The question is … Can I tell my Asteraceae from my elbow?

A community garden with raised wooden beds, featuring a variety of vegetables, including potatoes and herbs, alongside a greenhouse in the background.
This was the left hand half of the allotment yesterday – the other half is the same size

Sorry Mr Eliot but April isn’t the cruellest month for gardeners; its May, when nature moves from the subjunctive to the indicative and blesses all our hopes with the sheer thereness of weeds, frosts and withering droughts. Four seasons in the month when dreams can disappear in a night and the fragments of bindweed we left behind in the autumn come back roaring back at us like belligerent teenagers. Nights spent staring at seed packets and saying shall we or shan’t we sow them? as if we were a couple of lonely souls contemplating a bit of adultery. But in May, no-one knows what will happen next.

So we plod on as always, fearing the worst and hoping for the best. Gardening is an excellent training for the virtues. Patience, courage, temperance, and modesty are all as useful in on an allotment as in public life; in fact if we refused to vote for anyone who was not a true gardener the world might become a better place.

So in the midst of this all too predictable heatwave we’ve been up at 5.00am some days, to do a few hours on the plot before it gets too hot to work . In May we have an abundance of small and vulnerable plants which need constant watering until they get their roots down. You can hear the bindweed muttering dark thoughts of strangulation below ground and even repeated watering, waiting and hoeing fails to diminish wave after wave of germinating dandelions, cresses and willowherbs which just love a bit of bare ground.

In addition we’ve both been waiting for minor operations (that’s in the eyes of the NHS) for which the queues reach all around the block and back to the crematorium. The boys (all approaching their forties) still keep us awake at night worrying about how they’re coping with jobs and flats in the midst of Section 21 evictions being handed out by the thousand.

Last but not least, I’ve been designing a new workflow for recording plants which will be much faster and more accurate with the use of some AI – which turns out not to be in the identification department but in sorting out my dispersed data and separating plants from shopping lists. If it works it’ll be a life-saver and will reduce the weight of kit that I need to carry around with me, moving from rucksack to pockets. To celebrate all this we’re just booking a holiday in Marloes where I made my first ever plant list many years ago and we’ll be staying in a cottage we’d seen a thousand times but lacked the means to rent. All this to celebrate my 80th birthday and our 6oth wedding anniversary. I had my first botany lesson from a delightful scotswoman who found me lying on the sandy footpath around St Bride’s bay and trying to identify Hemlock Water Dropwort. She told me she was a botany teacher and that she always recommended Francis Rose’s flora to beginners. I took her advice and never regretted it – in fact I’d love to see her again and thank her personally but I fear it may be too late.

All of which will (I hope) explain why I’ve been a bit remiss recently in writing regularly. Life is just so exhilarating that I find acting my age a more and more ridiculous idea. I’m off now to make Elderflower cordial – the flower heads which were steeped in boiled water overnight, smell lovely – and it will only tale an hour to bottle enough cordial to last the summer.

A rocky formation emerges from a calm sea under a clear blue sky, with gentle waves lapping against the shore and pebbles scattered on the beach.
Marloes beach

They’re all Dandelions until they’re not

I was reading a new book this week – I know I could have said that any time in the last ten years and it would still have been true. I read a lot – period! Anyway this week I’ve been concentrating on Sarah Whild’s new handbook on biological recording and loving it apart from a creeping doubt whether I’d ever make the grade. Amateurs like me often face a Catch 22 situation where we find ourselves in an endless circular difficulty in which it seems (from reading this book) that the key to getting records accepted is to have a good reputation. How do you get a good reputation? Why of course by having lots of records accepted. We stand on the edge of the magic circle waving like a rapidly wilting wallflower; D listers in a school prom, and never being chosen.

I mean, I don’t mind too much because I’m not the train spotting type and I’m not even sure I’d like to be recognised for my botanical efforts alone. There are too many other non-wildflower subjects that I’m equally interested in. Sarah’s book is about the science of identifying and recording plants and goodness knows we need the science in this time of ecological crisis; but looking back at my long love affair with plants it seems to me that the true motivation was a combination of aesthetics and puzzles. When I first went to work as a very junior groundskeeper and school bus driver after leaving art school, I could easily identify Speedwells and Dandelions; enemies of the cricket square. However I learned very soon that not all Speedwells were the same, and more punishingly, that not all Dandelions are Dandelions. It was the struggle to tell apart and name the different members of their two families that really engaged me. It was a magnificent puzzle. The fact that almost all of them are extremely common and unworthy of the attention of the Magisterium made no difference – I loved the scruff-bags of the plant world, and I still do; probably because I’m a scruff-bag too. It also became apparent that Dandelions in particular are fiendishly difficult on account of their ability to clone themselves. I soon learned to walk on by!

So if I came to be a field botanist at all it was through trying to dig my way out of the slough of despond that all those Dandelion thingies inhabit, and when I hear one of the tweedies going large on their vast knowledge I retreat in case someone exposes my slim credentials. Imposter syndrome could have been invented just for me. I suspect I was a bit of a solitary from my earliest childhood and offering me a chance to do a course or take an exam would scare the living daylight out of me.

