I find that trips out invariably have a re-charging effect on me. A walk across a favourite dune slack, bright with marsh orchids, combines the familiar with the unexpected. I return home thinking how lucky I am, and how I must do more to convey the wonders of this landscape.

 

Few people I deal with need convincing. Whether as concerned individuals or professionals, we take it as read that every part of the landscape, every old stone cottage and every tree, matters to someone. The interweaving of layers of human and natural history, the bumps and burrs of people and nature hand in hand over time, give meaning to our landscape.

 

This meaning is not always apparent or important to the people who decide whether those bumps and burrs remain or are erased forever. Received wisdom and self-interest, economic signals and practical considerations often point the wrong way. Almost anything can be done to the landscape, such is the array of machinery now generally available, and this adds to the power in the hands of land managers.

 

In the virtual world, nature has never had it so good. Never have so many people been engaged in writing action plans and framing policies, not just to save biodiversity, but to enhance it. The challenge is to close the gap between the aspirations reflected in these plans and policies, and what we see actually happening out there under the open sky.

 

This issue is full of examples of how that gap is closing. The gardens at Plas Tan y Bwlch are transformed into a feeding station for the local wildlife, thanks to a decade of wildlife-friendly gardening. Using some innovative techniques, inhospitable bare rubble at a former gunpowder works becomes a wildlife-rich grazed heathland. Knowledge of the state of our rarest native timber tree, the black poplar, leads to propagation to secure its future; a delight in dragonflies and damselflies should stir a renaissance in the open water habitats they need.

 

Motivated conservation land managers are setting machines, and wheelbarrows, to work to put diversity back into the landscape. Water and fenland wildlife pour back into some dull, improved pastures within a site of high nature value, when the nutrient-rich top layer is removed. The splendour of one of the three main raised bogs left in Wales is restored, though the undertaking is huge. Far from changing it, these new embroideries allow the true nature of the landscape to come through, and add to its patterns and meanings.

 

The landscape is like a living, constantly changing Bayeaux tapestry: beautiful, precious, with a story to tell. Over the last three years we have published many articles describing how individuals and organisations have enriched this tapestry. I look forward to publishing many more.

 

James Robertson