Category: About the Potwell Inn

Sometimes you wonder why you put yourself through it!

Astra inclinant, non necessitant

The Latin quotation under the photograph is translated as – “The stars dispose but do not compel”. Notwithstanding Amos Starkadder’s wonderfully funny sermon to the Quivering Brethren in the novel “Cold Comfort Farm” – “You’re all damned!” -(if you haven’t read it or seen John Schlesinger’s film you’re missing a treat); but there’s a great lesson for gardeners in the proverbial saying because the best we can ever do when we grow things is to dispose them to succeed. If you’re an organic grower then disposing your plants to grow well needs foresight, planning and patience plus a lot of compost. This morning we picked our first crop of Victoria plums from the tree we planted in 2020 the apples were quicker, but the pears are at least fattening up whilst the damsons seem to fall off too early. The pests are better at judging the moment than us. Badgers, for instance, always stole our sweetcorn the day before we were going to pick it. Nowadays we protect it by growing it in the polytunnel. The agrochemical industry wants us to believe that their products can predestine plants to succeed; that we can transcend thousands of years of human experience and spray the latest chemical (let’s call it Compel!) to dodge nature altogether. It’s a lie. There’s no other way to describe it.

I once spotted a book in an Oxfam shop called “The Half hour Gardener”, but it wasn’t so much the title as the author’s name which caught my eye. She is the daughter of a woman I once worked with and lost touch with back in the community arts days, and when we went to hear her daughter speak soon afterwards at an allotments association AGM she pretty much admitted the half-hour suggestion was a bit of a stretch. Even if it were possible you’d still fall foul of the weather regularly through a whole year of allotmenteering. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too busy, too knackered, too fed-up; the fact is, gardening is hard work. It may be true – in fact it is true – that gardening is deeply rewarding, but the reward is inevitably separated from the pain by a matter of months if not years.

Today, for instance, the temperature is in the mid twenties after weeks of dry weather punctuated by one, just a single but tremendous, thunderstorm and we’re about to enter our second heatwave in a month, and so we water. And when I say we water that means carrying dozens of watering cans each weighing twenty pounds down a rickety ankle busting path from the communal water trough to the dry beds. On a good day I could water the whole plot in about three hours but that presupposes that no-one else is watering at the same time, so on those occasions exquisitely delicate and silently mimed negotiations take place near the trough. The growls are never vocalized but we all understand the implications. Neighbours are neighbours after all and we don’t want water wars to break out.

The forecast is predicting even hotter weather on the way and I desperately need to dig over and prepare a large 5’x 12′ bed which has become infested with bindweed and we need to plant out purple sprouting broccoli there by the end of the week. We don’t generally dig, but occasionally the bindweed or couch grass migrating in from the paths need teaching a lesson and digging it out is the only way that works. The only plausible time to do it will be in the cool of the very early morning before the builders turn up to finish the work to eliminate black mould in the flat.

NB linen suit

Any dreams of shimmying through the allotment filled with delicious produce in weedless beds (wearing my linen suit and panama hat) seem to evaporate like the morning dew. Try as I will to look on the bright side at 5.00am, or mid morning when I need to walk up an icy hill to knock the snow off the nets before they break, takes a bucketful of optimism.

I’ll never forget the driving rain on the morning we dug holes to set the uprights in their anchors for the polytunnel. It was raining so hard I had to bolt the uprights in a foot of freezing muddy water which had filled the holes because they were below the water table that day. During COVID when everyone had time and energy the allotment site looked wonderful, but work and families had to come first when it ended, and it was sad to see their hard work so quickly overgrown with weeds. It demonstrated two important things about running an allotment; you might say two sides of a coin. On the one hand it takes time – quite a lot of time – to grow an allotment but on the other hand, COVID demonstrated that so many people were up for the challenge if only the time and opportunity were there.

The upside

I’m absolutely not trying to argue here that suffering is its own reward. We had enough of that in Sunday School; but that it’s worth a few wet days, tingling blue hands and cold feet to pick something delicious from a plant or tree that you nurtured through the droughts, the cold north-easterlies and the Azores highs to the day you cut it, warm from the sun, and take to the kitchen. Yesterday I sautéed the first batch of courgettes in butter and oil until they were just beginning to caramelize on the cut edges. No more than an hour from plot to pot. A few weeks ago we were scratching about for something fresh to eat on the allotment but now it’s in full flow, overflowing with gifts. The only response to it is sheer gratitude. I once thought I knew who to thank for it all, but these days I feel more comfortable offering my thanks to the Cloud of Unknowing; “the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” After all, what’s a few hours of enjoyable work compared with the brightness and depth of tomato sauce made at home in the kitchen, or corn whose milk is still sweet, or borlotti – the winter banker for soups. We may be hard-up and scruffy but we live like royalty.