My real ambition is not to get an award or be recognised in the street. Years ago when I was doing a lot of slots and spots on BBC Radio, I was in the supermarket one day when a woman came around the corner after hearing me talk to someone and asked me – “are you Dave Pole?” – “Yes I am” – “ooh, I thought you were tall”. I am not tall. My only skill is as a communicator, although my several detractors would dismiss me as just being “clever with words.” Around the same time I was engaged on a project by the Bible Society who were recording the whole of the Bible. It felt less of an honour when I was told I would mainly be reading the devil’s voice. I’m quite sure that Jesus would have had a posh, English middle class voice but I never met my nemesis because I recorded alone in an empty studio and the editors joined all the bits together later. The only compliment came when I was told that my Gloucestershire accent went down a storm in Africa. A storm?

But this quest for a way of communicating hard ideas was the first glimmering of this blog. I was walking up on the River Severn when I found a row of abandoned concrete and steel barges hauled up on the banks at Purton. They were a sorry and desolate sight and I took loads of photos thinking how wonderful it would be if I could incorporate photos, text and HTML links in order to link the photographs as metaphors to illuminate the text. The links would be such that readers would be able to jump from place to place, choosing their own path through. I had to wait for years until the blogging technology came along and I’ve grown, along with the opportunities evolving programmes offered. My workflow always, without exception, begins with an image, a kind of Wordsworthian metaphor that acts as an armature for the writing. The hard ideas are what I’m really interested in and so my means are more creative than they are scientific. When I write about plants I’m often trying to shift a common misperception; to open up questions where there were once only answers. So I’m not so much offering answers to any particular questions but trying to suggest better ways of finding; better places to look for those answers. I use imagery from the allotment, the kitchen, the canal as well as our walks in which we are inevitably concerned with natural history not least plants; none of these in order to court celebrity but in the hope that readers can catch a glimpse of the power and the beauty of Nature. If I stray into the subject of Green Spirituality now and again it’s because I’m searching too.

Right now I’m experimenting with using my voice in some way, moving carefully towards video- who knows? I can blow the dust off my old devil voice once more or perhaps something a little less abrasive. There’s everything to play for.

Close-up of a dandelion seed head surrounded by green grass and wildflowers.
Goatsbeard, “Jack go to bed at noon” – Tragopogon pratensis

This is a member of the Asteraceae but not a Dandelion.

It’s a mess – but a holy mess!

A small pond surrounded by tall green grass and clusters of yellow and white irises in a garden setting.
If you look closely enough you can see a tiny patch of pale blue painted plaster where St Francis keeps an eye out for frog spawn

I know there are all manner of gardening styles, from Gertrude Jekyll’s gingham and lace to Beth Chatto and all the way to the regimental ranks of RHS Wisley. Our allotment neighbour Pete is definitely Midlands in style and we are – frankly – untidy. Some plants blow in on a gardening wind and some settle down. We don’t have weeds but we certainly have some pestilential visitors like couch and bindweed, who outstay their welcome. Other visitors are harder to evict – we have a longstanding relationship with some Tall ramping Fumitory, Fumaria bastardii whose nearest relative seems to grow in a quarry thirty miles down the road and came over from Ireland at some time in the past. A proper traveller you might say. Ours is a polymorphous, polyglot and pollyanna plot with attitude.

Madame is the seed sower and nurturer and I am the surly under-gardener who nails things together muttering dark threats, and does all the heavy work; which is OK because I like the civil engineering bit. My present project is turning four underused compost bins into eight raised beds using as much free material as possible. When I sawed it horizontally in half – as you can imagine – it became a bit floppy and so old screws were removed with my worn-out driver set and new ones driven in with the wrong heads because the others were all worn out from previous bad choices. My arms were consequently purple with bruises due to the blood thinners I take. What with the constant dripping nose from hay-fever and the ugly arms and the cursing, our neighbours gave me a wide berth. They think, maybe, that old-age is something you catch from people like me. I say my language is a homage to my maternal grandfather who taught me almost everything I know about swearing. You’ve no idea how much pleasure I get from celebrating my disused vicar status by creative cursing.

The trick to recycling old topsoil into new beds is to work out a way of minimising the distance each shovelful has to travel – so bed one which can’t be lowered because of the damson tree roots – gets the soil from bed 2 with some composted manure for good luck. Bed 2 then stays empty until some wood chip can be sourced when it will be topped up with the soil from bed three which I stored in old compost bags. That leaves bed four to be filled with much more expensive nursery-bought topsoil and compost. The upside is that beds are much easier to work and much deeper so we can grow longer carrots and parsnips and we haven’t bought a single plank or post.

