Month: July 2024

Gardening for the longer term

[Interestingly, there’s an AI tool built in to WordPress which I seem to have turned on accidentally, and which persistently interrupts and chides me for long or difficult words! I credit my readers with more intelligence than that!!]

This tree was on the allotment when we took it on – an old neglected espalier apple which Madame has retrained (restrained maybe). And yes those curled leaves are concealing Codling Moth.

If you’ve never read Michael Pollan’s excellent book “The Botany of Desire” then if you ever intend to grow apples you should go and get it right now. There’s a section in the book devoted to apples and among the fascinating facts and legends there’s mention of the fact that as the settlers crossed America and staked their claim on parcels of land, there was a legal requirement for them to plant apple trees in order to demonstrate their long-term commitment to the land.

Trees, of any kind, are a long term investment – for instance I marvel at some of the arboreta in the great estates of the eighteenth century where the landowners would have known they would never see the mature fruits of their planting. On any allotment site you’ll see many different styles of plot. Many will be cleared as annual plants mature and will spend the remaining parts of the season or year under cover. In a culture that lives for the moment, the idea of a long-term plan for an allotment might seem fanciful. Who knows when the landowner or the local authority will see it as a cash cow and flog it off to a developer.

But somewhere between the bland assumptions of a Humphrey Repton, for instance, that it was perfectly sensible to plant for future centuries, and the panicked sense of catastrophe of a 21st century environmental campaigner there’s still a case to be made for a commitment to slow growing perennials like fruit trees.

We’ve now planted two short (five trees) rows of apples, plums, damsons and pears – one row six years ago and the other three. It’s hardly an orchard and, until this year, we’ve barely picked an edible fruit but this year the first row of five apple trees has had an excellent set of fruit which should, if we planned it right, give us a few fresh dessert apples until October. The second row has given us a few Victoria plums and a decent crop of Bramleys – while we have to wait for any Damsons (could take years) and Conference pears. You’ve no idea how much pleasure it’s given to watch them grow from whips to cordon trees on MM106 or similar rootstocks. That’s a local authority rule, by the way, standard trees tend to swamp the allotments as they grow ever taller. One of our neighbours bought some standard apples cheaply off the supermarket and is only just learning the error of his ways. You can hear them growling at night!

Sadly, though, the deer are back on the site and nibbling away – especially the lower leaves and flowers of runner beans which are only just picking up speed after a very slow start. However the delayed gratification of the fruit trees has brought a whole new dimension to the allotment. Somehow it feels more mature, more long-term and more sense of anticipation of seasons to come. I remember our keen expectation of the greengages on our grandparents’ smallholding. I don’t think they were ever great croppers, but what they lacked in quantity they more than made up for in sweetness and flavour.

In the midst of the first and possibly the only heatwave of the summer we’ve been getting up very early and grabbing a couple of the cooler hours before we’re driven back behind the shutters in the flat. Our project has been to demolish the fruit cage which – given what I’ve just written – may sound counterintuitive but we’ve lived and learned a lot about weeds and in particular Bindweed (Devil’s Guts in one local name). Looking at the allotment earlier this year we realized that Bindweed just loves climbing up fences or nets. That raises two issues. Firstly you can’t strim or burn the young shoots off without destroying the cages and secondly cages are just as good at keeping allotmenteers out as they are at keeping out squirrels, birds and other roving pests. So we’ve taken away their climbing frames, let a lot of light in and given ourselves space to move around for pruning, watering, feeding and picking as well as dragging the long bindweed roots out whenever we see them. We shall see ….. I think we were rather affected by a protectionist frame of mind when we started out, but we’ve come to see the truth of that old saying – ‘the best fertilizer is the farmer’s boot.’ Wherever there’s a too narrow path or an inaccessible bed , or even perhaps a row of stakes the purpose of which you can’t quite remember, that’s where the weeds will flourish because you’re not constantly walking past and yanking them out. If you’re constrained by a fence or a low net you’ll avoid hoeing and the associated backache and go somewhere easier. At the risk of sounding extremely bossy you should avoid dumping full buckets of anything on a narrow path because if it stays there for even a week it will claim squatter’s rights and you’ll be tripping over it for a whole season – oh and when you finally tip the water off the rotting weeds it will go over your feet and it will stink. Trust me – I’ve done it all. By all means let a thousand weeds grow for the pollinators because nature abhors a vacuum, but let that be a matter of deliberate choice and make sure you know what’s in that cloud of parachute seeds passing you. Willowherb is a monstrously successful coloniser!

You probably won’t have heard of Jabez Bunting

The River Wye – a bit polluted and clogged with weeds

This is not going to be a religious piece, I promise, but my early experience of Methodism was as a child in a “Prim” (Primitive Methodist) chapel and so – I suppose – my childlike view of being a grown up was inflected by men, (they were always men), shouting at us and going on a lot about fornication a decade before I needed to know. When I was eventually overcome by the hormones I also had to overcome the gift of embedded guilt – a trick that fortunately I learned pretty quickly.

