I had a professor called Oliver Rackham, an ecologist and historian, who studied the ways in which ecosystems have shaped – and been shaped by – human cultures for thousands of years. He took us to nearby forests, and told us about the history of these places and their human inhabitants by reading the twists and splits in the branches of old oak trees, by observing where nettles thrived, by noting which plants did or didn’t grow in a hedgerow. Under Rackham’s influence, the clean line I had imagined dividing ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ started to blur.
Oliver was a wonderful teacher and very eccentric. His field trips were a roving one-man show, his stagecraft antique and understated. He would test us: “Why are the primroses and bluebells on the woodland floor growing in lines?” We’d um and ah, usually in vain. After a while he’d give us the answers with a quiet flourish: “The primroses and bluebells reveal the ridges and furrows left behind by medieval ploughs which worked this land before it became woodland in the thirteenth century.” He was a kind of sleuth and started a new discipline called historical ecology.
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