Man-made reed beds

click photo to enlarge
A couple of days ago I got up from my sickbed* and accompanied my wife on a shopping expedition to Spalding. Because I hadn't been out for a while we also had a walk round Springfield Gardens, a 20 acre site adjacent to a shopping centre. As we came upon an area of reed bed and water I reflected on how well this feature had developed. In particular, how natural-looking it was, what a welcome contrast it made to the areas of formal planting, and how it must increase the biodiversity of the site.

There was a time in the latter decades of the twentieth century when, on the back of the rise in environmental consciousness, every garden seemed to acquire a "wild" area. It could be as little as a pile of rotting logs, a bed of nettles or a structure made of bamboo tubes for bees to colonise. Or it was a meadow area, a natural-looking pond or perhaps a stand of native trees and shrubs designed to attract birds and insects. What characterised many of these developments was their unnatural appearance; the way they were clearly bolted on to a traditional garden. Rather fewer fulfilled their aim of being a haven of wildness in an area of manicured order, a place attractive to native species that was a counter-balance to the regularity and species-poverty of many gardens and much agricultural land.

As I gazed across the greater reedmace, reeds and trees, I could, for a moment block out the sound of traffic on the nearby A17, forget the hum of air-conditioning in the buildings behind me, and imagine I was out in the marshes where bearded tits flitted about, bitterns boomed and the only sound was the reeds rustling in the wind.

* My absence from blogging in recent days is due, I think, to the generosity of one of my grandchildren. Not for the first time after a visit I was stricken by a minor illness; in this instance a sore throat, loss of voice, streaming nose and general lethargy. I seem to be on the mend.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 10.4mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  - 0.3EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A man-made view

click photo to enlarge

The distinction between "natural" and "man-made" is interesting because it implies that which is made by man is not natural. And yet many of the problems that mankind creates, it can be argued, come about because people see themselves as different from, and better than, nature. If mankind saw itself as part of the natural world, beholden to what it gives us, and responsible to it as well, then perhaps we might fit into our world a little better, rather than moulding it and destroying it to fit around us. Mankind's depredations often result in diminished biodiversity, though animals and plants are surprisingly good at adapting to the new landscapes that we create.

In fact, it's surprising how many who live in Europe have forgotten (or maybe never knew) just how little of our landscape is now "natural" in the sense of being unchanged by man. Take, for example, the English Lake District, a National Park revered by poets and everyman for its natural beauty. It's a fact that with the exception of a few of the highest summits and screes it looks very different from how it would look without the effects of sheep grazing, forestry, shooting, and tourism. The romantic, bare fells would soon disappear under scrub without farming and land management to keep them clear. Take too, the area of wetlands known as the Norfolk Broads. These lowland peat bogs, reed beds, lakes and rivers, now the playground of boat owners and bird watchers, and home to a remarkable variety of plant and animal life, look like a natural feature of East Anglia. And so they were thought to be until the 1960s. Then the botanist, Joyce Lambert, showed that they result from peat excavation, an activity that began with the Romans and continued and grew through the medieval period, until at one point Norwich Cathedral was extracting 320,000 tons a year!

The photograph above is a spring evening view of part of the northernmost area of water in the Broads, Horsey Mere. The water levels used to be controlled by the five-storey windpump built in 1912 (shown), but today electrical pumps do the job. This is another photograph where I seem to have been influenced by my interest in painting. The processing I've given the shot gives something of a seventeenth century Dutch painting look to the image, making it a man-made view in another sense too!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 22mm (44mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.0
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 400
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On