Strawberries choose their own spot

I glanced on this subject in yesterday’s post when I was writing about the temptation to try to control nature on our allotments – encouraged, as always, by the siren voices of the agrochemical industry who want to sell us snake oil cures for every problem. So today I want to expand on a part of that argument by writing about strawberries, and more specifically about a bed of strawberries which – despite being dug up and moved – sent out scouts and moved slowly year by year until the plants found a place where they were happy and able to thrive. One of the most interesting discussions that I’m following at the moment frequently includes as a kind of “fact”, a plant’s inability to move to escape harm and to multiply. Where other life forms can make themselves look dangerous and unappetising to predators, plants are literally rooted to the ground.

Except, of course they can move, very slowly, season by season like our little strawberry patch until they find exactly the right spot. The strawberries in the photograph were initially planted out as runners in the space now filled by fruit bushes. They never did very well there so after a couple of seasons we took runners off them and discarded the mother plants so we could replant somewhere else. Over a period they’ve occupied a number of spaces chosen by us but never really thrived until they took their own destiny in hand and set off in search of strawberry nirvana. And they moved some ten feet and crossed a wood chip path (unnoticed by us) and set up shop at the western side of the polytunnel where they’ve begun to thrive. The photograph shows how they move by sending out stolons (runners) which root wherever they find a space. Earlier this year I figured out what was going on so I cleared the adjoining border of weeds, loosened the soil and fed it, pegged a couple of the runners to encourage the others and – as you see – they’re invading the empty space with enthusiasm. The narrow bed they’ve chosen is sheltered from the damaging and cold winter northeasterlies, and is well watered by rain running off the tunnel, and all we needed to do was to watch and learn while the strawberries showed us what they need.

Over the years this kind of thing has happened over and over. A patch of borage comes and goes, a buddleia dropped in from nowhere; even a rare form of Fumaria appeared from who knows where along with an Apple of Peru, Nicandra physalodes. Our asparagus bed never produced a decent crop in spite of our efforts to create a perfect environment and so we gave up and this year had a lovely crop of new potatoes from the same bed. The takeaway point of all this is that the plants know their preferences better than we do. The best way of learning how to grow food is to watch and learn from the plants themselves. Of course it’s easier and quicker to sow seeds in grow-bags and water them with plant food, but the resulting plants are often weak and vulnerable to attack by predators.

All this boils down to our 21st century obsession with speed, efficiency and above all – control. It’s as if we’re frightened of nature and her processes because we don’t really understand them. It’s an ideology that affects every aspect of our lives But in order to thrive, the needs of plants are not so very different from our own. We just need enough sunshine and rain, enough good food, enough shelter and enough basic care to see us flourish.

But there’s another component that we, as humans, need almost as much as we need the other material things – and that’s joy and wonder. Plants may not be able to move very fast, but they can respond to touch, they can shape-shift to catch the light, or respond to drought, they can attract or repel using the most complex chemical processes and they can embody the kind of beauty that feeds our need for joy. Sometimes, when I water a thirsty plant I can almost hear a grateful response, even if sometimes the thank-you takes all night to process.

An allotment or a garden isn’t just a place to grow things, it’s a place to grow us as well; even the lowliest cabbage can demonstrate the difference between thriving and failing. It’s not all plain sailing. This is the season when we have a great deal of produce stolen off the plots. Our neighbour had her entire crop of figs stolen yesterday and another lost all her broad beans. Sometimes I desperately want to believe in karma, but thieves can only take the bare husks of the beauty of growing. Ninety percent of the value of the crop is in the tending of it.

Sometimes you wonder why you put yourself through it!

Astra inclinant, non necessitant

The Latin quotation under the photograph is translated as – “The stars dispose but do not compel”. Notwithstanding Amos Starkadder’s wonderfully funny sermon to the Quivering Brethren in the novel “Cold Comfort Farm” – “You’re all damned!” -(if you haven’t read it or seen John Schlesinger’s film you’re missing a treat); but there’s a great lesson for gardeners in the proverbial saying because the best we can ever do when we grow things is to dispose them to succeed. If you’re an organic grower then disposing your plants to grow well needs foresight, planning and patience plus a lot of compost. This morning we picked our first crop of Victoria plums from the tree we planted in 2020 the apples were quicker, but the pears are at least fattening up whilst the damsons seem to fall off too early. The pests are better at judging the moment than us. Badgers, for instance, always stole our sweetcorn the day before we were going to pick it. Nowadays we protect it by growing it in the polytunnel. The agrochemical industry wants us to believe that their products can predestine plants to succeed; that we can transcend thousands of years of human experience and spray the latest chemical (let’s call it Compel!) to dodge nature altogether. It’s a lie. There’s no other way to describe it.

I once spotted a book in an Oxfam shop called “The Half hour Gardener”, but it wasn’t so much the title as the author’s name which caught my eye. She is the daughter of a woman I once worked with and lost touch with back in the community arts days, and when we went to hear her daughter speak soon afterwards at an allotments association AGM she pretty much admitted the half-hour suggestion was a bit of a stretch. Even if it were possible you’d still fall foul of the weather regularly through a whole year of allotmenteering. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too busy, too knackered, too fed-up; the fact is, gardening is hard work. It may be true – in fact it is true – that gardening is deeply rewarding, but the reward is inevitably separated from the pain by a matter of months if not years.

Today, for instance, the temperature is in the mid twenties after weeks of dry weather punctuated by one, just a single but tremendous, thunderstorm and we’re about to enter our second heatwave in a month, and so we water. And when I say we water that means carrying dozens of watering cans each weighing twenty pounds down a rickety ankle busting path from the communal water trough to the dry beds. On a good day I could water the whole plot in about three hours but that presupposes that no-one else is watering at the same time, so on those occasions exquisitely delicate and silently mimed negotiations take place near the trough. The growls are never vocalized but we all understand the implications. Neighbours are neighbours after all and we don’t want water wars to break out.

