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My early life was punctuated by wildflowers. Lady's smock and several different clovers in the fields near our home, scabious lining the roadside on the way to primary school, violets and primroses edging the bare earth each side of the footpaths. As winter eased into spring I looked forward to each one starring in turn.

Flail mowers had not been invented and nature graded her own borders with the tallest plants nearest the hedge and the shortest by the side of the road or track. Not only were the roadside verges a glorious carpet of colour, but the absence of mechanical hedge-cutters meant the accompanying hedges were delicious, nutritious, thick, often impenetrably safe larders and nesting sites for wild birds. They were tall too, providing high-rise options as well as low-level accommodation. Gaps in hedges often had to be hurriedly filled with whatever came to hand. One nursery rhyme tells us:

During my school years, farmers were given financial inducements to create larger fields by destroying hedges and ditches, and (as soon as such methods became available) to minimise the hedges that remained by frequent, mechanical cutting. The value of a field-grown crop was the only calculation used, and it was considered commendable to steal every possible extra inch from the margins by removing overhanging branches or flower-rich edges. The intrinsic value of a hedge to provide shade, stabilise soil and control water run-off as well as to provide habitat for natural predators of crop pests was ignored—now we know that they sequester and store carbon too. As Nicolas Lampkin noted in his seminal 1990 book Organic Farming: 'The increased yield of crops within a hedged field more than compensates for the loss of yield in the immediate vicinity of a hedge.'

Once I had learned to drive a tractor, the next step was to take a test. I was sixteen, and Richard said I would be more use if I could drive on the road. He was now farming a rented farm eleven miles away, and often moving machinery and straw between the two farms. I had only about twenty yards to drive to meet the examiner but I had to tie L-plates on. Everyone in the village decided to watch, while pretending to be busy doing something else. The examiner said he was going to hide behind a bush on the side of the road and when he jumped out, I was to perform an emergency stop, but as the bush was too small to conceal him, I had plenty of warning. He then asked me to drive 'at my normal driving speed' along the main A46 (now B4632) and do a three-point turn in the first gateway. I was too nervous to admit I was still in low range—normally engaged for slow reversing and manoeuvring rather than road driving—and by the time I reached the gate, a car had overtaken me and parked there. I carried on and turned in the next gap, which happened to be out of sight of the examiner. By the time I next emerged into view, he had almost given up hope of ever catching sight of me again. I passed, largely because I don't think he could face the idea of a repeat performance.

We moved from Middle Hill Farm, Saintbury, to Kite's Nest near Broadway in August 1980. Moving house is one thing, but it's got nothing on moving farm, something that isn't to be undertaken lightly. We fell in love with the farm as soon as we saw it, tucked into a valley on the scarp slope of the Cotswolds, with the land rising from about three hundred feet above sea level to almost nine hundred feet at the highest point. As a result it's not the easiest farm to manage, but apart from its fascinating contours, showing signs of past geological activity and human imprints, what appealed to us was its stunning natural beauty and variety, and the diversity of plants and wild animals that came with it.

The soils range from heavy clays through alluvial loams to light, stony Cotswold brash, with small areas of both peat and sand. Previous owners have planted a wide variety of different trees, each suited to the specific soil types. There are willow, poplar and alder in the lowest-lying areas; walnuts, oak, ash, wild cherry and silver birch on the better-draining deep soils; field maple, sycamore and more ash at four to six hundred feet; and the shallow-rooting larch and beech trees ideally suited to the thin, more typically Cotswold soils higher up.

The main enterprise in the early decades at Kite's Nest was the beef suckler herd, in which the cattle stay in family groups for life. I hankered after sheep, but the daily vigilance they require, including round-the-clock attention during lambing, was impossible while I was caring for Mum. Always in extremely fragile health, she became utterly dependent on Richard and me in the last years of her life. Much of our farming was done by torchlight in the stolen hours after midnight, and the cattle got quite used to our nocturnal routines. Sheep, however, had to wait.

We now have two flocks: Lleyn and Shetland. I'm writing this on the last day of lambing, and on the farm there are over three hundred sheep.

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