à chacun son goût

Goats eat anything, don’t they?  Or so we thought before hearing that our mission today was defined as “low level scrub management in the area that was the goat-grazing compartments.”

It was hard to imagine what kind of cellulose material a goat could possibly spurn, given that in my experience Alpine goats really do eat pillowcases, and will go on to devour pillow and mattress given half a chance.  As happens when there are young men in a party who simply do not believe Austrian landlady’s warning to lock all the doors when going out, including the one on the first floor, which leads to the outside fire-escape.

Perhaps South-Oxfordshire goats, living amidst the rolling hills of the Chilterns, have become soft; and it is only their counterparts in tougher parts of the world which retain the omnivorous instinct + some pretty awesome mountaineering skills.  Heck, I remember (another sign of me getting old: starting to reminisce) expeditioners in Altai Autonomous Republic (by the border of Mongolia, so not many westerners with kitbags full of yummy fabric passing by) re-naming the ground squirrels Sockenfresser (‘sock eaters’) – when they discovered the results of an overnight raid on their tent.

In the absence of hardy goats and ground-squirrels, it was up to us Green-Gymmers to come to the aid of beleaguered chalk-grassland flowers.  First step, solve problem of gate fitted with extra-secure latch …

and take a moment out to read the noticeboard for visitors:

On the way to the former goat-pens, see indications of why the situation cannot be ‘just left to nature’.  Here, a tussle between bramble and dog-violets for growing space …

and take another moment out to wonder, “Why are they called dog-violets?  They don’t look anything like dogs.”  (Answer: I don’t know.  An encyclopedia will tell you that they are so called to distinguish them from scented violets, but that doesn’t really explain the choice of ‘dog-’ for prefix.)

Step 2: decide which tools will be needed, and transport by hand to the target area …

while thinking what hard work it is going to be climbing back up again at the end of the session.

Loppers and the odd small saw were selected.  Two pitchforks and the fire-lighting kit were, we were assured, already down there.  On arrival at the fire-site, there indeed were the two forks, but where was the fire-lighting kit (big, red, metal box)?

Step 3: see if there is sufficient residual heat in the fire from the day before to be able to re-start it.  Answer: no.  Consider briefly rubbing two sticks/Green-Gymmers together.  Instead resort to lighting new fire with steel + cotton wool.  This is something I have never managed to do, so I was very impressed when the site manager was successful at the first time of asking:

Meanwhile, Green-Gymmers get going on clearing bramble and scrub which goats turned their noses up at:

If there were wistful thoughts that a dasselbasher might have been a more useful implement, given the proportion of bramble to scrub, these were set aside as we found just how resilient winter-toughened lengths of bramble are.  There are reasons why, in some areas of the country, they were traditionally used for rope – as in the nursery rhyme, ‘Here we go gathering knots in May’.  (Yes, ‘knots’ – East-Anglian dialect for ‘lengths of rope’.  Not ‘nuts’, as in many a nonsensical rendering of the rhyme: one could hardly be harvesting shell-fruits in early summer.  The alternative explanation of the rhyme is that it refers to ‘knots’ of flowers/blossom.)

It being a chilly start to a day when temperatures of 20 Celsius had been forecast, some volunteers were still kitted out in winter gear (fleeces, woolly hats, &c).  While I had gone to the opposite extreme of summer jacket, sunhat, sunglasses, suncream, insect repellent – the works:

The best feature of this work area had to be the view – though a little hazy today.  Yesterday, apparently, one could see the Cotswolds:

The downside of that area: it just has to have the highest trip-hazard rating of all the places we have worked at.  One had to tread awfully carefully to avoid looking even sillier by ending up sprawled on one’s face (which thankfully didn’t happen to anyone):

The goats would doubtless have made short work of our idea of good refreshments:

After tea-break we pressed on with the task, making rapid progress burning up heaps of brash left by the previous (non-Green-Gym) work-party as well as the cuttings from our own work with the loppers.  As grassland was cleared, we could see some of the diversity of plant-life which we were aiming to safeguard.  Here, infant Early-Purple Orchid (Orchis mascula), Twayblade (Neottia/Listera ovata), and St John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum):

Nearby were also:

• Speedwell (Veronica) 
• Forget-Me-Not (Myosotis) 
• Lady’s Bedstraw – a ‘strewing herb’ (Galium verum)
• Birdsfoot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus, aka Granny’s Toenails)
• Salad Burnet – edible, as the name implies (Sanguisorba minor) 
• Yellow Meadow Vetchling (Lathyrus pratensis)

 

Ah, the wonders of computers!  For I reflected at the time that I did not have to write down all the details of these plants on the spot: an internet-search tool would manage perfectly well even if I had only approximate knowledge of name or spelling.  This naturally led to some of us considering the difficulties created by Spellchecker, when Spellchecker thinks it knows best.   

Some of us find that Spellchecker leaves us in the lurch when we’ve spelled a word correctly, but it happens to be the wrong word for the occasion.  Other times, the word-processor – unless one watches it very closely – auto-‘corrects’ words one did spell correctly the first time.  Examples:

• Spellchecker tried to re-write the title of this blog as ‘Chacun a son gout’.  Exactly as in the Flanders and Swann song!
• ‘Rabbi’ routinely comes out as ‘Rabbit’
• And if one has occasion to refer to more than one rabbi, one has to be extra-specially careful, for this may be altered to ‘Rabies’!

We know, of course, that the correct term for a group of Green-Gymmers is a ‘banter’.  But what, someone asked me, should the collective noun for rabbis be? 

The answer to that is still awaited.  Suggestions, anyone?

Meantime, what finally put a stop to Green-Gym chatter this morning?  Toiling up the hill again at the end of the session!  At least one could turn round and see if one could make out where we had been today:

Before

After