It’s been a while, I know, but following the demolition of the Avon Street car park, many of us have wondered which building will take its place as the ugliest and most ill-advised building in Bath, and I’m delighted to announce that the top place (of my long list) goes to the old telephone exchange on the corner of Monmouth Street and Princes Street, built in the days when Crown buildings were not subject to planning permission. It’s always been a bit of a shady place as to its purposes, and it’s about to be anointed as Bath’s new police station – plus ĉa change etc.
Anyway, we were in the centre of town yesterday and as we passed the building I noticed this redemptive clump of Coltsfoot growing through the cracks in the neglected paving. As ever, Nature is quick to reclaim any neglected spot and I suppose we should record and enjoy this brief moment before it’s designated as a weed and summarily removed. Bath deserves its John Clare and I’m holding the place open until somebody better qualified turns up to celebrate the invisible residents of the city. In 2020, during the lockdown, I listed 26 wild plants growing in and around our car park – once a builders yard – and there are probably as many again waiting for someone to notice.
I know I write a lot about Cornwall and Wales and their wildflowers; but when push comes to shove there’s plenty going on in our own backyard – it’s just that the sunsets aren’t as good! As it happens it’s been a bumper year for Coltsfoot now I’ve got my eye in for likely spots. Their technical name is “ruderal” which means, well …… rude I suppose, in the sense of unkempt rather than wild; neglected rather than protected, and scarred rather than ploughed or dug. It’s the botanical equivalent of the favela or the refugee camp and it’s a great environment for dodgy characters to melt into the background. We even had a Sea Spleenwort hiding on the basement wall of the Guildhall – all washed up I suppose.
We’ve got a few guerilla gardeners in our neighbourhood too. Last summer we put some large compost filled pots outside the block and planted them up. This spring we see that invisible hands have planted tulip bulbs and even a bay cutting which seems to tolerate the extreme environment. The same invisible hands watered the pots when we were away in the campervan. Every year a solitary council employee hacks off the pavement squatters and sprinkles rock salt over the remains. Every year they return undiminished and sing their colourful madrigals to those with ears to hear and eyes to see them. It’s a dog eat dog existence for the rough sleepers of the plant world, but they seem miraculously to get by, and until you learn to distinguish one from t’other you won’t be able to understand their colorful histories. Railway trucks loaded with grain, bird seed imports, wool, and poorly tended compost heaps; even winter salted roads and lorry tyres all add their pennyworth to the diversity of the neglected environment. Old factories, mills and dyeworks cast off their workforce and their raw materials. These plants are evolutionary heroes, rapidly adapting to the new, often tricky places, where their better heeled cousins deign to set up home; on slag heaps, coal tips and mineworks; quarries, gasworks, docksides and railway sidings not to mention empty buildings like the old telephone exchange. Sadly, no-one is going to block the road marching for Whitlowgrass or Wall Barley, but they’re all part of the vast interconnected network of living things we call Nature – capitalizing the word although we have no idea if it really is a thing at all.
Still, we felt blessed by the Coltsfoot yesterday and celebrated with a pint at the Grapes; two old people drawing energy and hope from the crowd of young bar staff beginning their shift. We wish them the greatest happiness knowing, (as they have yet to discover), that in the end we’re all pavement dwellers.
Rue Leaved Saxifrage growing on the telephone exchange wall
Here’s a fascinating and chastening story from the Guardian newspaper at the weekend. It’s all there above, but you’d need to have sharp eyes and plenty of patience to join the dots. The common factor that joins the threads together is a name you’ll probably never have heard before. I always feel I knew him well because he was Madame’s boss for the four years that she worked at Long Ashton as an Assistant Scientific Officer helping to record experimental field trials of apples and pears; especially for their cider making properties but also as eating and dessert apples. If ever there was a man who knew his apple varieties inside out it was George Gilbert. After he retired he had a considerable hand in designing the orchards at RHS Rosemoor and for the Lost Gardens of Heligan. He could name many varieties simply by closely examining them; the markings, the shape and structure of the flower end and the stem end, and no doubt that word beloved by field botanists and birders – the jizz.
It was George’s great misfortune to live through an era where the brewing of cider shrank to a vestige of its former self, and the justly mocked Golden Delicious apple, grown mainly in Europe was feted as the apple of the future flavourless, unattractive but capable of being used in a cricket game without bruising and easy to grow. The Cox’s Orange Pippin – one of the few apples to come true from seed – always was, and still is liable to disease and difficult to grow. Hybrids galore have been bred from the Cox, but the emphasis was always on yield at the expense of flavour, and they have to be sprayed with a cocktail of fungicides and insecticides every ten days from fruit set until just before harvest.
Tens of thousands – if not millions of apple trees were grubbed out on government subsidies, many of them irreplaceable local varieties naturalised within their unique microclimates. Our son helped grub up an orchard on Severnside until the farmer discovered that he was only thirteen years old and not allowed to drive the tractor. Apples for the most part don’t come true from seed and so resurrecting these lost varieties can almost never come from seed banks, they have to be grown from grafted budwood. Back in the day if the question “which variety of apple is best adapted – let’s say – to growing on a windswept island, battered by the salt winds of the Irish Sea, a hundred people would have shouted out – “The Bardsey you idiot!” The good thing about the Bardsey apple is that it survives in specialist nurseries and orchards and could form part of a grafted apple renaissance in the midst of a climate catastrophe. The real challenge is that there must be hundreds, even thousands of micro-adapted apple varieties which were grubbed out and burned; so the scientists in the study cited by the Guardian are taking samples in Rosemoor Orchard – planted up by George Gilbert who must have had an eye to their future usefulness. The key point is that these are just a tiny proportion of the varieties that once grew in gardens and orchards over the previous centuries. Stripping out and comparing DNA samples is not the best way of discovering their unique properties, but the only way that’s available to the researchers – post orchard-apocalypse. As Joni Mitchell sang so beautifully – “you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone!”