This is a secret!

Yesterday went well. We got up early and gave the polytunnel and some of the most vulnerable transplants a good soaking in anticipation of the forecast hot weather. The plan was to drive over to the campervan storage site and make sure that the recent torrential thunderstorm hadn’t leaked in through the roof as it did last time we were away; but the van was bone dry and the battery was fully charged by the additional solar panel. So we transferred the bedding to the car for a good airing at home and found ourselves with time to spare. We’d booked a table at a favourite country pub so I rang ahead and asked if it would be OK to arrive an hour early. It was fine by them – they’re really nice people – and so we drove over straight away in the mid-day heat, looking forward to a (zero alcohol) cold beer.

I’m hesitating to name the pub in question because I don’t do reviews or expect anyone to be influenced by the pieces I write and, in any case most of my readers don’t even live in the UK. I looked at the stats a few days ago and that day’s piece had been read by folks from about fifteen countries with the majority in the US. So while I write a bit more about food, I’ll think about giving out the name with no expectation of remuneration or even gracious thanks.

We didn’t start to travel in Europe until we were in our sixties, and it was a most liberating experience to drop into random cafés and restaurants that looked as if they might have something local on the menu at a price we could afford. We sat in a café routier once, eating lunch whilst driving down through the Cévennes. The food was good but not memorable and the real joy of it were the large butterflies feeding on the Buddleia tree behind us. They looked just like Camberwell Beauties – awesome. Near Avignon we ate often in a little restaurant in the middle of nowhere where the owner always addressed me as Monsieur Paul. Just down the road was a restaurant ferme where we all got happy drunk and played football with a melon as we walked back to the campsite accompanied by the perfume of ripening grapes and attended by fireflies. Our teenage son wrote amorous messages to the waitress and posted them on paper darts. In Uzès I ordered foie-gras in a cafe and the waiters were so delighted see an Englishman try it they came out to watch. This is a confession by the way. That was my first and last taste. Eating local delicacies can backfire too. I shared a tripe sausage with our youngest in a motorway cafe near Lyon and we gave up after a single bite! We once ate a whole enormous tureen of vegetable soup while walking the Camino – it was delicious and so simple although I’ve never been able to replicate it.

These restaurants, and we’ve stumbled across them across Europe in Spain, Italy and France haunt our memories. We once passed a restaurant in the Accademia in Venice where every table had a reserved sign. We stuck our heads around the door to book the next day and the owner instantly removed all the little signs and welcomed us in like old friends. We stayed until late drinking brandy with the boss, and he insisted that we went back the next day because his wife – a tall and slightly forbidding woman with a Venetian nose – was cooking a rabbit ragu. There was no menu, no choice and it really was beautiful.

It’s a shame that such experiences are vanishingly rare in the UK. The mid-range affordable restaurant offering lovingly and freshly cooked food is as rare as hen’s teeth. Two of our sons are professional chefs and both say that the trade can’t seem to attract young chefs trained and willing to work in such highly stressful environments. Long hours and low wages have hollowed out the labour force, and high overheads have driven standards ever lower. Too many of their managers have trained in the Gordon Ramsay charm school and both have endured bullying from well qualified MBA’s who wouldn’t know how to boil an egg. Enough!

I’ve decided to name the pub because they’ve bucked the trend and recruited a brilliant kitchen team. The pub is the Cross House in Doynton – do Google it and try it out if you’re near Bath or indeed East Bristol. Yesterday the sun was shining, the restaurant was comfortably quiet, and the kitchen worked quietly in the background (always a good sign). We started with shared scallops and a smoked haddock fishcake, followed by pan fried Sea Bass, potato rosti with a salad and a green sauce flavoured with peas and with spinach. I’ll come back to the fish. Then I had panna cotta with a faintly lavender flavour and Madame had summer pudding and then I finished up with a good treacly black espresso.

