Et in Arcadia Ego is the title of Poussin’s 16th-century painting depicting shepherds reading an inscription on a tomb. They are reflective, yet robustly shepherding their flocks, crooks in hand, their heads crowned with foliage.
This sense of the pastoral as alive is captured in Adam Nicolson’s Smell of Summer Grass. The book is a pleasure to read for the beautiful writing, the beguiling habitat, the misbegotten animals and the satisfaction of observing order being born of chaos.
This is not new territory for Nicolson, who has written extensively about Perch Hill in Sussex, the tumbledown farm he and his wife, Sarah Raven, bought in 1994, having sold everything and borrowed from their families to pursue their dream.
The price of Arcadia? £432,000. Nicolson keeps us abreast of the housekeeping costs, from Roger the ram (suspiciously cheap at £100) to the sum the man from Orange offered to put a mast up (£20,000), adding a fascinating layer to the story and a reality check to anyone with rose-tinted spectacles.
This is a dusting down and polishing up of a book he wrote 12 years ago. It is Perch Hill with hindsight, and the result is a hymn to British small farms that will stand as a wonderful document both of the past and the shifting present.
Nicolson writes of a decade straddling the millennium, when everything changed for small farmers, from foot-and-mouth to the hunting ban, from building regulations to health and safety, and above all money. Nicolson speaks both languages, coming as a journalist from the outside and moving into this dying world to pursue a life close to the land. He apologises for not being authentic, but he does not need to. The chronicler has his place.
And he’s funny. “If there were mental hospitals for farms, Perch Hill would have been sectioned in February,” he writes, describing a less than glorious period at the farm.
With excruciating honesty, he charts the journey he and Sarah make into the Sussex Weald, introducing her as “the woman for whom, a few months before, I have left my wife. That is a phrase which leaves me raw.” His subsequent mugging and breakdown and their search for somewhere to settle will strike a chord with many a mid-lifer.
Raven inhabits the book as a warrior queen, a Britannia with her home birth, her babies, and the determination that in just 15 years has made her one of the country’s most celebrated garden experts.
At one point Nicolson describes her “striding around like Patton in Normandy, buoyed up by change, by things happening”. But it becomes clear that her focus has been wonderful ballast to his vision.
Nicolson illuminates fields of vetch and buttercups, woodland, people and bluebells: “That incredible, glamorous, seductive haze of the bluebell’s blue, a nightclub sheen in low light, the sexiest colour in the English landscape.” But he is also sensible, not least of his own part in change.
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