The battle to save the lost varieties takes on a much more than antiquarian significance as the search to find apple varieties for a very different climate future gets more intense. Many important insects have a mutually important role to play; they pollinate all kinds of fruit but many have evolved to emerge at exactly the time the apple blossom appears. They gather nectar and pollen for food, and the trees get pollinated. If that partnership fails we get a catastrophic failure of biodiversity and we lose a valuable crop. Just to take one example, most allotmenteers like us, no longer have any clear idea of when to sow and plant. Spring weather is so unpredictable now that we’re always trying to second guess the date of the last frost, or those destructive easterly gales. Will April this year bring showers of soft refreshing rain or portend the beginning of a prolonged drought?
I very much hope that the scientists can make rapid progress towards a DNA database and find ways of combining the growing and eating qualities of even a very few traditional varieties. This, surely is just the beginning – there are lovely collections of Welsh apple varieties (some of them in the photo above) in orchards run by the Marcher Network in the Welsh Borders. There’s another lovely collection at Plas yn Rhiw on the Lleyn peninsula in North Wales; and the National Botanical Garden of Wales also has an extensive collection of Welsh apple varieties planted by our friend Charlie Stirton, the first Director and now close neighbour. There are the Lost Gardens of Heligan and probably hundreds of other unknown collections nurtured for their qualities in remote farmsteads across the Western side of the UK. The writer and singer Raynor Winn and her husband are custodians of one of these. Cider has become a big business now, and so-called varietal ciders – Katy, Kingston Black and probably somewhere in a Dartmoor village even such melodious relics as Slack ma girdle fetch premium prices, although a now-passed cidermaker universally known on Severnside as ‘Doughnut’ – once told be that he always blended his cider and always included a few Cox’s.
My grandfather, a carpenter by trade, had a huge collection of tools, many of which he’d made himself. The point about them wasn’t that he used them very often; there must have been some that he never used – but if he’d ever needed it for the once in a lifetime job it would have been there waiting for its moment in the sun. Biodiversity is crucially important to us because when we move into unpredictable times is when we most often discover the irreplaceable usefulness of a single species. The apples are teaching us a lesson we simply can’t afford to ignore because – to quote a memorable sermon I once heard preached by Bishop David Jenkins “if we don’t act now there may be hell to pay!”
Tall Ramping Fumitory – Fumaria bastardii, var hibernica
Everything about the name of this wildflower is correct. It is tall, it’s ramping and it’s definitely a Fumitory. It’s also quite rare in this part of the world and in order to get the ID verified as correct, I had to take it to the national expert. If there are any other Fumaria experts out there who think that’s wrong then please write and I’ll find ripping it out by the handful in our polytunnel less ethically challenging, because the thing is – however tall and rare it may be, the ramping bit of the description is a problem for us. It sets seed prolifically and spreads like wildfire tangling itself rather weakly through our vegetables which makes it very hard to weed out. It started out as a single plant one plot up from us on a path next to a compost heap and it caught my eye. By the next season it had spread to one of our beds and now it’s competing with the Chickweed that also grows prolifically after the beds are cleared in the autumn. We would normally have covered the beds in the polytunnel to suppress weed growth but last autumn we had a bit of a punt with ultra early potatoes broad beans and carrots and so the beds were left uncovered. Apart from the beans, neither potatoes or carrots grew at all and the weeds had free range to strut their stuff. We’ve now had three years of different crops terminally weakened by what I now feel happy to call a weed and Madame rebelled against any protective thoughts I might have been secretly harbouring and so I reasoned that there was no form of weeding short of chemicals or a flame gun that would effectively kill the seeds. Flame guns and polytunnels or nets are not a good combination. And so my plan is simply to fight back by hand weeding, knowing that the process is inefficient enough to keep a few field botanists happy for decades whilst allowing us to grow some crops.
Allotments aren’t always well tended, and weed invasions – whether underground; Bindweed, Creeping thistle, and Couch grass – or by air; Dandelion, Willowherb or by human transfer, the infamous allotmenteers boot with plants like Fumaria – are always a danger’ especially on organic plots. Nature abhors a vacuum and bare earth can be seen from Mars especially if you’re a weed looking for a comfortable and well fed berth. I’m quite sure that one of the biggest reasons for new gardeners giving up their plots is when they leave them in October looking pristine and then in February and March return to an unmanageable jungle. The other reason is probably pigeon attacks. This year we lost much of our purple sprouting crop to a pigeon who managed to crawl in under the nets and then get trapped. We probably spend far more time dealing with weeds than we do sowing and harvesting. We don’t dig unless we really have to remove Bindweed for example.
It’s been an awful beginning to the new season and our plots are still sodden. Even the soil in the polytunnel is wet due to an underground stream running deep beneath it. However the warmest and wettest February could easily be followed by an April heatwave in this unpredictable age of approaching climate disaster. But we’re back with dirt under our nails and with aching backs. It’s good to feel better, but six months of fretting about AF has taken its toll on my confidence and I’ve been approaching physical tasks with my foot on the brakes. I haven’t felt like me at all until quite recently, and all the advice I’ve had is just don’t overdo it – what does that mean when it’s at home? (Sorry that’s a bit of a local phrase).
So there we are – onwards and upwards, but not too far we hope. The campervan is fixed and we’ve got places to go.