The forecast is predicting even hotter weather on the way and I desperately need to dig over and prepare a large 5’x 12′ bed which has become infested with bindweed and we need to plant out purple sprouting broccoli there by the end of the week. We don’t generally dig, but occasionally the bindweed or couch grass migrating in from the paths need teaching a lesson and digging it out is the only way that works. The only plausible time to do it will be in the cool of the very early morning before the builders turn up to finish the work to eliminate black mould in the flat.

NB linen suit

Any dreams of shimmying through the allotment filled with delicious produce in weedless beds (wearing my linen suit and panama hat) seem to evaporate like the morning dew. Try as I will to look on the bright side at 5.00am, or mid morning when I need to walk up an icy hill to knock the snow off the nets before they break, takes a bucketful of optimism.

I’ll never forget the driving rain on the morning we dug holes to set the uprights in their anchors for the polytunnel. It was raining so hard I had to bolt the uprights in a foot of freezing muddy water which had filled the holes because they were below the water table that day. During COVID when everyone had time and energy the allotment site looked wonderful, but work and families had to come first when it ended, and it was sad to see their hard work so quickly overgrown with weeds. It demonstrated two important things about running an allotment; you might say two sides of a coin. On the one hand it takes time – quite a lot of time – to grow an allotment but on the other hand, COVID demonstrated that so many people were up for the challenge if only the time and opportunity were there.

The upside

I’m absolutely not trying to argue here that suffering is its own reward. We had enough of that in Sunday School; but that it’s worth a few wet days, tingling blue hands and cold feet to pick something delicious from a plant or tree that you nurtured through the droughts, the cold north-easterlies and the Azores highs to the day you cut it, warm from the sun, and take to the kitchen. Yesterday I sautéed the first batch of courgettes in butter and oil until they were just beginning to caramelize on the cut edges. No more than an hour from plot to pot. A few weeks ago we were scratching about for something fresh to eat on the allotment but now it’s in full flow, overflowing with gifts. The only response to it is sheer gratitude. I once thought I knew who to thank for it all, but these days I feel more comfortable offering my thanks to the Cloud of Unknowing; “the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” After all, what’s a few hours of enjoyable work compared with the brightness and depth of tomato sauce made at home in the kitchen, or corn whose milk is still sweet, or borlotti – the winter banker for soups. We may be hard-up and scruffy but we live like royalty.

This is a secret!

Yesterday went well. We got up early and gave the polytunnel and some of the most vulnerable transplants a good soaking in anticipation of the forecast hot weather. The plan was to drive over to the campervan storage site and make sure that the recent torrential thunderstorm hadn’t leaked in through the roof as it did last time we were away; but the van was bone dry and the battery was fully charged by the additional solar panel. So we transferred the bedding to the car for a good airing at home and found ourselves with time to spare. We’d booked a table at a favourite country pub so I rang ahead and asked if it would be OK to arrive an hour early. It was fine by them – they’re really nice people – and so we drove over straight away in the mid-day heat, looking forward to a (zero alcohol) cold beer.

I’m hesitating to name the pub in question because I don’t do reviews or expect anyone to be influenced by the pieces I write and, in any case most of my readers don’t even live in the UK. I looked at the stats a few days ago and that day’s piece had been read by folks from about fifteen countries with the majority in the US. So while I write a bit more about food, I’ll think about giving out the name with no expectation of remuneration or even gracious thanks.

We didn’t start to travel in Europe until we were in our sixties, and it was a most liberating experience to drop into random cafés and restaurants that looked as if they might have something local on the menu at a price we could afford. We sat in a café routier once, eating lunch whilst driving down through the Cévennes. The food was good but not memorable and the real joy of it were the large butterflies feeding on the Buddleia tree behind us. They looked just like Camberwell Beauties – awesome. Near Avignon we ate often in a little restaurant in the middle of nowhere where the owner always addressed me as Monsieur Paul. Just down the road was a restaurant ferme where we all got happy drunk and played football with a melon as we walked back to the campsite accompanied by the perfume of ripening grapes and attended by fireflies. Our teenage son wrote amorous messages to the waitress and posted them on paper darts. In Uzès I ordered foie-gras in a cafe and the waiters were so delighted see an Englishman try it they came out to watch. This is a confession by the way. That was my first and last taste. Eating local delicacies can backfire too. I shared a tripe sausage with our youngest in a motorway cafe near Lyon and we gave up after a single bite! We once ate a whole enormous tureen of vegetable soup while walking the Camino – it was delicious and so simple although I’ve never been able to replicate it.

These restaurants, and we’ve stumbled across them across Europe in Spain, Italy and France haunt our memories. We once passed a restaurant in the Accademia in Venice where every table had a reserved sign. We stuck our heads around the door to book the next day and the owner instantly removed all the little signs and welcomed us in like old friends. We stayed until late drinking brandy with the boss, and he insisted that we went back the next day because his wife – a tall and slightly forbidding woman with a Venetian nose – was cooking a rabbit ragu. There was no menu, no choice and it really was beautiful.

It’s a shame that such experiences are vanishingly rare in the UK. The mid-range affordable restaurant offering lovingly and freshly cooked food is as rare as hen’s teeth. Two of our sons are professional chefs and both say that the trade can’t seem to attract young chefs trained and willing to work in such highly stressful environments. Long hours and low wages have hollowed out the labour force, and high overheads have driven standards ever lower. Too many of their managers have trained in the Gordon Ramsay charm school and both have endured bullying from well qualified MBA’s who wouldn’t know how to boil an egg. Enough!