So its been a good week on the whole, without paying too much attention to the elections. The fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the artists’studios of which we’re almost the last surviving founder members were such fun we returned there for the May holiday open studios. I was having a rather difficult conversation with a disarmingly lovely young welcomer and fiddling with my pixel watch nervously when I managed somehow to turn on a podcast which was sent straight to my hearing aids. Our conversation became bewildering and she must have thought I was quite demented. Madame had another such conversation with a rather deaf man when she was talking about Vermeer who did many of his paintings in pairs and he mistakenly thought that she was saying something about him painting pears. As I’m sure Sam Weller says in Pickwick Papers – ‘collapse of stout party!‘ There’s nothing funnier than a cross-purpose conversation with a complete stranger.

On Sunday, after a family meal our youngest son – who’s a chef – brought around the experimental sourdough pizza dough he’s been working on with my 20 years old starter. As we chatted he said that he’s got three of my favourite family favourites onto the menu at the restaurant. I felt absurdly proud. They’re not really mine at all but dishes I picked up over sixty years and worked up for fun. Some I’d eaten on our travels, and some came from books, all inflected with the local availability of ingredients.

He’s being evicted by his landlord (a so-called Christian charity on a Section 21 no-fault notice. As the evictions deadline has approached over the last weeks we’ve seen any amount of furniture stacked on the pavement outside their empty flats. This so-called charity has turned out thirty people from their properties in order to sell them off, under the pretext of rediscovering their original charitable aims; so it’s all perfectly legal and they make it sound as if it’s some kind of moral obligation to turf people out of their homes. Isn’t it just a bit puzzling how much suffering is caused by ultra respectable people who wear suits to work and worship the gods of commerce and profit? I think of Dante’s vestibule of hell; the place where the uncommitted, those who refuse to take sides on moral issues, those who just don’t give a shit are sent to continue their pointless existence in an eternity of suffering.

But that’s enough. Let’s get back to the allotment and finish this rather anguished piece with a couple of photos that say something about our messy manifesto. We found our first ripe strawberry today, lurking under its water-cooler micro-greenhouse. The two water butts are going to be plumbed into a row of four and could even be purposed to circulate lukewarm water beneath the greenhouse in winter, powered by a solar panel and a recycled radiator in a system we say years ago in the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth. Until today, the latest frost we’d ever experienced on the plot was on May 6th but we had a frost yesterday, today and possibly tomorrow, so- 11th, 12th and 13th May. Luckily we’d covered anything tender with fleece, but our neighbours potatoes were all frost nipped and damaged. They’ll recover but it will take them a while.

Meet the Cranesbill Trio

I used to work as a community artist on a large satellite housing estate on the North West of Bristol. This wasn’t of those six month temporary contacts, I was there for ten years nd I got to know a lot of lovely people I’d never otherwise have met; like the stripper who caught the same late bus as me into Bristol to work, and often had to walk home alone, and told me she never felt safe until she’d re-entered the estate. I loved overhearing conversations on the buses because I learned so much – and one day I heard a comment on another community leader which has never left me. “That Jack B” said one passenger to her neighbour – “He can’t tell shit from pudding!” The estate was one of those places where everyone was related in some way to dozens of others. You quickly learned not to express any opinion about anyone without checking carefully whose cousin they were. Anyway, I’ve been profoundly glad of that phrase over the years and today I especially commend it to those of us who are feeling a bit down at the success of election candidates whose tastes and opinions are wildly weird. If you’re hoping for a tasty meal never order the pudding on the say-so of a waiter who might be called Jack B, because it will probably turn out to be – well, need I say it?

So in order to escape from all that I was casting about for a cheerful story and as I wrote about the cousin challenge in the first paragraph, I remembered that yesterday whilst preoccupied about raised beds on the allotment, I spotted three botanical cousins just above our plot; Herb Robert, Geranium Robertianum, Hedgerow Crane’s-bill, Geranium pyrenaicum, and Cut-leaved Cranes-bill, Geranium dissectum all within ten feet of each other and – as far as it’s ever possible to know – growing wild. I wish I could say I’d stridden forth, vasculum across my shoulder and a copy of Stace IV in my poachers’ bag in search of them, but I was leaning on my spade gasping for breath after shovelling a mixture of compost, manure and topsoil into the four beds. Most good spots like that happen when – for whatever cause – I’m standing still. Please don’t run away with the idea that any of these geraniums are rare because they’re not. It’s just a lovely coincidence to see them together because the differences aren’t that great until you know what to look for and then it’s easy. Like the residents on the estate they are related but quite separate species and their antecedent connection, whether lawful or one-nighters are lost in the mists of thyme. Harm one and you offend them all.

Wooden raised garden beds filled with dark soil, positioned beside a greenhouse.
The cause of the pause – approximately 3000 kg of home-mixed topsoil.

It would be easy to mistake the total weight of four raised beds of soil. Once I’d added some strengthening posts, and mixed together the components it came to around 3 metric tonnes in weight and because I mixed them in situ it meant an awful lot of leaning and turning. Not to worry, though I’ve finished half of them now and the other four – which is to say the top sections of the dismantled compost bins – will have to wait until it’s time to plant up in the the autumn. My back will probably have recovered by then.

