Close to home: neglected beauty over the garden fence
Instead of presenting individual fine art images, this page is a short photo essay: a record in words and pictures of a particular time and place. The place is the fields near my home in Uplyme, Devon; the time is early August 2007.
Late summer is often a rather tired and dusty affair in the country, and this year is no exception. So, rather than being ravished by fresh greens and exuberant growth, we contemplate dark, sun-crisped foliage, cut stubble, and collapsed weeds in the hedgebanks. To find something worth photographing requires a bit more inventiveness, hence this page.
This year, because it has been so wet, the hay and silage are only just being made, and the harvest is only partway through. Over on Shapwick Hill, my neighbour is baling hay, and all the cows are standing in a row watching the unusually interesting scenery. This panoramic format image shows a very typical farm scene, probably being repeated all over England this week when we have at last had a few fine warm days to dry the cut grass. To some, the temptation might be to boost the saturation and contrast to give this more imapact - but for me, it perfectly recalls the washed-out look of the fields at this time of year.
Then a look over the uncultivated corner of another field adjoining the garden. The swooping lines of the field boundaries echo the contours of Cannington valley, looking west towards Seaton. The pale yellow field is normally pasture - but this year it's been cut for silage for the first time that I can remember. With the late cut and poor weather, I imagine the farmer needs all the fodder he can get; even small areas at the top of steep slopes are worth cutting this year.
To the casual eye, the uncultivated corner of the nearest field just looks like a mess of weeds and dry earth. But look closer, and you see a huge profusion of arable weeds, offering a feast for butterflies and finches.
This neglected spot may not contribute to the wealth of the nation - but is an invaluable resource for wildlife as long as it escapes the plough. Probably not for long, as I spotted a big pile of fertiliser in the field gate ready for spreading. England needs more overlooked places like this - not to be tidied up like suburbia, despite what a lot of recent country residents might like! Of course the weeds have to be kept under control, but we don't need to be too obsessive about it.
Scarlet pimpernel, forget-me-not, white clover, charlock, common and spear thistles, St John's wort, broad and narrow-leaved dock, common poppy, Oxford ragwort, black medick, fleabane, nettles, dandelions, hawksbeard - and probably lots of others I missed.
So: did I come away with any good photos? Not really - but I had the pleasure of watching butterflies feeding as well as seeing a wildflower I've never come across before.
Two ground-level shots of common poppies. They say a good photographer has dirty knees - and that's often true. Eye-level is frequently one of the most boring viewpoints. A shallow depth of field, and differing focal planes for two different interpretations.
Below: food for finches: puffs of sunlit thistledown