But going back to the fish, the skin was crisp – I love fish skin when it’s properly cooked and I always eat it, but there was an ingredient in the dressing that I couldn’t identify. I asked the owner and she said it was just coriander. But it wasn’t those chewy, fibrous seeds that we buy in the supermarket – it was perfumed, floral, citrus and wonderful. Eventually with a bit of forensic work on the plate we worked out that it was fresh green coriander (Cilantro) seeds, like the ones we have every year on our allotment. The ones in the photograph at the top. It was a revelatory first experience of an ingredient I’ve never cooked with. Driving home through the quiet Cotswold lanes we could have been back in one of those places in France. Obviously we stopped off at the allotment on the way home and gathered a crop of a few ounces of berries- enough to freeze and use the whole summer. Even eaten raw they taste great, but give them a little bit of heat and they develop a symphonic flavour. Wow!

I realize I’m treading on dangerous territory here; as if I’m auditioning for Pseud’s Corner so here’s a picture of me somewhere in Southern France just to seal the deal. I should say, though that just up the hill from where I’m standing we stopped off at a very run down cafe/hotel and got into a long conversation with the English owner. He brought out a local dry cured sausage to share with us, and as he told us about his (somewhat dodgy ) plans for the future a man passed us with a huge tray of freshly picked morels. We didn’t stop to enjoy them because we still had some miles uphill to walk. I should also say that the word “poseur” has two meanings in French. The first meaning describes a man who irons his jeans and the second refers to a tradesperson who sets things – say paving stones or tiles – into position. There’s even a feminine form “poseuse” . You can see the steep wall of a quarry behind me and I wonder if the poseurs in question were the workers who laid the nearby railway line from Paris to Marseille. That’s a railway journey I’d still love to make and we’d be sure to stop overnight at the Hôtel Terminus in Cahors where we had another of those meals that haunt us still.

God I’ve aged! – still wearing the same shirt today, though!

Meanwhile – back on the farm again

Well we arrived back in Bath on the Sunday before the heatwave struck, and after 2 weeks of rain in Cornwall we were just as trapped by the searing temperatures and – (ask any gardener) – under the cosh of constant watering. The only time to water in a heatwave is as early as you can bear to get up – in our case it was five am, because sleeping at all at 20C is a bit of a struggle. An early start gives you the very best of a fiercely hot summer’s day; much better than the evening when the earth is scorching. But nature doesn’t stand still just because you want a break. We left the allotment in good order but two weeks later the weeds were roaring and we had a battle on our hands.

There’s only one way to do this, and it’s to blitz the plot systematically from one bed to the next until it’s all as clear of weeds as it ever can be. If you’ve been watching Springwatch on the BBC and looking at the weary parents of fledgling birds endlessly feeding their ever more demanding family, you’ll have some idea what it feels like to clear an allotment that’s got above itself. The grass path that you should have strimmed before you went away is now three feet high in Cocksfoot, False Oat-grass, Couch and rough Meadow grass. I’m showing off a bit with the names there because Cornwall gave me a great deal of time to “do the grasses”

But doing the grasses involved a lot of work with the Olympus TG-7 camera because so much grass identification demands high quality macro photos which is far from simple in a windy situation when your subject is waving around. It’s a difficult skill to learn and demands that you step away from that comforting auto setting and get down and dirty with shutter speeds, flash values and f-numbers. Oh and I was also trying to develop a new step by step recording procedure – which I’ve bored you enough with already. Progress was slow. And that’s all I’m going to say. So with photographic experiments, learning new plants and weeding, the Potwell Inn has had to go on the back burner for a few days.

I said several weeks (weeds?) ago that the allotment had suddenly matured, and the top left photograph took me by surprise with an unexpectedly emotional reaction. I think I’d been strimming a weedy and grassy path, and it reminded me of my grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns where the garden paths always gave me a sense of delight; always verdant and closely mown. And then the photo looking along the plot and beyond the polytunnel seemed as if it expressed something of that childhood wonder – the chairs, the little pond and the sheer energy of the plants and running down the path to the greenhouse with my sister to see Charlie the toad. The trees we planted in Covid year are all in fruit now, and with the hungry gap over we’re eating our own produce. I think you have to treat allotmenteering as work -but not the grinding boredom of routine, but the utterly rewarding work of knowing what needs to be done and just getting on with it. It teaches you patience and resilience – we left the broad bean crop for a couple of weeks and when we got back the whole crop had been eaten and the plants were suffering from some kind of rust. Tomorrow we’ll pull them up. Cool weather plants don’t enjoy heatwaves any more than we do.