We’ve been very focused on the allotment this week because now is the time where – if you sit back and relax – you will discover the extraordinary energy of plants in the spring. Our plots are infested with bindweed, and we run a general (but not religious) policy of not deep digging but working just the top 3 or 4 inches of the soil with hoes and a three or four pronged cultivator. Bindweed spreads by way of underground rhizomes – thick and white and known as devils guts. It’s worth saying that, unlike those who spray them, they’re immune to glyphosate and other chemicals and so the only way to control them is to hoe the tops off regularly and pull out every bit of root as you find it in order to starve them. There are jobs you can leave for another day, but bindweed must be pulled up on sight! I’ll put some photos of the current state of the allotment on at the end.

Meanwhile I struggle but mostly succeed in finding time to read because things are changing so fast in our understanding of the earth and our role in its destruction. At the moment I’m reading Michael Pollan’s new book “A World Appears” in which he explores ways of understanding consciousness in plants and is absolutely fascinating, as are all of his other books. The parallel read is Mary Midgley’s philosophical book “Beast and Man” first published in 1978 which explores the roots of human nature and which overlaps slightly when it comes to the higher animals. She’s the most lucid philosopher I’ve read, and avoids technical language as a matter of principle. One stand-out insight from Pollan’s chapter on sentience is his sudden exclamation – “So that’s what a theory of consciousness is going to generate – Art!” Writing, reading, gardening, botanising, cooking are the key to flourishing for me. You can keep your profits and huge bonuses because I know better than most that there are no pockets in a shroud.

And so – a few more photos of our magical allotment that turns sunshine plus water into food and releases oxygen as it does so.

Beltane

A greenhouse interior showing rows of small tomato plants staked with bamboo canes, planted in rich brown soil with gardening tools and trays in the background.
Grafted, blight resistant tomatoes planted in the polytunnel today

I’m not a devoted follower of pagan festivals except for the neat way they divide the year into horticultural seasons that resonate with me. Checking back today increasing day length, frost free nights, warmth and sunshine which all shout summer’s coming – get the tomatoes in! and we’ve been doing just that for as long as I can check our records. Good Friday – the traditional day for potato planting is a lunar festival and varies by six dangerous weeks which means in some years we’d be coping with frosts and cold winds – so we compute the day from commonsense data. Today we also planted out ridge cucumbers, red peppers and aubergines in the warm soil of the tunnel – it was 22C this morning. The tomato plants and the others are all grafted onto vigorous rootstocks and although they’re expensive they repay the outlay with greatly enhanced crops. We harvest around 80 lbs of tomatoes every year and turn them into delicious sauces and passata which, like the home-made stock and home baked bread, are constant staples in the kitchen.

Sumer is icumen in,
Loude sing cuckou!
Groweth seed and bloweth meed,
And springth the wode now.
Sing cuckou!

This is the oldest secular song that we have; 13th century and still as vibrant as ever. I only dare quote it because this week we heard cuckoos calling in the Bannau Brycheiniog for the first time in years and they filled me with an inexplicable anxiety that we may never hear them again. Anyway I want to celebrate my mood of optimism and the return of my energy now that I’ve been given a new lease of life by our ultra observant GP who came up with the right diagnosis after all the consultants had tried and failed. Now I can prepare a 15 foot bed in one go, walk up hills without being breathless and carry bags of compost around the allotment. I sleep like a log, eat like a horse and read difficult books without losing my concentration. I go to sleep each night with a joyful idea of what needs doing on the allotment and still have the energy to write and cook when that’s done. So yes – Beltane’s a great festival this year even if green face paint would make me look a bit weird.

A close-up view of a raspberry plant featuring green and yellow leaves, set against a background of wood chips.

However, just to remind us that allotmenteering isn’t always a primrose path, the summer raspberries we planted last year are looking very chlorotic. We’ve seen it before and the cure is a foliar spray or a watering with Epsom Salt for the missing magnesium, and then just in case some chelated iron because the two deficiencies are strongly related. The long-term solution would include powdered dolomite rock but we’ll also give them a good feed with liquid seaweed stimulant and we should see an improvement within a week.

Then there were eight

A view of a vegetable garden featuring wooden raised beds, surrounded by lush greenery and a greenhouse in the background. There are tools and gardening supplies nearby.
A wooden planter box with small plants growing in it, surrounded by various tools and materials, including a yellow tarpaulin and wooden planks, on a garden path covered in wood chips.

