Let the plants speak!

Our kitchen in August 2018 – nothing changes much except we’ve now got two functioning extractor fans taking the fumes and cooking smells up the built-in flue. Only took 10 years of arguments with the landlord!

It’s early August and apart from being sweated alive by the fifth heatwave of the year there’s another sense in which it feels like Christmas every day. In these repeated heatwaves the only strategy we can follow is to keep as many of the plants alive as possible, and so life pretty well revolves around watering, cooking and preserving – and it’s worked wonderfully. Plants need water, food and sunlight, and the abundance of sunlight, although a curse through forcing us to water so much is marvellous in helping our crops to covert the water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. Just imagine what a miracle that is; but some plants like peas and broad beans will never thrive in these conditions however hard we try to help out because, like Madame, the heat makes them feel exhausted and they give up. But others take to it like ducks to water and each day, after watering, we bring the ripened produce into the kitchen and scratch our heads over what to do with it. Fresh vegetables are an order of magnitude more tasty than the impoverished lookalikes that taste of nothing after their long journeys. Every day is Christmas day.

Today it was the turn of the aubergines and after a test run in our youngest son’s commercial pizza oven I felt sure I could replicate the burn in our kitchen, with no danger of the smoke alarm going off due to the new extractors. And so it turned out to be – the fruits – still hot from the sun – blackened and smoked gently as the insides cooked at 275 C and, as they cooled, virtually peeled themselves leaving the pale, faintly smoky flesh waiting to be united with garlic and tahini. We’ve got more tomatoes, cucumbers, figs and new potatoes than you could shake a stick at, and it’s so exciting that I just put the apron on and relish every moment as the cupboards fill with winter stores.

It hasn’t always been that easy. Something of a turning point in my life was the day (just before we had an extremely low-key wedding), when we picked 40 lbs of blackberries on Rodway Hill. There were a couple of outcomes from that day. The first was that we made a huge amount of completely horrible blackberry chutney – so bad we couldn’t even give it away. The second outcome for me was the overpowering feeling of gratitude which (being a fervent convert to extreme atheism) didn’t fit at all well because there seemed to be no-one or nothing I could thank for the generosity of those spiteful bushes. Sixty years later I’m still struggling with that conundrum having tasted some of the off-the-shelf options without being convinced by any of them.

But I can dimly see a way through the desert by repairing and joining up the broken fragments of our polarized and fragmented culture. Let’s take plants as a beginning. We casually divide them into arbitrary categories (food; wildflowers; weeds; rarities; orchids and ragwort etc.) often entirely based on usefulness to humans or potential for monetization. But all plants come from the same tree of life as we do. Some time, millions of years ago, humans, dinosaurs and plants took different paths and we’ve evolved to live very different lives but notwithstanding Darwin’s troubles for suggesting that we share a great deal of our history with the great apes, for instance, and regardless of the religious arguments about it, we all came from the same single celled organism which contained the first few chapters of the library of life which have evolved, adapted and now reside in each of us inside every cell of our body; our six feet of tightly coiled DNA. The library is the same library which mothered (each with its own chapters) the butterfly, the tiger (Tyger?) the earthworm, the edible mushroom, the lichen and last of all, you and me. It’s not necessary for us to strive to unite with nature because we are already one with her. Hugely diverse and adapted; a coat of many colours you might say but a single one and not the atomised billions of homo sapiens who dare to think of ourselves as individuals.

So after years of seeing my passion for field botany, for gardening, for writing and spirituality for anthropology and for ceramics, for science and for cooking as separate “interests” I can see that they’re all more like spokes on a wheel at the centre of which is the big question –“What’s it all for?” – and when I ask myself the big question that way I can answer with another question which, for me, removes the thorn of the first. “Why does it have to have a meaning or a purpose at all?” We could invent a multitude of possible answers to the big question but I can’t see what useful purpose it would offer.

Just out of interest I should say that this far from sudden insight was triggered by my instinctive dislike for any kind of Magisterium which almost always exists to promote its own version of an answer and to persecute in the most cruel and heartless manner anyone who offers an alternative or sometimes even a slight amendment. The lightbulb moment came from binge reading about molecular biology and the latest plant taxonomy research in order better to understand DNA and one or two obscure (to me) statistical methods. Once, however dimly, I began to understand the beauty and complexity of what goes on in both plant and human cells; I began in an almost religious way, to see all of my interests bonded together by their common structure.

The icing on the cake has been to read about the work of Stefano Mancuso who runs a research programme at the University in Florence which he provocatively calls “Plant Neurobiology”. He and his colleagues across the world have come in for a great deal of flak from the old guard because plants don’t have neurons and couldn’t possibly have brains like ours but they are able to sense problems and respond to them; communicate with and “listen” to other plants and synthesise astonishingly complex molecules. All this has brought it home to me that writing about plants as if they were part of a giant but insensitive stamp collection is doomed. Without plants there would be no trace of the human and yet plant life would go on – probably less destructive. Plants are worth so much more than being pressed into herbaria and to even begin to understand what they are, we need poets and visionary science; we need anthropologists, herbalists, first nation men and women, collectors cooks and artists. I fear that we will never find a sustainable space for humanity on the earth unless we accept that we owe it all to the plants.

Messy thoughts, messy stove

I guess it’s safe to admit, ten years after I retired, that I would occasionally climb the steps to the pulpit with no script but just a cluster of ideas whirling around my brain and praying that I could somehow thread them together into a sermon. This risky strategy evolved from the Franciscans who understood that the genuinely authentic sermon came out of knowing your stuff and assembling your talk like the pieces of a jigsaw until the last piece, the big reveal, showed how it fitted together all along. Some of my congregation loved the excitement and learned to be patient. I never believed in the spoon feeding of platitudes taken verbatim from a commentary. Others were kind enough to describe it as a waste of time, and insult to their intelligence (what intelligence?), or told me they hadn’t understood a word. Actually I agreed with all of them – but for different reasons.

