw-yellow stripes and a reddish bottom, busying himself collecting nectar. This species is a great rarity in the UK – I had only ever seen them on the wilds of Salisbury Plain and in the Somerset Levels, and even there they are hard to find. To have them living on my farm in France was wonderful, and as soon as was convenient I rushed to tell my father.

Chez Nauche – the official name of the farm – is the most peaceful place. Outside the front door, the only evidence that there are other humans in the world are the vapour trails in the blue sky above, and the occasional distant chug of a farmer's tractor. Wall lizards scurry along the south-facing front of the house, snatching flies and fighting territorial battles. At night, garden dormice – beautiful and incredibly agile creatures with the face markings of a miniature badger – churr at one another while eating grapes from the vines I have trained over the walls, while glow-worms emit their phosphorescent green light from among the cracks in the old flagstone path. My boys have grown up spending a month-long holiday here every summer, catching mantises and butterflies in the meadow, building tree houses, and swimming in the local lakes and rivers when the afternoon heat becomes too much.

The changes I have wrought on the house are nothing compared to what has happened with the meadow. When I bought the property, the land had been under arable crops until very recently. Poupard had put the field down to grass the year before, but it was more or less a monoculture of false oat grass, a tall, coarse, emerald-green grass. Old plastic sacks of ammonium nitrate were strewn around in the barns, so it was clear that the fields had been fertilised, although I doubt Poupard would have put on more than the bare minimum as fertilisers are costly. Nonetheless, even small amounts are disastrous for flowers – they encourage coarse grasses to grow fast and tall, squeezing out all but the toughest herbaceous plants. Only along the edges of the drive and the hedge bottoms were there any flowers, and hence there were few bees and butterflies.

There is no easy way to reduce the fertility of soil in a meadow, yet it is impossible to recreate a rich flower community without first doing so. One option is to scrape off and remove the topsoil, but for such a large area this would have meant removing thousands of tonnes of soil and hence would have been prohibitively costly, as well as posing the considerable problem of where to dispose of it. An alternative is to deep plough, a tricky technique whereby the ploughman flips the top 2 feet or so of soil upside down, burying the more fertile topsoil under a thick layer of less fertile subsoil. Both methods require that one then sow a wild-flower mix, preferably using locally sourced seed. Such seed mixes cost several thousand pounds per acre; enough to sow the fields at Chez Nauche would have cost considerably more than the property itself.

There is a third option, but it requires considerable patience. If the hay is cut and removed each year, then some of the fertility is removed with it. So long as no more fertilisers are added, year-on-year removal of the hay results in a slow decline in fertility, and allows wild flowers to gradually creep back. I managed to contact a local farmer, Monsieur Fonteneau, who maintains a herd of 350 hungry goats, and he agreed to harvest my hay each year to provide winter fodder for his animals. Every July, he and his sons cut the hay and bind it into vast cylinders, removing about 80 tonnes of material and with it a small amount of the nitrogen and other artificial nutrients added by Poupard. Each year, out of politeness, Monsieur Fonteneau will pop in to exchange pleasantries. He is usually accompanied by one or more of his rotund boys whom he is training up to take over the family business. I offer them each a bottle of cold beer, which they drink while I rapidly exhaust my feeble repertoire of French farming-related conversation. None of them speaks a word of English, or if they do they have never let on, and my French is dimly remembered from lessons at school. To prepare for Fonteneau's annual visit I have rehearsed a number of conversational gambits, such as ‘
Le foin est bon cette année?
' (The hay is good this year?) and ‘
Comment sont les chèvres
?' (How are the goats?). Of course I rarely understand the answers, although I believe that his goats may have recently suffered from some sort of bloat. It is all a little awkward, but fortunately Fonteneau
et fils
drink fast; we smile, we shake hands, and we all breathe a sigh of relief that the conversation is over for another year.

