HERBAL HEALING in the meadow of dill A herbal garden designed for this year’s Chelsea Flower Show is to be given a second home at the College. It is, says Rhydian Evans (Year 12), just one reminder of the many significant and healing connections between human beings and the plants whose roots can be found deep in our culture
A s I cycle up College Road each morning, through the canopy of the horse chestnut trees I can glimpse an oasis of land surrounding the orange-red neogothic frontage. In these grounds, there’s a memory of some older place – of a small hamlet, the Anglo-Saxons’ Dilwysshe. A name is an excellent clue to follow when looking to understand a place’s former ecosystem, and the ‘wysshe’ or ‘wisca’ (meadow) of ‘dil’ or ‘dul’ (the herb dill, which traces its origins to the Middle East) is no exception: when we say ‘Dulwich’ we are really saying ‘Dill Meadow’, linguistically transmuted through time. While dill does still grow on the lofty bank of Grange Lane, a nationwide purge has taken place that has left the Anglo-Saxons’ ‘wysshes’ unrecognisable. Through the industrialisation of agriculture and its impact on ecosystems, the ways in which our food is produced and our localities look have utterly changed. One of the most distressing changes is that 98% of this nation’s wild- flower meadows have been lost. The reds, yellows and blues of wildflowers have been replaced with suppos- edly pragmatic monocultures, often comprising just one species of grass, and justified via the inherently exploit- ative narrative of the land being made more productive. Monoculture, I would argue, is as unnatural and barren as desertification. Yet our narratives manage to normal- ise the processes and their outcomes. Did you know, for example, that the artificial fertilisation of cattle causes them to produce abnormal, fluid excrements which lead to parasites and the spread of disease? And yet these are normalised as ‘cow pats’, when in reality they are the sign of a dysfunctional ecosystem and a lack of its – I stress natural – self-regulation.
To return to a more positive, local narrative, what is now seeping up from the depths of the College’s very soil is a concept which is forward-thinking yet inspired by the past; a change which is actually a return to something old- er; an ingenious yet simple set of ideas. In November, for an Eco Week film I put together with Ms Mackie, I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Purnell, who heads up the College’s team of 14 ground staff, and who has worked at the school for 34 years. Paul talks passionately about the changes he has made, first to the functional playing fields, then to the wayside margins, which now nurture a growing crescendo of wildflowers. In striving to ‘feed the soil, rather than just the plants’, he realised that expensive fertilisers and fungicides were not actually nourishing the soil ecosystem. Ten years down the line, he is replacing artificial products with natural ones, such as garlic, which not only saves money, but also creates healthier plants. During Covid, just as more people started walking along the periphery of the College, Paul’s wildflower initiative
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