At this time of year I have similar problems with cooking. There are only two of us permanent residents at the Potwell Inn, so what the hell do I cook with all these aubergines/ courgettes/ figs / tomatoes and beans? What with the drought, the successive heatwaves and the weeds it’s a wonder that we’ve got any crops at all but we decided early on to prioritise the watering and we’ve kept most of our plants alive – hence the surpluses. There’s a deep satisfaction in harvesting just as there is in cooking, although standing in front of the stove sweating and cursing all day when it’s well over 30C is less than fun. Growing, harvesting, cooking and eating are like a genetic sequence; they always belong together and as such they’re a part of ‘the way we do things round here‘; our culture and the meanings of our lives.

Of course it takes a bit of practice to acquire the skills in all four disciplines, but compared with the times we started it’s a doddle. You couldn’t buy garlic, olive oil, any imported foods unless there was a deli nearby (we were lucky because we had two deli’s but we could barely afford to shop in either of them and in one of them they treated you as if you’d been brought in on someone’s shoe. Food and class are another complex that should be more familiar to anthropologists than they are. I was taught to cook by Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and others. Even in the swinging sixties, Penguin books i.e affordable books were still printed on the cheapest paper and were rarely if ever illustrated aside from the wondrously evocative line drawings by John Minton and others which, while failing completely to convey much sense of what a dish was meant to look like, resonated with the culture of which it was a part. You could learn the ingredients of a dish – let’s say an omelette – but never be repulsed by some disturbing image, glistening like like a rabbit’s freshly drawn guts such as feature so widely today in food-porn coffee table books. Then you were lucky if you got more than “get some eggs, break them and whisk them, put a knob of butter in the pan and cook the omelette whilst stirring (?) and shaking it. Turn it out. When you learned to cook French food from ED you absorbed far more of the regional geography and culture of France that you ever learned about cooking an omelette. But you certainly knew what to cook it in. The first part of her books tended to be about “The batterie de cuisine” and in Clifton where we lived there was a shop that sold good pans that we couldn’t often afford anyway. Jane Grigson, another writer of real heft, was the same. No pictures to speak of but cultural wisdom hovered like a graceful miasma around every page. Her daughter, also a cook, recalled that she occasionally might find a dead pig in the bath waiting to be dealt with. That’s my girl! Jane’s partner Geoffrey Grigson was a polymath poet, writer and botanist who wrote one of my favourite books – “The Englishman’s Flora” which I discovered only an hour ago is soon going to be re-published by Doubleday under the more appropriate title “A British Flora”. Geoffey Grigson’s extensive research goes beyond listing plants by adding fascinating material on their uses and local names. Once again a Grigson book comes close to being a cultural anthropology of plants rather than a dry list.

Anyway, on the stove in the picture at the top – fig compote cooking down slowly until it become a dark, sticky and fragrant mass – (representing the lower strings section in the flavour orchestra) and the lighter woodwinds represented by Marcella Hazan’s marvellous no.1 tomato sauce which is indispensable to the Potwell Inn kitchen. We make pounds of it and bottle it to last through the year. The peapods are going to be part of a vegetable stock to give some hinterland to a french style vegetable soup.

Regarding the climate crisis we went for a wander around Bath a couple of days ago and I photographed this lovely Georgian street running down towards the river from Walcot Street. I’ve mentioned before the fanatical opposition to any move by the council to reduce traffic in Bath. More than fifty years ago when we lived here, the Local Authority when not occupied with demolishing fine houses on Snow Hill and replacing them with Tower blocks, also commissioned the Buchanan report which proposed demolishing much of Walcot and building a tunnel to link the north to the southbound routes. This plan would have involved the demolition of all of the houses you see. When the houses were empty it planned to set fire to one of them so the Fire Brigade could practice putting out fires in Georgian buildings. The sensible citizens of Bath rose up against the whole plan which would have left Bath without one of its finest parishes and the city remained clogged and polluted by ever growing traffic. The traditionalists seemingly grew attached to the noise and the choking fumes and every time a remedy is suggested which involves walking or cycling they rush, screaming like banshees to the high court to defend the ancient right to drive at 40mph in a 20mph zone , to park on the pavement and to treat zebra crossings as suggestions that you might care to stop but if, on the other hand you don’t feel like it you may menace pedestrians without fear of tiresome legal proceedings. Most amusingly the High Priest of rage oftens begins his letters to internet groups by writing “I’m not normally one to complain”. We really don’t deserve him!

Where’s the door? This is our friends Al and Helen’s old caravan. We once followed it from South Gloucestershire to Avignon on a camping trip. I’d know it anywhere.

It’s a good job I’ve got no badgers among my followers

Only someone who’s attempted to grow sweetcorn in the open will know that they need a high ring of steel around them to keep the badgers out, – because so acute is the badger’s sense of smell they can judge exactly when the corn is at its sweetest and ripest exactly 24 hours before you planned to pick it. We think we may have solved the conundrum this year by growing them in the polytunnel with an improvised half door to ventilate the tomatoes and by surrounding the entire tunnel inside and out with African Marigolds whose strong scent masks the rapturously tempting sweetcorn. The Marigolds were meant to be Mexican Marigolds ,Tagetes minuta, but we received a mislabeled packet of seed this year. Actually we receive mislabeled plants and seeds almost every year; last year the red peppers turned into Scotch Bonnet chillies and we now have a lifetime supply of them, dried and in a jar.