I’ve decided to name the pub because they’ve bucked the trend and recruited a brilliant kitchen team. The pub is the Cross House in Doynton – do Google it and try it out if you’re near Bath or indeed East Bristol. Yesterday the sun was shining, the restaurant was comfortably quiet, and the kitchen worked quietly in the background (always a good sign). We started with shared scallops and a smoked haddock fishcake, followed by pan fried Sea Bass, potato rosti with a salad and a green sauce flavoured with peas and with spinach. I’ll come back to the fish. Then I had panna cotta with a faintly lavender flavour and Madame had summer pudding and then I finished up with a good treacly black espresso.

But going back to the fish, the skin was crisp – I love fish skin when it’s properly cooked and I always eat it, but there was an ingredient in the dressing that I couldn’t identify. I asked the owner and she said it was just coriander. But it wasn’t those chewy, fibrous seeds that we buy in the supermarket – it was perfumed, floral, citrus and wonderful. Eventually with a bit of forensic work on the plate we worked out that it was fresh green coriander (Cilantro) seeds, like the ones we have every year on our allotment. The ones in the photograph at the top. It was a revelatory first experience of an ingredient I’ve never cooked with. Driving home through the quiet Cotswold lanes we could have been back in one of those places in France. Obviously we stopped off at the allotment on the way home and gathered a crop of a few ounces of berries- enough to freeze and use the whole summer. Even eaten raw they taste great, but give them a little bit of heat and they develop a symphonic flavour. Wow!

I realize I’m treading on dangerous territory here; as if I’m auditioning for Pseud’s Corner so here’s a picture of me somewhere in Southern France just to seal the deal. I should say, though that just up the hill from where I’m standing we stopped off at a very run down cafe/hotel and got into a long conversation with the English owner. He brought out a local dry cured sausage to share with us, and as he told us about his (somewhat dodgy ) plans for the future a man passed us with a huge tray of freshly picked morels. We didn’t stop to enjoy them because we still had some miles uphill to walk. I should also say that the word “poseur” has two meanings in French. The first meaning describes a man who irons his jeans and the second refers to a tradesperson who sets things – say paving stones or tiles – into position. There’s even a feminine form “poseuse” . You can see the steep wall of a quarry behind me and I wonder if the poseurs in question were the workers who laid the nearby railway line from Paris to Marseille. That’s a railway journey I’d still love to make and we’d be sure to stop overnight at the Hôtel Terminus in Cahors where we had another of those meals that haunt us still.

God I’ve aged! – still wearing the same shirt today, though!

Meanwhile – back on the farm again

Well we arrived back in Bath on the Sunday before the heatwave struck, and after 2 weeks of rain in Cornwall we were just as trapped by the searing temperatures and – (ask any gardener) – under the cosh of constant watering. The only time to water in a heatwave is as early as you can bear to get up – in our case it was five am, because sleeping at all at 20C is a bit of a struggle. An early start gives you the very best of a fiercely hot summer’s day; much better than the evening when the earth is scorching. But nature doesn’t stand still just because you want a break. We left the allotment in good order but two weeks later the weeds were roaring and we had a battle on our hands.

There’s only one way to do this, and it’s to blitz the plot systematically from one bed to the next until it’s all as clear of weeds as it ever can be. If you’ve been watching Springwatch on the BBC and looking at the weary parents of fledgling birds endlessly feeding their ever more demanding family, you’ll have some idea what it feels like to clear an allotment that’s got above itself. The grass path that you should have strimmed before you went away is now three feet high in Cocksfoot, False Oat-grass, Couch and rough Meadow grass. I’m showing off a bit with the names there because Cornwall gave me a great deal of time to “do the grasses”

But doing the grasses involved a lot of work with the Olympus TG-7 camera because so much grass identification demands high quality macro photos which is far from simple in a windy situation when your subject is waving around. It’s a difficult skill to learn and demands that you step away from that comforting auto setting and get down and dirty with shutter speeds, flash values and f-numbers. Oh and I was also trying to develop a new step by step recording procedure – which I’ve bored you enough with already. Progress was slow. And that’s all I’m going to say. So with photographic experiments, learning new plants and weeding, the Potwell Inn has had to go on the back burner for a few days.

I said several weeks (weeds?) ago that the allotment had suddenly matured, and the top left photograph took me by surprise with an unexpectedly emotional reaction. I think I’d been strimming a weedy and grassy path, and it reminded me of my grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns where the garden paths always gave me a sense of delight; always verdant and closely mown. And then the photo looking along the plot and beyond the polytunnel seemed as if it expressed something of that childhood wonder – the chairs, the little pond and the sheer energy of the plants and running down the path to the greenhouse with my sister to see Charlie the toad. The trees we planted in Covid year are all in fruit now, and with the hungry gap over we’re eating our own produce. I think you have to treat allotmenteering as work -but not the grinding boredom of routine, but the utterly rewarding work of knowing what needs to be done and just getting on with it. It teaches you patience and resilience – we left the broad bean crop for a couple of weeks and when we got back the whole crop had been eaten and the plants were suffering from some kind of rust. Tomorrow we’ll pull them up. Cool weather plants don’t enjoy heatwaves any more than we do.

And in what counts as a pretty low-level flash of inspiration, I discovered (on my hands and knees but not praying) how important edges are to the appearance of an allotment. Add that to another feature that only comes with time – I mean scale here – the allotment looks grown up because it’s literally grown upwards and whichever way you turn and move, new vistas open up. Neither of us wants regimented rows in the way that some of our old 1940’s allotment books showed – all rows perfectly straight – and few of us can afford to imitate Gertrude Jekyll in her archly curated informality; but just a few delineating lines and paths along with a scattering of sheds, trees, texture and colour but never forgetting an offering of plants for the pollinators – that’s a living, breathing, tactile work of art. It’s a conversation with nature.