Anyway, this pilgrim’s progress took me through the Wesleyan tradition because they had a brilliant youth club, run by the most patient people I ever met – although Mrs Round cracked once before a fancy dress party and said the expected I’d be ‘coming as the devil‘. After that I sank into the lukewarm waters of the Church of England where I was lost to the elect, as it were. God gave up on me about 100 yards above this stretch of the river Wye under a concrete bridge. It happened quite unexpectedly. I was a bit shocked but – like any failed relationship someone had to say something.

So to get back to Jabez Bunting, and I’d really rather not, but in my Wesleyan Days I really admired John Wesley. He had to manage with doubts and when he went to America he lost his faith altogether; fell out with the C of E because they stood in the way of his work of growing new leaders. He was a charismatic who must have had the loudest voice you ever heard and he made it all seem possible, even to the Cornish miners at Gwennap Pit and the now forgotten colliers of Kingswood and the North Somerset Coalfield. You might think he represented something of the enthusiasm and fire of Jeremy Corbyn (stop that hissing immediately! – they never asked you on to the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury). Wesley was succeeded by Jabez Bunting who grew the infant Methodist church into a powerful force by driving his steam roller over any charismatic or independent thinkers. Methodism became a monocultural institution which had some good bits but lost much of its founding enthusiasm.

Actually there seems to be a bit of a pattern here. When St Francis of Assisi died, having been pretty much driven out of the order he founded, he was succeeded by Giovanni Parenti who was – wait for it – a lawyer who tidied the order up, stomped on all that nonsense about not having possessions and grew the order into a mighty force using more force where necessary.

So now I come to Brother Keir Starmer who comes across as a worthy successor to Giovanni Parenti and Jabez Bunting; cheerlessly obliterating hope whilst imposing order and discipline on a much depleted congregation.

But there is always a point of light. Back in the day I took a funeral service as a favour for a family from the South East who had no church connections in Bristol. As I left the crematorium an elderly woman hurried up beside me and said “Hello David it’s lovely to see you, how’s Jenny”(My sister) I made the usual lame excuse about not recognising her and she said “I was your Sunday School teacher in Staple Hill” (The Prim chapel). I do remember a teenage girl from the Sunday School, but mostly I remember the shouting of the preachers and the noise of the cattle and sheep awaiting slaughter behind the butcher’s next door – a brilliant and inexpensive soundtrack to the hell and damnation we were being promised. It was so nice to make her acquaintance after all those decades and the nicest thing of all was that in spite of all that dark religious stuff she’d evidently lived a full life of ordinary, everyday goodness.

As I said once in the Cathedral to an ordinand standing in a long line waiting to process in to kneel in front of the bishop – “You know this is only alright as long as you don’t take it too seriously”. She looked terribly shocked, so I hope she figured it out before it was too late.

A hot day in the kitchen

Every year the processing of tomatoes comes around; always surprising, always rewarding but always knackering. The polytunnel is a tremendous asset on the allotment, but the crops inside it seem always to ripen almost simultaneously, leaving us with a challenging glut. Our small flat has limited storage space so the more reduced the crop is, the easier it is for us. This year, fortunately, we need to make tomato ketchup which reduces 2 Kg of tomatoes to three small bottles. The ketchup is intense and – dare I say – much better than the commercial ones and tomatoes are the only crop in which we’re almost completely self-sufficient. I could write volumes on the sheer impossibility of total self-sufficiency which could only ever function well in a close community with a tradition of barter – the kind of community that only a small handful of us now live in. Having lived in a couple of comunes we would say that they’re no kind of primrose path to happiness and contentment. There’s always at least one person who refuses to work!

That said, before we could get going in the kitchen there was heavy work to be done on the allotment because we have decided to remove the fruit cage which has become a climbing frame for bindweed and serves no useful purpose except choking and shading our soft fruit. The forecast had the temperature rising to the low 20’s by mid day, so we went out early to break the back of the job. Two hours later we’d removed the roof and three of the four mesh walls and rolled them into giant builder’s bags to take down to the tip. This should open up the space and make watering, picking and pruning much easier. We were pleased to find, once we’d fought through the jungle, that our mulch of sheeps’ fleece and wood chip has completely suppressed the weeds around the plants, but of course bindweed travels aloft and laughs at mulches.

Back at the Potwell Inn; hot and sweaty, I popped shallots, chopped garlic and sliced tomatoes, sprinkled them with herbs from our little pot garden on the pavement, drizzled olive oil and shoved them in the oven to roast. As I’m writing they’re cooling down and later I’ll put them through the passasta machine – which is the most useful piece of kit for anyone who needs to process a lot of tomatoes. Honestly I’ve spent so many hours trying to push tomatoes through a sieve doing a job that now takes minutes. Later again I’ll unite the passata with some cider vinegar, sugar and all the spices, reduce it down and bottle it.

