Cherishing the old ways lost to the dreams of modern corporations

In the mid-17th century, Penny of Wisbech led a crowd of thousands to Ely to protest at the draining of the fens. They sang one of the earliest modern protest songs, written from the perspective of an eel.

This captivating detail of our landscape's social history appears in Bonnie Lander Johnson's Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them. It's nestled in a gripping, conversational and carefully researched story of how the old crafts and livelihoods of fenlanders, highlanders, cidermakers, saffron farmers and others, were lost to a new force of enterprise: the dreams of the modern corporation.

Unlike Penny of Wisbech, these were not entangled with the local wildlife, but with projected profits and future global markets.

Lander Johnson is a fellow of Downing College, Cambridge University, and the book has grown from years of scholarship around the subject. A glance through a list of her previous publications indicates the fluency with which she integrates her research. Vanishing Landscapes is a eulogy to a lost way of being among the plants and places of Britain and Ireland.

Dividing her book into seven chapters, each named after the plants around which these various tales unfold, Lander Johnson carefully traces the events in modernity that changed our relationship to them.

Another litany of names builds within these chapters: the Court of Augmentations of Henry VIII, which administered the landgrab after the Dissolution of the Monasteries; the College of Physicians; the Corporation of the Bedford Level, the South Sea Company and the Bank of England. They lead Lander Johnson to wonder if our loss of understanding our own environment is "not just bureaucratic ineptitude" but "the result of decisions made incrementally over the centuries in preference for global markets, global goods, even a cultural reaction against parochialism".

Her remedy is to seek out the people who are currently living with a foot on each side of the modern-medieval divide: Sally the saffron-farmer, Rowena and Julie the dyers, the Starlings, who are fenland reed-pickers. These people are somehow able to give loving attention to the land and the old trades, without cutting themselves off from the current age. Their attentive relationships with their farms, woodlands, vineyards and orchards offer a realistic, if tentative, hope.

The writing is both richly researched and personal. "Reed", a chapter about the Fens, brought to mind Richard Mabey's Nature Cure – the author of Flora Britannica's stunning account of emerging from debilitating depression in the Norfolk landscape. Like Mabey, Lander Johnson's graceful intertwining of her own observations, with historical literacy and attention to detail, invites the reader into another way of seeing.

What might be strikingly different about this book to any reader of the writing of Mabey, Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane or other nature writers, is the ready celebration of the tie between the history of agriculture in this particular land and Christian metaphysics.

The attentive reader might notice that the first plant to be given a chapter in the book is the apple; the last two are grapes and wheat. Lander Johnson's litany of plants carries us lightly from Genesis to the Eucharist.

Of our premodern ancestors, she writes: "Wheat was not only food but the breath of God calling us to communion with each other." Echoes of the offertory work up from underneath the text: "Through Your goodness we have received the bread we offer You: fruit of the earth and work of human hands."

There is a recurring motif detailing how dates in the liturgical year informed the agricultural calendar: the saffron plot should be prepared between the feast of St Mary Magdalene and the Assumption. The old tradition of "beating the bounds" of a parish occurs at Rogationtide and at the Ascension.

Going deeper into the underpinning premises of this book, there's the further familiar influence of "integral ecology", à la Laudato Si': a concept which recognises that social and environmental crises are inextricably entwined. It's not a book about plants so much as a longing for a lost synergy, where the cultivation of plants deepens our relationship with, and gratitude for, the particular plot that sustains us.

Lander Johnson challenges, on this basis, the underlying logic of conservation policies employed by nature reserves such as the National Trust's Wicken Fen, which rely on a preservation of landscapes that precludes human coexistence with the land. It echoes a complaint in current eco-theological discourse: that these perpetuate an Enlightenment dualism between "nature over there" and "human over here".

There's little attempt to defend this overt investment in a Christian medieval teleology, that "all creatures are made for relationship". Nor is it needed. It is part of the fabric of her thinking. In sharing this personal attentiveness to, and relationship with, the landscape, Lander Johnson nudges us to go and try it for ourselves.

Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them by Bonnie Lander Johnson, Hodder Press, £22, 320 pages

This article appears in the September 2025 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre and counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door any where in the world ‍click HERE.