Speaking of which, the photo below shows the tough side of nature. I’m no entomologist but my ever available phone app thinks it’s a very deceased Southern Hawker dragonfly nymph which has been killed (and this is a guess) by a zombie fungus, (probably Cordyceps) which you can see growing out of its scales. With a twist worthy of Edgar Allan Poe the fungus takes over and consumes the living creature, leaving the brain until last, when the dying Dragonfly is induced to climb to a point high on a poolside plant and grip the leaf in its jaws in order better to spread its spores. Oh glory! That’s going to keep me awake!

Well that was a night!

Macro photograph of False Oat grass flowers

After a couple of weeks of waiting for the weather to improve, last night was the last grey and ill tempered shot from the gods before the promised heatwave makes life intolerable from a different direction. We’ve known for some time that the rooflight dome in the campervan is cracked, but at midnight the stormy rain started to drip relentlessly on the bed. We got up, shoved half a roll of kitchen roll where we hoped it would help; covered the bed with a waterproof picnic rug and went back to sleep. At three o’clock the rain hammered down again and the drip resumed. Sleeping while holding a washing up bowl is not a skill either of us have learned, so we found another roll of kitchen cloths and replaced the temporary dam.

We’ve had worse nights in tents of course. One pancaked in a storm and we spent the rest of the night listening to World Service on the radio while we held the flapping fabric away from the sleeping children. We became overnight authorities on some kind of African flea species. Another tent actually split in half in a fierce storm – so a leak in the campervan is, historically, not such a big deal. Our closest shave was when lightning struck a child’s bike just feet away and almost melted parts of it. That night we went to bed at a crowded campsite and woke up to an almost empty field. It wasn’t so much courage and resilience – I just didn’t really want to spend more time with the Mothers’ Union.

Anyway, after waking early for the third time to a slate grey sky and yet more sea mist; our hopes for something better were rewarded and, as I write this, the sky is clearing in defiance of the weather forecast. My inner Eeyore says it won’t last.

I like to go to bed on a positive thought, (see previous sentence), and so last night’s was the sudden realization, as I plodded around to the chemical disposal point with a full cludger, that my long standing habit of silently naming the plants as I pass them has extended to a few more grasses after a couple of weeks of intense work. Everybody except one thinks that grasses are hard, but I was challenged and inspired years ago by the “one” a fine teacher who dismissed my difficulties with the words “Oh … grasses are easy!” – and they are, provided you’re prepared to put the hours in.

As I think back to my childhood, back in the days when children were allowed to wander freely, playing wherever we liked as long as we turned up for meals, grasses were probably the first plants I knew; not by name (especially Latin names) but by purpose. Wall Barley provided darts to throw at one another, False Oat grass was great for stripping seeds with a finger and thumbnail and putting them down your best friend’s neck and the wide leaves could be plucked, held between your thumbs and blown into making loud screeching noises. Aside from grasses there was the ever reliable Cleavers which you could surreptitiously attach to someone’s jumper and Old Man’s Beard whose canes you could smoke just like all the grownups did. childhood is the place to start botanising – not smoking! – for sure.

Earlier this week we passed a couple and had a brief conversation about how dense and varied the wildflowers here are. She told me that she’d counted twelve different grass species on a walk the previous day. In her childhood she’d been really absorbed by finding plants and sticking them in her scrap-book. She didn’t know what the names of any of the grasses were but that really didn’t seem to matter. There is, I’m sure, a tremendous latent interest in plants but we don’t seem to be building a bridge towards beginners but tend to speak an arcane language and sound too clever by half instead of using English plant names and even telling the stories of how they got them. I ‘m sure if you shared the fact that Cuckoo Pint got its name from”pintle” which is the shaft which is (dare I say) inserted into the rudder- that “cuckoo” is a polite word for an adulterer and that one of its other many names is “Parson in the pulpit” you’d surely remember the name forever and then if you really needed to you could easily discover it’s also called Arum maculatum when it’s being used scientifically. It’s significant that one of the best and most entertaining books on English plant names was written by Geoffrey Grigson who was a poet. Plants aren’t just objects of study, but they feed us, heal us and make a walk in the countryside an aesthetic adventure.

So not surprisingly the first plant I was able to identify easily was False Oat-grass because I already knew what it was; just not what it was called. I could list the rest easily but only because in childhood they represented useful things like itchy powder and bows and arrows. We brewed elderberries in tin cans and puddle water and pretended it was wine and we scrumped apples in the abandoned orchards of a bombed house just up the road.

This weekend a large group of primary schoolchildren and their parents shipped up at the campsite and took over maybe fifteen pitches. The children’s voices filled the air and it was lovely as they kicked a ball around, threw water bombs at each other and annoyed the hell out of their mums and dads who just wanted to sit around and drink prosecco. Yesterday I made a collage of photographs of my first grass to celebrate its (and my) existence. It was good and that just leaves the other 2000 or so species to find and record. Back on the road tomorrow early and then the builders are coming on Tuesday to finish up the work that’s been waiting ten years. Then in the afternoon I’m off to the hospital for them to look at the cataract growing in one of my eyes. I’m so looking forward to be able to resolve distant objects once more.

The thing about Cornwall is it rains every day.

