The field that was left alone

In 1882 an agricultural research station in England stopped cultivating a wheat field and simply fenced it. The experiment, which was not really an experiment at first, has been left alone ever since.

What happened is now one of the longest continuous records of natural regrowth anywhere. For the first years the field grew weeds. Then grasses took over, then hawthorn scrub, then oak. The ground is now woodland, and the sequence it passed through has been documented at every stage.

Two findings have proved useful far beyond that field. The first is how long it takes: roughly a century from ploughed soil to something resembling woodland, which is far slower than most planting programmes assume. The second is that the sequence cannot easily be skipped. Attempts to plant oaks directly on cleared ground frequently fail, because young oaks do better in the shelter of the scrub that the sequence would have produced first.

The field also demonstrates something about research itself. Nobody in 1882 was asking the questions that the record now answers, and nobody could have been, since those questions arose from problems that did not yet exist. The value came from keeping something consistent for long enough that later people could ask it things.

That is an argument for a kind of patience that modern funding finds almost impossible to justify.