And in what counts as a pretty low-level flash of inspiration, I discovered (on my hands and knees but not praying) how important edges are to the appearance of an allotment. Add that to another feature that only comes with time – I mean scale here – the allotment looks grown up because it’s literally grown upwards and whichever way you turn and move, new vistas open up. Neither of us wants regimented rows in the way that some of our old 1940’s allotment books showed – all rows perfectly straight – and few of us can afford to imitate Gertrude Jekyll in her archly curated informality; but just a few delineating lines and paths along with a scattering of sheds, trees, texture and colour but never forgetting an offering of plants for the pollinators – that’s a living, breathing, tactile work of art. It’s a conversation with nature.

Speaking of which, the photo below shows the tough side of nature. I’m no entomologist but my ever available phone app thinks it’s a very deceased Southern Hawker dragonfly nymph which has been killed (and this is a guess) by a zombie fungus, (probably Cordyceps) which you can see growing out of its scales. With a twist worthy of Edgar Allan Poe the fungus takes over and consumes the living creature, leaving the brain until last, when the dying Dragonfly is induced to climb to a point high on a poolside plant and grip the leaf in its jaws in order better to spread its spores. Oh glory! That’s going to keep me awake!

Where’s Wally?

A vibrant patch of wildflowers and greenery by the seaside, featuring pink and white blossoms among lush foliage, with a calm sea in the background.
Coastal undergrowth on Roseland

We were sitting on a bench, resting after a bit of a hilly stretch on the coast path and I was squinting closely at a tiny fragment of leaf when a small group of walkers passed us. “What have you found?” one of them asked. “I’m just checking out this plant that I may have misidentified” “It’s Hedge Bedstraw”, one of them said. It was a friendly – we’re all in this together – kind of remark that instantly established a common bond. “I don’t think it is”- I replied – “I think it may be Heath Bedstraw because there are tiny forward-pointing prickles on the leaf. This is the kind of thin, acidic soil they grow on”. We were all set, then, for a long (and for Madame and the rest of the group) tedious hyper focused discussion when another walker standing at the back of the group said. “There’s a Hummingbird Hawkmoth!” – pointing behind us. We all stopped whatever we were thinking about and turned to where the the speaker was pointing. And there it was; I’ve never seen one before so it was a bit of a moment to see this oddly beautiful creature whose wings moved so fast they were not much more than a blur. Then there were five of us eagerly following the path of the moth as it foraged among the coastal plants, oblivious to us it seemed. Moths have had this capacity to evolve towards seemingly endless recklessly stunning forms and patterns. It’s hard not to think of some kind of artist lovingly creating them. Madame grabbed my phone from me and attempted to take some photographs but couldn’t get close; held back by thick brambles.

Our cheerful conversation continued and then we went our separate ways having – all of us – learned something new. Back at the campervan I just had to double check my already double checked identification and keyed out the piece of Bedstraw in my pocket (it’s a way of naming a plant by answering a series of either/or questions until the name pops out at the end). Yes it was Heath Bedstraw. Then I googled Hummingbird Hawkmoth and discovered that Hedge Bedstraw is one of its food plants; that’s to say it will lay its eggs on them for the hatching caterpillars to feed on. Interestingly it was hovering around clumps of the related Heath Bedstraw so maybe it’s not that fussy. One of the things I find most difficult to live with is the sheer provisionality of all wildlife records. It’s true until someone discovers that it’s not.

And that’s the trouble with this natural history malarky – it can get wildly out of control with those of us disposed towards intense attachments – let’s call them obsessions or addictions. Later, and wakeful in bed, I mentally rehearsed the various species of Bedstraw I’d seen, and where I saw them. That was fun, and there were five species spread across North Wales, Mid Wales, Pembrokeshire, Bath and Cornwall. Madame woke up and asked if I was OK? 3.00am is a bad time for those kinds of discussion – at least it wasn’t a nightmare, and we’d had a good day’s wandering about; pub lunch; a couple of excellent finds and a major step forward with the breakthrough discovery that I could load WAV audio recordings files of plant findings straight into Notebook LM which positively relishes English plant names and Latin binomials issuing gentle corrections and straightening out misunderstandings. All my previous doubts have been resolved, and I’ve got a functioning workflow at last.