Greater Bird’s-foot trefoil

Rather like Wales but further south and therefore a bit warmer, Cornwall has its very own special kind of rain – like a tiny hole in a leaky hose it can soak you through in minutes and you never know where it’s coming from. When we woke up yesterday morning rain was beading up and running down the campervan windows, and just beyond was an impenetrable sea-mist. We turned as always to the Met Office to lift our mood but drew a blank. They referred to a “wobbly front” which is seemingly weaving a narrow band of misery across Roseland and northeast passing anywhere else we might think of escaping to. We made a cup of tea and sat in bed looking at the window. Driving home seemed, and remained a good option throughout the morning so we dried out the groundsheet, emptied the cludger, topped up the drinking water, blew up the tyres and packed away the table. Then we changed our minds (it was still drizzling) and I went down the field to take some macro photos of a plant that needed a closer look (see above) and suddenly for no reason at all we felt cheerful.

There’s an upside to rainy days in the campervan and that’s because it gives us an excuse to read books and do whatever we want without getting wet. So Madame read and I finally transformed my eccentric records into compliant form using AI and a staggering amount of memory and data. Then we ate pasta for the 73rd time this week and lived like students for a few hours. I absolutely love getting into a topic and hammering it. I can feel my brain straining and the synapses making novel networks until it feels like new life spreading through me; and no – apart from a syrupy and fiercely bitter espresso coffee first thing – (a holiday treat) – no recreational chemicals were involved.

Heath Bedsraw

Anyway I’m sharing this next photo because it’s a lot more representative of the tiny details that I spend most of my campervan time looking for. It’s just a bit of a leaf, but if you look very closely (the leaf is barely 5 mm long), you’ll see a line of tiny spike-like hairs and whether they point forwards or backwards is a determining feature between two species. The thing is that close-up examination with a hand lens reveals a truly exciting new perspective. Things that once looked identical look a bit different under 10x magnification; even more different under 20x and under a microscope oh wow! When I enlarge a macro photograph on a big screen when I get home I can see details that until the invention of the lens in the thirteenth century had probably never been seen by a human being. Many people tend to assume that science is driven by numbers and rooted in solid facts. In fact it’s driven by wonder and curiosity. It’s people with neither of those faculties who give science a bad name. We’re bedevilled by binaries and especially the ones that divide science from art. Mathematicians will willingly admit that theorems and solutions to old conundrums tend to come in inspirational flashes leaving all of the work to be done in proving the insight. They talk about “knowing” that a theorem is true because it’s beautiful or elegant. Philosophers agonise about mind/brain binaries when that may be an artificial division. Maybe they’re one and the same thing; mind, body, spirit, brain, even – dare I say – male, female, human and non human, native and foreigner. Fragments of a whole waiting to be reunited in a kinder vision – the kind of vision that a child is gifted with and is taught to forget.

When we were at Falmouth Art School the Head of Sculpture was something of a reclusive genius. Without ever exchanging more than a nod with him – (Ray Exworth was pretty terrifying) – he taught me one of my most important life lessons. He worked every day except (it was rumoured) Christmas day. Even as fashions were changing and it was taken as read that creativity was like a special gland that only some people had – so whatever they did would be art on account of the secret gland – Ray Exworth just worked. I fell upon Samuel Beckett’s words when I first read them ;

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Sitting here in the campervan lost in a sea mist, the ghostly voices whisper words of discouragement and I tell them to piss off and go bother someone else. There’s a blackbird singing outside and soon the voluble family of crows will start their day-long group chat. The last few remaining campers are all lingering in bed like us, waiting for the sun to appear. It may take a couple of days yet, after all this is Cornwall where it rains every day. Hotter fiercer weather is on the way and this holiday will soon fade as the solstice takes us towards autumn. We’ll revert to our late summer heatwave timetable on the allotment and rise early to weed and water.

Life really is very simple if we allow it. Take out greed, petty disputes, ambition, pride and fearfulness and that leaves space for pondering, for growing, harvesting, cooking and eating, loving and allowing ourselves to be loved, and following our curiosity and wonder wherever it might take us and inviting those discoveries to share our lives and help us to fail better.

A rainy day in St Davids

Where’s Wally?

A vibrant patch of wildflowers and greenery by the seaside, featuring pink and white blossoms among lush foliage, with a calm sea in the background.
Coastal undergrowth on Roseland

We were sitting on a bench, resting after a bit of a hilly stretch on the coast path and I was squinting closely at a tiny fragment of leaf when a small group of walkers passed us. “What have you found?” one of them asked. “I’m just checking out this plant that I may have misidentified” “It’s Hedge Bedstraw”, one of them said. It was a friendly – we’re all in this together – kind of remark that instantly established a common bond. “I don’t think it is”- I replied – “I think it may be Heath Bedstraw because there are tiny forward-pointing prickles on the leaf. This is the kind of thin, acidic soil they grow on”. We were all set, then, for a long (and for Madame and the rest of the group) tedious hyper focused discussion when another walker standing at the back of the group said. “There’s a Hummingbird Hawkmoth!” – pointing behind us. We all stopped whatever we were thinking about and turned to where the the speaker was pointing. And there it was; I’ve never seen one before so it was a bit of a moment to see this oddly beautiful creature whose wings moved so fast they were not much more than a blur. Then there were five of us eagerly following the path of the moth as it foraged among the coastal plants, oblivious to us it seemed. Moths have had this capacity to evolve towards seemingly endless recklessly stunning forms and patterns. It’s hard not to think of some kind of artist lovingly creating them. Madame grabbed my phone from me and attempted to take some photographs but couldn’t get close; held back by thick brambles.

