As we walk in fields of gold

In a scene straight out of a Constable painting, John Lewis-Stempel luxuriates in a wheat field embroidered with wildflowers, as noughts and crosses of swallows and starlings traverse the mellow May skies  

- John Lewis-Stempel

SOME years ago, I decided to re-create an old-fashioned cornfield, the sort of poppy-resplendent arable scene you seldom find these days outside the frame of a Constable painting. I had two principle guides for this experiment in retrofarming. One was my own boyhood memory from the early 1970s of a rustling wheat field embroidered with wildflowers (weeds, if you will). My greater guide, however, was a chance reading of Walks in the Wheat-fields by Victorian countryside writer Richard Jefferies. One particular picture-in-words arrested my heart:

'Let your hand touch the ears lightly as you walk... There are hares within, and many a brood of partridge chicks that cannot yet use their wings... Finches more numerous than the berries on the hedges... There are, then, the poppies, whose wild brilliance in July days is not surpassed by any hue of Spain. Wild charlock-a clear yellow-pink pimpernels, pink-streaked convolvulus, great white convolvulus, double-yellow toadflax, blue borage, broad rays of blue chicory, tall corncockles, azure corn-flowers, the great mallow, almost a bush, purple knapweed...'

Jefferies made 'no further catalogue' of the wildflowers growing in corn land, because it would take 'pages more. Before the coming of herbicides and pesticides in the 1950s, the arable fields of Britain vibrated with colour and life. Now? The wheat field has become a monotone, monochrome unit of production and flowers familiar to farmers since the Stone Age have become extinct. (RIP lamb succory, interrupted brome, stinking hawksbeard, (possibly) York groundsel.) Arable plants are our most critically threatened group of wild flora. They need saving.