Overlooking the Kennet and Avon Canal on the footpath next to Cleveland House
A bit of a shaky start today because both of us had put an Extinction Rebellion procession in our diaries, but neither of us had written down the time or venue. I had a vague recollection that it began at the end of our street – it didn’t, and Madame thought it was at the Guildhall – and it wasn’t – which left us wandering around Bath listening for the sound of crowds or beating drums. We were just walking through Henrietta Park when we thought we heard some kind of rhythmic noise and some very loud shouting, so we sped out of the park towards Pulteney Street where we discovered that the whole of the noise was down to a single team of scaffolders. Aside from the veg market in Stall Street there’s no-one in Bath with voices half as loud as scaffolders who often need to communicate over five floors and heavy traffic. The trader with the huge voice in Stall street market can be heard half a block away “Free pounds of strawberries for a pahnd COME ON!” – with the rising and falling cadence reminiscent of a song – and come we do. It reminds me why barkers gained their nickname; he really does bark; but strangely when you hear him talking, his voice is perfectly normal. Sadly it isn’t quite posh enough to get the Town Crier’s job.
So with the possibility of being arrested as green, woke, communist terrorists receding we wondered whether we should just beat each other up, or go for a walk along the canal. On balance the canal seemed the more attractive proposition. It’s been an interesting few days anyway. When we got back from Snowdonia we noticed that one of the cars in the car park was swathed in blankets and polythene. We also noticed that one of our neighbours had disappeared with her children, leaving husband behind. Later, we discovered that the car (his car) had both front and rear windscreens stoved in with a hammer or – more theatrically in my mind – a baseball bat. The irresistible urge to clothe the evidence in a story involving someone being caught in flagrante took hold, but none of our neighbours seem to have seen who did what and to who(m). Who says that city centre life is boring? The funniest event ever – shared by about 250 twitching curtains – was the incapably drunk couple doing a bit of dogging after a hard afternoon in the sun. Naturally it was never spoken of again.
But back to grim reality, I decided to do a bit more plant ID practicing and chanced upon the first bluebell we’ve seen this year. Bluebells are a great test of the software because (like the dogging couple) they’re promiscuous hybridisers, and most of the ones you see in towns are hybrids between the English and the more vigorous Spanish Bluebells which, some say, will eventually drive out all the natives. I think that’s a bit alarmist and I also think there’s a whiffy smell of botanical racism about it. Anyway, the software turned out to be rather sniffy about Bluebells in any case and refused to applaud our find without a photo of the leaves. You may notice that it was growing through a bed of nettles so for the second time today discretion trumped valour and the ID was left at taxon level. I remember driving past a church in Essex once and seeing the signboard with the words “Strict and Particular Baptist” printed there. I’ve always wondered what minor peccadilloes managed to split a church three ways. I also hope never to have to listen to the explanation!
Anyway, one further benefit of feeling well again is that my appetite is slowly coming back. Last night I cooked the first mushroom risotto in ages and one of our sons joined us for a jolly (and greedy) meal where we drank too much wine and fought for control of the sound system as we played through all our favourites. I find it intensely rewarding that even forty years apart, we share a taste for the same music. He’s a good bass player and we’re so pleased he’s back taking lessons again.
Below, some flowering Blackthorn and some Green Alkanet; both common garden escapes . We also see Lungwort – Pulmonaria officinalis which has a long history (fuelled by the medieval doctrine of signatures) and probably originating from narrowboat herb gardens. The boaters had little access to medical care apart from a few charities, and so herbal remedies were really important to them.
I was going to call this post “punkt, point, period, full stop”. But decided to call it C.A.T. in honour of a very fine teacher I once had. His name was Canon David Isitt and he was the joint Principal of the Bristol and Gloucester School of Ministry and I was there to teach some sessions on communications but when David was around I was always a student. On training weekends when the weather was good enough we would sit in a circle on the grass outside the retreat house as if he were Socrates and we were the oikos and would spend a couple of hours distilling the myriad possible meanings of a verse or two from the Bible. The relevance of this charming memory is that today I solved a longstanding problem (my idiocy) by paying minutely close attention to a single Google generated password. For over a year I’ve been beating my head on a wall over my inability to access the OS map app on my phone because it kept rejecting the password. Today in a moment of sub religious ecstasy I noticed a single full stop at the end of it which my smartass phone had never copied because it thought it signified the end of a sentence. I added the dot and the app sprang into life as if by a miracle.
As of now I’m handing in my tools
I wish I’d paid the same attention last September when I replaced the £250 charger unit in the campervan by taking a photo of the original one (see above and despair) and replacing it wire by wire with the new one. That never worked either and in all our subsequent campings we would sit in the van with head torches watching the batteries go flat. Previously I’d done the same with the gas jets on the three way fridge with the same result – didn’t work – which was the point of our hideously expensive trip to the workshop on Dartmoor a few weeks ago when my handiwork was repaired but mostly replaced by some great guys who actually knew what they were doing. So the batteries now charge, the fridge works, the sink that always leaked after I replaced the plug has been renewed, and the satellite dish which fell off the roof on the way back from Brecon has been replaced by a new miFi router which works like a dream. As of now I am handing in my tools.
If you are sensing a new resolution and vigour in my mood, it’s because I’ve finally found out what level of beta blockers I need to take without becoming a zombie or listening to my heart thrashing itself to death. I’ve found the sweet spot, I think, and I feel better than I have since last September. Perhaps there’s a clue in the dates! Never undertake electrical repairs when your brain isn’t working.