It’s been a tough season, much of the blame for which lies with weak government and the unregulated greed of the privatised utilities. Why are we forced, like Oliver Twist to ask – “Please Sir can I have some more?” when the oil companies continue to promote a global environmental catastrophe and the overseas owners of privatised water companies, trouser the proceeds of their monopoly and conceal them overseas. As always, we – the despised customers – get the blame and pay the price. It’s our profligacy; demanding to keep clean, flush the toilets, water the plants and make a cup of tea, that’s causing the water shortage. Heaven forfend that we should prevent a 10 gigawatt data centre from sucking the life out of a small town.

And so we were up at six this morning trying to keep the allotment alive. It’s too hot to weed during the day and so we’ve had to prioritise the crop and worry about the Rosebay Willowherb and Dandelions shedding their ever virile seed next season – and bang on cue the so-called neighbourhood rage website hots up its campaign against anything that makes life in our traffic choked city more tolerable. For any of its contributors who read this – I doubt if I’ll get much flack, I wouldn’t think many of them can read – the whole trashy enterprise is run by the Mirror Group who’ve taken over local journalism like a metastasizing tumour.

Anyway, let me revert to real life and offer the picture of a plant that shows how strong is the will to live in nature. I’ve given it a full sized picture as a kind of prize. We bought this blackberry in 2020 and planted it at the edge of the fruit cage. To say it failed to thrive there is something of an exaggeration. It wilted, the leaves fell off and I can’t tell you how many non religious prayers were said over it. For three years it survived as a barely living stump. until it was accidentally amputated by a wildly inaccurate bit of pruning. I’m not blaming anyone – but it wasn’t me. However I couldn’t give up on it so I moved it into another border (I had visions of making a living fence out of it. I have to be careful because anything that actually looks like a fence is explicitly forbidden in the rules. Another three years have passed and I tended it like a sickly child – much to Madame’s amusement, until it grew several leaves in year two and this year, six years later, it’s suddenly taken off. I can almost hear it growling “Feed me now!” I’m thrilled to report that it’s well on the way to becoming a blessed nuisance. You’ll notice the Field Bindweed underneath it. Field Bindweed never seems to have a bad year

Even in a difficult year, a couple of post-dawn hours on the allotment is a special joy even though carting 30 gallons of water down a tricky path is a test of the ankles. I was thinking about – well, feeling miserable about how complicated life is in a drought accompanied by a heatwave. Our crops have either perished or are romping away, ripening early and behaving as they’re back in their home countries. Deep in the plant genes there are expectations that may or may not be honoured in real life. Plants can adapt, but not that fast. It’s we the gardeners who must learn to adapt but the harvest rush seems to have arrived about three weeks early and we’re flooded with far more vegetables and fruits than we can eat. There’s a crop drop scheme on the allotment site and at this time of year it’s mainly populated by marrows – otherwise known as neglected courgettes. We’ve cleared the freezer(s) in anticipation, and the bottles and kilner jars are all assembled ready for jams pickles and chutneys which at least improve with age (unlike us). There will be less tomatoes to process into ketchup, sauces and passata this year because they hated the second or was it the third heatwave. They’ve just started flowering again on the fourth and fifth trusses so we might get a late crop. The biggest challenge is making substantial changes to our diet to accommodate all the fresh veg. Harvest and cooking go hand in hand but you soon discover that the passion for courgettes and aubergines doesn’t take you as far as eating them every day; almost to the exclusion of all the other veg. And so we muddle on and I occasionally wonder if I should be spending more time on the blog and I’m reminded of the Brother Lawrence saying which suggest that the best road to contentment begins exactly where you are. I also remember hearing my mother saying (on one of the rare occasions she actually stood still) “Well this won’t get the baby a new coat” turning again to the sewing machine where she worked as a dressmaker or measuring up the local ladies for new corsets. (So now you know just how old I am!). I am content, I really am! But I’m also knackered; longing for a couple of weeks continuous rain and hoping, (probably hoping against hope), that this shitstorm of weak government and corporate greed will end before I do.

Hard questions of the third kind

I have eaten 
the plums 
that were in 
the icebox

and which 
you were probably 
saving 
for breakfast

Forgive me 
they were delicious 
so sweet 
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

Following on from the previous post; I have no doubt that we can occasionally understand when someone – usually an artist – has produced a work in a deep way; I’m thinking of this kind of work in terms of beholding or revealing their experience as opposed to just explaining it; It’s ferociously hard to explain how such a thing can happen and yet William Carlos Williams’ poem “This is just to say” takes an utterly banal idea and transforms it into a shared moment. “I have eaten the plums” Is surely a love letter to an unseen lover (the assured “forgive me“) who’s not yet awake; about a liberty taken – stealing their breakfast – and then almost a haiku (delicious, so sweet and so cold) .

William Blake could venture the possibility that we might see “the world in a grain of sand” in what feels like a poetic manifesto. It’s the expression of “The hard question”. How are the sense impressions we all experience every day – cold plums from the fridge; running sand through our fingers and idly watching them fall – how are these turned into “qualia” – or as Thomas Nagel puts it “what they feel like”. The hardest question of all is how can we communicate those feelings to another person – ever? Think of the struggle we have to explain a pain, for instance, to someone else.

I used to take our oldest son, then just a toddler, up Hope Chapel Hill in his pushchair when we lived at the bottom of this tremendously steep road. Often I’d let him walk up and he was always drawn to the cobblestone gutter where he would find treasures. The tops of ring-pull tins, cigarette ends, sweet papers, leaves, pebbles and grains of sand. It could take hours and yet he was completely absorbed by them.

