I suddenly realized that this tree could be Granny Perrin’s Nest.

Looking out of the bedroom window yesterday morning I had a small scale revelation; nothing huge but more of a bicycle tyre lever, gently easing an old memory off the rim in search of a leak. There’s a tall tree, a couple of roads north of the flat, and which rises above the roof line. I’ve no idea what species it is; it could be a Lombardy poplar – but without ever hauling it into consciousness I’ve been using it for years as a weather forecaster. There’s a companion met office rival a bit further away; the church clock on Julian Road which you can only hear chiming in a northeasterly wind. But yesterday, and returning to the tree, I could see it being bent by a gusty southwesterly wind – and that simple observation is the gateway to a great deal of useful information to a gardener. In itself that’s a mundane thought but a moment later the phrase “Granny Perrin’s nest” popped into my mind and my memory dropped into time travel mode.

Granny Perrin’s nest is an expression my Mum used to use when my sister and I stayed in our grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns. Mum would look up at some unfathomable point in the sky and say – “there’s rain over Granny Perrin’s nest”. As a child with a seedling poetic imagination it was a phrase of great beauty; pregnant with incomprehensible meaning but clearly something I would need to understand if I was ever going to be a grown-up. Yesterday I looked it up on Google Gemini just in case – in my eightieth year – it might finally crack the code and print the admission ticket.

I was completely taken aback by the result. This is a phrase that I’ve mentioned a number of times in this blog, and – here and there – I’ve mentioned childhood memories of The Crest – the cottage my grandfather built and the smallholding where I learned about nineteenth century farming at first hand. As I looked at the computer screen every word I’ve ever written about it had been scraped and stored by AI and, far more troubling, augmented by some local information and kneaded into a narrative with a completely spurious authority. My childhood memories refined and curated by a machine and spewed out as facts. I felt a bit violated to be honest; as if the AI had forensically scraped my childhood off the pavement and reconstructed an unwise night out at the pub. All the bits were there but they weren’t me. No lights lit up. I would never have joined those dots in the way that the machine did because there was none of the fuzzy logic of the mind. My Mum was missing; my grandfather with his unbuttoned shirt and jacket full of burn holes from the roll-ups that lived in the corner of his mouth; my Granny sweating and cursing over the paraffin stove; the chickens, Charlie the toad in the greenhouse. I suppose I should give credit to the suggestion that Granny Perrin’s nest referred to a tall elm, and support for my memory that there were still a few red squirrels but none of these were my memories. I only remember the grey squirrels which my grandfather would knock out of trees with a weighted stick so he could claim a bounty on the tails. I dread to think that some innocent enquirer might, one day, unleash these curated memories as if they were facts.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn? We worry about the power of AI but it seemed to me that it’s not behaving like an organised crime syndicate (at least at the information gathering level) but as a kleptomaniac or shoplifter criminally entering my mind and indiscriminately shoving everything into a bag marked swag, to be sold on in the dark web of plausible untruths.

Granny Perrin’s nest is, and always was a metaphor. My mum never for a moment thought that there was a real nest up there at the top of the tree, with an elderly lady living in it, issuing weather forecasts. It was a piece of folklore with a useful predictive truth about weather. The world of story and song is full of these instances and they can travel, even as far as a city like Bath so that I can listen out for the church bell which always brings cold winds, or the bending of the tree which tells me about atlantic weather approaching.

The great elm trees would have been used by the bodgers in the nearby woods who made the most wonderful Windsor chairs and other fancies using elm, which doesn’t split, for the seats and beech or some other locally available timber for the other parts. We would often walk through the woods to Margaret’s beer shop as our parents delicately named it, and eat crisps and drink cherryade. My grandfather was a carpenter whose family had lived in the same village since the 18th century. He made us rainbows with a stirrup pump and a bucket of water. My Granny was a cockney, brought up within earshot of the Bow Bells as an orphan. We never knew how she was brought up and cared for. Layer after layer of meaning that resonates for me, reduced to a handful of gradgrindian facts by heartless machine learning. And yet I often come across myself in some more or less caricatured form on the internet. My God I’ve lived an interesting life, I think as Madame and I lie in bed holding hands and dreaming. Our mother loved her plants and she would never visit a garden without indulging in a bit of harmless larceny; these memories gather around me like an incandescent ball of fireflies; immune to capture. Let’s not call it intelligence any more – it’s not spreadsheet knowledge it’s more of an address book for locked rooms which no AI agent will ever be able to enter. No one reading them off a screen in the future will be able fully to enter their world. All it will tell is where you might begin to look for your own story.

I’m wondering if it’s me that’s heritage!

Is it me? I wonder, as I sit here surrounded by cables and what the tech industry chooses to call “heritage” equipment. A few weeks ago I was involved in contributing to a podcast on Zoom and had a few anxious moments when I discovered that the camera on my laptop was broken and the tablet I brought in as reserve refused to play. In the end I did it with my phone and it was fine; but it left me with a gnawing sense that I should sort it out. First stop was to enquire about mending the laptop, but it turned out that it would cost £180 just to take the screen off. Meanwhile my room is filled with a collection of old and new cameras – all capable of video – indeed my friend Phil Peel has made whole films on his Panasonic GH2 in the past. The video quality would be miles better than a cheap webcam and I’ve already got a radio mic so being a thrifty kind of person I dropped into a rabbit hole of competing and conflicting standards in search of a way to join the dots and build a recycled webcam setup.

I quickly discovered that my box of carefully curated bits and bobs was full of kit that fought like rats in a sack. This was – I learned- due to problems with “handshake”. The IT malarkey is a very vocabulary extending business. I also fought my way through multitudes of standards, connectors and Papal encyclicals while I began to run up a hefty connector bill with Amazon. It would have been easier to understand if everyone else wasn’t speaking Greek while I was speaking Latin but a week’s onscreen work, with my eyes very sore from a cataract operation, produced something like the Nicene Creed which only worked then because absolutely no-one understood it and I – like a blind man given a Rubik’s Cube – fiddled about randomly changing around the plugs from my growing collection until sulk by sulk the camera talked to the laptop; the hub found the sound and by a miracle it all found its way across the wild waves to the front room where Madame was waiting patiently for my ghostly face to appear, connected to a voice. Most of the previous hour we’d just been shouting to each other across the corridor.