You’ll know the way it goes – last year’s brilliant idea becomes this year’s Christmas turkey. In our case it was the four bin compost factory which I built ages ago without thinking enough enough about the input of green waste needed to circulate 320 cubic feet of waste through my brilliant invention. It never worked, of course, and the principal beneficiaries were a family of rats who moved into our expensively built takeaway. We got rid of some of the rats by eliminating kitchen waste, but our trail camera photographed rats five or six times more often than any more desirable neighbours. Eventually the unused bins were mainly used as a temporary dump for things we couldn’t bring ourselves to take to the tip. Then Madame had a brilliant idea. Why not saw the bins in half and turn them into raised beds and create eight new beds, adding 640 square feet of growing space? And today with a bit of muscle thanks to our youngest, the four became eight and are now waiting for enough brash, woodchip, compost and soil to raise the level for growing crops. I think I like the civil engineering bit of gardening as much as anything else. Meanwhile there’s work to do, closing up the gaps in the planks and possibly fitting a couple of polycarbonate covers so each of them could act as cold frames when needed. We did that very successfully with a hot bed in the past, but we were unable to get enough hot horse manure without importing the vermicides and chemicals horses are dosed with these days. I guess we could improvise a solar heated hotbed to complement the spring sunshine, but my negligible plumbing skills would be tested too far I’m afraid. The alternative (another big bit of civil engineering) is to move two water butts into a new position behind the greenhouse and plumb all seven into one unit storing 1750 litres. Being so close behind the greenhouse just might provide enough thermal mass to protect it from short periods of frost. We shall see!

Our short break in the Bannau Brycheiniog yielded records for 27 species of plants, an equal number of birds and an unexpected polecat – very exciting. When we returned I had to do a lot of urgent watering, but the potatoes are through and most of the seeds have begun to push through. If you think the photo of the potatoes is missing the usual ridges you’d be right. These first early potatoes are of the type known as determinate which cluster the crop around the seed potato rather than growing (indeterminately) up the stem. So we’ve planted them all 8″ deep and we’ll see whether they do as well. We’re harvesting spinach, Rhubarb, and some lovely Rouge d’hiver lettuces which have overwintered well outside. One of this year’s targets is to break the back of our infestation of bindweed with a combination of continuous hoeing, digging out as much root as possible, and finally growing Mexican Marigold (Tagetes minuta) around the most affected borders to deter the devil’s guts before it gets a hold. The “minuta” part of the name, refers to the tiny daisy-like flowers not to the size of the plant which self-seeds furiously and will grow over six feet tall. The repelling work is done by the roots, and we don’t let them set seed to become a worse nuisance than the weeds they’re deterring!

So one piece of hard-won experience – is to get yourself a diamond sharpener and keep your hoes (all your tools in fact) very sharp. That way they make hoeing and digging a doddle – cutting through weeds like butter. When Madame worked at a horticultural research station the ground workers all sharpened their secateurs regularly. The problem with the older methods was having to have to-hand water or oil for the carborundum. Diamond sharpeners work dry; I only occasionally use the whetstones in the kitchen and sharpen knives with a good steel every time I use them. It’s counterintuitive I know, but sharp tools (treated with respect) are far safer than blunt ones and those natty holsters on your belt can fool people into thinking you know what you’re doing; plus of course they make you look awfully manly (if you’re into that sort of thing).

A lush garden area featuring tall green reeds and some flowering plants, with a wooden lattice fence in the background. The scene is set in bright sunlight, and various pots can be seen placed nearby.
The pond today

Canal Reflections

A tranquil scene featuring reflective water, with the sun illuminating the surface while green foliage and delicate plant stems are visible in the foreground.
Cow Parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris on the Monmouth and Brecon Canal
A close-up of a white flower with six petals, surrounded by green leaves and grass.

Maybe I’m being a bit evasive here. Obviously the photo is partly about reflections on the water – largely due to the inbuilt wizardry of phone cameras which make a photo with a huge tonal range like this so easy. However, as everybody knows, a stroll along a canalside towpath on a beautiful sunny day, is apt to promote a reflective frame of mind. This season of the year is especially beautiful because the emerging plants all look so pristine. I started taking a few photographs principally as notes for the blog, but within twenty minutes I was in full-on recording mode. One such photo was of the abundant Greater Stitchwort along the canalside. I can remember the first time I saw this plant; it was on Dartmoor on March 16th 2016, ten years ago. Yesterday they were everywhere, among many other favourites – 27 species in the end.

A cluster of small white flowers with purple accents, surrounded by green grass and leafy plants.

Another old friend that set off a chain of thoughts was the Cuckoo Flower, Cardamine pratensis which I’ve often seen but never once connected its flowering with the coming of the Cuckoo. “Why didn’t I notice?” I thought, metaphorically banging my head against a tree. The reason of course is that Cuckoos are becoming ever rarer, and it just so happens that we were lucky enough to hear them twice in the last two days. It may seem to us a bit like metaphysical poetry to yoke the two phenomena together but to my mother – born in a cottage in the Chilterns in 1915 – it was part of the the natural calendar that structured her days. The clouds over Granny Perrin’s nest foretold rain, and that was that.

A close-up of a person's hand holding a purple violet flower, with green grass and yellow flowers blurred in the background.

We wandered on, stopping to note a couple of dead Bream floating in the water. One had a deep nick in the side, suggesting a fatal encounter with a narrowboat propeller. There were more signs of the season’s perpetual motion; the Wood Anemones past their prime and ready to shed their petals, Lords and Ladies in their priapic stage but awaiting the big red berries; Herb Robert, Yellow Archangel below, Bird Cherries above our heads, Dog Violets nestling in the lower layer with the Primrose, Bluebells of course, and a single Barren Strawberry barely noticeable in the understory. With the canal on one side atop a bank, with a large marshy area below we spotted hosts of Ramsons undamaged so far by foragers and beside the canal the young leaves of Hemlock Water Dropwort, ready to administer a fatal punishment to those who gather incautiously.

