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

Being in a relationship (with nature)

A garden scene featuring a glass greenhouse and a plastic polytunnel, surrounded by various plants and greenery. Two large water containers are visible, along with wooden garden beds and a signpost.

In the recent BBC TV adaptation of the novel by Janice Hadlow, in which she constructs a plausible sequel to Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, the dreadful clergyman Mr Collins is found reading Aristotle; searching – as he says – for the way to be happy. Happiness is a fairly inadequate way of describing the best life as envisaged by Aristotle. In his view, happiness is not much more than a side effect; but the real deal, and the driving force towards it is eudaimonia usually translated as flourishing. We flourish when we practice the virtues – which can be expressed in a number of ways but to take just the foundational ones; courage, temperance, justice and prudence are some of the most important from a list that can be expanded to twelve or even more. If Mr Collins owned up to Aristotle that he was hoping to be happy as a result of reading a book, the philosopher might have made him write out 100 times – I must not be greedy, ambitious, hypocritical, grasping and in particular I must not render widows and their daughters homeless and dependent on the generosity of their rich relatives or hoping to be funded by marrying wealthy bachelors.

The virtues are not abstract bits of head knowledge but more akin to habits which – if we cultivate them – become embedded in our behaviour. We’re more likely to do the right thing without having to think it through each time. This all sounds a bit too intellectual but you’ll notice that all the virtues are relational; they’re to do with the way we relate to other people in our everyday actions. Kindness, loving, respectfulness, honesty, self control and courage, are not so much concerned with holding certain beliefs in our minds as with acting them out in the market-place of our lives.

Labore est orare

Sorry about the Latin, but it’s important. I first came across this saying – it means to work is to pray – many years ago in the context of Benedictine monasteries where, I discovered that in some of them the words labore est orare are inscribed above the chapel door as the monks leave and the opposite saying orare est labore –to pray is to work is written above the door as the monks enter. St Benedict wrote his rule of life centuries before the Greek text of Aristotle were translated but in a kind of wonderful evolutionary convergence, the Greek texts were translated by Benedictine monks centuries later and they became hugely influential largely through the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. I’ve only been to one Benedictine monastery and I very much regret not visiting the chapel to see if this suggestion is true. Anyway, it stuck in my mind as an almost perfect expression of the gardening life. Today I was on my hands and knees weeding (I’d also knackered my back digging out volunteer potatoes on one of the overwintered plots) – and I experience a prolonged contemplative moment when I lost myself even amid the intense noise of the building site across the road. I watched a holly blue butterfly, a small white, a brimstone and a red admiral all about their business in the warm sun. Yesterday I found a marbled white trapped in a greenhouse, and today small whites were about. An impudent jackdaw flew on and off the allotment stealing beaks full of sheep fleece from within five feet of us. The earth smelt beautiful as it always does around Easter time.

Black and white image of a rustic house with a garden, featuring wooden supports in the foreground and a stone wall in the background.
Our first real garden in Pickwick.
A quaint garden surrounding a cottage, featuring lush green plants, a small table and chairs, and a rustic wooden fence.
Here’s the same garden 55 years later

This connection with the natural world is a perfect example of the relational nature of the virtues. The reason we feel so content, so joyful when we’re gardening is because there is a kind of conversation going on between us and the soil and the plants. The seasons and the weather are all part of the great conversation that constitutes a season.

Our relationship with the earth is a lifelong conversation not a million miles from the great conversation of a long marriage. Kindness, loving, respectfulness, honesty, self control and courage are as applicable to the foundation and evolution of a garden, or a farm, or a nature reserve and SSSI as they are to human interpersonal relations. There’s always something to learn in a garden; a time to yield and a time to push forward. A time to bend every sinew and a time to rest.

And so it is, that labore est orare – to work is to pray – becomes the form of prayerful practice that leads to true, deep, inexpressible possibly even sacramental happiness rooted in commitment to one another -gardener and farmer with soil, human partnerships in all kinds of love. And the greatest thing about it is that it requires no dogma, no theology and no dressing up.