When we were at Art School I became equally absorbed with By Brook which is the little river that runs through Castle Combe and on through Slaughterford until it reaches the River Avon. It runs through a very lovely steep sided valley and there used to be a little pumping station – ruined by the time we found it; sitting in a clearing of boggy ground, and further upstream a disused paper mill. In those days the river ran gin clear and there were small brown trout that, once or twice, we tried (unsuccessfully) to fish for. The whole area was keepered for a pheasant shoot and there was a water bailiff that we made sure never saw. I was having a hard time and this empty spot had a healing effect on me.

I was particularly fascinated by the contorted and interlocking roots of the trees on the sides of By Brook, and made many drawings of them (bottom left above). The top left photo was taken almost sixty years later and you can see that the water is now milky and probably eutrophic from farmland runoff.

I’ve never forgotten the experience of being there but I’ve never found a way of expressing it; the sound of the breeze in the Hazel bushes, the occasional staccato alarm call of a pheasant, the rich smell of the grass and the water and my struggles to make pencils and heavyweight paper speak it all. I’ve returned there in my memory so many times and although for me it’s an effortless transition in time to revisit the memories, the expression of them in whatever form always seems to slip through my fingers. On Tuesday our visit to the Victoria Gallery to see Norman Ackroyd’s exhibition The transience of light was both deeply moving and extremely challenging. How did he pull it off?

So after a great deal of huffing and puffing and moody introspection we went up to the allotment to tend our thirsty plants today and I came upon a whole collection of squashes and pumpkins which had been fattening up relentlessly, hidden by leaves and just out of sight the whole time, and then a kind of resolution to my challenge was staring me in the face. The poems and the photos seemed to arrange themselves and the whole argument is there in cryptic form at the top of the page. It says ‘stop trying so hard!’

It all reminds me of a time when against all odds I threw a large raku pot – nearly a foot high, using crank mixture – a clay that’s so full of grog (fired clay sand) that it takes the tips off your fingers. I can remember every moment of that experience, and what seemed most miraculous to me was that I just instinctively stepped aside from it and let it form itself. These were still my own fingers but they were not moving at my behest but that of the clay itself. I can remember the sense of wonder as it grew taller and thinner. It seemed to me on reflection that the harder I tried the less likely it was that I would succeed and so I discovered how stepping aside could be the final flowering of technique.

The idea of never ceasing to try but never trying seems more like a Zen koan than a piece of serious advice and yet there’s much wisdom in it. It’s like St Augustine’s much misunderstood saying “love, and do what you will” which, when it’s properly unpacked actually means that if you love – I mean really love – then you will always want to do the right thing. What it categorically doesn’t mean is do whatever you want in pursuit of love. Whether it’s eating a cold plum, throwing a pot, growing a pumpkin or drawing a river sometimes – no, almost always – it’s best to get over yourself and let the experience speak for itself without you feeling you need to explain it or help it along. Maybe, and this is just a wild thought, what sometimes happens is that “what it feels like” can pass between us through the work of ghostly resonances where we are more often content with mouthfuls of dust.

It’s alright!

Dunno why this random group of plants caught my eye yesterday, but there they were minding their own business on top of the little freezer and they seemed lovely, I mean really beautiful. A bunch of Basil leaves- they’re for a panzanella; the remains of the Dill we used in making dill pickles this week and two South African plant cuttings from our neighbour Charlie. Madame’s an avid collector of house plants.

Just a kitchen snapshot

There’s a strongly aesthetic side to growing and cooking. We do both, and the uniting of the plants we grow with some jiggery pokery on the stove always feels like alchemy. Something emerges which is even more than the sum of its parts. Our neighbour on the allotment grows figs, and we exchange successes – like her lovely figs in return for our shining aubergines. Knives, pans and chopping boards occupy the same place in a culture as the brushes and palette knives of the artist or the laptop and camera of the writer or the secateurs and the spade on the allotment. Technique (and I’ve paid a price for this principle) is the invisible foundation of all creative work. The whole point is that technique should never be sufficiently in focus to be noticeable. It should be obvious that grandstanding around the world like a carpenter, wearing a belt filled with tools for all to see is not necessarily a sign of giftedness.

I’ve had a few days off to do some intense reading which is easy(ish) to do up to 25 C but if the heatwave gets any worse my brain just gives up at 26 C. I was studying DNA in a modest sort of way because I never had the faintest idea how it worked or what it did. I was curious to address the vacancy, but the books I was reading all seemed to mention, or even to major on the thorny subject of plant intelligence. I’ll spare you the technicalities but during my searches, I came up against a word, a conceptual word – “Qualia” which is the quality of experiences which are just so difficult to express to another person. As for plants and their feelings the jury looks set to die of old age! I’ve stolen the word from the Magisterium but they’ll never know because they think I’m the cleaner. When I talk about eating a crab for instance, I’m filled with the memory of a day we ate a crab on the beach at West Bay; breaking it up with a couple of heavy pebbles and washing it down with a bottle of wine we’d floated in the sea on a length of string. Or up in North Wales the memory of a long conversation with an old lady who patiently explained to me why crabs are seasonal and how to tell the difference between a cock crab and a hen crab. Or of the time when Madame (being pregnant) was suffering from pica – in this case instanced by crab meat, and my efforts to meet her needs with hardly any money. Would 2 oz do the trick I wondered . Mercifully it did.

So when I talk about eating crab; my side of the conversation is filled with happy memories which I don’t explain because you might die of boredom. You on the other hand might have eaten a wrong’un years ago and can think of nothing except a long night of retching. Short of a game of verbal ping-pong there’s no way in a normal conversation to convey the “quale” – pronounced kwaalay – in anything like a satisfactory manner. But that, of course, is precisely what the poet, the artist or the writer is attempting to do every day whilst always knowing that the dice are loaded against success.