Thrift is hard work. Another old friend, Harry Griffiths gave a wonderfully funny off the cuff speech at his 90th birthday when he finished a long excursus on apple trees and thrift by saying that the trouble with eating up the windfalls all the time was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The fact is, I’m not that interested in the IT at all. I begrudge the amount of time I spend learning new skills and new programmes because what I really want to do is get on with writing. The thrift is an ethical stance against premature obsolescence and waste. One of the main reasons I kicked the Apple (computers) habit was because I couldn’t stand the way that a 14 year old counter assistant curled his lip at me and said I should get a newer model when all it needed was a battery.

But now I’m almost there; just one new ‘Dp’ cable away from having to unplug and replug the old HDMI lead every time the laptop shuts itself down- so last year! – and then I can carry on experimenting with adding some video to the Potwell Inn feed. The biggest obstacle is getting the technicals under my belt to the point where I don’t even think about them. I’m used to “getting the script off the page” on the radio and I’ve got years of microphone technique under my belt. I once helped out with a recording of the Bible when – for a very small fee – I played the devil; typecast as always. They told me it went down a storm in Africa where they loved my accent. I had no idea that the devil came from Gloucestershire.

My biggest worry is that my readers will hate my voice and recoil from my weathered and ancient looks and frankly wild hair and turn to more sculpted and siliconised bloggers, but I cling to Samuel Beckett’s wise words –“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. Meanwhile I need to tidy up the clutter on my desk and ring the garage yet again. The campervan, having failed its MOT, is still baffling the experts with its record breaking emissions. Meanwhile here’s a nice picture of what my phone tells me is Ceylon spinach – growing in our neighbour’s polytunnel. Oh what a tangled web ….. etc. Then I’ve added some cautionary photos of leads in boxes. It should keep you awake. It did me!!

Is green spirituality just the same old same old – without the dressing up?

The moon in Lleyn – no really!

Forgive me for retracing my steps here, because I can anticipate a thousand toes available to be stepped on and I’ve often restrained myself when it comes to writing about spirituality because I’ve got previous, and you might think I’m trying to slip a bit of surreptitious religion into a post. I’m not. Mainly because I’ve moved on and I’d like to move an insight forward a bit. It always seemed to me that spirituality is akin to a flowing stream and if it stops flowing it becomes stagnant and sometimes even poisonous. Trust me, when you’ve seen how poisonous a religious bureaucracy can be when it refuses to countenance change, you’ll want to cross the road and walk on by. I can’t claim any particular philosophical expertise except for discovering that I could never fit what I might once have been called a religious experience into a religious framework. However hard I tried I found myself hacking some really important components off in order to force it to fit.

This was the moment

Curiously enough this feeling came to a moment of crisis as I stood next to the River Wye under a bridge in Hay one day when it was in full flood and huge branches were being swept downstream past me. What overwhelmed me that day and still moves me as I remember it was the sheer relentlessness and awe inspiring power of the flow. The river passed the spot where I was standing, oblivious to my presence, and onwards to the sea. Completely unexpectedly I “knew” that I no longer believed in any kind of supernatural extraterrestrial being. It wasn’t necessary; it added nothing to understanding; all it achieved was to force submission to the censor of difficult thoughts like an anti-heresy shrink wrap constricting the circulation. That odd experience opened the doors of a cage and a thousand WTF moments flew back out into the grey, stormy sky into the world of the ten thousand things.

But this doesn’t mean at all that the roots I had grown down into all those old religious texts had to be abandoned. I could still (loosely) meditate on them because they’d all been written by other beings just like me out of numerous experiences just like mine. But the writings could be validated perfectly well by experience, ordinary human experience, and claiming that they’ve been signed off in some mysterious way added nothing to them. Years before the bridge moment I’d realised that religion doesn’t, can’t, change the facts – the everyday phenomena that sometimes – like a bush – could burst into flames. Spirituality can’t change the facts; it can only change the way that we see and relate to them. Spirituality – to put it in a simple phrase – is a perspective changing phenomenon.

Of course I’m by no means the only person to travel this path: there are many others better qualified than me to elucidate the gritty detail and join the dots. But the transformation of my perspective came when I realized that nature isn’t about anything; not an explanatory metaphor or visual aid for the theologians or a demonstration of supernatural power; it simply is! There’s no destination; no culmination; no rapture; no sheep or goats; no judgement and no heaven or hell; no reward and no punishment.

“In short, non-theistic spirituality is about experiencing the sacredness of reality as it is, grounded in human experience and the observable universe.”

“a commitment to investigating the nature of one’s own mind, and experiencing states of consciousness that are transformative, without accepting unfounded claims about the nature of reality.”

Sam Harris

Here’s a cobbled together list from a Gemini AI search on a non-theistic “Green Spirituality which spells out a number of human attributes and dispositions that don’t need any theological scaffolding to hold them up. States we can all experience without validation from an invisible God. I find this list a bit abstract but it means well as long as we don’t have to take it too seriously. For me the truest joys are in the awkward and chameleon everyday when a bush suddenly seems to burn without being consumed or a blackbird seems to be singing just to me or when the moon rises over the sea on the Lleyn peninsula. Here’s the faintly anaemic list:

  • Awe and Cosmic Connection:
  • Mindfulness and Presence:
  • Ethical Interconnectedness:
  • Meaning-Making:
  • Transcendence:

In moments of flow, of ecstasy, of vision; but also in the more mundane moments on the allotment; out foraging for blackberries and as the unexpected beneficiary of a glorious smile from a stranger. No dressing up required but we could use more storytellers, artists, poets, troupes of actors and dancers and more time to slow down and take it all in.

The sun breaks through storm clouds on the Lizard in Cornwall

Dancing around the mulberry bush

Salisbury market stall – a few years ago.

I don’t seem to take many happy families photos or snapshots of the pier at Weston Super Mare – in fact I think I’m a bit of an old stick in the mud or, perhaps, all those church teachings about it being sinful to enjoy anything threw some switches in my DNA and I just can’t help myself. Of the thousands of photos on my computer the vast majority concern plants, flowers and locations. They’re all catalogued and recorded and tidy – although anyone who’s seen my workspace will insist that’s a barefaced lie but it’s not – it’s industrial strength masking!