A grassy garden area featuring sparse vegetation, a small shed in the background, and a few scattered tools and materials. A section of black tarpaulin is laid on the ground with twigs and dried plants on top.
The allotment on the day we took it over, ten years ago

Winter’s last gasp – hopefully

A panoramic view of snow-capped mountains in the distance, surrounded by rolling green hills and a sparse forest of trees. The sky is partly cloudy.
Pen y Fan dusted with snow, seen across the Usk valley from above Talgarth

A couple of days ago a minor skirmish broke out on social media regarding the change of name from Brecon Beacons to Bannau Brycheiniog – in the wake of the announcement by the National Park Authority that it’s rapidly going broke. Coincidentally I was continuing to read Jan Morris’ excellent book “The Matter of Wales” which exposes the part played in the suppression of the Welsh language by the English educator Matthew Arnold. This latest outbreak of social media bile and stupidity was led by a mob of English speakers, one of whom bravely named the mountain at the top of this piece “Penny Fan”. The troubles of the National Park and – for all I know – the entire nation could, according to the wisdom of the internet, be laid at the door of the Welsh Language. All those expensive road signs. They’d be stuffing themselves with silver spoons and turtle soup if they’d given up Welsh and spoken the same as what we do and joined our brilliantly successful politics and neoliberal economic witchcraft. Ah well! Whatever that means the answer is probably Port Talbot.

Anyway, back home from our little adventure in the hills above Talgarth we discovered that the builders had not finished dealing with our black mould and can’t come back to complete until the Easter holidays are over, so we spent a couple of days cleaning up the cement dust and turned to the allotment which is the only bit of our lives in which we have complete agency. Wales is a beautiful and paradoxical country and I often wonder why I feel such a strong affinity – except today I was reading about the 1930’s and I suddenly remembered my dad’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the miners strikes, the railway strikes and the suffering of the people in the valley towns. I was raised on tales of riots, police brutality and solidarity. My dad and my grandfather were ardent socialists and I suppose I absorbed their principles from my earliest childhood. As I grew up and saw how people actually behave I was, and I remain, shocked.

But I want to celebrate for a moment one of the great things about The Bannau Brycheiniog and you may be surprised to learn that I’m talking about the ironmonger’s shops. They’ve all but disappeared in much of the UK but Webbs in Crickhowell and Jones in Hay on Wye are survivors in the glum world of out-of-town superstores. We used to have several of them in Bath – one of them, clinging to a famous name in the area – called Avery and Bowlers – has just closed down. Bowlers fixtures and fittings can still be seen in the Museum of Work here in Bath and there’s a gas engine there that I helped photograph in 1971 when their factory was abandoned. The other I remember was a firm called Hine and Collinson on the London road whose employees, in their brown warehouse coats, could find almost anything you could name on one or another of its five floors. I once bought a new double duplex glass chimney for my granny’s paraffin lamp which I inherited by default because no-one else wanted it.

Webbs in Crickhowell is such a great experience it should be on the tourist map. We never go in there without coming out with a new teapot or a curious kind of egg cup. Anything from a bottle opener to a chair can be found there. Jones Home Hardware in Hay on Wye performs a similar service to its customers, scattered across the neighbouring countryside, who might be in search of a crowbar, a chainsaw or a broomhandle. It carries a similarly eclectic stock of very useful things across several shop fronts and a broad public alleyway horizontally arranged on Castle Street.

Exterior view of Jones Home Hardware shop, featuring a traditional facade, advertising for Honda lawn and garden equipment, and various gardening tools displayed outside.

Of course the butchers and bakers who are usually mentioned in connection with high streets are also important; but there’s nothing quite like an ironmonger’s shop to exemplify the way people live around here. Hay on Wye is mainly known for tourism and as a centre for second hand books and can often feel like a gated community of retired art teachers, but the thursday market is still a lively affair with more (and much more attractive) bakers selling every kind of sourdough bread, kimchi and mead – and where the trinkets are decidedly upmarket. The ironmongers aren’t after the tourist pound – they still serve the rural hinterland; the bit we enjoy for free – and hints at another deeper Wales just under the surface. As for bookshops, Richard Booth’s bookshop is still the first and the one I probably enjoy the best. On Thursday I came out with about the tenth rewrite of a wartime book then called “Plants poisonous to livestock” which Madame gave me as a gift in the 1970s; brown; thin; foxed and printed on cheapest paper. My new version is bigger and better in every way and it also gives plentiful tips for disposing of humans you’ve fallen out with.