With later harvestings we’ll make straight passata and two kinds of readymade pasta sauce which we use as a base for anything else that needs a shot of tomato umami. It looks likely to be a punishingly hot week so we’ll have our work cut out with watering and finishing the fruit cage. Early starts are the only way to get it all done before the energy sapping city heat takes charge.

Next on the tomato agenda is one of our favourite Italian recipes panzanella made to the recipe in Anna Del Conte’s wonderful “Gastronomy of Italy”. I’ve never been fond of raw onion, but her suggestion of steeping thinly sliced red onion in iced brine for an hour in the fridge transforms the sulphurous heat into something altogether more lovely.

While all that cooking was going on, I’d brought home a small piece of the (inedible) Stone Parsley I found next to the shed door so I could take some macro photos of it using the focus stacking facility on the new camera and the big tripod arranged over the dining table (my desk). The tiny compact camera, only 50g heavier than my phone looks a bit ridiculous on top of the full sized tripod, but camera shake would ruin the macro focus stacking. I was really pleased with the results – especially when I used some sharpening to clean them up. The photo is below and, for reference, the flowers are only about 2 mm diameter – so we’re almost in microscope territory. Not necessary for identifying this plant because one of the diagnostics is a strong – some say unpleasant – smell of petrol when you bruise the stem. I can certainly vouch for that.

Last night I slept for nine hours and woke up dreaming I was paddling the kayak down a small river. What a glorious start to the day!

Stone Parsley, Sison amomum photographed with an Olympus TG-7 using in-camera focus stacking and a bit of sharpening applied later.

Anyone can do this!

Stone Parsley leaves

As I was closing the lid on the laptop after writing about a bit of botanising in White Field yesterday I thought something along the lines of – “is it discouraging to someone interested in nature for me to write in a way that makes me sound much cleverer than I really am?”

The thing is, I’m a relative beginner and when I go out on field trips with very knowledgeable guides, I sometimes come home feeling a bit stupid. I was leading a field trip myself a few weeks ago and before we set out I read aloud half a page from a book I was reading which expressed exactly that sentiment in the hope that in such a mixed ability group we could look out for one another and try not to be patronising towards less skilled newcomers. I was, of course, thinking about my own experiences. However it was not to be and the propeller heads in the group all shot off trailing latin names behind them like condensation trails in the sky. You could see the hope die in the eyes of some of the others.

There’s no shame in not knowing a Latin name, or what tetraploidy means – they’re just steps on a road that leads to deeper understanding and far more fun. Some leaders are good teachers and some aren’t and if you think back to your biggest and most important learning experiences they usually began with someone taking your puzzled question seriously and helping you – as it were – through the hedge. On our very first field trip the leader took me in hand and began naming some very ordinary and common plants, knowing – as good teachers always do – that a willing learner will store that knowledge joyfully and never need to ask again. One of those plants was Nipplewort – and I was struck by the fact that the flower wasn’t as much like a human nipple but a grease nipple of the kind that used to lubricate old steam engines. In that short conversation I absorbed something of what birders call the jizz of the plant and now when I pass it on a walk I name it silently in my head and think to myself “Nipplewort; Lapsana communis” – in a form of greeting to an old friend. If I should be out walking with our grandchildren I’d do the same thing out loud. It could be the first step in a consuming interest. When, last autumn, we were out with them in Dyrham Park we passed some Spindle Trees I talked about the use of the wood in making spindles. What I didn’t know until very recently was that spindles were more likely to be pegs or skewers or – in Gloucestershire – skivers! Being more of a wordsmith than a taxonomist it’s often the local names that excite me as much as the strict accuracy of the scientist.

Anyway, the allotment takes up most of our time in the summer – here’s another photo I took today and I hope you’ll agree that it’s a very pretty mess.

Our wild Fennel plants. Madame wishes they were Dill but they love where they are and all our attempts at growing Dill seem to fail.

We went messy a couple of years ago in the hope of increasing our insect population. We dug a pond, stopped obsessively clearing the ground and continued never using any chemicals. The weeds said thank you very much and duly populated any square inches of bare soil – just the way nature intended it to be. About four years ago I found a rather bothersome weed with very pretty purple and white flowers colonising one of our beds. After a struggle and with the help of the national referee we finally found the name and it turned out to be rather rare in our district in spite of its name “Tall Ramping Fumitory” but a rare subspecies in this country – Fumaria bastardii ssp. hibernica – better known in Ireland. How lovely to have a rare plant growing wild on the allotment.