However today we went to an exhibition of Norman Ackroyd etchings and drawings in the Victoria Gallery in Bath, and I was quite overwhelmed by his work. Let the phenomenologists, the philosophers and the brain scientists tug each others beards like their counterparts did at the Council of Nicea as they argued fiercely about the exact wording of the Christian creed before they agreed on a solution that nobody understood which completely resolved the issue. For my part I believe that Ackroyd had worked the magic in spite of being dead for two years and I was able -for an hour or so – fully to engage with his experience of the light, the sea and the rocks around the Scottish isles. These wonderful etchings are not “about the sea, the sky and the rocks”, neither are they two dimensional renderings of the landscape; they are accounts of the artist’s inner experiences, the “Qualia” of those journeys which by some miracle I was able to access. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it always leaves me tearful. Being human – and that’s what this blog is all about – is difficult and at times incredibly lonely. More often than not our conversations are hit and miss – mostly miss – approximations in which, on reflection, we say too much and too little at the same time. His was the skill we’re all reaching for; the skilful act of communicating the qualia, the boring everyday moments on which a sharp ray of sun suddenly falls and illuminates a vision that lingers forever in the memory. Great art isn’t ever about anything its raison d’etre isn’t teaching us anything new, it’s about the certainty which comes mysteriously in music, in art, in poetry and song; in cookery and gardening and in walking that in spite of all the evidence it’s alright.

Botany on the Damascus Road

We’ve just got back from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) and things are getting desperate. Our friends, 1000 feet up in the hills, have already seen one major fire come perilously close to their smallholding which has hundreds of trees that they’ve planted and a small patch of ancient woodland. Despite two large water cisterns, and a smaller tank they came close to running out of water for their allotment, for their house and for the sheep, pigs and hens they keep last year, and things are worse now. Back at the Potwell Inn the allotment is suffering. The legume crop was a write-off, although a climbing french bean is hanging on in there and the polytunnel tomatoes have stopped setting fruit after the first truss. We’re having to contemplate a complete reset of our crops in the face of the inevitable heatwaves and droughts to come. We’re all living fear of the water to the troughs being turned off because we’re a third of the way through our stored water and most allotments have no stores at all. What’s clear is that the heat loving plants – cucumbers, aubergines, courgettes and squashes are loving it but the cool temperate plants are suffering.

There’s talk of forest fires joining up in France, but this is really about global warming and economic and societal breakdown and the last deadly throes of neoliberal greed as exemplified by the brutal and illegal wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. There is a very disturbed young man in our street who will lean out of his first floor window and scream at the top of his voice “the earth is burning” for hours . Sometimes the dog walkers and picnic loungers on the green will join with the sunbathers and shout abuse at him. But he isn’t wrong and taking an ostrich attitude isn’t going to turn away the wrath of the damaged ecosystem.

So, it being too hot to do anything much more than keep the plants alive I’ve been forced into a big think. My lifelong passion for plants was really rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of their lovely forms and colours. Later on I got interested in identifying them, photographing, painting and writing about them and of course growing and eating them. But I’ve always had a particular love for the urban rogues and weeds; the plants that love to send their roots into places other plants just couldn’t tolerate. I love the survivors who cling to life by modifying their life-cycles and surviving as seeds and underground rhizomes during the hot and the frozen seasons.

So I’ve paid particular attention to the plants that grow outside our flat in the most hostile positions on and below a tall south facing wall. They survive not only drought and frost but inundation with weedkiller, vinegar and salt not to mention the attentions of the local council workers who scrape them up with metal tools; but still they grow back with almost heroic stoicism. The kind of stress that would send tender F1 Hybrid into seizure and death seems to be an accelerant to these guerilla weeds.

Over the years I’ve been so focused on the identity, form and appearance of wildflowers that I’ve barely thought about how they do their thing. I was aware that the study of plant DNA has driven any number of family changes as we realize that relatedness isn’t all about appearances and so many different species might share the same evolutionary outcome without actually being related at all. So a couple of weeks ago, and totally fed-up at my ignorance of anything to do with DNA or the difference between chromosomes and genes I resolved to find out more.

There were two slightly different results of my binge reading. Firstly there were proper eureka moments as I began dimly to understand how plants reproduce, grow, deal with attacks, weather and soil differences with the truly breathtaking assistance of their DNA. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it became impossible to see the life of plants in the same way, once I understood that they possess amazing powers of sentience with which they are able to negotiate with their broader environment, I could almost feel the tiny electrical charges flowing through the plants and triggering the needed response through a series of chemical, biological interactions initiated by a jigsaw like connection between the smallest molecular components of cells. If you think plants are wonderful to look at, knowing something about their invisible inner lives will blow your mind.

I talk about this almost as a kind of conversion experience – hence the Damascus Road of the title. All my spreadsheets and careful labelling of thousands of photographs suddenly feel like butterflies pinned to a board. If plants can sense what’s going on around them, anticipate and initiate an appropriate response, then they’re doing the kind of thing that we do but using a very different set of “plantish” properties which are bafflingly and beautifully complex. The western world’s so-called “tree of life” with diatoms at the bottom and us (and some kind of god) at the top sets us into a colonial earth. But there are some first nation cultures which see the plant world as part of the community. Without plants at least a couple of the drugs that keep me going are plant based or synthesized and that alone seems to make thankfulness appropriate. It doesn’t seem entirely bizarre to say thank-you to the cabbage you’re cutting or the carrot you’re pulling. This afternoon I made fig compote and that (the flavour, not my cooking!) deserves a round of applause. Plants give us so much; nutritionally, aesthetically, and for healing us because many cancer treatments are synthesized from plants. They’re amazingly clever at making the kind of molecules that we can use to our own benefit. The kind of attitudinal change we desperately need if we’re going to avoid being caught up and killed in another extinction event would be to treat our plants – and not just the delicate hybrids that feed us but all our plants with the respect that they deserve. Maybe those roguish and indestructible weeds have the exact secret we need to ensure the survival of the earth.