I know this is problematic for some, but Notebook LM is rapidly becoming my pocket tutor and data organiser. Oh, and I also made progress with identifying some new grasses and that meant getting to grips with identification keys – PLUS our youngest moved into his new flat after being evicted by a (barely Christian) charity under one of those noxious Section 21 orders, now abolished due to abuse. We also met some heartwarmingly nice people with whom we shared many interests and the Potwell Inn human kindness index leapt up three points, something of a record. We rarely listen to the news when we’re away.

What’s happening on the allotment while we’re here? Well we gave it a deep watering, especially in the polytunnel, before we left and there are a couple of allotment neighbours who have promised to keep an eye on things. Every day we scan the weather forecast and wonder what will be happening on our patch of earth. Bath is situated in the steep sided valley of the River Avon and surrounded by the outliers of the Cotswolds, which means that rain tends to fall on the hills rather than in the valley. But then, we’ve also often had heavy showers at home and discovered that the allotment – only 800 yards away – is still dry. The most accurate forecast amounts to looking through the window. Madame retains a passion for isobars, warm and cold fronts and all the rest which she gained at the research station where it really mattered, and thousands of trees could lose their blossoms to a sudden frost.

We even have some allotment planning software on my laptop and we’ve spent one rainy morning here bringing it up to date. Does that make us into a couple of old saddo’s ? Ask us that when we’re eating just-picked peas that make the frozen ones taste like bin waste; and ask us again when you taste one of our tomatoes just harvested and hot from the sun, or sweetcorn from the polytunnel that would make a badger faint with pleasure. As with every other human pursuit, the more we practice, the harder we work, the happier we get; so thanks for asking ….. we’re not saddo’s!

It rains every day in Cornwall and today is no exception and so I’m writing and Madame is reading a biography of the artist Gustav Klimt and reading aloud to me the bits she finds most interesting. I’m a man, so that’s the closest I can get to multi-tasking.

Bird’s foot truffle oil and other disasters

Close-up of a small flower with orange and yellow petals surrounded by green grass.
Lotus corniculatus

These past two days have been a revelation – although not a good one. and I’ve been left with just the embers of my project and on my knees, eyes streaming, trying to blow some life into them. The bright new day is yet to dawn.

Just to recap, I’ve been designing and now testing a new workflow for my botanical recording – attempting to make it faster, more accurate and less of a square peg when it comes to uploading into the round holed national databases; but rather like the time I rebuilt the engine of our Morris 1000 and left out the rotor in the oil pump, the flaws soon made themselves apparent when I road tested my bright new idea down here in Cornwall.

There’s a lane outside the campsite which begins as the metalled road down to a large house, presumably once part of a home farm at the centre of the big estate. It then continues as a footpath above what’s now a hay meadow for a couple of hundred yards, across a stile into a patch of scrubby woodland for a little way until it joins a very pretty deep sided sunken track which leads to the beach via another track heavily decorated with dog poo bags making the exploration of its botanical residents a bit hazardous. The fact that it’s Madame’s favourite walk makes it easier to smuggle in a bit of road resting. Sometimes. Although I’ve never formally surveyed the plants along with its several micro-environments, it’s the perfect place to learn. So here it is; the method …..

Step one attach the microphone and receiver ready to record all the details for later, and when the plant is spotted, record them in one continuous packet of data – Problem – I talk too much and instead of recording just the details, the recording features too many oohs aahs and miscellaneous grunts and strange noises. Worse still comes later when I load the recording into the transcription software.

Step two – take a quick photo on Flora Incognita to get a reference picture with a provisional name. Problem – no internet signal. But I do get a time and unreliable location so as to link the data together later

Step three – take any measurements that I might need later and note them for the audio

Step four – take more reference photos on the Olympus camera which can do macro and has better resolution. Problem – stiff winds make focusing on grasses a complete nightmare. I either need to take a small piece of board as a background or uproot specimens to photograph later – not ideal and sometimes illegal.

Step five– take GPS reading and photograph it on the phone or note it. This ties it all together. Problem – remember to figure out how to reset the GPS to gather the current location and write it down (data separation hazard) or record it. Need to write a short script and stick to it.

Step six – record all the data; names, grid reference and measurements etc in a standardised form that AI can understand.