Then today, I was locking up the shed and I spotted something else – although this time I knew its name because I’d been shown it before by a competent botanist, growing close by..

So this is Stone Parsley – Sison amomum – another unusual plant taking advantage of our relaxed, not to say libertarian regime. I took some photos and when we got home I hit the databases and field guides and confirmed the identification – at least to my own satisfaction – it’ll have to be approved by a referee before it gets into the big database.

So to get back to where I kicked off, absolutely none of this demanded a degree level qualification or anything like it. Just a curious mind, a bit of tenacity and a willingness to ignore any snotty remarks from fellow allotmenteers about how untidy we are. I do this purely for pleasure and I have no interest in impressing anyone. When I was regularly on BBC Radio 2, I was in the supermarket chatting to a friend and a woman came around the corner and said to me “are you Dave Pole?”. “Yes I am”, I replied. She looked at me quizzically and then said “Oh. I thought you were tall”.

An oasis of peace behind the car park.

Marbled White butterfly sipping nectar from Red Clover in White Field today

Dyrham Park can get very busy – especially in the school holidays – I took a picture of the car park before lunchtime today just to give some idea of how crowded it can be with hundreds of visitors walking down the steep approach towards the house. But there’s one part of the grounds where you can pretty well guarantee a bit of peace and quiet. Today we spent over an hour there plant hunting and we didn’t see a soul.

White Field is a wildflower meadow where, in the late spring and early summer, you can find three species of orchid growing without leaving the mown paths. To be fair, it’s not particularly easy to find, tucked away behind the car park and technically outside the grounds behind a high deer fence, but it’s a lovely spot in which to learn to identify many of our most attractive wildflowers. But don’t leave your visit much beyond mid July because it’s mown off and the hay baled and taken away as part of a management programme. These wildflowers actually prefer poor soil and a single dose of artificial fertilizer could cause irreparable harm allowing rank weeds and grasses to choke out their more delicate cousins.

This was the first place we saw Marbled White butterflies and they really are very beautiful; but why here and not, for example on any old grass verge? The food plant – the one which the caterpillars feed on – is a group of grass species collectively called Red Fescue – which is common across the whole country but there are several other food plants as well. So it’s not the food plant alone but some other factor too. The butterflies display a preference for purple flowers and the distribution maps suggest that unimproved grassland is one important factor. So White Field fits the bill perfectly; unimproved grassland on Cotswold limestone with masses of purple flowers; not least Knapweed, Clover, Meadow Cranesbill, Selfheal and lots of orchids. The sad truth is that the butterfly is as rare as unimproved grassland and we’ve ploughed up and poisoned over 90% of our wildflower meadows in the last fifty years. Anyway, they were there on White Field in abundance today and they were a joy to find.

The field which on our last visit was golden and white with Rough Hawksbeard and Oxeye Daisies looked more brown and shriveled today, but if you looked between the straw coloured mature grasses there were hundreds of Pyramidal Orchids, Oxeye daisies, a few Rough Hawksbeard clinging on, Knapweed, Selfheal and Meadow Cranesbill plants at the edges as well as Birdsfoot, Clovers, Hogweed and Ragwort. Lots to look at and enjoy including Ribwort Plantain, Red Fescues, Timothy grass, Cocksfoot and loads of other grasses I’ve never got to grips with. Altogether a rewarding end of season walk with fabulous views out towards the River Severn and down as far as the Mendip hills.

Being annoying isn’t just a personality trait – it’s a vocation!

Yesterday’s food from the allotment

City centre life is something of a competition between optimism and pessimism much of the time. Even in this impossible summer season the vegetables still grow and ripen; our best ever crop of Alderman peas – they grow vigorously to six feet and more and this year, for unknown reasons, we’ve escaped the usual infestation of pea moth. The pods are full of large, sweet, delicious peas of a quality that make you wonder if the frozen supermarket peas are even the same vegetable. The polytunnel tomatoes (Crimson Crush) are their usual vigorous and blight resistant selves, in fact the maincrop potatoes (Sarpo Mira) are also blight resistant and so we haven’t seen the ruination of the whole crop since we started growing them. We’re holding our nerve this year and growing all our sweetcorn in the tunnel – last year I transplanted them outside when they were 2′ tall and they too gave us a lovely crop because the badgers, squirrels and rats left them alone. The courgettes still try and rampage all over the allotment, but we’re ruthless with them. The only surprise is that pollintions have been generally good notwithstanding the desperate shortage of pollinators. We can’t claim any credit for the blackberries aside from training them along the boundary fence to deter night-time visitors. Unlike most garden cultivars the fruits taste great but the thorns are long and sharp enough to snag a rhinoceros.