So today we went down to the van and tested the new systems and they all worked. We have booked a couple of short breaks in some favourite places with good botany potential, and I’ve spent the past two weeks designing the best possible workflow for submitting records – which included learning an entirely new application; iRecord – if you’re at all interested. Having offered to do a talk on useful apps to the Natural History Society, I wandered off into the impenetrable scrub of phone apps for identifying and recording wildlife. As ever, I entered the thicket with the fullest knowledge of what I might find there and promptly discovered that my understanding was mostly cobblers. I began by being quite certain that iNaturalist was by far the best recording app, and then after a few small irritations I fired off some emails to naturalist friends who mostly thought there were big problems with it – not least the verification process which, it seems, might allow three or four people with even less knowledge than me, to tick a box and elevate my incorrect identification to “research grade”; good for my ego but very bad for science. It seems I was conflating easier to use, with best; an error from which none of us are immune.
So, if not iNaturalist; which? Most of my enquiries trickled into the sand when it came to the big beasts at County or National level. Natural history recording, it becomes clear, is like Italy before unification; awash with fiercely defended kingdoms about the size of your average hamlet, and one particular bone of contention is the use of artificial intelligence – please feel free to rub that clove of garlic on your laptop.
The problem with identification is getting worse and not better. DNA analysis has thrown a boulder into the pond – I’m a stranger to any deep understanding of the subject, but the names and familial connections of living things seem to change all the time. The identification of plants by their appearance – morphology in science speak – is no longer as valuable as it once was; and that pulls the rug out from under one of the great strengths of AI – its ability to scan tens of thousands of photographs in less time than it takes you to find your notebook and come up with a plausible ID and name. Like stocks and shares, identifications can also decrease in value. Most of my learned friends prefer to lean on their many years of experience rather than trust a phone app, and if I had that much experience I’d probably feel the same way.
But what about those of us who love to look for plants. birds, mammals, fungi and all the rest – and regularly get stuck in an identification but would still like to make our contribution to the records in this era of environmental destruction. Getting your records confirmed can take weeks and even months but it’s imperative that records are checked by the best available experts before marshes are flooded and rivers diverted to save things that were never really there. Sometimes it’s best to give way and beg forgiveness when your record is rejected but sometimes – more rarely perhaps – it’s worth backing your hunch and asking for a second or even third opinion. So my money, at present, is on iRecord which uses the same family of software as iNaturalist – designed by an outfit called Indicia; hence the similarity of web design. In the iRecord app, you have to enter some kind of identification before you can add photos – then AI will tell you in percentage terms whether you nailed it or failed it. The saved data is made available to hundreds of skilled volunteers who can either agree or disagree with the machine intelligence. The software puts human intelligence firmly in charge. The other great advantage of the programme is that when all’s settled, the record is shared with all the appropriate local and national recording schemes (the warring states?). The data from iNaturalist is also now passed to the British databases but has to go through the same verification process as it would coming off my phone – which is a tremendous waste of volunteer effort.
What’s in it for us apprentices? Well I’ve found that the process of getting some sort of name necessarily involves turning to the books; learning families, environments, seasons and relationships through a process of reinforcement – good educational practice – we all get quicker and more accurate; and therefore more useful in the fight against environmental destruction.
I’ve had a comical vision of future field trips in which participants carry enormous pieces of computer and electronic kit across the fields on converted trolleys with old pram wheels (we’re like that) and stand in silent circles around wiFi aerials and routers gazing at our phone screens in silence. Actually, that’s not funny at all, and in any case hand-held DNA sequencers can already be had at huge cost; sequencers which rely on pre-existing DNA databanks, which can be searched using (you’ve got it) AI. I much prefer crawling around on my knees in the rain and mud. AI is alright for some jobs, but it will never have those moments of left-field inspiration that human minds are so good at. I shared that thought over coffee this morning with (name drop alert) our neighbour Prof Charlie Stirton who came up with exactly the same proposition. High fives then!
So in the next three weeks we’re off in our newly and fully functional campervan and spending a few nights on the beloved Mendips and in the Brecon Beacons – Bannau Brycheiniog means the peaks of Brychan’s kingdom – and later a grand tour of Dartmoor, then West and East Cornwall to catch the spring flushes of flowers while I test a few more phone apps and websites for my talk. Life is good!
“Blanche” on the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railway
I had the great misfortune to waste a lot of time at art school having to battle against one of the great 20th century myths about creativity. This was the idea that creativity could somehow shape the material world and could manifest itself without the mediation of any discernible skills at all. Creativity was thought to be an epiphenomenon of being, and being was definitely the thing. If you could get enough being on board you were set up as an artist. Later on I encountered much the same mindset in some of the more gimlet eyed evangelicals who had an unshakeable belief in the inerrancy of their obscure beliefs. Nowadays it’s conspiracy theorists, climate deniers, brexiters and anti vaxxers but it’s all rooted in the same problem; the refusal to examine, to question, to test and to modify your own practices and beliefs in the light of the evidence. Put simply; how can you possibly get better at what you’re trying to do – whether it’s running a country, making a pot or identifying a flower if you start with the assumption that anything you do is beyond critical reach because it just is!
I’ve heard apparently sensible writers say that they won’t read other peoples’ writing in case it influences them. They’re often the ones who make Vogon sonnets look like literature. I’ve spent most of this rainy week in North Wales grappling with computer programmes associated with the identification mainly of plants and it’s been a revelation to discover some of the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). You might think it would have been a better use of my time crawling around in the pouring rain with water running down my neck, looking for Wilson’s Filmy Fern – (I know where it’s supposed to be but it’s up a mountain wreathed in rain and mist) – but there’s nothing virtuous about unnecessary suffering and a bit of study pays better in the end.
