In Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, John Lewis-Stempel charts a year in the life of a field on his farm on the Herefordshire border. If you're thinking that sounds like it could be a claustrophobic or dull experience, put such ideas out of your mind immediately. Books have been written about entire countries that contain a less interesting cast of characters than Lewis-Stempel's account of one field on the edge of Wales. Foxes, red kites and voles become as intricately shaded as characters in an HBO drama, the readers' sympathies swinging between them and their adversaries. Not every English meadow contains such a vast variety of wildlife as Lewis-Stempel's, and he's lucky to live somewhere so unspoilt, but his immense, patient powers of observation – along with a flair for the anthropomorphic – mean he is able to offer a portrait of animal life that's rare in its colour and drama.
Lewis-Stempel's eye for detail and the poetic imagery of sentences such as "Behind me the river shouts with the abandon of a football crowd" or "Someone has stirred the clouds into milk pudding" are reminiscent of the late, brilliant Roger Deakin. But if Deakin is a writer you feel you could have easily gone for an ale with in a beer garden, dressed in your oldest jeans, Lewis-Stempel is one you sense you might have to dress up for slightly. He shoots game, has a son called Tristram, and his ancestors have connections to Elizabeth I (his descriptions of the latter are arguably the only bum note in the book). But when he writes about the history of his meadow – and by extension the British countryside as a whole – it never feels like he's writing purely from a landowner's perspective.
Meadowland is folksy and funny at times (see Lewis-Stempel's description of a neighbour known as "the black-and-tan man" because he's constantly asking people if they've seen "a little black-and-tan dog") and, even if you don't approve of its author for shooting foxes and pheasants, he writes at such a powerful emotional level, you at least get a sense of his ambivalent feelings: he is, he says, the only person he knows who "has both hunted foxes on horseback and 'sabbed' fox hunts". The fact that he rears and eats livestock means he's that much closer to the animals he writes about, and able to describe the joy and sadness of life with them that much more powerfully. Passages here will probably stay with me for years: especially the one about a red kite eating one of his lambs and the one about he and his wife losing their daughter and fearing she'd been eaten by their pigs, only to find her happily sunbathing with them.
There is barely a creature in Meadowland that I didn't learn at least one interesting new fact about (the occasional tendency of badgers to hold funerals for one another is a particular favourite). It's also a book that will give you a new appreciation of grass: for its different textures, for the amazing stuff going on beneath it throughout the year, for what can go on above it. After finishing it, I found myself reluctant to give my lawn its regular cut, stalling and examining its texture. "A lawn is a meadow in captivity," says Lewis-Stempel. "In the middle ages, a lawn was more like a meadow; it was a flowery mead, bursting with perfumed wildflowers and herbs and grasses." In medieval times, this meadow was a place used for dancing, walking and lovemaking. A dream featuring a lawn is often forgettable, but one featuring a good meadow can become etched on your mind for ever.
