- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
We’re going to review a couple of books this week, you and I.
I mentioned backalong that I was going to address the merits of Colin Pearse’s 2 volume opus ‘South Devon (South Hams) Cattle In Their Verdant Pastures’. And indeed I’d better get on, as I’m already receiving correspondence on the subject. One wise sage has sent me reams of information regarding the book, the breed, and the wider Westcountry farming community. And as endlessly fascinating as this stuff is David, if I’m not careful I’m going to be writing the third volume!
So…. This is a difficult publication to review, or even sum up. A thumbnail description would show it’s an encyclopaedic collection of stories about, and photographs of, the cattle –both historic and contempory-, sale posters, and show results. The text is both Colin’s own gentle prose, and accounts drawn from other aficionados. Equal weight is given to the cattle, and their connection to the Westcountry families who raise them. But it’s so much more than that. Individual herds of cows, and their place in the landscape are listed and described with a fondness running deep as an ocean. Ranging from the days of hand milked herds of yore, through to the colossal weights attained when steers were run on. The reader is taken from the lush richness of the coastal South Hams, with their lugubrious great cattle, up onto the slopes of Dartmoor where cows nimbly tread between the granite boulders. Onwards even to far flung corners of the world where the cattle have travelled. Interspersed are photos of Colin’s own cows on Dartmoor- and who could blame him!
The books as a whole remind me of the huge part these iconic orange cattle have played in some of our lives. Of all native breeds, their place in their original homeland is still deeply, extraordinarily entrenched. Around me, they’re still the breed of choice on more than half the farms. As the books recount, there’s herds on farms where they’ve been over a century ago- both pedigree and commercial. In a changing world, their constancy is hard to grasp. The breeds’ collective gravity causes the rest of the world to orbit them. Their docility and easy nature are beyond price, and scores of the photographs Colin gleaned show this.
This pair of books represents a phenomenal piece of work. And for anyone connected to the breed, the landscape, and the community, they’re an essential and endless font of interest.
Moving on, I’d heard good things about a very special little book by a German forester called Peter Wohllenben, called ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’. Then an old friend sent me a translated copy, so I had a chance to explore this secret world. For the author takes you on a journey into the very cells of trees, detailing how they move food and water up and down, communicate warnings to each other, and enter complex symbiosis with everything from fungi woven into their very roots, to the fauna and flora we can see with our own eyes. And by his showing us all this with fresh eyes, a world of activity I’d scarce given thought to is revealed. The sharing of nutrients between trees, using roots and fungi populations was a revelation, as is their level of ‘communication’ and ‘response’ to insect attack.
The author is a forester long employed to manage a community woodland – a typically sensible and efficient Teutonic arrangement. And as his career went on, he began to see the woodland in his care as more than a ‘tree trunk’ farm. Corresponding with a variety of academics and institutions– some of whom are very much on my own reference list- he has come to unravel the deepest mysteries of how trees function, especially in old growth, unmanaged forests.
And here is the stumbling point for me. He attributes far more conscious ‘thought’ to his trees than I’m ready to buy into. Typically, we think of ‘anthropomorphising’ as lending human traits to animals….he does it to trees. If saplings benefit from the dappled shade of their parent trees, I don’t accept that the parents are deliberately tending their offspring…rather it’s a happy evolutionary coincidence. And if a leafless stump is somehow able to survive decades – centuries even- after it should have rotted away, by robbing nutrients from the roots of surrounding trees, that doesn’t mean either is taking conscious steps. It merely reflects that circumstance has permitted this to occur.
Increasingly, it matters that we don’t attribute magical properties to woodland, but nonetheless, this is a fascinating book for anyone with one foot in ‘the sticks’.
There…a weighty tome your shelf should have, and a stocking filler to make you think.
-------------------------
Anton's articles are syndicated exclusively by TFF by kind permission of the author and WMN.