Step seven– back at the ranch, run the audio through the transcription software and edit if necessary. This is where the system totally collapsed because I was using the free Google Record app which handles ordinary conversation pretty well, but went to bed with a headache at the sound of plant names and just fainted at Latin binomials. I tried to edit the result but it was terribly time consuming so I recorded a page from John Wright’s “Grasslands” to give it another chance. This was a great laugh, with Bird’s foot Trefoil being rendered as Bird’s foot truffle oil, and the blameless little Eyebright – “Euphrasia nemorosa, the commonest form” unaccountably branded as the communist form. Obviously this level of inaccuracy is beyond the editing powers of any AI programme. The plan was to feed these pre-digested dollops of data into Notebook LM and ask it to sort them into a spreadsheet in correct order to pass through the pearly gates of head office; every single entry checked against the great canonical parchments.

Step eight – this was meant to be the bit where I closed the reference books and where I modestly admitted that the new workflow was a triumph, instead of which there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. When I remonstrated with Google Gemini it almost cracked a robotic joke and said the bird’s foot truffle oil sounded like the salad dressing from hell! (now that is scary – it’s cracking jokes already).

However – I’m an eternal optimist – there are some tweaks I can see which fall short of carrying a mobile router around with an aerial tied to my bandana. It’s helped me see how to improve my photographs to get better results – especially with grasses and I’ve learned a lot about identifying grasses – which was one of my targets. I’m pleased to say that I’ve added five more grass species to my total. We also met a Swedish woman and talked about the yellow flowered strawberries that grow down the lane. We thought they were probably poisonous but she said they used to eat them in Sweden but they were insipid and not that sweet. She doesn’t eat them here because of the dog poo that gets everywhere. After a few days of wind and rain the sun has now come out and Madame is cooking a dish of ratatouille as a punishment for my distraction. Over the twenty years we’ve been coming here the village has become more and more gentrified. The local spar shop now sells curated wines, amalfi lemons and “pain de campagne” and an ice cream next door sells for £4.50 a scoop. Here are a few pictures from the entirely un-gentrified lane. They’re all weeds, but nonetheless rather charming in their blunt honesty. It’s a very under-recorded little paradise and one day I’ll bite the bullet and do a proper survey.

A short message from paradise

Close-up of a cluster of flowering plants with pinkish buds and delicate green leaves in a natural setting.
Wild Carrot, Daucus carota ssp carota

I could as easily have subtitled this post “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” so as to join together our being in one of our favourite places in the country – the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall – and linking it with AI. One half of the couplet represents all that’s good and the other the spawn of satan.

We arrived here completely knackered after days of work on the allotment getting it ready for our temporary absence and a couple more days of readying the campervan for its inaugural long drive after the troubles (new engine, clutch, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Up at five am only to discover that the roof had leaked in a place it had never leaked before – we quickly sorted it and set off in gathering sunshine for a long drive at a stately sixty in honour of the engine; “she being brand new and consequently a little stiff “. That last bit was a quote from a poem by ee cummings which a musty old critic once described as only fit for adolescents. I haven’t aged a day!

Musty old critics have had their field day over AI as well – marching en mass under the banner of the goose quill pen and denouncing AI vehemently, claiming to protect the masses from evolving technology. Good luck with that then, although Google seems to have messed up their latest software update on my watch which insists that I only slept for three hours last night. It was ten hours and I felt all the better for it.

So part of the purpose of this trip is to field test a new plant recording system and that’s where the AI comes in. Knowing a place like this really well has its advantages for rehearsing a new way of plant recording; not least that I’ve already put in the hard miles for most of the species. But anyone who gets interested in plants and wildflowers will know that there are some very common species that are extremely hard to tell apart. So part of the aim is to revisit the difficult ones and see whether I can distinguish the trees from the wood. In preparation I picked three brain teasers and posed a question on Google Gemini. “How do I distinguish A from B” . The first one sounds easier than it is in practice. How do I distinguish between a wild Carrot and a sea carrot? In a few seconds the AI answer dealt with two things – the hows and the whys of wild carrots v sea carrots. The how is demonstrated in the photo at the top. It’s a wild carrot growing on a clifftop near here and that’s because the flower head is in the process of forming a basket/ lobster pot shape. But then you might well ask – what’s an ordinary wild carrot doing on a sea cliff? and the answer is that wild carrots normally grow in and around arable fields and sea carrots grow near the sea. BUT, growing close together, they readily hybridize and so in Cornwall where the arable fields often come to the clifftop with only a footpath between and so there are a lot of what we might call cousins that look somewhere between the two. My mind is at ease because the hybrid plants can be assigned to the (very large) category of WOB’s the walk on by’s.

