14 quotes found
"[On the unsustained optimism at the time of the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018.] This new era did not dawn. But the prophecies of it are useful to revisit, because they should remind us that it didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. Because the country that Harry and Meghan married in was one that, just a few months before their wedding, declared Paulette Wilson, who had lived in Britain for 50 years, "removable to Jamaica" and detained her in Yarl's Wood. The Windrush scandal was also "modern" Britain."
"It is because Britain was breaking that Brexit happened in the first place. It was a necessary, phantom new road to prosperity when all other roads had reached a dead end. In that sense, it has been a success. Because when it did happen, the shock was so huge that it diverted attention away from all the reasons that it had come about in the first place. To those who opposed Brexit, leaving the EU was not only a political event, it was an emotional and cultural one too: a physical wrenching from a liberal fraternity, perpetrated by liars and charlatans and maybe even shady foreign influence. The feelings Brexit inspires are understandably strong. But they are also broadly wasted when their purpose is merely to reverse Brexit, to fixate on Brexit as a uniquely calamitous event that is bringing about Britain’s decline, rather than a secondary cause of that decline."
"Over the past decade, almost 22 million people have been displaced every year by weather-related events. The projection is even more staggering. By 2050, the forecast is that 1.2 billion people will join the ranks of climate migrants, most of them from the countries with the lowest capacity to deal with the fallout from global heating. They will not all be fleeing a fire or a flood. The climate crisis is not about a single photogenic weather event. The climate crisis is war, it is poverty, it is radicalisation, it is the disappearance of the habitat families have lived in for generations, and it is the geopolitical and security fallout of collapsing ways of making a living. The result is a movement crudely summed up as a "refugee crisis" – a description that makes a constant churn of displacement sound like an exotic temporary phenomenon that will abate, or can be quarantined to other countries, if only the barriers are raised high enough."
"19TH JULY SACRED GROVES Ancient Rome The Roman term ' (plural luci) referes to a class of woodland with special religious significance. Luci took the form of sacred groves or clearings, often featuring special trees and springs. They were places of celebration, communion and ritual offering. Well-documented examples include in (now in ) and (now the city of ). The was celebrated within such groves on 19th and 20th July."
"We speak of as if rock were the epitome of durability. It isn’t. Where rock meets water, it is water that wins in time, every time, and there are few places in England where this is more obviously true than the . Hollowness is ubiquitous here; a landscape riddled with caves and pots and channels. You can even watch them forming in many rivers and becks, where below most drops, you can find circular dishings in the rock, some shallow, some deep, some containing pebbles conscripted to the river’s work; swirling and scouring, day and night. ... It’s not necessarily the speed, volume or power of a river that wins, but its relentlessness. It needs no breath, no sleep, no pause to stretch or shake. And in time, without fuss or ceremony, it will take heat from flesh, life from limb, tree from bank, rock from channel, mountain from continent. It will hollow the land. And it demands total respect."
"Water reveals how small our lives are in time as well as space. Less than 0.025% of the water on our planet exists in all the world’s rivers, lakes, marshes and biological s combined. A river is water’s chance to flicker and dance under the sun before it returns to the deep, dark ocean, is frozen in or stored away underground, sometimes for hundreds of millennia. Flowing water moves mountains, it hollows and builds land. It provides the medium in which the chemistry of life recycles and reorganises energy and matter."
"... "wild service" ... is an ethos ... giving back to nature — but also, obviously, it's the name of . ... it's, after all, the tree of generosity and hospitality that used to be grown on the grounds of s, because beer was . So when you see a pub called "The Chequers", it's named for this wonderful ..."
"In the long run, extinctions of species are as inevitable as the deaths of individual animals, and it may be that the causes of extinctions are as varied as the causes of individual deaths.A wave of extinctions—a sudden diminution in the number of species—is analogous to a sudden big drop in the size of a human population, an event that deserves to be explained even though the individual people would inevitably have died sooner or later anyway. Catastrophes in human populations have many causes: war, famine, and pestilence are the possibilities that first spring to mind. There may be equally many causes for evolutionary catastrophes, as waves of extinctions could well be called. Another possibility, however, is that extinctions come in waves that are part of a recurring cycle. It would then be the cycle itself, rather than each individual wave in the cycle, that would need to be explained. If there is such a cycle, it presumably follows a cycle in the inorganic world, such as cyclic climactic changes."
"From the time the European invaders of North America established themselves and began keeping records, the bitter winters of the Little Ice Age become part of written history.From that point also, the natural history of northern North America began to deviate from its “natural” course. The continent was no longer isolated. The foreign invaders multiplied rapidly, destroying native ecosystems at an ever increasing rate. In time, the byproducts of technology began to poison earth, water, and air and have now begun to influence the climate. The measured responses of biosphere to climate, and of climate to astronomical controls have, for the foreseeable future, come to an end."
"I remember more the atmosphere than specific memories — being in the garden and hanging out with both my parents while they were doing things, walking through, smelling the flowers. I was very keen on s from a young age – that very much formed the basis of my love of gardening. Wild collecting dictated what we had in the gardens. On holidays in the Mediterranean, my parents collected plants such as and s – we had them long before they were fashionable. s, too."
"I'm on a mission to get more of us to grow British wild flowers in our gardens. As ever-increasing numbers of these plants vanish from the countryside, our own private spaces become more important – and genuinely useful. Between us, our gardens cover more than a million acres, which far exceeds the total area of all our nature reserves. We need to think of our gardens as little reservoirs in which British biodiversity can survive. In time, it will spread out from there, but if we make our gardens wild flower hot spots, then at least we know things aren't disappearing at quite such a rate. There's plenty of evidence from the work of etymologists such as Dr (see her brilliant book Wildlife Of A Garden: A Thirty-Year Study) that gardens can provide rich s, with flowers the key part of that ."
"'Madame Alfred Carrière' This was the first rose planted by Vita at in 1930, before the deeds were even signed, and it quickly covered most of the south face of the South Cottage and in Vita and Harold's day was left to 'render invisible' most of the front of the house and trained around her bedroom window to pour scent into the house for months at a stretch. It is still there, and now has a huge trunk wider than my husband's thigh."
"We moved to Perch Hill in 1994 from London and found a rather ramshackle ex- with a lot of concrete, corrugated iron and a small garden with a on the south side of the house. Since then, we converted the farm into an organic 90 acres, putting in new hedges on old lines, trying to encourage wildflowers into the meadows and introducing our own herd of and a flock or Romney-cross sheep."
"Let’s start in the garden. This year cookery writers are as happy digging and planting as slicing and braising. Sarah Raven is a great gardener and, on the evidence of her latest book, Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (, £35), she’s a good cook too. This is a book for a lifetime of cooking: there are more than 400 recipes based on fruit and vegetables. It is not vegetarian — she uses fish and meat too — but vegetables and fruit are to the fore. Raven’s recipes are simple, practical and enticing, and there isn’t one I don’t want to cook. The book is divided into two-month chunks and full of suggestions (snip off pea tendrils for salads, or leave a few beetroot in the ground to produce an early spring salad leaf) and tips on the most tasty varieties to grow. Her ten recipes will sort out an impending green avalanche, and she has five good marrow recipes for when the wretched plants have triumphed."