This is one of my favourite beaches and it’s also one of the most complicated in geological terms. I looked it up on the British Geological Society website which I often find very useful, but this one had my eyes glazing over in a paragraph. It’s very much like looking at the side of a closed book and knowing that the hundreds of pages all contain important writing, but being unable to open it. You can see the stratified pages and even work out that some are made of different paper but other than that it remains as comprehensible as the Dead Sea Scrolls (unless you’re an expert, you’re delusional or you’re in some kind of counselling. All I know is that it’s eroding at a rate of knots and that it appears to be mainly mud with boulders which range from car crushing to the things so pretty you put them into your pocket and then wonder later why you ever picked them up. Here there are topaz and serpentine and bits of manganese ore, but mostly mud. When I saw the bright yellow flowers growing there I just had to go and look, but I also had to pick my way through great heavy lumps of the stuff. It’s a hard-hat area for sure!
I ask myself what kind of plant would pick a completely unstable seawashed near-vertical cliff to set up a family home? The answer, of course is in two parts. Firstly the plant didn’t actually choose to live there, the clifftop where it was previously growing happily just collapsed on to the beach. Part two suggests that possibly dozens of species fell over and most of them died. The survivors – so far as I can work out – are all perennials, and they are all able to spread vegetatively – so they take a packed lunch with them if a lump of cliff soil comes down with them: and here’s the rogue’s gallery:
Clockwise from top left, kidney vetch, field sow thistle, sea mayweed,sea plantain and coltsfoot.
You may think this is a pretty pathetic way to spend an afternoon on the beach and, in the light of a brilliant book I’m reading at the moment, at least I’m not straining medieval latrine waste through a sieve to see what grains the deceased were eating. Each to his own, I say. I’ll be writing about all this again no doubt. but for the moment I’ll just say that plant hunting is much more than ticking species records like so many steam engines. The plants on the cliff are perfect examples of what I mean because I (maybe you too) just have to ask myself- how did you get here? There’s always a story and I’m a storyteller so I always want to know why? and how?
Last week, walking down past the site of the old riverbank gasworks I started to record the plants I was seeing. I won’t bore you with another list, although you might be interested to know that Figwort is so-called because its fruit looks rather like a small haemorrhoid and fig was one of its folk names for reasons you won’t want to think about. Anyway the riverbank was lined with plants and among them were a very pretty hybrid dog-rose and some lemon balm – oh and tansy as well as weld. I can see how the weld got there because Kingsmead had a dyeworks and weld provides a yellow dye – a very smelly process I read. Tansy was used in folk medicine, lemon balm is reputed to keep flies away and lady’s bedstraw smells lovely and was apparently used to stuff mattresses back in the day; possibly with an addition of fleabane. All seemed to have a history but I was puzzled by the lemon balm and the rose, so I got going on Google Gemini because I had a story in my head about a young couple scratching together the money to buy a tiny cottage between the river which flooded regularly and the gasworks which must have smelt horrible and produced foul air twenty four hours a day. My couple were making the best of a bad job by cultivating a little garden on the riverside. Sadly my fantasy collapsed at the first hurdle because there never were any houses on that stretch of the riverbank. So my next narrative is of fly tipping bargemen either chucking their waste over the side on to the riverbank or growing their medicines wherever they could find a suitable spot to plant them. Naturally there’s no way of telling what the real back-story is but there is a more prosaic explanation because the site is now very close to the council recycling depot. Who knows??
But there’s another aspect to this that we need to pay attention to, which is that the whole issue of how plants wind up where we find them is fascinating and complicated. A few weeks ago I finally recorded a Hungarian mullein flowering on the canal miles and miles from any other similar plant. It’s not a bit of use telling it that it shouldn’t be there because it’s an event comparable to spotting a white tailed eagle over Bristol. These things shouldn’t happen but they do – very occasionally.
The title of this piece is “You in your small corner and I in mine” and it comes from a children’s’ hymn I was obliged to sing many times in Sunday school. I quote it because looking back it seems that one of the more sinister purposes of the whole cultural apparatus of church and sunday school is to ensure that we each stay in our own small corner. You don’t want to be too big for your boots, a smartass, all fur coat and no knickers, or jumped up. Best stay where you are; no past and no future because there’s nowhere better than home sweet home, nowhere more comfortable than your own small corner. Fortunately they didn’t send the plants to Sunday school and when things got tough they moved on somewhere else – with nothing more than the mud in their roots. “Weeds, we call them”, says the Telegraph in thundering denunciation. I beg to disagree!