Yesterday we went to see an exhibition at the Oriel, Glyn y Weddw in Llanbedrog involving the gathering, dying, spinning and weaving of wool – this is Wales after all. Here there was an abundance of art, technique and skill on show. Of course, all works of art begin with an idea – often very vague – but the real creative work is preserving and developing the initial vision through the processes that render it visible and never sacrificing the initial idea to showy skills. Great creative art is self-effacing about its means whilst being utterly dependent upon them. It’s not just musicians who have to spend so much time doing their scales. I couldn’t stop myself from getting down to nose-to-nose contact with one blanket just to see how the warp and weft was so skilfully woven that bright colours of the wools blended into the colours of autumn on the hills and mountains.
Upstairs in the same gallery is a permanent exhibition of porcelain, some of which was made at Nantgarw. My first degree was in Ceramics and I became fascinated by porcelain, and got to know and love the work of Thomas Pardoe – a decorator (I’d rather call him artist) of genius and William Billingsley a potter and decorator himself who ran huge legal risks by leaving Royal Worcester having signed the equivalent of a non-disclosure agreement by successfully arguing that the agreement didn’t cover the activity of making and decorating porcelain himself because he wasn’t disclosing any secrets. The technical expertise these and other working class potters displayed is awe inspiring. The process of manufacturing what was known as soft paste porcelain was wasteful, expensive and heartbreaking and neither man was a stranger to hardship and bankruptcy. The different styles of the two artists, though different, were so lovely I instinctively connected with them, and if they were alive today they would stand equal with the best natural history painters around. Pardoe produced some amazing botanical series, and Billingsley was so good at roses that Royal Worcester begged him to stay for fear of any competitor getting hold of him.
John Llewellyn, foreman – by William Jones Chapman, painter – in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
The 1800’s was an era when Wales was being stripped of the mineral wealth which was mined, forged and cast by men and women of real moral stature and turned into grand estates by their employers who often had none; or otherwise offshored the loot in English banks.
At art school, once again, we had a technician called Jack Pearce; a retired plasterer who could make plaster sing – he could speed the set or retard it and could feel the state of things in the bucket with his bare hands. Later on we moved to Stoke on Trent for a few months and saw the skills which were being discarded as the work was moved increasingly to China. Our mould maker Stuart, when he wasn’t recovering from a wild weekend, could cast anything – no matter how complex – and he helped to unload the last functioning bottle kiln in Stoke for the very last time as the industry died. As a child our next door neighbour Jim French was a glaze dipper at Pountney’s the Bristol Pottery where Pardoe worked for a while, and below our house was a marvellous allotment kept by Mr King – a fully Edwardian coal miner whose daily work involved walking to Parkfield Colliery in Pucklechurch and then walking back home hundreds of feet underground; only to repeat the walk in reverse at the end of his shift. I’d like to think that the Bristol Pottery kilns, pots glazed by Jim French, were fired with coal dug by Mr King’s forebears. My Dad was a GWR railwayman; I’m proud of my working class background
But what I’m doing here is not to promote hard work as a freestanding virtue, but to link it to the astounding creative achievements of these people; often poorly educated but who worked tirelessly to develop the skills which released and realized their creative abilities. At art school I was heavily penalized for spending too much time investigating glazes, clays and working techniques; but he who laughs last etc. If you want to be creative – I mean really creative – you’ll only ever be as good as your technique allows.
This is the outline for a talk I was due to give to the Bath Natural History Society, and which had to be postponed due to unexpected death of the President, Rob Randall
This is Coltsfoot; Tussilago farfara It’s got a number of other names but apart from English tobacco – which I’ll come back to, none are really common. its name comes from the similarity of the leaf shape to the footprint of a small horse, hence colt. The tobacco bit comes from its inclusion in smoking mixtures which until recently were commonly offered as a herbal medicine for asthma and other chest complaints. However some recent research has revealed that the plant also contains some pretty dangerous chemical compounds called hepatotoxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids (liver toxins) which could cause more harm than good – plants and fungi are terrifically effective synthesisers; that’s why drug companies spend so much time and money investigating them. I did once try to smoke a herbal cigarette containing coltsfoot but it was truly horrible and I never went back for more.
But beyond the health warnings it’s a favourite of mine because it offers a ray of sunshine in the spring; often in the ugliest of environments; and also it’s a plant that taught me a huge lesson in plant hunting. My first awareness of it came when I was working as a groundsman on a school playing field. The second find came, years later, on a bike ride around the villages where I worked as a parish priest. It had been snowing but the snow was melting quickly and where it lay on the verge it was stained and brown with mud thrown up by cars and lorries. Suddenly, in the midst of this gloopy, brown stained, melting snow I spotted a little group of bright yellow dandelion-like flowers poking through. As an avid but very inexperienced botanist I knew that they were Coltsfoot from watercolours I’d seen in my battered field guide and on a grim day they cheered me up. I was also pleased to have seen them because I knew that they were often associated with healing properties. Then they disappeared for a decade – well actually they didn’t disappear at all but I never looked in the right places.
It’s a pound for the stone and ninety nine pounds for knowing what to do with it.
Local drystone wall builder in conversation with customer
The quotation – the reply to a silly question – arose from a chat with a local stonemason who told me how he was once asked by a prospective customer how he had the nerve to charge so much for a cheap raw material like stone. It was a wonderfully tart response and I never knew whether he lost the job as a result of it.