Very slowly, over the last decade, the meadows have begun to fill with flowers. It has been frustratingly slow. Even if conditions are suitable, the flowers have to come from somewhere, and this limits how fast they return. Some, such as poppies, can survive for years as seed in the soil, but most of the perennial plants that typically thrive in a flower-rich meadow cannot, so seeds have to arrive from elsewhere. Some flowers have seeds which readily disperse over a huge distance. Dandelions are a well-known example – their seeds hang below a fluffy pappus of fine hairs and can drift for miles on the wind. They have lots of relatives – mouse-ears, cat's-ears, hawkbits and so on (the last taking its name from an ancient belief that hawks ate them to improve their eyesight). All share the same seed-dispersal mechanism, and so these were among the first flowers to arrive. The meadow is now a sheet of yellow in June and July, but only from late morning through to the afternoon, for these flowers close overnight and they are not early risers. Wild carrot followed close behind; the seeds are light and flattened, and so can blow a short distance on the wind. They seem to be thriving in the drier soils in the higher parts of the meadow. Other plants are much slower. Cowslip seeds are heavy and round, so they will always fall close to their parent. There were some cowslips along the side of the track to the farm, and these have been slowly spreading into the meadow, but they have only made it a few yards so far.

From a bumblebee's perspective, legumes are among the most vital components of a wild-flower meadow. Plants of this family include clovers, trefoils and vetches, as well as garden vegetables such as peas and beans, and they have an unusual trick that allows them to thrive in low-fertility soils. Their roots have nodules, small lumps inside which live
Rhizobium
, bacteria that can trap nitrogen from the air and turn it into a form usable by plants. Most plants are severely limited in their growth by a shortage of nitrates, which they require to construct proteins, and yet nitrogen, the element from which nitrates are made, comprises 80 per cent of the air that surrounds them. By enlisting the help of bacteria, legumes get around this problem – they feed their pet bacteria on sugars, which they obtain by photosynthesising, and in return the bacteria provide them with nitrates. This relationship gave legumes a huge advantage in the days before artificial fertilisers were widely deployed. Ancient hay meadows are full of clovers, trefoils, vetches, meddicks and melilots, able to outcompete grasses because they alone have access to plentiful nutrients. Most of these plants are pollinated by bumblebees.

Over the last fifteen years or so I have gathered a lot of records as to which bumblebees feed on which flowers, separated into visits for pollen and visits for nectar. One of the striking features of these data is that some bumblebee species, such as the brown-banded carder, the garden bumblebee and the ruderal bumblebee, seem to get nearly all of their pollen from legumes. What is so special about legume pollen? To find out, I gathered pollen samples from various different flowers – a remarkably tricky business, which bees make look ridiculously easy – and sent them off to a lab in Cambridge where their nutritional composition was analysed. It turned out that legume pollen is especially rich in protein. What is more, the protein in legume pollen was itself unusually rich in ‘essential amino acids', those which animals cannot synthesise for themselves. To ensure the fidelity of bumblebees, it seems that legumes offer pollen which is unusually rich in high-quality protein. Since pollen is the only source of protein available to bees, it makes perfect sense for them to selectively visit the flowers that provide the richest source.

There is an interesting parallel to be made here with vegans and vegetarians. Bees are the vegetarian descendants of wasps, having turned to feeding on pollen and nectar instead of the flesh of animals. They visit legumes to obtain protein. In much the same way, human vegetarians and especially vegans tend to include a large proportion of pulses in their diet because they provide a rich source of protein and particularly of essential amino acids – and pulses are the seeds of legumes. Legumes can afford to put plentiful protein into both their pollen and their seeds because of their root nodules.

The mutualistic relationships between bees, the flowers that they pollinate, and the bacteria that live within the roots of those plants are at the heart of the functioning of a natural, species-rich meadow. The problem is that these relationships can be ruined by application of a sack of fertiliser, which allows the grasses to swamp the legumes and other wild flowers, swiftly resulting in a bright green, flowerless sward, with no legumes, no
Rhizobium
, and no bees. In the farming world this is known as ‘improved' grassland. In the 1940s, Britain had in the region of 15 million acres of flower-rich grasslands. It is hard to get precise figures, but about 250,000 acres remain; a staggering loss of over 98 per cent. Fertilisers were cheap, and successive governments were keen to persuade farmers to boost productivity, so ecosystems that had taken hundreds of years to develop were subject to swift and wholesale destruction. Most of what remains of our flower-rich grasslands is in tiny patches of less than 5 acres, usually on nature reserves. I cannot find equivalent figures for France, but I suspect that they would be equally depressing for lowland areas such as the Charente as I have yet to discover a single sizeable patch of flower-rich grassland anywhere near Chez Nauche other than my own. It is hardly surprising, then, that many bumblebees and other insects have disappeared from much of the countryside, both in Britain and across Western Europe, for most of the flowers, including their favourite foods, have all but disappeared.