Anyway, personal reflections aside, there’s another photographic category that’s extremely important to me because of the way I work. Almost every piece I write begins with a photograph. I can’t do the ‘eyes meeting across a crowded room, stuff; I’m an intensely visual kind of person. I can remember in complete detail the appearance of a woman in a summer dress that was no match for the cold wind across the churchyard as we buried her dad. I remember the goose pimples on her exposed arms and how they seemed to express her lostness at that moment. I can’t imagine making written notes about the things I see – I just take photos, thousands of them. and they are my aides memoir. Over many years the technology has come to my rescue and now I can make notes with a very small Olympus camera and also with my phone. I remember standing on the bank of the Gloucester Sharpness canal one day alongside the collection of scuttled barges there and thinking how wonderful it would be to be able to unite pictures and words in a computerised internet form with powerful search capacities so readers could create their own path through the pieces. When I first had the idea it would have required technical expertise I just didn’t possess and technology that didn’t yet exist, but nowadays it’s easier. I take my photos, recall the moment and write the story of it. The photo is the starting point for the story that sits at the centre of a human mind at a particular place and time.

So when I sat down to write today we’d just finished packing away the emergency stores we’d bought at the behest of the (UK) government in case of shortages. It’s a sensible enough policy for a very temporary fix but whilst we filled the boxes with tinned food and pasta I wondered where were the signs of government policy concerning the risk of disruption through climate collapse, oil wars, organised crime and hostile governments . You’d have to be quite old to remember the government “Protect and Survive” campaign during the Cold War which urged us to whitewash the windows and sit under the kitchen table eating tins of corned beef as the nuclear bombs fell. A perfect example of the reliance of politicians on our gullibility to get them off the hook.

But we didn’t just pack the stores today; we also discussed seed orders and what we’ll try to grow next season in the light of inevitable shortages in the supermarkets. We discussed water storage again to help during the droughts which are now inevitable. We investigated getting a fitted mesh cover to the polytunnel to reduce sunlight by 47% and keep the temperature down. We talked about our diet and how we could be more self sufficient . We ordered bread flour in bulk and we sorted through our own stored food – this year’s tomato crop was severely affected so do we have enough of last year’s tomato passata and sauces to see us through until next summer? We need to revise the plan for the allotment and attempt to develop more shade through some judiciously planted taller trees, and we need to keep pressing the Council to improve security on the site because the amount of thieving has greatly increased. Food disappears from our plots, and even disappears from the charity veg boxes that we support, whilst the Government maintains a Trappist silence on the global climate issues and the chickens come home to roost.

Inevitably then, I searched the Photos library for inspiration and it brought to mind all those choppings and simmerings, crankings of the passata machine and other evidence of our semi peasant life at the Potwell Inn. I also remember how the head of ceramics at Farnham College got into terrible trouble for asking a female student if she was strong enough to lift a bag of clay during an interview. It was certainly tactless, but not on the scale of the question Madame was asked when we were interviewed together at Falmouth. “What if you get pregnant?” We need to expect governments to find ways of tackling the hard questions, formulating the right policies and acting urgently on them. We need the courage to evaluate whether they actually work rather than looking good on the headlines; but what all of us seem to do is dance around the mulberry bush, stick our fingers in our ears and sing “la la la” while the politicians throw elderly peaceful protesters into prison for daring to question their cowardice. The point of the metaphorical photo at the top of this piece is – as the proverb suggests – that you can only make pigs’ ears out of pigs’ ears!

Castle Class 4-6-0 No 4079 – if you can name it you probably need professional help.

In the plant world there are the exact equivalents of famous railway engines worth hanging around at the end of a windy and wet platform for hours, and then, of course, there are the weeds. Steam engines still give me the shivers even seven decades after my first illicit cigarettes on the Pines junction waiting for the Cornish Riviera express to fly past. There’s a Castle Class plant in this gallery of rogues; in fact it may even be a Pacific Class but of course, because it was expressing no clouds of steam or haunting whistle I must have walked past it and failed to notice it for nearly fifty years before I finally put the time in and found it, sharing the moment with Madame – windswept and even eager to find it so we could go down to the cafe and get warm. It’s a very rare Quillwort so if you’re a fellow trainspotter you’ll know exactly where we were.

Sometimes these excitements just happen. I’ve had to stop any work that involves bending over (so no weeding or watering) while my cataract procedure heals, and so I was watching Madame weed a raised bed of carrots as she pointed to a tall but familiar looking plant poking through the crop. We both knew it was a nightshade of some sort, but there was something odd about the flower. Putting all doubts aside, I chucked it in the bucket with all the other weeds (mostly Fat Hen) and consequently there is no photo for the record and I have to consign myself to never being able to prove its identity. * but see postscript below

Later I realized that what was odd about it was that the flower wasn’t purple and yellow like its cousin Woody or its great aunt Thorn Apple, always blowing her own trumpet or Henbane with her lace collar and Deadly whose name exaggerates her gifts a bit with dull brown flowers but still as murderous a family as you could ever hope to avoid. This shy little assassin was a Black Nightshade with white flowers who hides her poison in shiny green berries which, joking aside, are a bit safer to eat when they’ve actually turned black, and I’m furious that I failed to take a photograph because it would have been (still is I suppose) a first for me.

Before I wrote this I thought I might try to work in the metaphor of trophies and tramps but it seemed a bit of a forced image and I’ve already been rude enough about the militant trainspotting tendency. (It takes one to know one)! But the whole idea for this little piece sprang precisely from my wilful failure to notice something growing on the allotment that we couldn’t eat; threw away without a thought and yet – given a bit of a reverse ferret – turned out to be really very interesting. How many other plants live and die under the radar because they have no immediate value to us. Just for starters, many of these little treasures have had a long and valuable life as herbal remedies – phytomedicines – if you must – before they were overtaken by big pharma who may have done us all a disservice by eliminating every molecule that wasn’t on their power list. And never think that herbal remedies should be eliminated because they can be poisonous. Just think of Paracetamol; and while we’re on the subject, don’t assume that herbal remedies strip the planet of protected species because I ran a check comparing the British list of rare and protected plants with the plants listed in the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia and there was just one single species listed as appearing in both lists. We are talking for the most part about what we now call weeds. It correlates well with being old (like me) which some younger people seem to believe is contagious; crossing the road to avoid the possibility of an outbreak of wrinkles and boring stories.