Meanwhile, as I always feared, the newly published flora of Brecknockshire (that’s Breconshire in old money) arrived too late to take with us to Talgarth and as soon as I took off the wrapper it fell open on the page describing Herb Paris. I know and I’ve seen the plant in Velvet Bottom, on the Mendips but that was in the days before I knew anything about proper recording and I didn’t take a photo I could refer back to for verification. In spite of a number of return visits to the spot I’ve never been able to record it. So yesterday I discovered that it’s found in the same nature reserve in Talgarth – Pwll y wrach – that we visited. I excuse my failure to see it because it’s the wrong month for flowering, and the lower paths, closest to the water, were closed due to the danger of falling ash trees. No such excuse for another long-sought plant; Spring Sandwort which grows on the hills just above where we were staying. We’ll just have to go back and take the new flora with us. The book took almost 60 years of intense research to write, and sadly the author, Mike Porter, died a year before it was published.

The weather, during our visit, was pretty wintry and we had rain, sleet and even snow during our four days. Thinking back over our sighting of the old Central Wales Hospital, the discreetly renamed asylum, I woke up this morning after a sleep troubled by dreams with a phrase from a Robert Burns poem turning slowly in my mind:

Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless thousands mourn!

Why do I love Wales so much? There’s a sentence in the Jan Morris book that comes close to expressing it. I often used the contrast between the favela and the steppes when I was in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It seemed to express the polarities of mood that I live with. Jan Morris, in trying to express the Welsh personality draws on another source from the Welsh language. The Welsh, she says, hover between hiraeth and hwyl – between the sad longing for a lost home, and the exhilaration of a full sail at sea. Either way round, it sounds a lot more creative than a diagnosis for some kind of disorder of the mind!

A ‘crown of thorns’ moment in the Bannau Brycheiniog

A view through thorny branches and barbed wire, looking out onto green fields and distant buildings across the valley.

We’re here in Wales again; this time we’re 1000 feet up a hill and just on the edge of the treeline. We’re here because the builders have moved into our flat, finally to install some humidistat extractor fans and get the black mould permanently off the walls. It’s been a ten year battle with the landlords and we’re so relieved they’ve finally listened to us.

This time we’re above the small town of Talgarth beneath Waun Fach and very close to the Cambrian Way walk. It’s cold; extremely windy and we may even get some snow up here later on. There’s a small stream running very close which becomes larger as it tumbles down the hill and finally when it reaches the town, feeds a working water mill as the River Ennig. Its route takes it down a steep sided cwm where there is a partially open nature reserve called Pwll-y-wrach “witches pool” which – legend has it – was used for ducking suspected witches in a heads I win, tails you lose form of rough justice.

A view of a rocky landscape with flowing water and moss-covered stones, surrounded by trees and greenery.

Rough justice is a bit of a theme for this corner of God’s own country. We arrived too early to check in so we parked up and visited the nature reserve of the same name which is partly closed to visitors due to the epidemic of Ash dieback. The combination of emergency felling and wind damage give the valley a strangely gloomy air notwithstanding the emerging spring wildflowers which seem not to mind. There were even a couple of species of Bumble Bee mooching about to provide a soundtrack. The wildlife managers of the site have taken a decision not to remove all the ash trees, but just the dangerous ones and to leave a good deal of the brash in situ for the woodland residents.

