Calendar Customs

Customs and plants

Many of our customs have been continued or revived across the country by people who share a strong relationship with local plants, they enrich local culture and add to the identity of our places. These events, old and new, and the records and exhibitions, have not been inspired by a scientific or ecological interest, but rather a working affection with which people hold their familiar floral landscape.

Our cultural relationship with the land is born out of what is at hand, and more has been lost in the space of two generations than our ancestors could have imagined. As most of us spend less and less time in touch with it, we lose our understanding of familiar nature.

Our need for wild plants and trees, which exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen, which hold onto our soil, which provide food and materials for ourselves and so many other creatures, is vital in economic, ecological, cultural and spiritual terms. We depend upon them. It is not enough to content ourselves with admiration and celebration of them, going no further than taking stock of what we have or documenting what we've lost - we must work hard to conserve local wild plants, to make sure they can thrive where they most want to exist and create the conditions, ecologically and culturally, to invite them back to the localities from which they have been banished.

Customs involving plants have been celebrated for centuries. Holly, ivy and mistletoe, for example, remind us of their importance in season and festival.

The trees and flowers around us are often particular to their place and they add to the patchwork which makes up the locality. Attitudes and activities over 50 years have gone a long way towards undermining our sense of local difference, and much of the landscape and nature conservation focuses attention on the special and the rare.

The intensification of agriculture has resulted in the disappearance of many arable 'weeds', such as corn cockle, ox-eye daisy and knapweed, and of course, the effects of the decline in plant diversity and changing land use must be passed on to dependent animal life. No more teasels and rough grasses on field margins also means no more seeds for finches to feed on; it means there is nowhere for the voles and mice to live and breed resulting in a reduction in food for the barn owl. Organic and extensive farming, rather than intensive monoculture, offers the most promise for wild flowers and trees.

Hedgerows and hedgebanks, the linear havens for so many of our common countryside birds, frogs, snakes, insects and plants, have suffered greatly from destruction in favour of ever larger fields.

From Local Flora Britannica, published by Common Ground.

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