Don’t get despondent get organised
If there’s any primrose path to finding your quarry in field botany it’s the ability to tap into all the information you can find for free in books and on the internet. After many field trips with some real experts I began to notice the secret they never revealed. They weren’t just wandering around hoping to bump into something interesting, they had all done reconnaissance trips in advance, and they had all researched the area we were visiting in extreme detail. It wasn’t the case at all that they had encyclopaedic knowledge of every UK plant. All they needed to do – and here’s where the experience comes in – was to search the chosen area on one or another of the huge databases available – I particularly like the BSBI Ddb plant distribution atlas (Google it and you’ll find it immediately) and specify the 2X2 Km square you’re visiting – there’s a bit of a learning curve here but a little patience will soon be rewarded with a neatly laid out printable list of plants that have been recorded inside what’s known in the jargon as a Tetrad. The 1800 wildflowers that grow in Great Britain and Ireland will immediately be cut down to three or four hundred which is much more manageable. If you’re a birder or fascinated by beetles and spiders, or if larger mammals are your thing, the NBN Atlas might suit you better. It’s like the BSBI database but for all species, and you can drill down to individual records. Another alternative is to print off the plant lists for the Vice County you’re in – these are already formatted on the BSBI website when you click on the “explore and record” pull down menu tab and click on “recording cards” and print the result off. The downside is it’s Latin names only, but if you get serious about plant hunting you’re going to have to use them anyway. Most modern field guides also have thumbnail distribution maps which won’t give you the grid reference, but will at least tell you that your plant only grows in Snowdonia.
Someone humorously pointed out that distribution maps are really maps of recorders and all of the large databases contain the possibility that the plant in front of you has just never been recorded before. I just checked for our present location on the NBN Atlas and none of the four ferns within twenty yards of me have ever been recorded. Some big databases haven’t quite kept up with the momentous changes brought about by DNA analysis, and so – again today – I was surprised to see that BRERC – the Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre still has the Harts Tongue fern as Phyllitis scolopendrium when it’s been in Asplenium for some time. But don’t be hard on the compilers, there are millions of records to be checked and processed. Sometimes plants just seem to be entirely in the wrong place. Having spent hours on the Cornish coast searching for Sea Spleenwort, Asplenium marinum; I mentioned the unsuccessful search to our Vice County Recorder and she pointed out several specimens in the centre of Bath.
If, on the other hand you think you’ve found a Ghost Orchid in the garden, you can access the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 and type in “ghost” and the orchid will surely arise as the only option. Click on it and you will be given a map of the UK with just four little black spots in it. If your garden is not marked by the black spot you can be quite sure that it’s something else – not certain, mind you unless you’re out for a walk with a man called Peter Stroh and he’ll soon put you right in the nice way that really good botanists always do.
Slumping cliff without Coltsfoot – yet – in Aberdaron.
So if you’re looking for a particular plant, or group of plants, these databases can give you a huge advantage. Then you can find out everything possible about the preferred habitat for your plant. This is exactly where I went wrong with the humble Coltsfoot whose black dots seem to cover the entire country until you enlarge the map and see the gaps. Somewhere in your research you will read that the Coltsfoot is something of a pioneer plant because it loves disturbed ground, is salt tolerant, and grows particularly well on what are known as slumping cliffs. Muddy cliffs with an inclination to break down and collapse on to the beach below. So first, check the maps in the databases for the black dots, and second, look at the flowering dates. Although Coltsfoot can be identified by its leaves (which grow when flowering has finished) that’s a bit trickier because there are at least two other plants with very similar looking leaves – so Coltsfoot, smallest; Winter Heliotrope, middle sized and purple flowers from December onwards anyway; and then Butterburr which has the largest leaves of all. If you want to see the Coltsfoot flowers it has to be around March. In my book that’s learning three plants – three for one offers are good.
99% of the effort goes in before you leave home
What you should be taking from all this is the fact that 99% of the effort in finding less common plants is in the research. You probably wouldn’t do it if you were looking for Dandelions, Celandines or Primroses because they tend to turn up anywhere – they’re generalists, but perhaps most happy in springtime hedgerows, so maybe start there. But I found the Coltsfoot in abundance as soon as I started to apply the “right place, right time” approach, one day when we were walking along the beach called Porthor or known in English as Whistling Sands, here on the Lleyn peninsula.
Most of us begin naming plants by flicking through a book. That’s about as effective as standing on a bus stop and asking people if they know John Smith. With the advent of AI there are a wealth of phone apps available to help identify plants you don’t know. HOWEVER they’re not infallible and there are both more and less reputable contenders in the market. Even Google Lens can usually give you a family name with reasonable accuracy, but never trust it down to species because it seems to want to help so much that when it’s stumped it starts throwing in silly answers. With all phone apps – I’ve got loads on my phone – try another and then, when you’ve found some consistency always turn to the books.
Just a word of warning here. I left the Apple religious community three years ago and moved over to Android, and so my photos are taken on a Pixel 6a and this is being written on a Pixelbook. I gave up on Windows when I retired. Everything is stored in three places on the Cloud. The information I’m giving should work with minor variations on iPhones and most Android phones.
So finally, there’s no finer instrument than the modern mobile phone for keeping records. Most phones store what’s called EXIF data (Exchangeable Image File Format) which sounds very technical but just means that as well as exposure etc. the phone records stuff like lat and long information for the exact place the photo was taken; date and time and is often editable so that you can add the name of the plant and any other information you think is important. This allows you to create a simple searchable database of your own photos. Google tells me I can’t do this, but as long as I separate the data with commas it works pretty well because the search facility is based on a very simplified comma delimited database . No need for endless hours designing your own. Phones also offer basic GPS but for proper accuracy it’s better to use a handheld. I’ve had photos given locations ten miles from where the photo was taken. The only problem with handheld GPS is that you have to carry a notebook and make sure you link the photo to the location in case the phone GPS turns out to be unreliable. But then, as an incorrigible compiler of lists I do that anyway. The latitude and longitude data can be loaded into the OS Maps application which will obligingly give you the national grid reference equivalent without any complicated calculations and pencil chewing.