I’ll come back to the more cheerful spring flowers, but when we first booked here and got the address “Hospital Road” I guessed instantly that we would be near the old Talgarth asylum which has fallen into dereliction and now is locked away from visitors apart from urban explorers who are prepared to take the (considerable) risks. We were walking down the road back to the car when we spotted it through the hedge below us and it truly is a melancholic ruin. I once worked as an art therapist in a similar hospital in Bristol which has now closed and is largely demolished. It was a dark place of historic injustice and suffering in spite of its origins as a safe and productive, self-sufficient colony. Overcrowding, underfunding and sheer lack of vision condemned thousands of guiltless men and women; many of the men shell-shocked after the cruelties of war and the women labelled as moral defectives because they had become pregnant. All crowded together with other violent and sometimes psychotic residents and nurses who acted more like prison warders, and who would punish those who got out of line with injections of paraldehyde which was so noxious it had to be administered with a steel and glass syringe because it ate through plastic as it ate through the skin of the unfortunates who called it “pollyeye”. Something went terribly wrong with the vision and a miasma of suffering still hangs over the buildings in which it was administered. Thank goodness those days are largely gone. A classic example (think of the present government) of what happens when policies fail but no-one has any inclination or clue how to mend the damage.

Anyway – enough – I wanted to write about spring as she’s manifesting herself here up in the hills where it’s colder and later. We only had a short walk, but we spotted primroses, common dog-violets and early dog-violets, lords and ladies, dandelions, wood anemones, barren strawberries, lesser celandines and soft shield ferns. The woodland floor had the early leaves of herb robert and wild garlic and there were large numbers of acorns on the ground in the process of germinating and opening their seed leaves like scarlet cloak – very pretty. I didn’t have time to make a detailed list, but there are some photos below.

Not a bee then? a Furry Dronefly!

Four consecutive days of wall-to-wall sunshine should have reminded me that the spring equinox – not the boring Met Office one but the proper mobile one – isn’t always on the same day. So we missed it entirely while we worked on the allotment. When I was a schoolboy I was invariably referred to by one teacher as “rod pole or perch” – an ancient system of length measurement which lingered on the back of our exercise books along with acres, chains and gills. Equinox is at least based on an observable measure – the day nearest to offering an equality of time between night and day. Easter, of course does its thing based on a 13 month moon cycle defying all logic and creating great hazard for those who always plant their potatoes on Good Friday. I love it: the sheer irrationality of it all defying the tidiers-up makes me smile.

Anyway we were so busy on the allotment that the equinox passed us by and bang on time I’m driven back to the same old question – why is nature so good for us that it distracts us even from marking the (old) beginning of spring? After the winter we’ve had, I can’t begin to say how lovely it’s been to feel the sun on our backs at last. Coming back home every day with our muscles aching and fingers creaking you might think a bit counterintuitive to make a fuss about it. But the allotment offers one small part of our lives over which we have almost complete agency. In an existence filled with expectations from every quarter; bills; health problems and you name it – the allotment is an oasis in which we get to choose what to do without having to bend to the cold winds of authority. There are rules of course but they’re mostly common sense and neighbourliness. Nobody pays any attention to the daft rules about the permitted colour of sheds and the precise percentage of flowers to veg that must be adhered to, and as any Welsh poet will say; rules are the primrose path to creativity.

Anyway, the business of agency is a key concept for achieving eudaimonia – true, deep, happiness. We spent a lot of time this week planning how to move the compost bins and turn them into raised beds, how to move two water butts from one optimal position to another even optimal-er one. We ordered our seeds, decided our priorities and prepared beds for sowing and planting out in the next few weeks. Each day we felt that little bit stronger and we thanked the weather gods for their generosity as we always must.

Being perpetually hard-up we are free from fantasising about machinery and fencing to keep out badgers and people. Every bit of mulch has to be planned and transported down the bumpy path and, expecting the weather to be unexpected much of the time, we develop a kind of radical patience thanking nature for her unexpectedly generous lessons. The bee at the top for instance is not a bee at all but a fly; a dronefly- in fact a Furry Dronefly. I’m not an entomologist but a handy app on my phone helps me to sound cleverer than I really am. “Shame on you” cry the gathered deacons with their withered knowledge and multiple imagination-sucking certainties. But I’ve got other things, better things to do – like learning Welsh and cooking lovely meals and so I’m content to make an assisted guess now and again.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

A stone staircase leading down through an arched entrance, with a lantern visible at the bottom and greenery lining the path.
The passageway and steps leading steeply down from the Paragon to Walcot Street

We were lured out by the sunshine this morning and went for a decent circular walk taking in some shopping, a stop off at Toppings bookshop to book tickets for John Wright’s launch for his new book”Grasslands” in May, and then a bit of wall propping overlooking the weir feeling warm for the first time in months. Then another loop up the greatly diminished Walcot street to the top and back along through the Paragon, Milsom Street and home.