The other two questions were necessarily more general – what specific details should I record with photographs and all the other tools – hand lens, ruler etc in order to distinguish and identify the other big families grasses (Poaceae) and the huge family of Dandelion/ daisy lookalikes. In a few moments Gemini gave me a brilliant crib sheet to take out on my adventures. Traditionalists may take a couple of minutes here to rearrange their scowls in case the wind changes and they get stuck with lemon faces. Each and every record will be taken home to my study and interrogated with the books.

Until the plant apps bed in – which they soon certainly will, the old way is still the final arbiter; but I can foresee a day when taxonomy will be a matter of taking a clipping from a specimen with a hand-held DNA analyser. How you might challenge an identification after it’s been deified by its genes by a person in a white coat who’s never as much as sniffed a rose is not one I’ll live long enough to worry about.

The thing about AI is that we have to make the cultural move from knowing everything by rote towards asking better and better questions. The skills of the future will lie in knowing how to extract the maximum good science through a question that’s as sharp as a samurai sword.

We’re having a recovery day first and apart from lazing around and snoozing I’ve been looking at photos of the allotment plants as if they were our children, and reading John Wright’s excellent new book Grasslands. A further search with AI revealed that grasses are by far the most numerous species if you exclude the 57 varieties (OK thousands, then) of the apomicts which have dispensed with messy sex and just clone themselves; Dandelions and Blackberries are two of the other culprits here in the UK. The following two species in numerical order are the daisy (dandelion) family, then the Sedges and the roses. I can’t see myself getting bored anytime soon.

There’s not a great difference between learning to live a virtuous life, reaping the benefits of eudaimonia (flourishing) and learning to make better plant records. They both require constant practice – which is one of two reasons that we’re here. The other reason is the joy of walks near the sea. There is – I suppose – a third reason which is far less virtuous. The botanical societies tend to cling to traditional ways, and getting records through the minefields and the heavily guarded portals into the universe of scientific data can be a tortuous and Kafkaesque experience. I should know. I worked inside a conservative organisation (the C of E) for 30 years and I learned that these organizations will never abandon a regulation without a decade of bloodshed. I’m trying to develop a personal recording method that will shortcut the traffic jams by providing exactly what the gatekeepers are asking for. I’m not trying to change anything, I’m plotting a path through the maze.

Our allotment just grew up

A wooden raised garden bed filled with dark soil, surrounded by plants and trees in a garden setting.
The final set of four raised beds

The ambiguity in that title was entirely deliberate. It was some time last year when we were standing on the allotment and I said to Madame – “It suddenly looks as if it has matured”. Whatever it is – possibly the fruit trees which have really got their roots down, but also the fact that all the wooden structures are greyed and in some cases needing replacing; the polytunnel is theoretically due a new skin which we can’t really afford, and somehow when you add it all up it looks as if it’s been around the block a few times and decided to settle down to middle-age.

Of course, looked at through the eyes of love (how else should you look at ten years of your gardening life?) – it’s what the scholars call a palimpsest. Back in the day when writing was an expensive luxury, the materials were used more than once and traces of a previous, older message, letter or even book could be discovered lurking faintly under the younger. It’s exactly the same for our grown-up allotment. Every bed, and almost every other structure is just the latest version of an older one; complete with previous soil level, old screws and joints betraying their previous history. Beds have been re-purposed and re-designated over the years and the soil improved with tons of compost and leaf mould. Where once there was a difficult mix of clay and loam, there’s a much more fertile, sweeter smelling and friable soil. Despite all our efforts to find the best place to grow strawberries they migrated without any intervention from us to a spot in the lee of the polytunnel where they’re completely happy. Who says that plants can’t talk!

The latest batch of four raised beds are actually the top of four deep compost bins that I sawed in half horizontally a few weeks ago because they’d become an unofficial dump. They’ll be replaced by a single California Cylinder made from two concentric rings of sheep wire filled with cardboard and with a rough and ready chimney driven through the middle. It’s an idea we got (I think) from Lawrence Hills and it works a treat and heats up fast with the help of what he called “human activator” and you can work that one out for yourselves. An alternative activator is comfrey liquid but be warned, it really stinks.