There’s a whole layer of cultural history down there at our feet, and ripping it all up or poisoning it because there’s no profit in it is ecological vandalism. As we consider this growing season just ending, and the five heatwaves that turned our legumes into lectin factories making them inedible and dangerous to eat raw, it’s a moment to consider our relationship with the earth. Is it purely instrumental? or is it something more. A history; a culture recorded in remedies and songs, times of plenty and times of starvation? are we too clever by half assuming that the shelves in Sainsbury’s will always be full? What does it say about us that we’re so content to destroy the lives of plants whose names we don’t even know and whose gifts we will never be able to benefit from; new cancer treatments, undiscovered strengths and properties that might give us some understanding of plant stress and how we can overcome it?

We live as if our allotment has just two layers – food at the top and dirt at the bottom. But what about that third layer that we simply ignore. Even the earth layer has its own lively presence, teeming with microscopic life and miles and miles of fungal threads, and the surface between earth and profit deserves better than being treated as if it were a plague of squatters. Nature hates bare earth and will always fill the bare patches with plants from across the world that have names and histories and gifts to give. Even dogs know that Couch Grass has valuable uses, and Ground Elder isn’t just a pest if you’ve got gout. We have to think that in tolerating weeds we may be entertaining angels unawares.

  • Postscript

So today we went up to the allotment to do a bit of harvesting and I made sure I took my phone so I could at least photograph the wilted remains of the Black Nightshade and now it will eventually reach the official database.

Nature is never tidy!

It may look unkempt but there’s a nice Hungarian Mullein blown in from who knows where?

This is a piece I wrote for another magazine some time ago, and since I’m suffering a bit from double vision after having a cataract removed yesterday I thought I’d cheat a bit and re-publish it for a much wider readership.

“I wonder if I dare stick my head over the parapet to challenge several of the principles behind the tidy-up rules so beloved of allotment sites. Words like “rubbish” and “dumping” suggest that when we use them we have a clear understanding of what they refer to. I’m afraid I think this isn’t true in some cases. We allotmenteers are often inveterate recyclers and can’t pass a wooden pallet, a shower door or a glazed window frame without dragging it back to the site because we know “it’ll come in handy one day” The trouble is – as someone once wrote of Karl Marx’s rather evolutionary theory – the glorious “one day” of the last instance never seems to dawn. I’m intrigued to know how long a potentially useful item has to linger before it finally becomes proper rubbish. Imagine sending a team of lay-assessors complete with clip-boards to mark items seen (on a scale of one to ten of course) on their “state of rubbishness”. What about two assessors who disagree completely about a cardboard covered plot in autumn – is it a bold step in recycling and sustainability, or is it just dumped rubbish? When we moved on to our allotment ten years ago we found two bicycles in an abandoned compost heap. How long does it take to compost a bicycle? Where does an unkempt looking plot belong on the scale – a little untidiness around the edges? What if the untidiness includes ragwort|? Good for Cinnabar, moths bad for horses and cattle. Thank goodness there are no farm animals on site. What if it’s got creeping thistle? Couch grass, bindweed? Oh goodness we’d have to think about that! Well, let’s have an easy one; stinging nettles. Almost exclusive food plants to peacock, red admiral, small tortoiseshell, comma, and painted lady butterflies. If we run with the theory that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place, then perhaps it’s permissible to remove them as long as we make provision somewhere else.

I see a lot of rewilding schemes where packets of commercial wildflower seeds have been thrown into a verge or the corner of a plot and left to their own devices. This summer we saw the lovely intense blue of cornflowers along the riverside. I’ll guarantee they won’t be there next year because this isn’t their natural habitat. Allotment soil is often far too rich for wildflowers that evolved on poor stony soil or in distant hills. To create true wildlife habitats could take years of preparation with several transitional states. So although it might suit our love of tidiness to clear the plots of weeds; as many as ten, ever-dwindling generations of wildflowers and their associated insects would struggle to survive. If we want to clear the plots of weeds we’ll need to start providing alternative food and shelter now because we’re in the midst of a mass species extinction already.

But what shall we do with the weeds? Annual weeds grow annually, it’s not rocket science. They usually set seeds – the nuisance seedlings that come up every year and which we hoe off our beds all too regularly. It’s the perennials like couch, creeping thistle, creeping anything in fact – tormentil, buttercup, and the pernicious bindweed that are hardest to deal with. And because some of them grow from rhizomes, the tiniest piece of snapped off root will soon grow again. So the only effective way of dealing with them is to dig them out – but the couch dives deep, metres deep in the ground and once it’s established we just have to grit our teeth and dig it out. But what then? We’d be mad to put it in our compost heaps because unless they’re seriously heated, they’ll just keep growing. Hot heaps are hard work, need continuous management and require lots of green material like grass mowings to keep them going. We’ve built California cylinders on our plot but even with the addition of gallons of what we’ll call human activator, they never really get going. Normal heaps never get hot enough to kill couch or bindweed and most of us land up with cold heaps that sit there sulking and do nothing.

So what do we do? If we take them down to the recycling centre they’ll probably wind up as landfill or be quietly burned in out-of-county incinerators. If we burn them in bonfires we’re going against current efforts to reduce pollution. If we all burn our rubbish we’ll cancel out all the CO2 being saved by the 20mph limit on the other side of the fence. But if we heap them up by the fence they’ll rot down naturally – if very slowly – mixed with prunings from fruit trees and return their goodness to the soil. Those rows will provide a safe shelter for a multitude of insects, invertebrates and small mammals. They could give living and sleeping space to slow-worms and hedgehogs, field mice and such like. They could provide for birds and the other larger mammals like foxes, badgers and even deer, all of which we’ve filmed passing through on the site.