Don’t try this at home (or ever)
A lush patch of green foliage with bright yellow flowers growing alongside a stone wall.

Going down the steps to Walcot, if you looked closely across the road,you’d have noticed a rather early flowering Greater Celandine in a large pot outside a charity shop. I took this photo ages ago and didn’t think to photograph today’s specimen until it was too late. The thing is, I’d only today been looking today at an entry in a book on Welsh herbal remedies. The section on Celandine comes from a 15th Century herbal translated from the Welsh by John Pughe in the mid 18th century and taken from the tradition of the Physicians of Myddfai – so going back a bit.

A good eye salve. Take vinegar, white wine, the juice of Celandine, and Plantain. Mix them together in a pan and let them stand there 3 days and 3 nights, take it hence, keep it in a box and anoint thine eye therewith.

Here’s the thing, though. Among many other suggested uses, the bright yellow juice of the Greater Celandine is caustic enough to burn off warts and piles. There’s no way on earth anyone could put such a decoction in their eyes without damaging themselves unless there’s something in the recipe or the procedure that the canny doctors failed to share. I’ve got both glaucoma and cataracts (not that they trouble me much and they’re being well looked after by the NHS) but I’m sure that if Andy the optometrist were to lean across me with a mixture of Greater Celandine juice, vinegar and Plantain, and then try to drop it into my eyes I’d be out of the door pretty fast.

That’s the trouble with the reading that I’m doing about Wales and her history. Someone recently alluded to a kind of Cambrian fog that gathers over the culture of the country and leads unprepared travellers (like me) astray if we fail to inspect the teeth of the Bard to be sure that it’s gold and not mercury amalgam glittering between the lines.

We learned the difference between exegesis and eisegesis at theological college. Exegesis means trying to unpick what the original author was trying to say. Doing it properly can feel like unpacking a bottomless suitcase full of ancient garments and figuring out how they were worn. The opposite term, eisegesis, is much beloved by the evangelicals and involves trying to stuff a pair of your own theological pants into the suitcase after discovering that there’s nothing in there that quite matches your prejudices and so you have to chuck out the original contents and their bizarre notions, so you can get more of your ideas in and declare that you have the true meaning of the original.

There’s a phrase that comes from one of the great 20th century scholars of ancient literature who said – if that was what it meant then to the writer, what should it mean to us today? – which is to say that ancient literature and history need to be read with your brain in gear and not uncritically regurgitated as if it had nothing to do with the culture in which it was created.

The events of history are mundane and slippery; evanescent. It takes a poet to land a grappling hook on them and haul them in. It takes a poet to write about them fruitfully and yet another to read them well in vastly different circumstances and even those readings are as evanescent and slippery as the original events. There is never anything but provisional in the pursuit of history, and yet it’s the cultural air we breathe and so we must take it seriously.

I’ve been reading Jan Morris’ book “The Matter of Wales” and the third chapter deals with religious faith in Wales. I found it quite troubling because as she enumerated the waves of religion from the Celtic through Roman Catholicism, post Reformation Anglicanism (both enforced on the Welsh) and then waves of Calvinism, Methodism, Moravianism leading to the 20th century collapse of faith – I realized that in my own way I’d been touched by all of them and even experienced many of them myself. I went through what’s falsely described as Primitive Methodism in Sunday school (the Prims); conventional low Church of England, fiery atheism, Wesleyan Methodism, Evangelical low churches, Anglo Catholicism and theological college on the cusp of the Charismatic revolution. Whatever the light was at the end of the tunnel, they all seemed to swerve away from it when it got too challenging. Pretty well all of them operated a chaplaincy to the status quo. Nowadays if I was forced to put a label on my beliefs it would fall somewhere in the dim space between Celtic Christianity and Taoism but it would be better to evoke the old spiritual doctrine of reserve and apply it to the world in general and the understanding of past cultures in particular. The light at the end of the tunnel for me is the incredible freedom of feeling I don’t have to defend any orthodoxy at all.

The three graces – possibly