Spadgerland

Forget the vanilla perfume of a madelaine for one moment and think of a single sound that takes you right back to your childhood home. Mine would be the sound of the House Sparrow, or rather sparrows, because they’re such convivial birds it’s hard to imagine just the one on its own.

I’ve renamed this campsite for entirely selfish reasons. If you recognise the tin roofed reception building, the cider press and the orchard then you won’t need me to tell you. If you haven’t a clue where it is then Eldorado is waiting for you – provided you can find it. There are enough clues scattered through the ten years of the Potwell Inn that you stand a real chance of getting here if you can be bothered to wade through a million plus words. Years ago I saw my first kingfisher nearby. Today I heard and then saw a red Kite circling overhead; I’ve never seen the Ospreys that hunt across the area but hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful. What makes this place so much greater than the ornithological creme de la creme is the abundance of the peasant birds, the fish and chip birds; the ordinary everyday types that are rapidly becoming extraordinary as we continue to poison and disturb the environment. This paragraph is illustrated by a tall and slightly unkempt looking hedge. The campsite has taken all the best ideas from the French sites and there is a small enclave in which every pitch is a self-contained enclosure surrounded on three sides by tall hedges. The hedge at the top of this paragraph is barely ten feet from the campervan door. There are no dogs allowed to disturb the wildlife, and the customers self select after their first visit. The quiet campsite policies make every day feel like the Sunday afternoons of my childhood. In fact the sound of children playing outside every evening is an equally chilling reminder that children once played outside and had never seen a Playstation on a smartphone. Happiness doesn’t always need to come commodified and packaged like a supermarket turkey.

Running a pub, even an imaginary one called the Potwell Inn with its name stolen from an HG Wells comic novel is extremely hard work and – dare I say – very poorly paid or rather not paid at all. And so these little campervan breaks are an essential escape. I often call them adventures because with a seventeen year old campervan almost anything could go wrong. Yesterday, having packed everything, I turned on the ignition and there was a profound silence. It was a glum start but I had a cunning plan. If I could just get the engine running, I could get to the campsite running everything off the alternator; as long as I didn’t stall the engine, which could leave us blocking a narrow road until I could get it going again -because I’d already used the emergency NOCO jump lead battery twice. It all went swimmingly until we arrived at reception and I turned off the engine without thinking. Oh gloom, oh silence. Mercifully the NOCO delivered for a third time and we managed to park up and call the AA who came this morning with a new battery and fitted it in ten minutes. He was a cheerful South Walian. Yesterday’s groceries were delivered in the evening by another cheerful delivery driver who shared my surname. There followed a long and serpentine conversation as we tried to establish some connection between us but I’m afraid we Somerset Poles cannot claim any legitimate Welsh blood although according to the driver the other kind of illegitimate bloodline was just as likely.

Anyway back to the birds. The sparrow is known in some places as the spadger, also spuggie, or (inexplicably phillip!). They were constant companions and the soundtrack to my childhood in suburban east Bristol. In fact they’re a bit complicated to identify because there are three species that are what sometimes get called little brown numbers. House Sparrows, Hedge Sparrows and even Dunnock rarely stand in an ID parade for our benefit – and so to my untrained eye they will have to look similar until they don’t any more. Last night just before sunset a flock of sparrows prepared to nest in the hedge on our pitch. My goodness they’re a chatty lot. Chickens roost in much the same way, each of them competing for the warmest spot in the middle. They’re much safer from predators in a thick hedge so I can see why they do it but they make quite a hullabaloo while they greet each other, quarrel a bit, shove each other off their respective branches and settle for the night. We became fascinated by the range of sounds that they can make without ever producing anything in the least tuneful. As the sun set they stopped their fidgeting and as twilight came they were silent. It was surprisingly moving to share that moment.

Today, using the Merlin app, apart from the sparrows I recorded Woodpigeons, Swifts, the Red Kite, barn Swallows, Blackbirds, Robins and Collared Doves; bread and butter birds in terms of rarity but many of them declining in numbers. Coming here always reminds me of the sheer joy that the natural world brings to us if we just stand, watch and listen. There is an ancient bond between us and the wildlife that surrounds us and it’s not sentimental or gushing leftie nonsense to hold that thought close in a destructive culture fed by greed and division.

There isn’t a division between so-called forward looking and backward looking politics, or if there is it’s characterised by backwardness in the industrial and financial wilderness and forward looking amongst those of us who actually understand what’s worth saving when the earth is burning. I write the Potwell Inn, even on the rare sunny and dry Welsh days, not because I’m a politician with an A4 list of policies to mend the world, but because human flourishing depends on the much broader and complicated set of behaviours that we call a culture. I’m naming this campsite Spadgerland in honour of the rogues; vagabonds; weeds; fish and chip birds and vermin which collectively give our lives depth and meaning.

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Foodie business

There’s a mirror in the lift and today I caught sight of myself as we came back from getting a few last bits of shopping before we revisit God’s Own Country (Wales of course) yet again; I just can’t keep away. I’m ashamed to say I looked completely raddled – red eyed, my hair which has turned curly makes me look like Medusa in the dim light, and a million miles from the picture of me that I keep safe in my head – like Dorian Gray without the excesses.

