Trees and Hedgerows and their significance to artistic thinking

I have a friend who is involved with the Wildlife Trust in Kent and we were discussing the rationale behind taking out old hedgerows and the subsequent effect of topsoil erosion (as you do). The scientific logical argument behind doing this is that if a field is bigger you can use machinery and make the work more effective however in due course we discover the long-term effect is detrimental; a little bit like killing the goose that lays the golden egg, you may get short-term benefit by long-term disaster.

I grew up in Cornwall and I did actually meet some old farm labourers who had lived and worked on the land and had some of the old-time wisdom that often feature in West Country jokes. One of these is the guy turns up in a flash car asking directions from the old farmer ‘so what is the quickest way to get to Scotland from here’ the old farmer thinks for a while and then says’ best not to start from here’. That sums up the problem that we have currently, many things including the education system, health care and the environment are best fixed some place other than where we are.

There were written cases around the time of the enclosure acts where trees that had figured in the lives of generations of a family suddenly became the possession of a landowner where in the past it sat on common land. This was one of the biggest forms of theft that we experienced in this country and something that is rarely taught in any significant way in schools, that the people with money stole the land by changing the law and disenfranchised ordinary people like you and me.

Old style thinking that the tree lived on the land, and had done for centuries, and did not belong to anyone it belonged to the land. Now this argument works incredibly well when it comes to environmental thinking, because if that tree has a right to exist and has some form of ownership of the land it sits on then by keeping it the tree effectively safeguards all of the environmental infrastructure that it supports and is supported by. This is a simple way of expressing a complex idea just as listening to something in your head and expressing it musically is easier than explaining how the music and is created theoretically.

The problem with the intellectual approach is it is far too simplistic and seems to be inefficient when dealing with complex situations such as the environment and expression in music. So going back to the idea of the hedgerow and the incredible diversity created by borderlands (it is well known that diversity increases in areas that are bordering something else, such as a shoreline, forest edge or in this case the edge of a field) maybe this is a good way of looking at music that does not sit easily within a genre in that it might create more musical biodiversity, the Beatles and their use of Indian music as an example.

So there we have it music and hedgerows and we have not even got into the song of the blackbird and thrush which of course along with the Oak, Hawthorn and Apple would give us plenty of material for the English folk music tradition.

Vic

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