Yesterday's Anglo-Saxons, today's Tibetan spaniels, tomorrow's Afghans
PAUL JOHNSON
Globalisation is not just a commercial phenomenon. It is a human one too, and a natural one. As part of this process, Britain is being invaded, on a larger scale than at any time since the 5th century when Jutes, Angles and Saxons began to arrive in large numbers. The government does virtually nothing to stop it — as in the 5th century, come to think of it.
How disastrous is this invasion? When I was at Oxford half a century ago, the AngloSaxon settlements were seen as the true beginning of English history. The movement of peoples across the planet may or may not be a good thing in general (though history suggests it has been an indispensable part of human progress), but it appears to be a phenomenon so ancient, persistent and continuous as to be part of nature.
There appears to be a biological or organic impulse in all living things — all nature, indeed — to move into areas where they flourish and, equally important, where they flourish more efficiently than the existing occupier. These developments are not welcome in many cases. Most of us hate the grey squirrel taking over from our own red. Another example: in large parts of the British uplands, the once ubiquitous purple heather is being ousted by bracken. In the Quantocks, and in other places, bracken itself is being ousted by tough, purple rhododendron, an advancing line of which is now only about two miles from where I am writing. No place on earth, it seems, can stop the conquest.
Changes to the landscape, such as the growth of a river system or the building of canals, or the way the land is farmed, are taken advantage of by venturesome plants, just as people from the East and South exploit cheap jets and new routes such as the Channel Tunnel to get themselves here, lawfully or not. The yellow monkey-flower or rninudus came to England in the early 19th century in minute quantities. It flourished wherever it could implant itself on the banks of a stream. John Stuart Mill (of all people) noticed how it used the waterways of England — streams flowing into major rivers such as the Thames, now connected to each other by canal systems — to spread itself all over the country. Water was its method of transport, exactly as it has been for countless humans throughout history. If you improved the transport system for human purposes by building canals, you helped this little flower too, and doubtless others. It was, as it were,
illegal: it had 'escaped' from a conservatory whose botanist-owner had imported it from North America.
I have been reading the text of a talk given by Iolo Williams on the wireless many years ago in which he gives instances of this furtive colonisation. At the end of the 17th century, somebody put a ragwort called Senecio squalidus from Sicily in the new botanical garden at Oxford that had been founded by Charles II's rascally minister, Danby. By 1790 it had escaped and spread to various old stone walls, in which Oxford abounds, and which it found hospitable. By 1879, according to a botanical historian, G.C. Druce, it had found an even more suitable element, the clinker ash then used as a base for railway tracks, which was in some ways similar to the lava-soil spread by Mount Etna that had enabled it to proliferate in Sicily. Here was a wonderful coincidence! Once the ragwort had reached Oxford station, thanks to the ability of its seeds to float through the air like a dandelion's, it had automatically linked itself to a travelling system, built by humans for their own convenience, which took it all over England and beyond, so that it is not only universal wherever you find cinder tracks and the like, but has spread well beyond the railway network. Venturesome and dynamic, it is also beautiful and adds colour and gaiety to many dismal industrial areas. So it has paid its way, like many other immigrants, such as the Indian shopkeepers who have put their white counterparts out of business in so many big towns and cities simply by being more efficient.
Some plants, such as ragwort, escape from specimens deliberately imported by collectors. But many more, according to Williams, emerge from ports on their own. He instances a pepperwort. Lepidium draba, which he calls 'pestilential' and which he says first came to Kent in the straw bedding of troops returning from the disastrous Walcheren expedition (1809). Goods packed in straw or hay and landed from ships on the dockside are the means whereby literally hundreds of foreign plants have arrived here — one study shows 700 in Bristol alone. The growth of iron steamships in the last two centuries, one of the primary reasons for the improvement (and multiplication) of the human race in modern times, has also served to globalise thousands of plants. How do seeds get from the dockside to soil where they can thrive? It must take extraordinary
dynamism and persistence, but there are reasons why such organisms, which have no brains but powerful DNAs, thrive mightily once they are established.
A recent addition to the transportation network which assists botanical immigrants is the motorway. It was Lady Bird Johnson and Miriam Rothschild who launched what has become a worldwide scheme to sow the grassy banks of motorways with wild flowers. This has proved expensive and is not always successful. But they were not the only organisms which had noticed that the sides of such roads. where humans and livestock are not allowed, proved perfect protected places for venturesome immigrants. Many plants have got there themselves and flourish, as do living wild creatures which soon get used to the traffic and find they have little else to fear. Moreover, the motorway, like the railway and the canal before it, provides the means whereby any successful plant can spread all over the country.
The truth is that globalisation, far from being a horrible product of industrial capitalism, as its opponents claim, is the most natural thing in the world. And it is good and bad. It may tend to make everywhere seem the same, but it also makes that 'same' infinitely more varied and rich in choice. Dogs, for instance. Recently. in Sheila's Bookshop in Notting Hill — that caravanserai of the learned and the smart bibliophile — I met two ravishing immigrants. These creatures are called Tibetan spaniels, though they are not spaniels at all, more like pekes, but much more attractive. They were born here, as were their parents, but their grandparents came in perfectly legally, having been presented to a British bigwig by one of the last abbots of the giant monastery at Lhasa, and served their proper quarantine. These dogs are wonderfully clean and fastidious, real aristos if not royals, but being so resist training for useful work, with one notable exception: they make excellent guide dogs for the deaf. Moreover, they are wonderful fun. A lady has written a book about them, and the owner of the two I met says they have added enormously to his life. I suspect they will soon be the height of fashion. So globalisation marches on. People too. Perhaps chroniclers of the future will insert in their histories of Britain a chapter called 'The Coming of the Afghans'. Stranger things have happened in the dark backward and abysm of time.
Previous page
