It’s early August and apart from being sweated alive by the fifth heatwave of the year there’s another sense in which it feels like Christmas every day. In these repeated heatwaves the only strategy we can follow is to keep as many of the plants alive as possible, and so life pretty well revolves around watering, cooking and preserving – and it’s worked wonderfully. Plants need water, food and sunlight, and the abundance of sunlight, although a curse through forcing us to water so much is marvellous in helping our crops to covert the water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. Just imagine what a miracle that is; but some plants like peas and broad beans will never thrive in these conditions however hard we try to help out because, like Madame, the heat makes them feel exhausted and they give up. But others take to it like ducks to water and each day, after watering, we bring the ripened produce into the kitchen and scratch our heads over what to do with it. Fresh vegetables are an order of magnitude more tasty than the impoverished lookalikes that taste of nothing after their long journeys. Every day is Christmas day.
Today it was the turn of the aubergines and after a test run in our youngest son’s commercial pizza oven I felt sure I could replicate the burn in our kitchen, with no danger of the smoke alarm going off due to the new extractors. And so it turned out to be – the fruits – still hot from the sun – blackened and smoked gently as the insides cooked at 275 C and, as they cooled, virtually peeled themselves leaving the pale, faintly smoky flesh waiting to be united with garlic and tahini. We’ve got more tomatoes, cucumbers, figs and new potatoes than you could shake a stick at, and it’s so exciting that I just put the apron on and relish every moment as the cupboards fill with winter stores.
It hasn’t always been that easy. Something of a turning point in my life was the day (just before we had an extremely low-key wedding), when we picked 40 lbs of blackberries on Rodway Hill. There were a couple of outcomes from that day. The first was that we made a huge amount of completely horrible blackberry chutney – so bad we couldn’t even give it away. The second outcome for me was the overpowering feeling of gratitude which (being a fervent convert to extreme atheism) didn’t fit at all well because there seemed to be no-one or nothing I could thank for the generosity of those spiteful bushes. Sixty years later I’m still struggling with that conundrum having tasted some of the off-the-shelf options without being convinced by any of them.
But I can dimly see a way through the desert by repairing and joining up the broken fragments of our polarized and fragmented culture. Let’s take plants as a beginning. We casually divide them into arbitrary categories (food; wildflowers; weeds; rarities; orchids and ragwort etc.) often entirely based on usefulness to humans or potential for monetization. But all plants come from the same tree of life as we do. Some time, millions of years ago, humans, dinosaurs and plants took different paths and we’ve evolved to live very different lives but notwithstanding Darwin’s troubles for suggesting that we share a great deal of our history with the great apes, for instance, and regardless of the religious arguments about it, we all came from the same single celled organism which contained the first few chapters of the library of life which have evolved, adapted and now reside in each of us inside every cell of our body; our six feet of tightly coiled DNA. The library is the same library which mothered (each with its own chapters) the butterfly, the tiger (Tyger?) the earthworm, the edible mushroom, the lichen and last of all, you and me. It’s not necessary for us to strive to unite with nature because we are already one with her. Hugely diverse and adapted; a coat of many colours you might say but a single one and not the atomised billions of homo sapiens who dare to think of ourselves as individuals.
So after years of seeing my passion for field botany, for gardening, for writing and spirituality for anthropology and for ceramics, for science and for cooking as separate “interests” I can see that they’re all more like spokes on a wheel at the centre of which is the big question –“What’s it all for?” – and when I ask myself the big question that way I can answer with another question which, for me, removes the thorn of the first. “Why does it have to have a meaning or a purpose at all?” We could invent a multitude of possible answers to the big question but I can’t see what useful purpose it would offer.
Just out of interest I should say that this far from sudden insight was triggered by my instinctive dislike for any kind of Magisterium which almost always exists to promote its own version of an answer and to persecute in the most cruel and heartless manner anyone who offers an alternative or sometimes even a slight amendment. The lightbulb moment came from binge reading about molecular biology and the latest plant taxonomy research in order better to understand DNA and one or two obscure (to me) statistical methods. Once, however dimly, I began to understand the beauty and complexity of what goes on in both plant and human cells; I began in an almost religious way, to see all of my interests bonded together by their common structure.
The icing on the cake has been to read about the work of Stefano Mancuso who runs a research programme at the University in Florence which he provocatively calls “Plant Neurobiology”. He and his colleagues across the world have come in for a great deal of flak from the old guard because plants don’t have neurons and couldn’t possibly have brains like ours but they are able to sense problems and respond to them; communicate with and “listen” to other plants and synthesise astonishingly complex molecules. All this has brought it home to me that writing about plants as if they were part of a giant but insensitive stamp collection is doomed. Without plants there would be no trace of the human and yet plant life would go on – probably less destructive. Plants are worth so much more than being pressed into herbaria and to even begin to understand what they are, we need poets and visionary science; we need anthropologists, herbalists, first nation men and women, collectors cooks and artists. I fear that we will never find a sustainable space for humanity on the earth unless we accept that we owe it all to the plants.