We already have a wide strip of land next to the fence at the bottom of the site. These plots are heartbreakers because they’re in a frost pocket at the bottom of a slope and they’re overshadowed by trees which keep the soil beneath permanently dry and in winter deny the soil any direct sunshine. New allotmenteers come and struggle for a season and then leave, demoralized and disappointed. These unrentable plots could be a part of a deliberate plan to create a proper but small wildlife and wildflower reserve. Coupled with shelter for the small beasties we could plant swathes of nectar rich pollinator plants and join with other green spaces up and down the river to increase the viability of the green corridor which is a bit narrow in places.

Every single reputable nature agency from the RHS to the RSPB is begging us to make more provision for wildlife in our gardens by leaving much more “untidy” space for it. There’s an old business saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast and it’s especially true for gardening where many of us were brought up to think that clean, weed free plots and straight lines were nature’s way. We’re gradually coming to realize that nature actually prefers, thrives on a bit of muddle and mess and neglect. So let’s have a think before we start clearing up. That abandoned piece of corrugated iron lying on the ground might – if we lift it slowly and carefully – have a slow worm under it. The weedy looking pond might welcome frogs or toads once more as they’ve been suffering from a fungal epidemic.

As to deciding what kind of wildflowers to grow, the cheapest and most reliable system is to wait and see what comes in on its own. Plants have been managing for aeons without our help and they’ll soon drop by. We’ve had innumerable wildflowers including half a dozen real rarities – unknown locally – some of them quite plain, like Bilbao’s fleabane this year, and some rather lovely ones like the Peruvian apple, the Irish version of Fumitory not to mention the very tall Hungarian mullein up near the gate. If I could put in a plea for just one plant it would be for an isolated clump of Bocking 14 comfrey that we could cut and steep to make the best tomato fertilizer ever. I know it smells like a dead sheep in a ditch but this first cross is sterile and doesn’t spread like most other comfreys. Thanks for reading this if you stuck it out to the end!”

Dissecting a canary

Yes I know it’s not a canary exactly, but on the allotment it seems to be bringing a canary style announcement to the coal mine. The tomatoes on our allotment, although they looked OK (with a great deal of watering), and tasted fine even though it has been a much reduced crop, have no seeds; no descendants; no progeny. The canary is lying dead on the bottom of the cage and suggests that although they remained just about alive during the five consecutive heatwaves, they were suffering greatly and couldn’t stand the temperatures. They weren’t the only casualties this season. The legumes either failed altogether or failed to pollinate well. There’s a reason for all this; apparently pollen gets sticky in the heat and doesn’t transfer so easily from plant to plant leaving them seedless.

For a while I thought we’d got the first mutation to seedlessness that ever happened on a tomato but I soon realized that Darwin would have sucked his teeth and shaken his head. If the seed merchants have the same trouble as us, there will be almost no viable tomato seeds next year and the price would go through the roof. I’ve seen internet reports of sunflowers with no seeds, and our own sweetcorn only managed a couple of viable cobs on each plant, and the potatoes were very small and sparse. The newspapers are being told by farmers that this year is the worst cereal season for at least ten years. You can ask what the outcome of all this will be, but you can only answer it by accepting that “the local supermarket” is not the correct answer. We, collectively, created this problem and as sure as eggs is eggs we’re going to have to do something about the way we live if we’re not all going to suffer serious privation when the prices rise and the shelves are empty. The canary is lying dead on the floor and I did the autopsy.

Charlie our neighbour gave us a couple of Sungold F1 cherry tomato plants in late spring and we planted them outside in a raised bed. They got the same watering regime as the ones in the polytunnel but they’ve had no cracking or greenback and the fruit is delicious. The problem is obviously high temperatures but anyone with a very small greenhouse or a polytunnel will know that they’re fiendishly hard to ventilate at night, while at the same time protecting them from the “shoppers” who climb over the gate in the late evening and reap where they haven’t sown.

But one plant which appears to thrive under the heat has had a great year both here in Bath and on the Bannau Brycheiniog, where we were last week. It’s called Fat Hen – Chenopodium album and it’s been a virulent weed in both places. Our friends keep sheep, pigs and hens – all of them free range within their field boundaries. They’ve got internet up there on their hillside and so we were able to discover that Fat Hen is capable of causing harm to animals and humans in spite of being consumed by us and our livestock across Europe and since neolithic times. Tollund Man’s last meal, we’re told, included Fat Hen but that wasn’t what killed him. Back home I turned to the books and worked out that the point at issue is how large a percentage of the diet comprises Fat Hen and how much you (or they) eat at one time. The take-home point is that in a field situation it’s better to cut a small amount and add it to the feed, rather than leaving it growing where the livestock can overdo it. Used in that way it’s apparently high quality food, and the oxalates and nitrates which cause problems are kept at a safe level.

But all this talk of poisonous weeds must have lodged in my mind and a strange dream carried me right back to the tomato family, the Solanaceae which gives us potatoes and tomatoes but also the Nightshades, Henbanes and Thorn apples all three dangerous if not fatal when eaten; and thorn apple, also known in the US as Jimson weed apparently had a loyal following among soldiers during the Civil War. I mentioned only a few days ago a T shirt I saw with the slogan “all plants are edible – some of them only once”. This was a property that was understood and often used by poisoners in the past.

Anyway, in my dream I was leaning against the wall of a pizza hut deep in conversation with one of our son’s ex’s trying to explain that something she was going to cook was extremely poisonous when another young woman turned up looking faintly odd; intoxicated and away somewhere else. She explained to me (with a voice from somewhere else too) that she had been preparing Thornapple for a meal. I begged her not to eat it and she replied that it was fine, because if you sang this song while you cooked it, the poison would be neutralized. Then she uttered this haunting ululating sound – the song – and then nodded as if to say “that showed you!”and wandered off.

Thorn Apple is an intoxicating hallucinogen with severe chance of causing death and whose hallucinations are widely spoken of by people who’ve tried it as horrible so it’s not likely to catch on. But it demonstrates that plants have the ability to synthesize good things and bad. Without them the earth would cease to have life in any form, but they also demand respect. For many years tomatoes were assumed to be poisonous precisely because of their relationship with Deadly Nightshade, Enchanter’s Nightshade and all the others and you have to wonder what brave soul took the risk of eating one and began the huge cultural change that brought the plant to its position as number one home-grown fruit in the UK.