Our cheerful conversation continued and then we went our separate ways having – all of us – learned something new. Back at the campervan I just had to double check my already double checked identification and keyed out the piece of Bedstraw in my pocket (it’s a way of naming a plant by answering a series of either/or questions until the name pops out at the end). Yes it was Heath Bedstraw. Then I googled Hummingbird Hawkmoth and discovered that Hedge Bedstraw is one of its food plants; that’s to say it will lay its eggs on them for the hatching caterpillars to feed on. Interestingly it was hovering around clumps of the related Heath Bedstraw so maybe it’s not that fussy. One of the things I find most difficult to live with is the sheer provisionality of all wildlife records. It’s true until someone discovers that it’s not.

And that’s the trouble with this natural history malarky – it can get wildly out of control with those of us disposed towards intense attachments – let’s call them obsessions or addictions. Later, and wakeful in bed, I mentally rehearsed the various species of Bedstraw I’d seen, and where I saw them. That was fun, and there were five species spread across North Wales, Mid Wales, Pembrokeshire, Bath and Cornwall. Madame woke up and asked if I was OK? 3.00am is a bad time for those kinds of discussion – at least it wasn’t a nightmare, and we’d had a good day’s wandering about; pub lunch; a couple of excellent finds and a major step forward with the breakthrough discovery that I could load WAV audio recordings files of plant findings straight into Notebook LM which positively relishes English plant names and Latin binomials issuing gentle corrections and straightening out misunderstandings. All my previous doubts have been resolved, and I’ve got a functioning workflow at last.

I know this is problematic for some, but Notebook LM is rapidly becoming my pocket tutor and data organiser. Oh, and I also made progress with identifying some new grasses and that meant getting to grips with identification keys – PLUS our youngest moved into his new flat after being evicted by a (barely Christian) charity under one of those noxious Section 21 orders, now abolished due to abuse. We also met some heartwarmingly nice people with whom we shared many interests and the Potwell Inn human kindness index leapt up three points, something of a record. We rarely listen to the news when we’re away.

What’s happening on the allotment while we’re here? Well we gave it a deep watering, especially in the polytunnel, before we left and there are a couple of allotment neighbours who have promised to keep an eye on things. Every day we scan the weather forecast and wonder what will be happening on our patch of earth. Bath is situated in the steep sided valley of the River Avon and surrounded by the outliers of the Cotswolds, which means that rain tends to fall on the hills rather than in the valley. But then, we’ve also often had heavy showers at home and discovered that the allotment – only 800 yards away – is still dry. The most accurate forecast amounts to looking through the window. Madame retains a passion for isobars, warm and cold fronts and all the rest which she gained at the research station where it really mattered, and thousands of trees could lose their blossoms to a sudden frost.

We even have some allotment planning software on my laptop and we’ve spent one rainy morning here bringing it up to date. Does that make us into a couple of old saddo’s ? Ask us that when we’re eating just-picked peas that make the frozen ones taste like bin waste; and ask us again when you taste one of our tomatoes just harvested and hot from the sun, or sweetcorn from the polytunnel that would make a badger faint with pleasure. As with every other human pursuit, the more we practice, the harder we work, the happier we get; so thanks for asking ….. we’re not saddo’s!

It rains every day in Cornwall and today is no exception and so I’m writing and Madame is reading a biography of the artist Gustav Klimt and reading aloud to me the bits she finds most interesting. I’m a man, so that’s the closest I can get to multi-tasking.

Bird’s foot truffle oil and other disasters

Close-up of a small flower with orange and yellow petals surrounded by green grass.
Lotus corniculatus

These past two days have been a revelation – although not a good one. and I’ve been left with just the embers of my project and on my knees, eyes streaming, trying to blow some life into them. The bright new day is yet to dawn.

Just to recap, I’ve been designing and now testing a new workflow for my botanical recording – attempting to make it faster, more accurate and less of a square peg when it comes to uploading into the round holed national databases; but rather like the time I rebuilt the engine of our Morris 1000 and left out the rotor in the oil pump, the flaws soon made themselves apparent when I road tested my bright new idea down here in Cornwall.

There’s a lane outside the campsite which begins as the metalled road down to a large house, presumably once part of a home farm at the centre of the big estate. It then continues as a footpath above what’s now a hay meadow for a couple of hundred yards, across a stile into a patch of scrubby woodland for a little way until it joins a very pretty deep sided sunken track which leads to the beach via another track heavily decorated with dog poo bags making the exploration of its botanical residents a bit hazardous. The fact that it’s Madame’s favourite walk makes it easier to smuggle in a bit of road resting. Sometimes. Although I’ve never formally surveyed the plants along with its several micro-environments, it’s the perfect place to learn. So here it is; the method …..

Step one attach the microphone and receiver ready to record all the details for later, and when the plant is spotted, record them in one continuous packet of data – Problem – I talk too much and instead of recording just the details, the recording features too many oohs aahs and miscellaneous grunts and strange noises. Worse still comes later when I load the recording into the transcription software.

Step two – take a quick photo on Flora Incognita to get a reference picture with a provisional name. Problem – no internet signal. But I do get a time and unreliable location so as to link the data together later

Step three – take any measurements that I might need later and note them for the audio

Step four – take more reference photos on the Olympus camera which can do macro and has better resolution. Problem – stiff winds make focusing on grasses a complete nightmare. I either need to take a small piece of board as a background or uproot specimens to photograph later – not ideal and sometimes illegal.

Step five– take GPS reading and photograph it on the phone or note it. This ties it all together. Problem – remember to figure out how to reset the GPS to gather the current location and write it down (data separation hazard) or record it. Need to write a short script and stick to it.

Step six – record all the data; names, grid reference and measurements etc in a standardised form that AI can understand.