I was lagging behind as always, when Madame waved me closer and told me to be quiet. She had spotted something interesting down on the edge of a marshy pool below us. We waited in silence until something moved, ran along a log and disappeared into the undergrowth. Too pale for a ferret, too large for a stoat, and unlike any squirrel we’d ever seen. Back in the campervan we searched diligently and decided it was a pale Polecat – possibly a hybrid ferret polecat cross – and it had obviously been stalking a mallard perching on the log. What a find!

We spent the afternoon (after dropping off at the pub) reading and cataloguing today’s finds. I’m reading David Elias’s book “Shaping the Wild” at the moment and in the chapter on moorland birds in a discussion of the present state of the Kestrel population, he quotes Mary Midgely who wrote in one of her books:

The world in which the Kestrel moves, the world that it sees is, and always will be entirely beyond us

Mary Midgley, “Beast and Man: the roots of human nature”

All of which brings to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Windhover” which fails to bridge the gulf magnificently.

Later we watched (part of) David Attenborough’s latest TV series “Secret Garden”. I say part of it because we both found its anthropomorphism both saccharine and misleading, and turned it off. I spend a lot of time and words here on the Potwell Inn trying to say something sensible about our connection with the natural world. There’s no doubt we are dangerously detached from nature.

Last night our son recounted a truly worrying account of a difficult conversation with his neighbours in Birmingham. He overheard them discussing the lovely mature oak that overlooks his, and their garden and it was clear that, for them it was nothing but a nuisance. They complained that it blocked out the sun and the birds made an intolerable noise. The tree had probably been there for a century before their terraced houses were even built and yet they were trying to enlist him in a neighbourhood campaign to have it felled. Yes we’re dangerously if not fatally detached from the natural world.

However the manner in which we re-attach ourselves is questionable, and here’s my beef with Attenborough and the BBC version of wildlife. It’s all too cuddly, and smooths over the immense difficulties with a commentary that reduces everything to winsome little human stories, as if animals were simply miniature and cute versions of ourselves. Attempting to engage with nature on those terms reflects an almost colonial attitude.

Yesterday’s encounter with the Polecat, as David Elias’s and GM Hopkins with a Kestrel is a form of engagement that takes seriously the otherness of the species we share the earth with. As long as we think that we can batter the natural world into the shape we invented we’re lost. If our love of nature, or if the idea of green spirituality strays too far into the religious mindset we’ll repopulate the horrors of religious extremism with an equally dangerous set of ideas taken from misunderstandings of nature with all the witch trials and heresy hunting thrown in.

If we can confine ourselves, in these occasional and wonderful encounters, to behold the inscrutable strangeness of the creatures, plants, insects, mammals, fishes, birds, moulds and fungi in silence then maybe we could begin to rediscover our own creatureliness which could be the foundation of a true green spirituality.

Close-up of two butterflies resting on a green leaf with a blurred background featuring water.
Crane flies mating

At last – a Cuckoo

A hand holding two small salamanders near a pond, surrounded by greenery.
Probably young Palmate Newts – a cryptic diary entry

I know that the last time I heard a Cuckoo was Monday May 6th 2019, and that’s because it was the same day we photographed these two young (probably Palmate) newts in the pond at Kate and Nick’s smallholding in the Bannau Brycheiniog. We were up there on the hill yesterday for a few hours, and although it was my dearest wish to hear the cuckoos call again it didn’t happen until this morning – back at the campsite – when a single cuckoo called just three times and then fell silent in the woods below the high ridge that overhangs us. I’d thought I might get quite tearful when it happened, but in fact my predominant feeling was a kind of resignation that to spot any threatened species nowadays could be the last time ever. It was more of a ghostly reminder than the vibrant song of a returning pirate, fluting their two note song in anticipation of plundering more nests and displacing more nestlings.

When we got back to the campsite yesterday the air was thick with smoke from the many barbeques making their burnt offerings to a warm and sunny evening. I’ve gone off the whole idea of barbecues in recent years; they seem to celebrate the same kind of disappearing culture as the Cuckoos. But to balance the picture another lovely sound on the campsite was the thumping of footballs and the chatter and laughter of the children as they played while their parents and grandparents, uncles, aunties and cousins – South Wales has a big family culture – sat in their folding chairs as if they were the cast for a Martin Parr photo-shoot. We’ll miss his kindly eye.

There’s always something botanical to celebrate up here; often it’s not even rare but just happens to catch your eye. This little plant was concerning Kate because it’s swamping the grass above their cottage. It’s Doves-foot Cranesbill. Geranium molle, which has found its way on to a sunny spot at the top of a high wall supporting the bank outside . It’s the perfect spot for a sun-loving plant but in the thin soil it was much smaller than its family might be in deeper richer soil alongside a hedge. In a close-up photograph it displayed its full glory. I’m not a trainspotter and for me ubiquity and weediness would never dim my affection for them. The wall was also home for a multitude of Spleenworts, Foxglove, Mullein, and a Wren which seemed unconcerned as it shot out of a small gap in the wall and past me.