Finally, but by no means least, there are applications which allow you to submit photographs of plants with provisional id’s and get them checked by panels of experts. Among these programmes one of the best is iNaturalist where, once you’ve signed up for free, you can submit photos and other details and – if you’re lucky – an expert somewhere in the world will verify the name. I only say if you’re lucky because there are so many records, most referees don’t have time to verify really well known things. I tried familiarising myself with the app at the beginning by posting some extremely common plants and they languished unloved and unnoticed until I took them down. The best and fastest responses seem to come from groups like mycologists (fungi) or pteridologists (ferns) but if you’re posting a less well known plant the support is good. Another virtue of iNaturalist is that verified records find their way onto the national and international databases and can be used for research. Vice County Recorders mostly use a Windows programme called MapMate which was state of the art when it was designed, but hasn’t been supported and has apparently become a bit clunky.
Flora incognita, another freebie uses AI and gives a useful percentage figure for certainty; and there are more coming on to the market all the time and may suit your needs completely.Finally, for birders I can’t resist recommending Merlin. I was out on a trip with the Three Musketeers in the autumn and we all heard an unrecognised bird song coming from a dense hedge. We all pulled our phones out and then discovered that we were all using Merlin.; an American app that comes with add-on national databases.
But saving the best until last, often the very best support and advice comes from your (in the UK) local Vice County Recorder. If you join a natural history society you’re bound to meet them very quickly. They’re all volunteers and many of them act as referees for iNaturalist as well. Ultimately every record comes down, in the end, to human judgement. AI is good and getting better, but rather like Satnav it can let you down spectacularly if you don’t use your own judgement or tap into someone else’s.
So I seem to have slipped into writing about records. You may, of course, spend a lifetime finding beautiful plants, fungi, mosses and ferns purely for your own pleasure, but in this epoch of ecological crisis every single record – even of daisies and dandelions contributes to the global picture. Natural history is a field where volunteers make a huge contribution. We can’t all afford our own scanning electron microscopes and perform DNA analyses on the dining room table but we can observe and record so that the scientists with all that expensive kit can pore over the trends and direct their research towards the most pressing challenges. As Joni Mitchell has it – “You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.”
I suppose most of us can remember our first view of a Red Kite – ours was, predictably, whilst driving on the A470 past the Red Kite feeding station in Rhayader. The folks who pioneered the return of this lovely bird deserve all our thanks. Now they’re spreading across the country and we see them regularly in Bath and east of Bristol. On Saturday on our drive up to the Lleyn peninsula we took a back road across the hills beyond Rhayader where we have often seen them in ones and twos, but we were completely taken aback at a flock of maybe fifty birds massing like seagulls behind a plough and swirling noisily in the air. It passed through my mind that either a new – and in my mind unnecessary – feeding station had opened up; or that there was a dead elephant at the very least lying there somewhere. The truth, though announced itself with a horrible putrid smell and explained the excitement. They were gathered over a large waste disposal site which we thought had been closed and capped but which looked and smelt as if the recent rains had flooded and possibly even ruptured the covers. There were pools of water everywhere; a hazard to local watercourses but paradise to a flock of hungry, or more likely greedy scavenging birds.
We look at vultures with distaste and suspicion because of their feeding habits and I wonder how long it will be before a campaign against the Red Kite ‘menace‘ will leak out of the same filthy mess. As we know to our cost in Bath, rats and gulls will take the easiest available food source and if that happens to be human rubbish then that’s what they’ll have. In Bath we even have bilingual signs on the rubbish bins urging tourists to dispose of their leftover takeaways properly – although it seems a bit rich to have them only in English and French. Are the French more inclined to dump their leftovers in the street than other nationalities? – of course not! I suppose in a perfectly ordered ecosystem, the Kites would eschew the rotting burgers and concentrate on eating only rats but in the real world once an ecosystem has been disrupted the consequences simply cannot be predicted. Think of the consequences of introducing myxomatosis into the rabbit population, and of doing the same thing with freeing mink into the wild, releasing grey squirrels and of course allowing Muntjac deer to escape. Farm subsidies, along with the Common Agricultural Policy have skewed the whole food economy in favour of intensive farming for decades and we’re only just beginning to understand at what cost. The unpalatable truth is that in every case the disruption was caused by human intervention. “We have seen the enemy, it is us!” Red Kites prefer to eat carrion – dead flesh and roadkill, and were so efficient at clearing the filth from medieval streets they were protected by law.
Aside from that depressing episode we also passed a number of farms showing “No farmers no food” banners. I can totally understand why farmers with poor quality marginal hill farms are struggling at the moment, but even a quick look at the organisation pushing the campaign would show that it isn’t being funded and promoted by farmers but by rather shadowy and wealthy climate deniers and extreme right pundits who have no interest in the welfare or survival of farms here in Wales. This is one of those covert populist campaigns that spreads utterly daft ideas such as green campaigners are forcing us all to eat insects. What can’t be denied is that the Government is so much in hock to agribusiness and big energy, they’ve totally rolled over to the climate denial lobbyists. This is industrial strength ignorance and stupidity and we know it – and farmers would do well to refuse to have anything to do with it because if the No farmers no food gains traction the only beneficiaries would be the oil and agribusiness industry and the hill farmers will be thrown under a bus.