Step seven– back at the ranch, run the audio through the transcription software and edit if necessary. This is where the system totally collapsed because I was using the free Google Record app which handles ordinary conversation pretty well, but went to bed with a headache at the sound of plant names and just fainted at Latin binomials. I tried to edit the result but it was terribly time consuming so I recorded a page from John Wright’s “Grasslands” to give it another chance. This was a great laugh, with Bird’s foot Trefoil being rendered as Bird’s foot truffle oil, and the blameless little Eyebright – “Euphrasia nemorosa, the commonest form” unaccountably branded as the communist form. Obviously this level of inaccuracy is beyond the editing powers of any AI programme. The plan was to feed these pre-digested dollops of data into Notebook LM and ask it to sort them into a spreadsheet in correct order to pass through the pearly gates of head office; every single entry checked against the great canonical parchments.

Step eight – this was meant to be the bit where I closed the reference books and where I modestly admitted that the new workflow was a triumph, instead of which there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. When I remonstrated with Google Gemini it almost cracked a robotic joke and said the bird’s foot truffle oil sounded like the salad dressing from hell! (now that is scary – it’s cracking jokes already).

However – I’m an eternal optimist – there are some tweaks I can see which fall short of carrying a mobile router around with an aerial tied to my bandana. It’s helped me see how to improve my photographs to get better results – especially with grasses and I’ve learned a lot about identifying grasses – which was one of my targets. I’m pleased to say that I’ve added five more grass species to my total. We also met a Swedish woman and talked about the yellow flowered strawberries that grow down the lane. We thought they were probably poisonous but she said they used to eat them in Sweden but they were insipid and not that sweet. She doesn’t eat them here because of the dog poo that gets everywhere. After a few days of wind and rain the sun has now come out and Madame is cooking a dish of ratatouille as a punishment for my distraction. Over the twenty years we’ve been coming here the village has become more and more gentrified. The local spar shop now sells curated wines, amalfi lemons and “pain de campagne” and an ice cream next door sells for £4.50 a scoop. Here are a few pictures from the entirely un-gentrified lane. They’re all weeds, but nonetheless rather charming in their blunt honesty. It’s a very under-recorded little paradise and one day I’ll bite the bullet and do a proper survey.

A short message from paradise

Close-up of a cluster of flowering plants with pinkish buds and delicate green leaves in a natural setting.
Wild Carrot, Daucus carota ssp carota

I could as easily have subtitled this post “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” so as to join together our being in one of our favourite places in the country – the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall – and linking it with AI. One half of the couplet represents all that’s good and the other the spawn of satan.

We arrived here completely knackered after days of work on the allotment getting it ready for our temporary absence and a couple more days of readying the campervan for its inaugural long drive after the troubles (new engine, clutch, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Up at five am only to discover that the roof had leaked in a place it had never leaked before – we quickly sorted it and set off in gathering sunshine for a long drive at a stately sixty in honour of the engine; “she being brand new and consequently a little stiff “. That last bit was a quote from a poem by ee cummings which a musty old critic once described as only fit for adolescents. I haven’t aged a day!

Musty old critics have had their field day over AI as well – marching en mass under the banner of the goose quill pen and denouncing AI vehemently, claiming to protect the masses from evolving technology. Good luck with that then, although Google seems to have messed up their latest software update on my watch which insists that I only slept for three hours last night. It was ten hours and I felt all the better for it.

So part of the purpose of this trip is to field test a new plant recording system and that’s where the AI comes in. Knowing a place like this really well has its advantages for rehearsing a new way of plant recording; not least that I’ve already put in the hard miles for most of the species. But anyone who gets interested in plants and wildflowers will know that there are some very common species that are extremely hard to tell apart. So part of the aim is to revisit the difficult ones and see whether I can distinguish the trees from the wood. In preparation I picked three brain teasers and posed a question on Google Gemini. “How do I distinguish A from B” . The first one sounds easier than it is in practice. How do I distinguish between a wild Carrot and a sea carrot? In a few seconds the AI answer dealt with two things – the hows and the whys of wild carrots v sea carrots. The how is demonstrated in the photo at the top. It’s a wild carrot growing on a clifftop near here and that’s because the flower head is in the process of forming a basket/ lobster pot shape. But then you might well ask – what’s an ordinary wild carrot doing on a sea cliff? and the answer is that wild carrots normally grow in and around arable fields and sea carrots grow near the sea. BUT, growing close together, they readily hybridize and so in Cornwall where the arable fields often come to the clifftop with only a footpath between and so there are a lot of what we might call cousins that look somewhere between the two. My mind is at ease because the hybrid plants can be assigned to the (very large) category of WOB’s the walk on by’s.

The other two questions were necessarily more general – what specific details should I record with photographs and all the other tools – hand lens, ruler etc in order to distinguish and identify the other big families grasses (Poaceae) and the huge family of Dandelion/ daisy lookalikes. In a few moments Gemini gave me a brilliant crib sheet to take out on my adventures. Traditionalists may take a couple of minutes here to rearrange their scowls in case the wind changes and they get stuck with lemon faces. Each and every record will be taken home to my study and interrogated with the books.

Until the plant apps bed in – which they soon certainly will, the old way is still the final arbiter; but I can foresee a day when taxonomy will be a matter of taking a clipping from a specimen with a hand-held DNA analyser. How you might challenge an identification after it’s been deified by its genes by a person in a white coat who’s never as much as sniffed a rose is not one I’ll live long enough to worry about.

The thing about AI is that we have to make the cultural move from knowing everything by rote towards asking better and better questions. The skills of the future will lie in knowing how to extract the maximum good science through a question that’s as sharp as a samurai sword.

