The love of horses

Every year during Memorial Day weekend Sandy Saunders, who farms 150 acres in Garrison, New York, invites Leona Dushin, seen here on the right, to bring her horses and young riders to spend two days and nights in the ring, jumping and dressage in the fields, and sleeping in the hayloft of the stable barn. The photograph is of Caroline and others watching a demonstration, given by Hope Turino of Equine Assisted Growth Learning Association, of how we can overcome troubles and develop skills through studying a horse's reaction to our behaviour with them.

Leona is 88 years old, and many of her horses are Morgans which she has bred herself. "When I started these pony camps just after World War II we were all boys. Then the boys became interested in masculine sports like lacrosse, and now I do not have a single boy."

I was a boy who had always ridden and who never took to masculine sports. As a child in England, I was first taught by Miss Rogers in Crockham Hill, Kent. She had all of the discipline and loud voice of Leona without her humour and gentleness. When I was in my early teens I was taught by Sam Marsh, a former Olympic rider.

Then, for a number of years in the 50s and 60s, I rode in the early mornings in Richmond Park in London, exercising polo ponies with my friends Tatyana and Marina Orloff, who were sisters and also half Russian. It cost nothing — you went out once with the head lad of the stable and if he saw you were all right with his ponies, you could come as often as you liked at 7:30 in the morning and walk and canter for an hour across the rough grass and bracken in the park.

Sandy Saunders more or less runs the farm single-handed. For ten years he has had help from Shelley Scott, a 28 year-old recently qualified nurse. She loves the farm and the work, lives over one of Sandy's barns, and arranges her nursing schedule so that she can still be there for the horses and haymaking. Now that she has steady work as a nurse she wants to buy a horse herself. "You can buy a racehorse for a dollar. If they don't win races they are useless to their owners."

I am filming Sandy and his life on the farm. Here is a sequence I made last autumn.

Sandy Saunders

Telephone call last week from Sandy to say that I must go and see the cow parsley in his top field. As beautiful as it was, as soon as I saw it I wanted to include a person. Sandy, the guardian and farmer of the land immediately came to mind. Here he is at 7.15 in the evening, just returned from bringing in the last of the hay and mercifully keeping still for one-half a second.

"This field will make good silage."

Longish hair and hay

We returned to the farm after photographing in the cow parsley to find Matthew, one of Sandy's helpers, standing by the barn. Sandy had warned him that I was on the hunt for more farm subjects and asked him to wait. I looked at the sky. We had 10 minutes, that's enough time. I dug the legs of my tripod into the mixture of hay and manure outside one of the stable doors and screwed on the camera.

Ava and compost

Ava's career as an organic farmer began eight years ago when she was eleven-years-old. She worked the till at a farmer's market stand in Cold Spring on Saturday mornings. Soon she was spending her summers on the farm and last year lived there in a trailer. Next year, she and another intern from the farm are starting their own organic farm in New Hampshire.

Ava with scythe

A skill Ava developed on the farm was how to use and sharpen a scythe. She said she learnt a great deal from watching eighty-year-old English farmers demonstrating their skills with a scythe on YouTube. The two scythes she now owns came from her father (not a farmer) who had them in a shed.

Morningside Farmer's Market

He was loading up the unsold produce at the end of the day. His farm was in Kingston, NY and on Saturdays they had stands in Queens and Brooklyn as well as Harlem. He delivered and picked up from all three locations.

Rebecca, organic farmer

For two years, Rebecca and her husband Joe grew organic vegetables on a communal farm in Wappingers, New York. Every week from May to October we would buy their vegetables at the local farmer's markets. In the winter she would knit and make quilts and he would knit and make furniture. In September this year they told us they could no longer go on alone and were returning to his father's farm in Iowa to join forces with him.

Rebecca looked at the camera I was using. She said, "That's the most beautiful camera I have ever seen." It was a Rolleiflex 2.8E that I bought in 1955. It is the only camera that I love. I must be careful now because I have enjoyed the luxury of digital cameras. I have, a Nikon D40, and as excellent as it is, it is the wrong format for me and woe betide you if you over expose. The armchair life it gives you, not having to go to the lab, is habit forming.