Madame and me were walking one afternoon in Leigh Woods on the Somerset side of Brunel’s Clifton Suspension bridge, and a elderly man who looked like a rough sleeper came up to us in a state of breathless excitement and dragged us deep into the woods saying that he’d been living there for (if I remember right) ten years and he’d never seen a Purging Buckthorn before. I was right at the beginning of my interest in plants and after he showed us the bush, we shook hands and thanked him and went on our way. Purging Buckthorn – Rhamnus cathartica – is another of those plants it’s wise to get to grips with if you’re foraging in the woods. The clue is in both “purging” and “cathartica” if you think about it. A bilingual warning that all plants are edible, some only once.

But to finish on an entirely delicious and safe account of the tomato I’ve put a photo of the Italian dish Panzanella which I made to Anna Del Conte’s recipe but it’s capable of any amount of variation. It was while making this dish that I discovered that the tomatoes I’d harvested that day, had no seeds. Inside every silver lining, these days, there’s a cloud waiting to get out!

Foraging – like the curate’s egg, good in parts.

I’m allergic to plants in the obvious sense that I get terrible hay-fever between March and October and I always wonder if, when people see me in the street during those months, they might see my streaming eyes and nose and wonder if I’ve just had some terrible news. But I’m also allergic to the idea of picking them. Madame has no such inhibitions and it’s a rare day when we don’t have a small jug of wildflowers from the allotment in the middle of the table. Occasionally I suspect they make me sneeze but I wouldn’t be without them. Thinking for instance about the Cowslip, the dilemma about picking them becomes more insistent because they’ve declined so much in the past due mainly to changed farming practices and chemical weedkillers. The idea that we mustn’t pick them is a bit of an urban myth because they’re not legally protected if you just pick them for that traditional jam jar display. If, however, you’re making cowslip wine and need a bucketful of flower heads, your actions would be extremely thoughtless and reprehensible and if you uproot a few plants for your garden without the owner’s permission you’d be committing a criminal offence under the Theft Act 1968. If you gather flowers and leaves for personal use in making herbal medicines it’s lawful, but it’s unethical if you strip a whole cluster bare and illegal to dig the roots up without permission. If you forage to supply your phytomedical business then you might get an appointment with our learned friends. It’s a legal but also an ethical minefield which I prefer to resolve by trying to take the best possible photographs to use for identification and taking the bare minimum from a plant only if I need to take it home for further work. I’m bound to say that the decline of wildflowers is very little to do with over enthusiastic picking as opposed to intensive farming and chemical sprays but legal sanctions and self restraint engender a cautious attitude. There’s another reason – amusingly expressed on a T shirt doing the rounds at the moment with the slogan – “All plants are edible; some of them only once”. The gravest danger lurks for any ill informed forager who thinks that because it’s wild it must be good for you.

But this raises the issue concerning learning our plants which begins with falling in love with them. At that crucial early stage how is anyone supposed to decide whether a pretty looking plant is on Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act if they don’t even know that such an act exists. Wildlife programmes on TV rarely pay much attention to plants, and when they do it’s usually the show stoppers that get the attention. It’s hard to imagine getting a programme about common weeds getting on to the screen without a Dalek shouting “Exterminate”. My Mum learned her plants by osmosis. She only ever used latin names if they had become common by usage but most of the time it was the common name used in her part of the Chilterns. She not only knew their names and where to find them, she also knew what they were used for. Brimstone and treacle was the name of a very unpleasant blood tonic not the title of a Dennis Potter play. Glycerine and thymol was a gargle for sore throat; dock leaves eased nettle stings although broadleaf plantain is better and if you’ve got the patience you can peel off the outer layer of a Navelwort leaf leaving a cooling substitute for an Elastoplast. Zinc and castor oil (Zac) – probably made up by the local pharmacist was the go-to remedy for rashes along with calamine (zinc) lotion for chicken pox. These were all well known and traditional remedies for the everyday complaints – the piles and varicose veins, childhood illnesses, constipation (my Dad was a martyr to his bowels!). So there was nothing strange and technical about a licorice stick or a Dandelion root and conversely all country children knew about deadly nightshades and Foxglove. For the overwhelming majority of children today even those common plant names are another language altogether and so plants – because they don’t know what they’re called or what they do, disappear to the background of consciousness and the reach what’s come to to be called “green blindness”.

Herbal medicine or Phytomedicine as they now call it – possibly because it sounds posher and less attached to the peasantry – demands a wide knowledge of plants. Dying and weaving use many wild plants for colours, foragers introduce old foods to a new generation so long as they know what they’re doing and don’t flout the law but for the average person there’s a huge gulf between liking plants and understanding their names and broad place in the culture. Many £500 weekend courses suggest that the freedom of the earth is yours when you’ve seen a Thornapple or a Death Cap just once, and every year someone will have a final meal of Hemlock Water Dropwort. It takes time to know even the basics fully and because we’re no longer peasants, drip fed the meanings of plants; but we have to do it the hard way on our hands and knees, and through books.

My own very cautious venture into plant medicine is confined to making calendula cream which is wonderful for skin complaints and we make a great deal of it using marigolds we grow on the allotment. I also made a batch of medicine for Madame which took ages and tasted filthy with no notable result, but the experience taught me a great deal and showed me where to obtain the plants I couldn’t forage or grow myself. However many everyday herbs which we grow on the allotment are foods, packed with vitamins and trace elements as well as specific molecules which have an effect on everyday complaints. Here I am, sitting and typing in rude health, having taken a digoxin tablet with my breakfast. This is a drug synthesized from the Foxglove and deadly in the event of overdoing it. Plants – and perhaps this is one of the most exciting and staggering gifts they bring to the human race – have the gift of putting together complex molecules which Big Pharma is only too pleased to identify, synthesize or refine and then patent making shedloads of money in the process. The Foxglove doesn’t even get a cursory thank-you on my Digoxin packet!

Just out of interest I did a bit of research on any commonly used medicinal herbs which are also on Schedule 8 and therefore fully protected. A bit of jiggery pokery and a small Python computer routine – AI, not written by me – compared the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia with the latest Schedule 8 list and came up with the fascinating fact there is only one plant appearing in both lists – the Marsh Gentian, which I’ve never seen – and three near misses with Centaury Thistles which would be easy to sort out in the field. Bear in mind, though that the UK National Trust, many wildlife trusts and all Sites of Special Scientific Interest forbid any taking of even parts of plants so it’s not an open house on herbs.

