5 - Landscape

Summary

Through a series of spontaneous, self-intensifying, unforeseen, and unforseeable nonlinear processes, the ecological revolution reshaped the nation's landscape, working conditions, social structure, disease pattern, and political life. In the course of this process, a new Denmark was created. Let us begin with what was immediately visible, the new landscape.

THE DENMARK FACING EAST

Where in the past there had been barren, cropped, greyish, scentless, silent outlying areas and poor pastures of self-sown couch grass, the countryside now became full of life, colours, scents, and sounds. Clover provided not only the soft, cool “clover-field for noonday peace” that Poul Martin Møller, the Lolland vicar's son, dreamed about when he lay beneath the burning tropical sun in the South China Sea, but also several new colours. From the end of the eighteenth century, fields of red, white, and green clover appeared between the cornfields, creating the yellow-and-green and red-and-white patterns that have characterized the Danish agrarian landscape ever since. Finally, the clover also brought new scents. As P. E. Lüders wrote as early as 1758

it is incredible how much superfluous sweetness is generally to be found in these clover-flowers when the summer weather duly alternates between dew and warmth; when walking in the fields the sweetest smells often linger in one's nostrils.

The new fences also introduced scents and colours: Stone walls had willow and hawthorn planted on them, and hedges of poplar, bullace, and elder were planted.