FALLOW MEMORIES THEY LEFT BEHIND

by Bryan bvyn Wong

“You will also allow the fallow land when harvested to be at rest in each alternate year, let your ideal field grow with neglect. As season change, you will sow the golden emmer on land, whence you have earlier taken off the prolific bean, with its rattling pods, or the tender growth of the vetch, and the fragile stems of the bitter lupine and its crackling foliage.”

Virgil’s Georg 1.71-79 in White, K.D. 1970. Fallowing, Crop Rotation, and Crop Yields in Roman Times. Agriculture History. Vol. 44, No.3, pp281-90.

In crop rotation, fallow is a technique that periodically idles for nutrients to replenish, soils to recover, and matters to restore. There had always been a clear distinction between the vacant and the working as a cohesive system that cycles around the year, where “non-productive” is essential to the abundance of the next agroecosystem cycle, a “facilitative biodiversity”. Fallowed arable lands were called vervactum (overturned), derived from the Old German felo (pale). But fallow is no fade plain, it is only a premise for the luxuriant in time. For the technology antedates the dawn of Byzantine, Georgics’ irrigation to the nature is a complement to the birth of fallow. It praises seasons­, it follows a “food, feed, fallow” system, it respects growth and formation, and it sees through past, precedents, and memories.

This column writes about the slowness and idles of left over memories. It traces development by reviewing backward. Through time, shall we begin to lookback our thoughts in attempt to retrieve memories they had left behind. Do we romanticize?

Bryan Bvyn Wong / SMArchS Urbanism 24’ /

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