That’s all on the plus side, but more negatively we have to cope with the usual inner city challenges thick and humid air; of night time overflights to Bristol Airport; constant ambulances and police cars driving past with warning sirens blasting; juvenile seagulls – temporarily grounded by their inability to fly back to their nests screeching for food from 4.00am, kitchen waste strewn across the pavements by urban gulls and foxes, noisy hen parties in the airBnb opposite with occasional glimpses of male strippers doing their thing, and then the ubiquitous semi conscious junkies, dealers, drunks and out of control dogs crapping unobserved by their owners who make sure they’re deeply absorbed by important business on the mobile rather than doggy business on the grass. Then, yesterday afternoon a squadron of jackhammers, bulldozers and heavy lorries started breaking up the foundations of the old Homebase site ready for another completely unnecessary block of overpriced and under spec flats. Promises to build doctors surgeries, primary schools and community facilities alongside low cost housing will be broken as always with the payment of a small fine to the local authority. The snagging for the redevelopment opposite has continued for years with missing damp courses, missing fire safety precautions, crumbling lintels, lime green slime mould on the faux Bath Stone walls, windows improperly installed or not fixed at all, and, (following a conversation today with a very upset owner) meaningless insurance. He couldn’t talk about it because it just made him emotional and depressed. Any word of protest will result in angry responses from landlords and Airbnb owners who would prefer you not to know that this is not quite the Paradise Regained promised by the publicity. Naturally, for a student of life like me, it’s a marvellous field for research and we wouldn’t want to live anywhere else! The weeds are fabulous.

My interest in Geoffrey Grigson (The Englishman’s Flora) has continued and I wanted to find out why exactly he’d managed to fall out with quite so many people. As someone who has regularly been told that I’m the rudest person they’ve ever met I thought he might have something I could learn to improve my technique. However it seems we are simply inveterate bubble poppers and can’t help ourselves when we’re confronted by mediocrity and dishonesty. His collected newspaper reviews* are tough going – far too prolix and dripping with anger aimed at other writers who are now (decades later) absolutely unknown – so they seem like a drastic waste of emotional energy. Far better to go for a walk and try to identify that tall Dandelion looking thing on the pavement outside. Most of the spanners, fruitcakes and halfwits will lose their reputations purely through the attrition of time. I’m aiming to disappear long before I’m dead, but the prospect of cluttering up the memory of a computer in the middle of the Mojave Desert with the Potwell Inn blog for all eternity amuses me, as I shall be asleep under a rock in a troutstream somewhere having completed my million words.

But hey, The Englishman’s Flora in spite of it’s Grandiose “The” in the title, rather than a more modest “An”; and its inappropriately sexist attitude to non male botanists is a really interesting and useful book that attempts (against all the odds) to unite the great ship of field botany with the other great ships of folk medicine, regional and local names and even witchcraft; all of which are heading off in different directions. It’s a book that hasn’t yet fallen for the daft idea that the pruinose texture of a Sloe in the autumn can be completely or even adequately described by a DNA string. Who’d have thought that there’s a member of the Stonecrop family called “Roseroot” which lives high in the mountains and whose roots smell of – obviously roses. Who’d have guessed that the odd looking Pineapple Weed, which lives in farm gateways where it’s guaranteed a regular hammering, actually smells just like a pineapple when you squeeze its flowerhead. For me this is not at all evidence of the hand of God, but of the awe inspiring, wasteful and aesthetically dazzling creativity of evolving nature.

  • Geoffrey Grigson – “The Contrary View” 1974

An old friend – the Widcombe Heron

Not being a birder of any merit, I couldn’t tell you which of the Widcombe herons this is. There’s a substantial heronry just up the road from Prior Park nursery and it’s not unusual to see one anywhere along the Kennet and Avon Canal between Deep Lock and – let’s say – Dundas aqueduct. I’ve never forgotten seeing my first heron take off unexpectedly from just behind a hedge. My heart almost froze as it cranked itself into the air like a pterodactyl entering my world through some kind of worm hole into the past. Today’s creature was less impressive as it perched on the rope bumper waiting for us to leave and toppled into the canal after a half-hearted attempt to fly away. Later it flew away down the canal in that nonchalant way that we humans adopt when we’ve done something really stupid.

I think Madame and me both needed a break from weeding on the allotment – I mean I quite enjoy hand weeding but hour after hour of its punishing effect on our backs and knees makes the prospect of a straightforward walk all the more attractive. This particular walk is one we’ve done many times because we developed it during the COVID lockdown; a circular walk of almost exactly 10,000 steps using the river and the canal towpaths and passing through Sydney Gardens and Henrietta Park and back through Widcombe.