If you read my last post concerning the ghost garden where we’re staying we did a bit more research and discovered that the overgrown garden is the remnant of the guest house nearby whose owner was a keen gardener and botanist. So yes – it’s a melancholy oddity bearing in mind the hill farms surrounding us but it must have been lovely in its heyday.

Hemlock Water Dropwort – don’t say I didn’t warn you!

There must be a story here but I don’t know where to start

So here we are back in the Bannau Brycheiniog, thirteen hundred feet up the side of Mynydd Bychan on a hill farm which is emphatically shouting “history, history” in my ear. There’s an odd feeling that this place is peculiar; not quite right by the culture of the surrounding hills. We were in desperate need of a bit of peace after months of building work on the flat during which we’d had to move out several times and equally tough times on the allotment with the heatwaves and drought which I’ve already written about; not to mention the continuing saga of the campervan engine. That’s a very inelegant sentence but it perfectly shows how stress gets inside our heads and muddles them.

I brought four books with me apart from the usual Potwell Inn clutter of cameras and notebooks, and they are respectively “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold; “The Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwest Europe” by Julian Barker and, “A History of Wales” by John Davies which is a real 750 page clonker; also “Joseph Banks” – the biography by Patrick O’Brian. I grabbed the first one, the Sand County Almanac off the bookshelf as we left the flat to drive here and I’m so glad I did. The Flora was a chance find of the out of print volume which hardly ever comes on to the market second hand so I jumped on the only available copy on the internet. The history of Wales isn’t the most up to date or indeed the most radical; less fun than Jan Morris’ – “The Matter of Wales”, less political than Carwen Graves’ “Tŷr” and less focused on hill farming than David Elias’ “Shaping the Wild”. I’ve left out William Condry’s New Naturalist volume “The Natural History of Wales because I haven’t read it yet but I’d recommend the first five without reservation, and you need to read all of them plus the poems of RS Thomas too even to catch the flavour of the debates that still burn underground like peat fires. The Banks biography is the sole English representative because I wanted to get a feel for the plant hunters of his era.

Normally I’d be out there on my hands and knees searching for plants to record; I’ve even printed off lists of possible sightings but I seem to have hit a bit of a parting of the ways – I want to explore not just the names but the science, the habitats, the uses and the whole culture. In fact it increasingly seems to me that I need to focus on the meaning – in the broadest possible sense – the meaning of plants in our culture. Hence the disparate choice of reading for our break: Davies for historical context, Banks for the beginnings of scientific botany; Barker for the many uses of plants and Leopold who – even almost eighty years ago – was asking the most profound philosophical questions about conservation in a world where even back then species were disappearing and humans were becoming increasingly detached from the natural world under the cover of progress.

….. each [professional]n his own way is a hunter. And why does each call himself a conservationist? Because the wild things he hunts for have eluded his grasp, and he hopes by some necromancy of laws, appropriations, regional plans, reorganization of departments, or other forms of mass-wishing to make them stay put.

A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold 1947

So let’s be clear. Without plants we’re all dead. No oxygen to breathe, no food to eat and an empty windswept desert instead of a green and pleasant land. The glossy prospectus of life support under a big tech dome is a fraud; there is no white coated Seventh Cavalry hiding behind the hill, and without nature we would cease to exist; without meaning or purpose.

We were children, my sister and me, walking back along the road to Pucklechurch from the Rose and Crown in Parkfield with our parents. We were replete with red lemonade and crisps. Jenny was picking dandelions and we came across an old man, possibly a farm worker or miner who could have come direct from a casting agency as a typical peasant. He stopped us with a wave and asked her if she knew what the flowers were called and she told him dandelions. He tittered and leaned in conspiratorially -“we calls em piss the beds!” Our parents made conventional end of conversation noises, gathered us up into a safe huddle and we walked on towards the bus stop. I might have been eight years old and that experience felt as if a gap had opened in the evening sky and another world revealed.

Plants and memories have a powerful aggregating force between them; they’re sticky and accumulative. Only yesterday we were walking along a narrow lane towards an area of boggy heath called Rhos Fach which I’d read about and seen on the OS map when I spotted a harebell and some lesser Hawkbit among strangely familiar grasses beneath a bank on which, fifty years ago there could have been a hedge of hawthorn; now just a few elderly horizontal branches surviving from the last laying. Somewhere deep in my brain the neurons made instant connections and I was the same child just a couple of years after Pucklechurch, lying on the same grasses on Rodway Hill, gazing at the sky and feeling, well, ecstatic. The two experiences connected by a powerful force with no name other than memory in which every sense is stored and released – colours, smells sounds; every subtlety every nuance encoded like messenger RNA searching out its target and – once found – springing into life.

We don’t any longer know how to love

Needless to say, back at the cottage I turned to the AI and quickly discovered soil type, bedrock conformation, a series of predicted NVC classifications and a list of plants recorded there; oh and the national grid reference finally to drive the pin through the thorax. I was reminded of the fictional artist Gully Jimson’s priceless comment in Joyce Carey’s “The Horses Mouth” – “It’s like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?”

In the clash between the instrumental and the aesthetic there lies our culture’s dirty secret: we don’t any longer know how to love. It’s too nebulous, too fragile, too open ended, and like apomixis (that’s the way blackberries do it), just too bloody complicated.

This isn’t an attack on botany or botanists, but it is a serious warning about the dangers of idolatry (which should never be consigned to arguments about religion). Idolatry worships the part rather than the whole; in fact you might characterise it as the all too human root of reductive thinking which in turn is the cause of so many human tragedies. A form of ethnobotany could be a way around the mountain.