Anton also writes regularly for the Dartmoor Magazine
I mentioned backalong that I was going to address the merits of Colin Pearse’s 2 volume opus ‘South Devon (South Hams) Cattle In Their Verdant Pastures’. And indeed I’d better get on, as I’m already receiving correspondence on the subject. One wise sage has sent me reams of information regarding the book, the breed, and the wider Westcountry farming community. And as endlessly fascinating as this stuff is David, if I’m not careful I’m going to be writing the third volume!
So…. This is a difficult publication to review, or even sum up. A thumbnail description would show it’s an encyclopaedic collection of stories about, and photographs of, the cattle –both historic and contempory-, sale posters, and show results. The text is both Colin’s own gentle prose, and accounts drawn from other aficionados. Equal weight is given to the cattle, and their connection to the Westcountry families who raise them. But it’s so much more than that. Individual herds of cows, and their place in the landscape are listed and described with a fondness running deep as an ocean. Ranging from the days of hand milked herds of yore, through to the colossal weights attained when steers were run on. The reader is taken from the lush richness of the coastal South Hams, with their lugubrious great cattle, up onto the slopes of Dartmoor where cows nimbly tread between the granite boulders. Onwards even to far flung corners of the world where the cattle have travelled. Interspersed are photos of Colin’s own cows on Dartmoor- and who could blame him!
The books as a whole remind me of the huge part these iconic orange cattle have played in some of our lives. Of all native breeds, their place in their original homeland is still deeply, extraordinarily entrenched. Around me, they’re still the breed of choice on more than half the farms. As the books recount, there’s herds on farms where they’ve been over a century ago- both pedigree and commercial. In a changing world, their constancy is hard to grasp. The breeds’ collective gravity causes the rest of the world to orbit them. Their docility and easy nature are beyond price, and scores of the photographs Colin gleaned show this.
This pair of books represents a phenomenal piece of work. And for anyone connected to the breed, the landscape, and the community, they’re an essential and endless font of interest.
Moving on, I’d heard good things about a very special little book by a German forester called Peter Wohllenben, called ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’. Then an old friend sent me a translated copy, so I had a chance to explore this secret world. For the author takes you on a journey into the very cells of trees, detailing how they move food and water up and down, communicate warnings to each other, and enter complex symbiosis with everything from fungi woven into their very roots, to the fauna and flora we can see with our own eyes. And by his showing us all this with fresh eyes, a world of activity I’d scarce given thought to is revealed. The sharing of nutrients between trees, using roots and fungi populations was a revelation, as is their level of ‘communication’ and ‘response’ to insect attack.
The author is a forester long employed to manage a community woodland – a typically sensible and efficient Teutonic arrangement. And as his career went on, he began to see the woodland in his care as more than a ‘tree trunk’ farm. Corresponding with a variety of academics and institutions– some of whom are very much on my own reference list- he has come to unravel the deepest mysteries of how trees function, especially in old growth, unmanaged forests.
And here is the stumbling point for me. He attributes far more conscious ‘thought’ to his trees than I’m ready to buy into. Typically, we think of ‘anthropomorphising’ as lending human traits to animals….he does it to trees. If saplings benefit from the dappled shade of their parent trees, I don’t accept that the parents are deliberately tending their offspring…rather it’s a happy evolutionary coincidence. And if a leafless stump is somehow able to survive decades – centuries even- after it should have rotted away, by robbing nutrients from the roots of surrounding trees, that doesn’t mean either is taking conscious steps. It merely reflects that circumstance has permitted this to occur.
Increasingly, it matters that we don’t attribute magical properties to woodland, but nonetheless, this is a fascinating book for anyone with one foot in ‘the sticks’.
There…a weighty tome your shelf should have, and a stocking filler to make you think.
-------------------------
Anton's articles are syndicated exclusively by TFF by kind permission of the author and WMN.
Anton also writes regularly for the Dartmoor Magazine