The advantage of repeatedly following the same walk is the way we get to know the plants and birds. I suppose you could over-egg it by calling it a transect but it’s really much more informal than that and we include sinking boats among our objects of interest along the way. The regular floods we’ve been experiencing wreak havoc with moored boats which – if their mooring lines are too short – turn turtle and sink. Here’s one from September 2022

-and the same boat today:

You may notice that the Buddleia has now been joined by a big group of Purple Loosestrife and the wreck is gradually turning into a small nature reserve as the cabin roof gradually rots away. On the far side of the bridge pier a sunken narrow boat rests dangerously beneath the surface, the roof rail with which it was obviously hitched has torn off and is all that’s now visible except for a big yellow buoy to warn passing boat traffic. At least it makes a pleasant change from stolen pushbikes and supermarket trolleys, but you have to wonder whether there’s a rusting fuel tank hidden inside, waiting to leak into the already polluted river. It costs thousands of pounds to remove these sunken boats.

I was on the lookout for a Soapwort that usually shows itself on the canalside, but it was a tad too early I think. I was so absorbed in photographing narrowboats that I passed a site where Marsh Figwort grows. I’ve always wondered where the name Figwort comes from and I’m indebted to my new favourite book for telling me that figs is one of the names the herbalists gave to piles – which judging from the herbals was an extremely common affliction in the past.

Our last find was a group of Musk Mallow growing in a little wildflower area at the end of Widcombe High Street. Unlike many such little created reserves, this one has nothing but native plants in it, and they seem to be enjoying themselves. I think they’re really beautiful.

The stream of consciousness – a creative affliction.

Whitchurch Common, Dartmoor. March 2016

I said to Madame yesterday while we were walking through Bath – “I think I’m living in the 1940’s and 50’s”. She, being an avid reader of history and biographies, knew exactly what I was saying. She’s presently finishing the last of C J Sansom’s Shardlake novels and living in the Tudor period. Not having to explain things is one of the great blessings of our long relationship. Of course the imagination can play tricks and too lax an attitude towards truth telling could lead all the way to prison or even to 10 Downing Street; but in the manner of a psychoanalytic session – by allowing the mind to range freely and without comment, connections of the utmost significance can be forged.

So, if you’re a Potwell Inn regular you’ll know I’ve been thinking about and researching Geoffrey Grigson – author of “An Englishman’s Flora” and husband of Jane Grigson the great food writer. Chains of thought often take us on a journey and in this case it involved reconnecting with the village above By Brook where we lived for two and a half years while we were at art school; and a hairy drive over to Slaughterford in search of a pub that was actually one village further upstream on the little trout river which runs for around twenty miles between Castle Combe and the Avon at Bathampton . In the course of our day and in subsequent reading we discovered that Slaughterford is probably not the site of a famous battle between Alfred the Great and a small army of Danish raiders. and that the name probably derives from the Anglo Saxon term for the crossing near the place where the Blackthorns grow.

But this turned out to be much more than an antiquarian story. Immersing ourselves in a landscape in which we’d lived the early years of our relationship stirred up the strata of many memories. The melodious sound of the small river, for instance became the river that runs through the Potwell Inn garden in HG Wells’ novel – “A History of Mr Polly” as well as being the real place where we’d attempted unsuccessfully to poach brown trout and where I’d spent days drawing a tangle of tree roots. Being an artist or a writer seems to involve a huge struggle to lay hold of something significant. That laying hold rarely seems to work and we are left empty handed. The poet RS Thomas brilliantly describes it as being like placing your hand in the warmth of a hare form which a hare has recently fled. The creative life is full of almost and not quite.

Standing next to the river, memories resurfaced of moments in galleries and museums when suddenly, as if a flare has gone off in the mind, you can see clearly for the first time. Once, unexpectedly bursting into tears in front of a Renoir painting I’d only ever seen poorly reproduced less than the size of a postcard. Being young, passionate and raw the memories never leave you. The paintings that had given us a whole expressive language floated through my head and so in a wild yomp through the unconscious I remembered John Minton and, the imagination being capable of leaping over impossible fences, suddenly brought a roomful of associations – Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, MFK Fisher, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Davidson; who would all have known one another. Geoffrey Grigson would probably not have figured in too many Christmas card lists having been rude to, or about, so many people.

I’ve got a proof/review copy of Francis Spalding’s biography of John Minton “Dance ’til the stars come down” * which I bought quite cheaply because I couldn’t afford the original. It has no illustrations but in searching the secondhand booksellers today the book came up with his familiar self-portrait on the cover. Completely unexpectedly I almost welled up with grief as I recalled his melancholia, alcoholism and eventual suicide. A man I never met evoked a sense of loss that took me completely by surprise and the terrible thought came to me that this, perhaps, was the beginning of the end. The moment when the dark forces of conservatism began their fight back against post-war optimism and freedom. Since then they’ve synthesised joy and sold it back to us by subscription – one trivial experience at a time. We seem to have lost touch with the ordinary, everyday moments that used to make us dance ’till the stars came down. Art’s now a business, patrolled by curators and gallerists, and art schools run courses on keeping accounts, tax returns, building a website, networking effectively and staying in touch with the fashion of the moment.