Just up the track our friends have bought a field which was absolutely overgrown with brambles, bracken and shrubs. It would have been useless for any kind of grazing and so they’ve cleared it during the winter leaving a huge pile of brash in the middle. It was very dry yesterday although the stream that feeds it was still flowing fitfully. Not quite a mire but certainly not a conventional meadow, it’s an interesting place with the potential for recovering many species of plant which – like the Dove’s-foot Cranesbill – have their strong preferences. Meanwhile I was fascinated to see what had appeared already from the seedbank. The were bluebells, of course; daisies, dandelions, Mouse-ear and barren strawberries all of which must have been waiting in the soil for their moment. The bracken was just at its crozier stage so it will need dealing with- Nick says that the best way of getting rid of it is to bruise the stems with a kind of roller which disrupts the flow of sap feeding the rhizomes.

I’ve been reading a new book by David Elias called “Shaping the wild”. It’s an account of his long association with a hill-farm and its occupants near Bala lake over a period during which the farmers struggled to comply with the contradictory demands of various government subsidy demands. It describes how entrenched the battle is between conservation and environmentalists as opposed to those dedicated to so-called improvement. If, when the results of the May elections are counted, the previous incumbents are kicked out they’ll have no-one to blame except themselves.

As I write this, a flock of house sparrows is working the hedges in front of the campervan. That’s what I mean when I write about the ordinary. As Joni Mitchell’s song says – we don’t know what we’ve got ’till it’s gone!

Back in the Bannau Brycheiniog

A scenic view of rolling hills and greenery under a bright blue sky, framed by trees and shrubs in the foreground.
The view from the door of the campervan

I use the Welsh name of the Brecon Beacons because that’s what they’re called, and those who object to the correct name are all too often readers of the kind of newspapers that think their role in life is to incite incandescent fury against foreigners of any sort. We have a favourite campsite here that’s close enough to home to be extremely accessible and also fabulous for walks and wildlife. We drove in yesterday and had a brew up and then listened to 13 species of bird in barely half an hour. Dare I make a list? – Blackbird, Chiffchaff, Robin, Grey Wagtail, Mistle Thrush, Blue Tit, Dunnock, Blackcap, Garden Warbler, Wood Pigeon, Goldfinch, House Sparrow, and Raven – all without getting off my chair. Then the braver among the birds swept in while we cooked and ate every crumb of cake that we’d left there for them.

We are escaping from a difficult week with the builders who are treating our black mould; or rather not treating it because they have the habit of scarpering whenever an easier or more profitable job comes up. It’s been five weeks and goodness how many emails and they still haven’t fixed the shutters after they broke them. There was a building firm in Swindon years ago who operated out of a Morris 100o van and called themselves “Bodgit and Scram”. I imagine their slogan was You know where you stand with us!

Anyway on Wednesday we’d been invited to a “Founders Lunch” at Spike Island, the increasingly well-known artists’ studios on the floating harbour in Bristol where I was to make a short speech about how we’d set it up fifty years ago. Madame and I had put an ad in the local paper and asked any artists in the area who needed a studio to join us at an open meeting and we were astonished at the numbers who not only came but were prepared to pay rent on our imaginary studios while we looked for somewhere cheap enough to build them. It’s a long story that travels from flat broke to manageable overdraft and from fractious meetings to – well, probably even more fractious meetings because creatives don’t readily work cooperatively until there’s no alternative. Strangely and beautifully we went back on Wednesday and were greeted by many old friends who’d been tracked down by Bruce and Novvy Allan and discovered that the original artist-led community of our dreams is still alive and kicking. It was a powerful moment to be reunited with a part of our own history which we’d moved on from many years ago. As I said in my speech – it made me feel very proud and very old! Travelling by train – it’s so much quicker – we decided to walk over to Spike Island passing the house we lived in while I was curate at St Mary Redcliffe and then caught the M2 metrobus back to the station after the event finished. It was a beautiful sunny day for walking and after the speeches which encompassed past present and future plans we had a lovely meal in the cafe – prepared by Josh Ecclestone and his team, and some equally good sparkling wine from the Limekiln Hill vineyard. We don’t drink any more but in this instance I drank half a small glass of their biodynamic wine and it was big – if you know what I mean. It was a lovely thank-you. I haven’t kept in touch with the project as much as I should, in fact the last time I heard from anyone connected with it was a solicitor’s letter from a company I’d never heard from threatening to sue me for 1 million pounds worth of damage by a frozen water pipe in the old building. I replied and said “go ahead, I haven’t got two halfpennies to rub together” and the matter was dropped.

Anyway, here we are again in God’s Own Country taking a day’s break before we go for a walk tomorrow to look for interesting plants. In Spring, every plant looks beautiful before the insects, rusts, galls and smuts get to work. Either way they’re fascinating and remind me – as if I needed reminding – that nature is in constant motion and nothing, no-one, lasts for ever.