The red eyes are partly down to hay fever which has been shocking this year; but three heatwaves in quick succession have taken their toll on my body clock and I’m irrevocably awake every morning at around 5.00am – the same time as I can hear the allotment screaming for water in my fertile imagination. So today we were on the allotment soon after six – to give it a thorough soaking – and then we picked anything that looked edible to take with us to Wales; dug some early potatoes for lunch and came home by 7.30am. Then we cooked the aubergines we harvested a couple of days ago by roasting them and stuffing them with richly spiced lamb mince giving them a distinctly North African flavour. I cooked some stewed apple, made up two jars of fridge pickled cucumbers with our own cucumbers and dill; some fig compote and then finally sat down at 11.00 for a cup of tea. So perhaps the red-eye was also to do with being knackered.

Going away, for me at least, is extremely stressful because I’m terrified of leaving something behind. I’ve left our beds behind, even the complete set of tent poles on one occasion – so remembering to pack all our plentiful meds, every computer and charger lead we could conceivably use, not to mention two portable routers (you can’t be too careful) various laptops, phones and Madame’s tablet; books, cameras, maps, GPS unit and so on. One of our neighbours asked if we were moving out last time we took the campervan to Cornwall.

But tomorrow we’ll set out on the busiest day of the year on the M4 and M5 to travel by our much practiced secret route, on which – unless we meet a tractor, a school bus or a herd of cows gets us there in rather less time than queuing outside Newport for several hours in the blistering heat. We’ll be tired I’m sure, but nothing is better guaranteed to give me a long night’s sleep than the sound of sheep on the hill. I have a rather higher clock speed than most people which has impacted my life quite a bit. I piss people off – mostly managers and jobsworths – because I can’t keep my mouth shut when one of them says, or does something really stupid. Our sons have inherited this tendency from me and we all need these regular breaks to let ourselves slow down and cool the brains a bit. Naturally this won’t stop me from a bit of plant hunting when I think Madame isn’t looking.

This is an inherently busy time of the year because harvesting and cooking are joined at the hip, and since the harvesting always produces a surplus of something or other (courgettes?) the cooking extends into preserving, freezing and storing so yes, the days can be very long, but home grown and home prepared food is in a league of its own when it comes to nutrition and flavour. It’ll be another early start tomorrow but the other reason we need to go away is because the builders are coming back to repair and re-lay the bathroom floor after its flooding last year, and they’ll be taking out the seat of mercy for two days. Neither of us fancy trudging around Bath looking for a friendly shop or cafe several times a day. The campervan has a very serviceable loo and it’s only eight feet away! Meanwhile some photos taken on the allotment in the early morning coolness today. The sweet corn has thrown out its first silks – it’s self pollinating and the upper male flowers shower the lower female silks with pollen which is in itself a bit of a challenge for me in the confined space of the polytunnel. However it keeps the cobs out of the reach of the badgers which otherwise would eat the lot every year. It’s our own version of that old government slogan – Protect and Survive. Thank goodness ours works very well and theirs is best left untested.

How to survive a heatwave

Taken over Alveston, sitting in Helen and Alan’s garden in July 2020

I think this was one Filton pilot’s attempt to cheer us all up by making smoke trails of smileys and hearts in the sky during the post-apocalyptic gloom of Covid, and it worked. This year we’ve sweated and grumbled our way through three heatwaves and by now we’re used to coping by completely changing our daily timetable. No more lingering in bed until 10.00am – I seem to have changed my body clock so much I wonder if I’ll still be waking up at 5.00am in the winter. There’s really no alternative but to reserve the very earliest part of the day for whatever hard physical work on the allotment needs to be done. It’s not that bad – I don’t set any alarms I just wake up, make a cup of strong tea and eat my regulation five fruit shortcake biscuits – that’s breakfast (sorry Doc!) . Today we cleared the failed pea crop away and hoed the plants off at the roots to gift any remaining nitrogen nodules to the purple sprouting broccoli which follows it. Then I sharpened up the hoe – always carry a sharpener when using hoes, scythes and secateurs and learn how to use it. A sharp hoe razors off the weeds with minimum effort. Two passes of the hoe and the spring tine rake is enough to clean the bed and then I spread compost or whatever on the bed and work it in with a three tined cultivator with a long handle. These are all simple hand tools and they’re worth their weight in gold. I once attempted to rotavate the bindweed and couch grass out of a new garden and it was a complete disaster. They both regenerate and spread from the tiniest fragment of their underground roots – but I didn’t know that at the time. My friend and mentor Don Streatfield once put a piece of bindweed root into the freezer for weeks and planted it again in a pot. It grew again with undiminished enthusiasm.

So then I marked out the two beds using a line and a long builder’s tape. I know it’s a faff, and measuring the distance between plants might look over-generous today, but next winter you’ll see they needed every inch of legroom. Then we water the holes and drop the plants in, firming the soil around them and water them again, and then we net them to keep out the cabbage white butterflies whose caterpillars will strip the leaves down to the ribs if you let them.

The peas and the broad beans were a complete failure this year. The wet spring retarded their growth and then the succession of heatwaves pretty well finished them off. They’re typical temperate, cool loving plants and the failure isn’t just down to our poor gardening skills; farmers have lost millions of pounds worth of crops this year and I expect both will be hard even to find frozen in the supermarket. If you live in an air conditioned house and drive to an air conditioned workplace in an air conditioned car it would be hard to gain any understanding of environmental breakdown such as growers and gardeners have.

So we work until it’s too hot and then we come home. Sometimes we have a late breakfast, but our preferred timetable is to have a late lunch followed by a siesta and then just a sandwich in the evening. It’s a Spanish way of life that suits the weather perfectly and keeps the allotment going through the hard times. Today I cooked a sort of paella, flavoured with smoked paprika, chilli, garlic and tomatoes in a strong fish stock and topped with pieces of roasted pepper and monkfish fried in a hot pan. Tomorrow we’ll be making dill pickles with the miniature ridge cucumbers we gathered today. Before that I need to finish digging the bed where the broad beans came to nothing and removing the bindweed as early in the morning as possible. It’s hard work but bindweed just has to be dug out every few years. We’ve been powering through our seven water butts and the next bit of civil engineering will be to link four of them together and install much bigger guttering on the shed and the greenhouse so we don’t lose a single drop of rain.