I’m filled with the need to go and sit quietly on the bank next to the river once more to listen to what the spirits of the place still have to say to me. They, at least, have not been silenced by the self appointed magistrates of taste!

Postscript

The title of the Minton biography is a borrowing from W H Auden’s poem, which is itself a representation of the medieval “Danse Macabre” and equally a working of Stravinsky’s 1910 Firebird. The idea was very much in the air and was echoed in all sorts of media, not least in Bernard Leach’s rediscovery of 17th century English slipware. I’m thinking of the pelican in her piety. With two world wars in mind, there’s less hope in Auden’s poem – “not to be born is best for man”. A kind of mad defiance in the face of an overwhelming threat is his prescription.

Dance, dance for the figure is easy,
    The tune is catching and will not stop;
    Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
    Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

W H Auden – Death’s Echo

Bloodstained Juggling with six balls

By Brook seen from the lawn of the White Hart in Ford

I’m wrestling with half a dozen recalcitrant strands of an idea that just might make a story. Of course it might also just make a WTF? mess – only time and a patient reader will tell.

So the first strand is this. I mentioned last week in The Potwell Inn blog that my copy of Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellously useful book “An Englishman’s Flora” is falling apart and I’d have to buy another copy. My clapped out paperback is a 1975 reprint of the original hardback published in 1958 and the pages are now turning brown and are foxed. The glue binding is breaking down and it’s just at the point where the pages start dropping out. I bought it for next to nothing in an Oxfam shop and I see that the cover price was less than £2 when it was new. Anyway, prompted by my resolution it went into our very small bathroom where I rediscovered what a magnificent resource it is and immediately searched out a hardback secondhand version for £17, presently on it way from another OXFAM shop in Harrogate. That’s thread one.

Thread two emerged when I was browsing through the book and randomly came across the entry for Dwarf Elder which is given no less than seven pages by the gloriously erudite Grigson. Married three times, his last wife was Jane Grigson the food writer who – I discovered today during my flurry of research – believed that food is such an important component of being human flourishing that it deserves the same high standard of writing as any other form of literature. Of course she was absolutely spot on which is why I’ve got a shelf full of her books. That’s a side issue, though for the purposes of this piece of weaving, but what a family they must have been!

The main thread concerns the Dwarf Elder because I only saw the plant for the first time this year on the footpath to the north of the lakes at Woodchester Mansion. According to the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 it’s in steep decline across the country; probably partly due to the fact that it’s no longer planted as a medicinal herb often in churchyards in order, they believed, to improve its health giving qualities.

So threads three and four join the river at this point because Grigson points out that it’s a stronger version of the Common Elder, the roots and leaves of which can yield a blue dye and a powerful purgative. We should bear in mind that for many centuries (this plant gets mentioned by Dioscorides in his first century pharmacopeia ) – plants were prized more for their medicinal usefulness more than for their aesthetic qualities. However the more intriguing point is that its local name is Danewort and it was believed – perhaps due to the colour of the berries and leaves – that it sprang from the bodies, or more specifically the blood, of Danish invaders. The bloody colour and the doctrine of signatures gave the game away – it was thought. So far, so fascinating I thought, but then I (metaphorically) sat up straight because he wrote that the plant could still be found in 1974 in the village of Slaughterford which straddles By Brook. Hold on to that thought because I’ll come back to it for another thread. As it happens, and as you’ll know already if you’re a Potwell Inn regular, we drove over to Slaughterford only a few weeks ago in search of a pub which turned out to be in the next village of Ford. If you were even considering duplicating our trip I’d strongly advise approaching the pub from the A420 because the connection between Slaughterford and Ford is not much better than a muddy track.

But why Slaughterford? You have to ask don’t you? Grigson quotes the 17th century Wiltshire historian John Aubrey and then dismisses his assertion that Dwarf Elder aka Danewort or even Danesblood which still apparently grows in Slaughterford is the sign that a battle between King Alfred and the Danish invaders was fought in the village and resulted in the rout of the Danes with much slaughter. A quick scamper around Wikipedia establishes that the consensus today is that the battle was actually fought some miles away in Edington.

But in the early hours of this morning, I was mulling over what I’d discovered about Grigson, and another fact that came up was that he’d lived in “North Wiltshire”. Might he have lived in Slaughterford? was the tantalizing thought which kept me awake. The answer, after an early start on the laptop, was no he didn’t. But he did live quite nearby on the other side of Chippenham.

Gradually the picture was emerging that Slaughterford was not the scene of a famous battle fought by King Alfred and so how on earth did it come by such a gory name? The truth turns out to be that the name is a contraction from the Saxon of Sloe Thorn – and so the village name really means the river crossing where the sloes trees (Blackthorn) grows.

