Being More Gilbert
Sitting in the deserted garden at The Wakes in Selborne looking out on the Great Mead and Selborne Hanger is one of life’s pleasures. The great oak, planted in 1729 has recently burst into leaf, the kestrels nest in their customary hole half-way up its trunk. Brimstone, peacock and orange tip butterflies flutter across the 20-acre Great Mead, yellow with cowslips and meadow buttercups and surrounded by blackthorn hedges. Beyond the meadow, Selborne Hanger, steep ancient woodland of ash, beech and oak, is bursting bright with spring green.
This was home to the great naturalist Gilbert White; hallowed ground for today’s naturalist. It is where Gilbert ‘observed narrowly’, the first person to conduct close fieldwork to understand nature better. It is where he formulated the concept of the food chain, wrestled with the conundrum of what happened to hirundines in the winter, concluded that earthworms were essential to healthy soil, and contemplated the interconnectedness of life. It is where he recorded the dates of natural events, an early practitioner of phenology, a science that has helped us understand climate change. And it is, of course, here that he wrote his much-loved book, the Natural History of Selborne. Published in 1789 it has more than 350 editions and has never been out of print.
The reason I sit here today is very un-Gilbert. His aversion to coach travel prevented all but essential journeys. Unlike Gilbert, I have travelled great distances to enjoy nature. Gilbert made constant excuses to avoid visiting his brother, who had moved to Lancashire, but five years ago my wife and I moved from our beloved Yorkshire to East Hampshire to job-share the role of director at Gilbert White & The Oates Collections, a museum (the holy relic of which is the original manuscript of the ‘NHS’), field studies centre, café and 30 acres of listed garden and parkland. We’d applied for the job on a whim having fallen under Selborne’s spell earlier in the year.
2020 is the tercentenary of the great man’s birthday. A busy programme of events was planned, at The Wakes and further afield, including the Natural History Museum no less, to raise awareness of Gilbert and his work, and to tempt more visitors to Selborne to boost our flagging coffers. But here we are in lockdown. The museum and grounds are closed. After strategising to meet the potentially catastrophic loss of income, furloughing staff, turning the café into a village shop and take-away meals operation to support the local community and applying for grants, we can but wait as our plan plays out.
In the meantime, we can enjoy the great man’s former home and wonder what he might have made of all of this.
Like most of my colleagues, I am ‘furloughed’ on the government’s job retention scheme. As my wife works on. I am fortunate to have time to ‘be more Gilbert’. The man’s genius was in looking and listening intently at a small scale. When do we get a chance to do that in our ‘normal’ lives? But here’s the luxury to observe narrowly myself and muse on where we have come since 1789.
I head along the mature hedge between the Great Mead and the Ewell field, names Gilbert would have known along with the Piddle and the Pumfle, adjacent woodland and meadow. One of the kestrels perches in a mature hedgerow oak, and above, rooks mob a buzzard that nests in the Hanger. How many black hairstreak butterfly eggs, laid on two-year-old blackthorn, have survived the winter predations of spiders and birds this year? Will the adjacent grasses be thick enough to support harvest mouse nests, a species identified by Gilbert?
In his time the Great Mead was subdivided into small fields by hedgerows, like most of the surrounding landscape. Parts of Kings Field to the south and the North Field were still open fields, relics of the mediaeval farming system. Sheep, barley and hops were dominant where wheat, rape and cattle reign supreme today.
In the mead the ribwort plantain which was rampant two years ago is now sparse and the cowslips have spread more widely. Last year, the Hanger had grey brown patches within the greenery until late into May, whilst this year the ash, beech and oak ‘blew’ within 10 days. My attempt at phenology.
I dally in the wine pipe, a replica of a primitive bird hide constructed by Gilbert from a Portuguese barrel after he and his friend the vicar had consumed the 760 bottles of port it previously contained and consider his ingenious reuse of materials. Though I’m not sure that I would go so far as using the skin of my favourite dog to bind my personal copy of the NHS.
Beneath an isolated beech I count over a dozen green shoots of white helleborine. This and nearby beech woodland in the Piddle is stronghold for the species in Hampshire with over 200 individuals most years.
Gilbert White was a humble man, curious and thirsty for knowledge. Whilst he rarely left his beloved Selborne, he corresponded with the great naturalists of his day including Pennant, Linnaeus and Banks, fresh from wanderings in the Pacific with Cook. He would have loved e-mail.
Confinement would have meant little change for Gilbert. He would have carried on being Gilbert; observing, learning and enjoying. After eventually predicting that swifts and swallows migrated, I suspect he would have been fascinated by the idea that a virus (an organism he had no knowledge of) could have migrated across the whole world within three months, let alone by the ivy bees, only recently recorded in Britain, that have set up home in his garden. In the last five weeks, I have become very ‘Gilbert’. Due to a strange combination of a random job application and a pandemic I am much ‘more Gilbert’, finding time to work on grass and insect identification and being intimately connected to this very special corner of the world.
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