Above is a view of Bath from the top of the hill at Sham Castle taken in July a few years ago during a very hot walk, and the balloon below has been a regular sight during fine weather spells in the past, although there are rather fewer this year , perhaps due to the cost of gas to power them. I once had a flight in a balloon that took off at exactly. the same place. There are houses all around and so we launched as fast as a high speed lift and then flew pretty well up-river for an hour or so enjoying long moments of uncanny silence punctuated by awesome roars from the burner. It was a day not unlike today and at one point we sailed above a fox crossing a field which clearly had no idea we were there. The landing was less eventful than I had been fearing the whole trip and I got home with no idea how to explain, let alone describe the experience I’d just had. Improbably, the company which owned the balloon ( I was a guest of the pilot) was based just fifty yards down the road from where we now live.

It’s an odd time we’re living through. We’re researching plants for the allotment to give ourselves the best chance of landing a decent crop, and it may turn out that broad (fava) beans and peas will have to come off the plan – something we’ll deeply regret because they’re so powerfully better than their frozen supermarket equivalents. The upside seems to be that the cucumbers, melons and squashes all love the heat and the sunshine.

Feeling slightly overwhelmed!

However long we garden, every year takes us by surprise when the crops seem almost to overwhelm us. This isn’t bragging as much as an admission of poor planning. In early spring when we’re working out what to grow we always seem to forget that the seeds and vegetables we plant out will need more space than we expect, and that to grow all that we’d like to grow when we’re looking at the seed catalogues in the winter we’d need to take on half a dozen volunteers and several acres of land. For instance the polytunnel cucumbers planted next to the fennel looked absolutely fine when we put them in but now the rowdy cucumbers are overwhelming the smaller plants so Madame had to spend an hour this morning pruning some of the exuberant growth back and whilst doing so she discovered a large cache of fruit which had hidden itself among the leaves. Sadly our peas couldn’t cope with the heatwave and, like the broad beans have lost their flowers. The broad beans were so stressed they were attacked by some kind of fungal infection. We’ve known for years that this was coming, but it’s now serious enough for us to abandon some old favourites and hope that the plant breeders are ahead of the game when it comes to drought resistance in plants. A quick look online today suggests that we shall be trying out entirely new varieties of peas next season. In fact all our cool weather plants are going to fail very soon and plant scientists are already looking closely at the DNA of likely plants . This is a subject I know nothing at all about but I’m very curious to know more.

The other problem is when the produce comes in fast, we have to cook and eat it all, and with only two mouths to feed we really don’t need ten cucumbers or five large aubergines at once. I banged hopefully on Charlie, our neighbour’s, door this morning but I discovered he’s allergic to cucumbers, and so the only answer will be to pickle as many as we can. Fortunately the dill is in full flower and those of our neighbours who were silly enough to plant horseradish are glad enough to get rid of some – “take more!” they often plead. This doesn’t really solve the problem because we have cupboards full of five year old pickles, chutneys and relishes not all of which age well. The good news is that our youngest son will cheerfully munch his way through a jar of pickle and a pound of cheese in a single late night sitting.

The heatwave continues and we’re still getting up extremely early and putting a couple of hours in before it’s too hot to work any more, but the knock on effect of that is that we need to go to bed at 9.00pm. However we don’t complain about it because early morning gardening means we get entertained by a resident song thrush who will work through his entire repertoire of phrases dozens of times without ever stopping. The battle with the weeds never eases up, but I’ve discovered that three pronged cultivators loosen their roots quickly and then I can rake most of them out or leave them in the sun to crisp up and die. Watering takes up a lot of time and although a hose would be quicker, watering by hand gets you up close and personal with the plants, and it’s always lovely to see a large pumpkin lurking in the shadows, or scrump a few strawberries, tayberries or an apple, or pull a few weeds on the way round.

Tomorrow we’re expecting the last of the builders to lay new vinyl in the bathroom and that will end an unbelievable ten year battle with our landlord to deal with our serious issues with black mould. They’ve finally connected the bathroom and kitchen extractors to the outside world and cleaned down and sealed the affected walls and repainted them. They even replaced the asbestos cupboard door in the hall which we were told not to use soon after we moved in.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours looking for a second hand book I need to use. It’s a rather academic 600 page tome which I discovered would cost over £300 to buy new or just under £100 second hand. I made some enquiries about the astonishing cost and it seems that the academic book trade is surviving but only just. A typical print run has gone from several thousand to several hundred because universities and their libraries are so financially overstretched they can’t afford to buy them. It’s a bit of a death spiral. The solution seems to be renting, and so I’ve rented the ebook for a year for thirty quid and I’m bound to say it’s a great way to read because you can search and mark-up with all the power of the computer and enlarge the size of the type to suit your own eyesight and it’s even accessible on my phone. I guess an eagle could read it but not me. I’m hoping that very soon I’ll have a better – if still underwhelming – grasp of DNA and all that stuff. I went to the doctor once with a very painful big toe. “Oh” he said breezily, “you’ve got Hallux rigidus”. No-one in my family was brought up in ancient Rome so I’m a bit rusty on the latin, but even I knew that it meant “stiff toe”. I remonstrated with him that I knew that before I walked through the door. He never tried it again. I often read appeals to get more people involved in botany, but (I speak from experience here) all too often a beginner runs into a brick wall of scientific language which – when used out of context or an appropriate setting – feels like you’re being pushed back. All the research suggests that if you can’t explain a difficult idea simply you shouldn’t be trying to teach it.