National Association of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty Conference, 2023

On a field trip to the Cranborne Chase AONB (National Landscape), representatives of protected landscapes from around the UK stumbled upon a feast in a clearing by the river within the Mill Mead conservation area in the Chalke Valley near Salisbury.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously described dirt as “matter out of place.” (Purity + Danger, 1966). For this to be so, two conditions are implied: “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order”. Pests, diseases and weeds behave much like dirt. They contravene our boundaries, our sense of belonging and control over our environment. What if – instead of trying to eliminate them altogether – we just reframed them as opportunities instead of threats? The menu connected the guests to the missed opportunities in the landscape they were exploring, the so-called ‘invasive species’ including squirrel, water mint, nettles, hogweed and himalayan balsam.