The past is there, right where you stand, under your feet

By Victoria Plum

“It’s not what you find, but what you find out” is a maxim followed by Graeme Simmonds, this month’s speaker at the Reepham & District Gardening Club, who talked about “History beneath your feet”, which includes those little oddments that give us clues about past lives and send us on a path of discovery if we have a curious mind.

Not so much about exotic gold torcs but small objects, regrettably lost and difficult to replace. (Just one field yielded many coins over a wide span of time, but our speaker would not reveal where this field is!)

There are mysteries. Many bronze-alloy thimbles are found on fields all around. Graeme showed us a box with perhaps 200 in, and I know a farmer locally who has found many on the fields in Cawston.

Some are tiny. So perhaps there used to be many people in the past, with very small fingers, sitting in the fields sewing?

There is another theory. In Tudor times it was legally allowed for the poor to glean the fields after harvest, to pick up the odd grains of corn left behind after harvest; many people depended on this.

It would have made your fingers sore, rummaging in the soil and stalks for tiny grains, so perhaps you and your children would wear thimbles on several fingers for protection when engaged in this important task. They might get lost as you worked.

I didn’t give this theory much credence until I remembered that in Tudor times corn was broadcast by hand − no seed drills to provide neat rows until the agricultural revolution and Jethro Tull around 1701, so that randomly placed plants would have been more difficult to work round. So now that theory makes sense to me.

Do you belong to the EPT (Earwig Protection Trust)? Hooray for earwigs. Did you know that they eat aphids and are very good mothers? They are omnivores, but particularly enjoy aphids of all sorts, codling moth, leaf rollers, scale insect and psyllids.

The insecticides you reach for will kill all these things, but earwigs have only one brood per year whereas aphids have many. When you have killed the earwigs with your spray, they cannot quickly breed more to consume the aphids, which can rapidly reproduce and resurge later on.

Dave Goulson, author of The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet, is sceptical of some pollinator-friendly plant lists. He suggests noting which varieties are attractive to insects at the nursery or garden centre to help with your choices.

Having just written this, I went to Woodgate Nursery (10% discount with your gardening club membership card) and there on the lungwort were three big bumblebees.

Next month, on Tuesday 15 April, involves the gardening club AGM at 7.15 pm (always very quick) in the Town Hall, Church Street, Reepham, followed by Martyn Davey, who always has lots of helpful advice.

The famous annual plant sale takes place on Saturday 10 May, from 8.30 am until sold out. Please pot up any extra plants to donate for the stall in Reepham Market Place; more details next month.

Photo: The Gleaners (Des glaneuses), an oil painting completed in 1857 by French painter Jean-François Millet, held in the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris.