A Good Parcel of English Soil by Richard Mabey

Author:Richard Mabey [Mabey, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846146176
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

The lakes and thickets just south of Uxbridge resembled this scene re-imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. My own rambles (invigorating, I concede, but far from health-giving) took me across derelict Victorian rubbish tips and through burgeoning woods of rampant Asian and Mediterranean shrubs – buddleia, bladder senna, Russian vine. I saw terns wafting over pits where the dredgers were still pulling up buckets of gravel, and great-crested grebes nesting on floating car tyres. The fragrances on the breeze were household garbage and engine oil, and the top predator was the scrapyard Alsatian guard dog. On one of my very first forays I stumbled into a plant I scarcely knew existed in Britain, a thorn apple, an aggressively bushy member of the nightshade family from the New World, with deceptively beautiful, swan-necked flowers that later develop into spiny fruits the size of conkers. These contain potent, psychotropic alkaloids, and up to a few centuries ago the seeds were used as an anaesthetic during surgery. Wild dope – sprung maybe from seeds in an imported Peruvian house plant – was growing on a refuse tip just three miles from Uxbridge tube station.

I was, for a while, emotionally lost in these ecologically potent badlands. I felt exhilarated, bewildered, mischievous. Despite the way my imagination had been freed up by those childhood days in The Field, I still shared the conventional, anthropomorphic assumption that industrial dereliction was as inimical to nature as to humans. But here the wild seemed to have a different agenda, an insistence on a postmodern coexistence with the city, even a hint of triumphalism. In the mood of the times, it seemed almost insurrectionary.

It wasn’t that I needed relief from the indoor publishing routine. The work we were doing at Penguin Education, reinventing the school textbook, was radical and powerfully exciting. Walking out into the bolshie exuberance of Metroland’s jungle edges seemed, in the fervid atmosphere of the late 1960s, to be just taking the office outdoors.

This was all a long time ago. These days much of the land is being reined back into a more recognizable Metroland profile. The canal towpaths are gravelled over, and marinas for weekend narrowboats are being scalloped out along their edges. Part of the area is now inside the Colne Valley Regional Park, with its own signposted walks and interpretation boards. But many of the refuse-tip scrublands are still there, now evolving into a bizarre high forest of thirty-foot-tall buddleia, sycamore, willow and pioneering oaks. And down in the Colne’s tributaries, great green wands of club-rush are swallowing the dumped fridges and lager cans.

But in trying to piece this story together, to understand better how these improbable wastes had captured my heart, and those of so many others, there were bits of Metroland I needed to experience again, and crucial stretches I’d never seen at all. One in particular lay deep in my old Penguin terroir. I first saw it, tipped off by a friend, in 2005. In the midst of a cluster of old

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