For the tourist whisking briskly through the modern English landscape, all its rich particularity and variation is laid out like a theme park containing pockets of heritage experience. Dedham Vale in Suffolk is now “Constable Country” while Dorset is “Thomas Hardy’s Wessex”. Anna Pavord deplores the bossiness of this approach, its assumption that the pleasure of encountering the surprises of a new landscape need be snipped into a neat educational opportunity. When a visitor to the Jurassic Coast is greeted by a sign proclaiming it “the land of the dinosaurs”, the imagination is firmly plonked on the path the municipal tourist office has marked out with arrows. “With landscape,” Pavord writes, “you first need to be hooked. Then, later, you can engage with the place on your own terms, find out what you want to know, rather than be force-fed with the things that someone else has decided to tell you.”
Pavord, an acclaimed gardening columnist and writer, here revisits the British and their relationship with their landscape. She walks the places that she writes of and her vivid and knowledgeable descriptions of plant life, of seasons and of the changing historical topography of the land, are among the pleasures of an intensely enjoyable book. It is a book about place, about how deeply in the past the landscapes of our lives defined us. Pavord herself is from the Welsh borders, where her family have been farmers for generations. She is a hill person – and cannot feel the pull of, for example, the flat Norfolk coast with its watery skies. The book concludes with a moving account of her casting her mother’s ashes to be carried by the wind over the Usk valley.
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