In 1939, my parents bought a Kentish farm-house surrounded by orchards. Plantations of cobnuts lay near the house, with apple, pear and cherry orchards further away on the adjacent farm in search of wild flowers, obviously an influential early experience, for I have made a career in nature conservation. Today, the landscape is differnet. A featureless field replaces the cherry orchard, and the present apple trees, hardly taller than I am, grow out of herbicided bare earth – no flowers here.