The underlying theme of the new subsidy scheme is public money for public goods. The Conservative government is now brain dead, bereft of ideas and capable only of pleasuring the biggest landowners. None of the major parties, to my knowledge, has come up with a plausible plan for farmers across the whole spectrum from hill to fen which is regenerative; sustainable and working within a market with its greedy exploitative ethos brought under control, and so if the Labour Party hope to run the show they’ll have to come up with something concrete for farmers to vote for. Any footballer knows that the easiest way to run in a goal is to get the opposition divided.
Aside from the polemic, there are dangers which I know have been recognised by Welsh farmers but which are easily buried under culture war rhetoric. In Wales the more isolated areas are also strongholds for the Welsh language and if the population falls below a certain level, the language will disappear. Why should that worry anyone? It worries me because a language, any language, is a kind of cultural DNA. All of Welsh experience and history is encoded within the language and allowing it to die is a tragedy at the level of burning the library at Alexandria in AD 48, and which was all the more poignant because it was said that the fire was the unforeseen consequence of Julius Caesar’s order to burn the ships in the harbour. But this isn’t a plea for a handful of academics to be given access to the language. It’s the language of RS Thomas’s imagined hill farmer Iago Prytherch, and the language of William Williams of Pantycelyn, and the language of the local butcher and the youngsters who served us our Guinness in the bar today. With a language you can write and say and even think some thoughts that are not encoded in any other tongue. Languages are the glue that holds communities together and introduce the memories and experience of the old to the young . Destroying a whole way of life is a terrible crime – so the plight of these farmers demands our fullest possible attention and the kind of policies that uphold the best and most sustainable practices, supported by clear and reliable subsidies. Demonising farmers as backward looking luddites on the one hand, or sending them off to block motorways on a false prospectus are both dead ends.
At last! a proper spring morning; one to get us out on our favourite circular walk along the river and back along the Kennet and Avon canal. I suppose I could lend it a bit of spurious significance by calling it a transect but today was about the sun on our faces, warming us right through. Of course we noticed the sheer dynamic of plant growth but my notebook stayed in my pocket as we paid more attention to the nest building swans on the canal and the birdsong everywhere. The power of spring is unstoppable and knowing the succession of plants in the same spot year after year only makes it more impressive – or should I say awe inspiring. Spring is so transient that it’s almost a spiritual exercise in non-attachment. We can wonder at its beauty whilst knowing all along that it all passes. No place here for bitter reflection or clinging to the moment – it comes, it lifts our spirits and it passes and we can give silent thanks for that little shared moment.
In Henrietta Park we passed a Birch tree that expressed something of the paradoxical nature of life. I can’t recall ever seeing a tree so knackered by galls and outgrowths and yet still possessed of a strange beauty. Just down the path a great tree stump which last year boasted a large crop of Oyster fungus, is being rapidly consumed by other fungal rotters.
So let’s not call the walk a transect although we do it twice or three times a week, and let’s call it a conversation over time between sentient beings of wholly different orders, and I have to confess that this morning I think we both identified more with the knackered tree and yet – reading Oliver Rackham’s extraordinary book “Woodlands” – (P. 38 in my paperback edition) trees have their own strategies for longevity, none of which require expensive creams or medications. I think this one caught my mournful meditation on the fragility of life and whispered to me “Get over yourself and enjoy the sun!” So that’s what we did!
I don’t know what it is about Rue but its leaves lend their name to several other plants including a little fern called Wall Rue – Asplenium ruta-muraria that grows outside on a stone wall near our flat, and this plant, Rue Leaved Saxifrage – Saxifraga tridactylites that’s set up shop all along the road. You’d have to be quick to find it though because it’s an annual which flowers early and then pretty much disappears until the following spring. Once you get your eye in it’s easy to identify. The leaves really do resemble the leaves of Rue which, come to think of it is a neophyte that’s set up shop here in the south so you may never see it in the wild. But the giveaway are the sticky glandular hairs which are pretty clear in the photo. Plants have all sorts of survival strategies; but sometimes they just get lucky and this one keeps going by reproducing itself so early in the year that it escapes the attention of the council sprayers. Why our neighbours work themselves up into such foaming indignation about a few tiny plants in the pavement is beyond me, but they do – and they write furious letters to the council denouncing the evils of weeds and their effect on property values. Sure enough the assassins are never far behind although here they’ve given up on glyphosate and have resorted to salt. You can hear the plants laughing and after a brief period when they look dead enough to give the Council a break, they come back in full vigour.
Back at home our recent Dartmoor trip continues to refresh our minds like a bubbling spring and we’re already planning a return. Going through a previous set of photos and notes we remembered that we’d spotted about half a dozen Dunlin up near Great Staple Tor on a previous visit; completely unaware of their rarity we hid behind a rock and watched them for half an hour.
I’ve spent the day collaborating on writing a very short description of a walk for a field trip later in the year. You’ve no idea (or perhaps you have) what hard work it is to steer four strong individualists towards a common purpose. My forthcoming talk next month on the use of wildlife databases and apps to help nature lovers find what we’re looking for had to be cancelled because my co-presenter died suddenly and quite unexpectedly yesterday. We’d all turned up for another lecture and suddenly it was cancelled and everyone was in complete shock and disbelief.
It was Rob who first helped me to identify the Rue Leaved Saxifrage in the photo, and he was my go-to teacher for all botanical enquiries. He was an inveterate explorer and you would sometimes spot him rooting around for rare plants on the central reservation of a busy dual carriageway with buses, lorries and cars dashing past. He would cheerfully spend a year on a seashore project thirty miles distant, travelling back and forth in buses or on the train because he didn’t own a car. It’s funny isn’t it. I spent my working life looking after grieving people and yet when it comes close to me I’m useless at dealing with it.