There must have been many crossing points on By Brook. At one time there were over twenty mills working there and we actually walked up the river past the last functioning paper mill in around 1970. Coming upon it while walking the banks from Corsham was quite a surprise – a semi derelict industrial site in the midst of the most beautiful valley. I’m waiting for my newer and more durable copy of the book to arrive, but what a fascinating journey from a Greek botanist to a 20th century poet. The Slaughterford myth gets repeated even in quite recent herbals – Mrs Grieve’s 1920’s book “A Modern Herbal” quotes it without comment.

There are two further points about By Brook I could make. Firstly the photos I took from the pub garden strongly suggest that the water is far more polluted and eutrophic than it was when we first encountered it in 1970. You’d probably find it impossible to make paper there now, and the brown trout also need clean and unpolluted water. But secondly, there is strong enough evidence to make it to the Natural History Museum website, that there is at least one family of beavers living on the brook. Thank goodness the beavers are vegetarian and therefore no threat to the local trout. In fact the fly fishers commissioned a report on the condition of the brook which recommended some modifications to the river bed to improve flows and slacks to help with breeding the native brown trout. Maybe they’ll get their wish granted free of charge by nature. I’m sure beavers and brown trout have lived in harmony in previous centuries before the beavers were hunted to extinction.

Postscript

My secondhand book arrived today – big thanks to OXFAM in Harrogate. It’s wonderful – in excellent condition and properly bound to lie flat. I absolutely love it! The paperback version can go back for an honourable retirement in the bookcase.

Wilding

Priddy Pool – April 2024

First the excellent book – written by Isabella Tree – which I read almost as soon as it was published; then an illustrated edition, more of a coffee table version; and now Wilding the film. The pond at the top, as they say in true crime fiction, was posed by models; in this case the lovely Priddy Pool on the Mendip Hills which is on one of our favourite walks. I loved the book and we loved the film too when we saw it in the Bath Picturehouse yesterday along with a half empty theatre and a mostly elderly audience which was completely in agreement with the thrust of the film – if the subdued nods and grunts of agreement were anything to go by. Why it’s become a thing to suggest that older people are mostly reactionary and conservative is a mystery to me; just another way the media frame the arguments by associating them with a bunch of cliches – tall tales without any real evidence.

So we loved the film in spite of the occasionally romanticised view of nature – the Attenborough effect – with some occasionally ravishing filming of misty waters at dawn. I very much hope that I’m right in thinking that the film-makers had one eye on a later television showing. It’s just about short enough to fill a single slot and it presents the arguments in favour of rewilding along with some compelling evidence.

There is, however, quite a herd of elephants skulking in the woods, and these are mostly about funding. How do we take a brilliant idea for improving a few thousand acres of depleted farmland and extend it across the whole country without the benefit of all that bankable collateral, inherent in owning an inherited estate. With next to no income the Knepp estate must have sunk eye watering sums of money into legal fees, infrastructure and last, but by no means least, fencing. With a moribund subsidy system in place; strong opposition from many local farmers and stolid lack of imagination from the government it must have been a terrifying journey at times and we have to applaud their tenacity.

But at times you had to wonder whether the financial pressures have led to a kind of theme park temptation. Safari rides, miraculous appearances of storks, Monarch butterflies and beavers ; the Painted Lady butterflies flying over the horizon right on cue like the visionary apparition of a saint and vanquishing the plague of Creeping Thistle in one season; glamping sites and so forth are more suggestive of Woburn than wilderness. The references to the Oostvaardersplassen rewilding scheme in Holland didn’t quite spell out the public opposition that forced a change of direction on account of the perceived suffering of sick and dying animals. The direct to camera segment about the so-called wood wide web, linking trees together in a sympathetic collegiate structure through mycelial links is by no means a done deal in scientific circles; the absence of any boring detail on the funding and income streams which any farmer considering this idea would need to know. I’m trying to be a critical friend here but such a wholesale upscaling from one estate to the whole country would need huge amounts of subsidy, review, research and feedback. The question asked by one farmer – “how are we going to feed the country?” demands a convincing answer which I don’t think DEFRA has really grasped; and with the average age of a British farmer nudging 70, many working almost single handed, how on earth are they going to cope without at least some telehandling and labour saving machinery?

I’d love to let more young people see the film if only to help them grasp the mess we’re in more completely. Knepp may only be a few thousand acres but it’s a few thousand recovering acres which are already attracting attention from a generally conservative constituency on farms all over the country, struggling to make a living.

What I’d really like to see is the development of many more farms, each exploring progressive, locally inflected ideas and reducing harmful practices including chemical use; soil compacting heavy equipment and enormous fuel costs. The agrochemical industry will howl and lobby furiously but – going forward (how I hate that phrase!) there’s no alternative. Knepp will be part of the answer and that’s a lot better than being part of the problem.