Oft times a subject comes up that you feel would make a nice blog. One that doesn't ruffle feathers or take a poke at the current milieu or maelstrom depending on your point of view. My Father's Garden comes to mind and I don't mean that in a religiously symbolic way I just mean it, as it was, my Dad's Garden where he nurtured it for many years creating vast crops of strawberries, potatoes, carrots, onions, gooseberries, blackberries to name but a few.
His garden was a wonderful creation that he tended with some professionalism, because his degree in agriculture made available to him in the post-war education of returning soldiers from the battlefields of world war two, allowed him to know about the correct seeding of plants, the turning of the soil at the right time and all the other secrets that others might not know.
But his tilling of the soil came from another tradition that was embedded in him from his days as a child watching his forebearers, Highland crofting exiles manage what little land they had left. This crofting tradition saw the use of trees to create fruit while the land below was prepared for potatoes and other vegetables in a rotated way that would mean the food was on our table until the ravages of winter came along.
How I enjoyed as a child the fruits of my father's labors because we eat all of the food he produced with great relish. He of course was ahead of his time in that most suburban homes only had a patch of grass and lines of domesticated flowers to show off, while he had a finely honed system that could only have been got from a long line of land managers in the Sutherland deer estates of the North and further afield in places like Montana where his Uncle had reared sheep, to the vast wilderness of Patagonia where his Father had run cattle for the Estancia companies there. The land was my father's forte and in his work as an Inspector for the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries he had stopped many an epidemic in farms of foot and mouth disease. His one accolade that remains as a testament to his ability to understand ecology was his attention to the preservation of the red squirrel and the area of some 500 miles straight across for which he was in charge for some 40 years remains the only active domain of Red Squirrels in Scotland.
He was very much before his time and if he had been around today he would have been lauded for his simple crofting techniques that are now regarded as the future of a vast present system of intensive farming that is failing to deliver safely manageable food chains for large populations.
As the experts begin to understand the cost of overproduction and its effect on the climate and the ecology of animals, the 'grow your own movement' is becoming a cry for change. How is it then that those who pushed for a balanced ecosystem of small-scale crofting, were marginalized in their time and their work was gone unseen? Just like the now deserted island of Tanera on the West coast of Scotland near Ullapool, where the famous ecologist conservationist Fraser Darling wrote his books and planted the seeds for the future of land management. Little wonder it was there that my grandmother was brought up and also handed down in Gaelic the special heritage of Walking songs about the making of the wool from the occupying army of sheep, whose presence was not accepted fully and today remains a blight on the sustainable management of the land in the Highlands.
My Father's Garden remains a testament to him and his ability to cast forward and know that it was to become one of the most important lessons for present humanity as it deals with the erosion of the topsoil of the entire planet alongside vast wildfires, and the destruction of entire animal species.
My Dad was smart, innovative, and forward thinking, during the 1970s when such ideas were neither understood nor appreciated for what they were or how they should be practiced. It is a great shame that the society he founded The Highland Resettlement Society fell by the wayside after he become ill with diabetes in 1972.
To Dad missed but not forgotten pictured there with a cigar in the late 1960s visit to Essex. (Mushroom Farm)
Donald Fraser Sutherland 12th June 1920 to 27th Jan 1997