Clusters of white flowers with pinkish centres surrounded by bright green leaves, growing in a natural setting.
Hawthorn in its pristine state before the “catastrophe of life” takes hold.

The moon and the weather – their effect on the shed door and me.

Exterior view of a potting shed with a wooden sign labeled 'POTTING SHED' in a window framed with wire mesh.

Our shed goes up and down – not in a major way but enough to make opening the door quite difficult at times. When we first put it up we’d seen enough tottering sheds to know that if you just stand them on the ground – sooner or later the footings will rot and they’ll fall over – and so our shed has foundations – a thick layer of gravel topped with sand and then capped with level paving stones. What we couldn’t have known is that our clay subsoil seems to rise and fall in harmony with the water table, thereby twisting the frame and jamming the door.

I share this entirely uninteresting fact because in my earlier reflections on the way in which gardening is the kind of practice that leads to flourishing, I left out some threads which can be woven into a bigger picture. The rising and falling of the shed always seemed to me to be down to the rising and falling of the water table. The allotment is close to the river and we have at least one small underground stream running below it. In flood conditions it occasionally breaks out from under the apple trees and runs across the surface. The piece of pipe that secures the polytunnel door is driven into the earth and you can see the water level at the bottom of it. There’s no serious hydrological kit involved at all, if the door is hard to open the foundations have dried out and QED the allotment will need watering.

I once visited a pottery factory in Wrecclesham near Farnham where they used the local clay to make traditional pots of all shapes and sizes. Their kiln, a large brick built bottle kiln had no obvious pyrometers to measure temperature and when I asked, our guide said that they didn’t use seger cones or any other indicator. They packed the kiln the same way as they’d always done, and when the pots at the top had shrunk to the same height as a corbel that you could see through a spyhole in the intense heat they knew – along with a great deal of practice – that the firing was done. It was a kind of organic knowledge rooted in history and experience.

Where’s this all going then? and what’s the moon got to do with it? Well the missing thread from the previous post was the concept of seasonality. We live in a world a world dominated by constant artificial light, supermarkets which (just for the moment) seem to be immune to the seasons and sell the same food the year round and fly it in, or drive it up from southern Spain in convoys of heavy lorries. If we want sunshine we can just travel towards it and with the benefit of air conditioning, warmth and cold only affect us on the walk from the car park.

The allotment necessarily puts us in the midst of a constantly changing seasonal world and we live in a subtly different seasonal timetable. The weather forecast becomes as important for us as it would to a farmer or a fisherman. Sunrise and sunset are as important once again to us as they were to our distant ancestors, spring, summer, autumn and winter aren’t just words any more, and anyone who reads books on gardening or farming will encounter the esoteric theories of Rudolph Steiner who wrote a great deal about horticulture and who thought that the moon emitted some sort of invisible and undetectable force that influenced the growth of plants. These days the Biodynamic method has crept in at the edges of the mainstream and the moon certainly has an effect on the tides. Our campervan is parked within 100 yards of the river Severn and we get flood warnings from the Government whenever winds, river level and tides combine to make a possible flood. As gardener I’ve always wondered whether the passing moon has any effect on groundwater and a little bit of research suggests that the moon has a greater effect on groundwater levels if you’re very close to the sea but that it also has a much lesser effect on groundwater – measured in a few millimeters at most and that the probable cause is the gravitational pull on the earth being sufficient to cause these tiny distortions.

So our understanding of the earth as an immutable lump of solid ground isn’t quite right. Times, tides, seasons, and weather systems are in constant motion around us whether or not we stop racing about and consider them in relation to our gardens and farms. When Copernicus used his mathematics to suggest the theory and later Galileo used his telescope to prove it, they risked their necks to describe the rhythmic motions of the solar system, because it upset the static view of of a universe with the earth at the centre, and bit by bit our view of the earth and our position in it began to change. Today just a few flat earthers tie their hopes to the idea of an immutable earth but all the signs point to its fragility. It’s a massively depressing thought unless we learn to live in this new dynamic which more closely resembles a complex dance or a multiverse orrery such as was invented by Phillip Pullman whose alethiometer discerns the truth in his novels. But that’s a beautiful fiction; a mythical object that tells the truth about mysteries.

So our choice is whether to retreat to the bunkers in bafflement or to see this immense mutability as a source of wonder – and here’s the link back to flourishing or if you prefer Aristotle’s word, eudaimonia . If human fulfilment can be found through the cultivation and practice of virtues until they become benign habits, then they need to be practiced in the real world, and not the wobbly stage set of “the good life”. Here’s another, longer list of the virtues:

Courage, Temperance, Generosity, Magnificence, Magnanimity, Proper Ambition, Patience, Truthfulness, Wittiness, Friendliness, Modesty, and Justice.

I hope to unpick some more threads from the delightful fleece in the coming weeks.

Two figures walking along a rocky beach with crashing waves and a misty landscape in the background.
Hell’s Mouth bay on Lleyn if you look carefully at that wave you can see how it got its English name