And so, back to the troubling garden

It seems that there is a real story behind the uneasy feelings that the surrounds of the cottage evoked. Walking around yesterday we found sheds, a couple of abandoned rotavators, a steel shoe tree, a lead model of a horse next to a horseshoe; any number of bird boxes and seats wrapped around out of place trees, a broken beehive, empty bird cages, and an overgrown vegetable garden; walkways mown through the site but with little sign of walkers. There is a strong sense of something abandoned. It didn’t take much research to find that this was once the site of a much loved Edwardian guest house run by a woman called Rita who was also a formidable gardener. She created an arboretum, dug a lake, planted an orchard and made a gathering place for walkers drawn to the Bannau. We are among the tail enders. Everything has a lifespan, even (or perhaps especially) gardens. They’re our attempt to bring nature close and under control on our own terms which is, sadly, both beautiful and fruitless. The circus moves on; the power and beauty of the hills is stronger than our dreams of upstaging them.

A quantum of hope

A little rain – and I mean little – more of a mist – fell earlier in the week and last night a little more. Madame woke up and we peered through the bedroom window and saw the first puddle in many weeks forming in the yard below . We’ve become weary of heatwaves with the need for early morning starts to water the plants on the allotment before the disabling heat blankets Bath. We say to one another how good it is to be up early but the enthusiasm has morphed from bright eyes to gritted teeth. Peasant life, we’ve always known, is no picnic. It’s small wonder that our ancestors spent so much effort on placating the weather gods and searching for the inadvertent sins that might have pissed them off. Blaming the victims has always been the first and best tactic, and getting us to blame our neighbours or ourselves is even cheaper and preserves the peace for the winners to pursue their wealth unhindered. Such gloomy thoughts with the cherry on the cake being the campervan failing its MOT spread through my mind and silence my imagination with introspective fog. I’m reminded of the 1950’s “ballad of the sad young men” – brilliantly covered by Mose Allison and The Who – and many others.

And so, in the midst of what must have looked like a shuffle up the road to the supermarket I met Wes, our neighbour, clutching a tall plant of Guernsey Fleabane which is having a bit of a moment this season. He was taking it to the waste bin having turned against it. During our conversation on the pavement outside his flat I looked down at the gutter and saw this little cluster of flowers which seemed to be raising the finger to the parched grass across the road. It was a single verbena flower(Verbena bonariensis), that initially caught my eye, and then when I bent down to look more closely there were others. Apart from the ubiquitous Wall Barley, there was Catmint, Lemon Balm, Dandelion, Procumbent Yellow Sorrel and Redshank not to mention Mexican Fleabane. That’s a garden of eight flowering plants in a strip of parched gutter seemingly surviving the heatwaves in the most arid place you could imagine. It’s hard to speculate on what might be keeping them going – maybe the cars parked there every day sheltering them from their south facing perspective. Let’s not get sniffy about the fact that several of them are garden escapes; the point is that these plants are truly drought resistant. Somewhere deep in their DNA there are genes that assist their survival as the global climate crisis becomes a chronic affliction. My heart was lifted and all day yesterday as I sat in a garage waiting for the van alongside the noisiest and dirtiest dual carriageway Avonmouth could offer, I kept remembering that little quantum of hope making its own way in a changing earth – that’s until one of our gentrified neighbours phones a councillor and threatens not to vote for them if they don’t get rid of the disgusting weeds. We have seen the enemy, it is us! Another thought came to me as I wandered back to the Potwell Inn in the direction of the river. There are large trees growing around and on the Green, and as I walked beneath them in their shade, the difference in comfort and temperature was striking. There’s a bench under one of them and it’s been in almost continual occupation since the heatwaves began. We need to be thinking about shade, and on the allotment this is perhaps the time to plant some fast growing shade producing trees to help us to keep our plants alive under the new weather regime. It’s against the rules to grow taller trees, and they are always blamed for depleting the soil moisture and yet there is some evidence of moisture exchange by trees into the upper 30cm of soil, and abundant evidence that shade reduces surface evaporation. So the case against trees on allotments and in gardens is not closed and we allotmenteers should, perhaps, be able to experiment with tree shade to see if it helps to reduce the prodigious amount of water we use to keep our plants alive.

Living through an age when we simply cannot rely on ‘the way we do things round here‘ to keep us alive. Agribusiness and big farming would have us rely on univented, energy hungry technologies to save the earth, and yet we know in our hearts that it’s their activities which have contributed greatly to the present crisis. British farmers are, by and large, a fairly conservative group of people and yet even they seem to be open to new ideas like regenerative farming as long as it helps them to run their businesses and feed the rest of us. Any allotmenteer will tell you that you can’t live on large courgettes and abundant aubergines the year round even if we do make a real contribution to feeding ourselves. However allotmenteers are a highly motivated bunch of potential citizen scientists who, with a bit of organization, leadership and help from scientists could conduct field trials on a scale undreamed of by the industry. Field trials of new varieties, new ways of increasing soil fertility and moisture retention, new methods of increasing water storage; the sky’s the limit, but only if someone trusts us enough to gather the data and process it so we can begin to understand what works on a small scale. Just one example that I can offer relates to composting. Over the years we’ve tried just about every way of composting our waste efficiently. Of all the methods we’ve found that the California Cylinder – which requires only a roll of stock fencing and a lot of large cardboard (eg bicycle boxes) is one of the best – especially if you grow enough comfrey activator – which is easier to do on a site basis. Does anyone know whether any dangerous and persistent chemicals are carried forward in grey water or human urine which, after all, mostly seems to find its way back into the rivers in about a day. We’ve used both but stopped because of our doubts. There are so many trials that we could participate in if only DEFRA would stop seeing allotmenteers as a bunch of tree hugging hippies or even worse terrorists. What about gathering and collating data on the most effective way of facing shed roofs for water gathering, or doing some controlled records on air temperatures and soil temperatures or soil moisture; and how about gathering information about diseases or crop yields or the best varieties for our soil. How about some soil surveys, insect surveys, or plant records. I think we’ve reached the point in our relationship with the earth where it’s a broken marriage which can’t be saved by saying “sorry” and carrying on as before. The sums of money involved in searching for a system that works would be trivial in relation to the cost of doing nothing, but it first requires government to lead. At present DEFRA has only 20 staff members out of 6,613 working on the problem. The danger (which most powerful legislators, corporations and oligarchs fear), is that opening Pandora’s box and encouraging cooperative structures to have our say would seriously hamper their activities. We need – with some help – to change a whole culture but that’s a challenge which many of the folks we garden with would be pleased to step up for.

The Green in drought. Let’s call it the Brown