We’re having a recovery day first and apart from lazing around and snoozing I’ve been looking at photos of the allotment plants as if they were our children, and reading John Wright’s excellent new book Grasslands. A further search with AI revealed that grasses are by far the most numerous species if you exclude the 57 varieties (OK thousands, then) of the apomicts which have dispensed with messy sex and just clone themselves; Dandelions and Blackberries are two of the other culprits here in the UK. The following two species in numerical order are the daisy (dandelion) family, then the Sedges and the roses. I can’t see myself getting bored anytime soon.

There’s not a great difference between learning to live a virtuous life, reaping the benefits of eudaimonia (flourishing) and learning to make better plant records. They both require constant practice – which is one of two reasons that we’re here. The other reason is the joy of walks near the sea. There is – I suppose – a third reason which is far less virtuous. The botanical societies tend to cling to traditional ways, and getting records through the minefields and the heavily guarded portals into the universe of scientific data can be a tortuous and Kafkaesque experience. I should know. I worked inside a conservative organisation (the C of E) for 30 years and I learned that these organizations will never abandon a regulation without a decade of bloodshed. I’m trying to develop a personal recording method that will shortcut the traffic jams by providing exactly what the gatekeepers are asking for. I’m not trying to change anything, I’m plotting a path through the maze.

Our allotment just grew up

A wooden raised garden bed filled with dark soil, surrounded by plants and trees in a garden setting.
The final set of four raised beds

The ambiguity in that title was entirely deliberate. It was some time last year when we were standing on the allotment and I said to Madame – “It suddenly looks as if it has matured”. Whatever it is – possibly the fruit trees which have really got their roots down, but also the fact that all the wooden structures are greyed and in some cases needing replacing; the polytunnel is theoretically due a new skin which we can’t really afford, and somehow when you add it all up it looks as if it’s been around the block a few times and decided to settle down to middle-age.

Of course, looked at through the eyes of love (how else should you look at ten years of your gardening life?) – it’s what the scholars call a palimpsest. Back in the day when writing was an expensive luxury, the materials were used more than once and traces of a previous, older message, letter or even book could be discovered lurking faintly under the younger. It’s exactly the same for our grown-up allotment. Every bed, and almost every other structure is just the latest version of an older one; complete with previous soil level, old screws and joints betraying their previous history. Beds have been re-purposed and re-designated over the years and the soil improved with tons of compost and leaf mould. Where once there was a difficult mix of clay and loam, there’s a much more fertile, sweeter smelling and friable soil. Despite all our efforts to find the best place to grow strawberries they migrated without any intervention from us to a spot in the lee of the polytunnel where they’re completely happy. Who says that plants can’t talk!

The latest batch of four raised beds are actually the top of four deep compost bins that I sawed in half horizontally a few weeks ago because they’d become an unofficial dump. They’ll be replaced by a single California Cylinder made from two concentric rings of sheep wire filled with cardboard and with a rough and ready chimney driven through the middle. It’s an idea we got (I think) from Lawrence Hills and it works a treat and heats up fast with the help of what he called “human activator” and you can work that one out for yourselves. An alternative activator is comfrey liquid but be warned, it really stinks.

Recycling of old materials isn’t just virtuous, it’s cheap. The eight beds I’ve just finished cost the price of a few new screws and some additional topsoil and compost for the new growing layer. I saved all the original topsoil in bags – they were hellishly heavy – and filled the resulting holes with fresh vegetable waste, cardboard and wood chip, then I put the original topsoil back on top and augmented it. The good soil is now 18″ deep and will be perfect for growing show-off carrots and parsnips.

The only constant factor in an allotment seems to be the unexpected. Last year’s pepper plants bought from a garden centre turned out to be Scotch Bonnets. We now have a lifetime supply of dried chillies. Each season is spent in negotiation with the weather, and with climate change advancing rapidly the old certainties and folk rhythms are becoming redundant. This year, for instance May and June swapped places whilst April showers were in short supply, and all we can do is ride with the volatility of the weather.

And so we soldier on. The allotment is less tidy and yet more interesting as the years go on. Plants come and go – last autumn the Tayberry got a savage pruning and this year the blackberry has stopped sulking after two transplantings and is, at last, showing the will to live. When we first moved on to it as an unkempt field we thought of the plot as a blank canvas on which we could do as we pleased. In the fullness of time we’ve realized that we can only do as it pleases – which turns out to be a much happier experience. The asparagus bed went the way of all flesh and now hosts a crop of new potatoes. The approach we adopt is a form of informed imagining in which we propose an idea, dispose the place in which we want to grow it by preparing the ground and selecting the spot and then leave it to nature to say yea or nay. Some we win and some we lose and that’s OK too. Allotments, like their tenants have previous history. Ours was probably once part of a Roman vineyard and then a nursery and has probably been in some kind of cultivation for a couple of millennia. Going back even further the origin of our soil is alluvial clay and loam formed by the ebb and flow of the river as it cut its valley through the soft oolitic limestone. We dig up fragments of clay pipes abandoned by the Georgian gardeners and some time in the future some hapless archaeologist could puzzle over the multitude of sea shells that stowed away in the bags of seaweed we once brought back from Lleyn to feed the asparagus. We may think that we live in the moment but as gardeners we only thrive within and upon the past. Some of the plants we grow we choose, and some that grow just happened in on the wind, dropped by a bird or attached to a car tyre. All gardeners have to learn to rule kindly and lightly over their kingdoms. We may think of ourselves as owners of our plots but in truth they own us and we can do nothing except by their permission. As butterflies and migrant birds cross the channel sans passports and permits so too do seeds, insects, plant diseases and all of the thousand things that charm us and taunt us. Most of the troubles of the world are due to people who misguidedly believe in control. We bend with the wind if we want to grow crops while growing ourselves comes free but not cheap.