Recycling of old materials isn’t just virtuous, it’s cheap. The eight beds I’ve just finished cost the price of a few new screws and some additional topsoil and compost for the new growing layer. I saved all the original topsoil in bags – they were hellishly heavy – and filled the resulting holes with fresh vegetable waste, cardboard and wood chip, then I put the original topsoil back on top and augmented it. The good soil is now 18″ deep and will be perfect for growing show-off carrots and parsnips.

The only constant factor in an allotment seems to be the unexpected. Last year’s pepper plants bought from a garden centre turned out to be Scotch Bonnets. We now have a lifetime supply of dried chillies. Each season is spent in negotiation with the weather, and with climate change advancing rapidly the old certainties and folk rhythms are becoming redundant. This year, for instance May and June swapped places whilst April showers were in short supply, and all we can do is ride with the volatility of the weather.

And so we soldier on. The allotment is less tidy and yet more interesting as the years go on. Plants come and go – last autumn the Tayberry got a savage pruning and this year the blackberry has stopped sulking after two transplantings and is, at last, showing the will to live. When we first moved on to it as an unkempt field we thought of the plot as a blank canvas on which we could do as we pleased. In the fullness of time we’ve realized that we can only do as it pleases – which turns out to be a much happier experience. The asparagus bed went the way of all flesh and now hosts a crop of new potatoes. The approach we adopt is a form of informed imagining in which we propose an idea, dispose the place in which we want to grow it by preparing the ground and selecting the spot and then leave it to nature to say yea or nay. Some we win and some we lose and that’s OK too. Allotments, like their tenants have previous history. Ours was probably once part of a Roman vineyard and then a nursery and has probably been in some kind of cultivation for a couple of millennia. Going back even further the origin of our soil is alluvial clay and loam formed by the ebb and flow of the river as it cut its valley through the soft oolitic limestone. We dig up fragments of clay pipes abandoned by the Georgian gardeners and some time in the future some hapless archaeologist could puzzle over the multitude of sea shells that stowed away in the bags of seaweed we once brought back from Lleyn to feed the asparagus. We may think that we live in the moment but as gardeners we only thrive within and upon the past. Some of the plants we grow we choose, and some that grow just happened in on the wind, dropped by a bird or attached to a car tyre. All gardeners have to learn to rule kindly and lightly over their kingdoms. We may think of ourselves as owners of our plots but in truth they own us and we can do nothing except by their permission. As butterflies and migrant birds cross the channel sans passports and permits so too do seeds, insects, plant diseases and all of the thousand things that charm us and taunt us. Most of the troubles of the world are due to people who misguidedly believe in control. We bend with the wind if we want to grow crops while growing ourselves comes free but not cheap.

A few good things that gardening brings us without going full guru.

A close-up of a cluster of hollow plant stems, showcasing their circular openings and colourful outer layers, surrounded by green foliage and a garden backdrop.
This is a home made insect hotel made from Angelica stalks. No takers!

Instinctively; the statement that Being in Nature and gardening is good for us is a no-brainer. You’ll notice the grace bestowing capital B on Being. But that doesn’t stop me from asking “Where’s the evidence Dave? – especially since time in the bosom of nature is now available on prescription on the NHS. We can say that all too many new gardeners end up in A&E with fork through boot syndrome, or infected thorns; back trouble and even coronaries; so, like sleep remedies and strong painkillers, nature and gardening are probably approached cautiously being both addictive and potentially lethal.

However – and you knew that was coming – and speaking entirely for myself; controlled immersion seems to have some great side effects. I’m absolutely not trying to be an influencer here I’m simply saying how it works for me and if that’s an encouragement to anyone I’m delighted as long as you don’t overdo it. Thirty years ago I found a lovely and inspirational book about fitness for the over fifties and got my first gym subscription. I absolutely loved it, especially as I discovered that however sweaty and painful it got – it made me feel better. But our bodies and brains get older, slower and less reliable as time goes on and now, with 80 just a few months away Madame and I have a large allotment which involves a fair amount of lifting, carrying, digging and banging in posts all or any of which have exact equivalents in the gym. For what it’s worth, after a long fallow year with various complaints now fixed by the glorious NHS, the allotment has increased my strength and stamina and radically improved the arthritis – especially in my hands. The other unexpected side effect is that constantly negotiating narrow paths and beds whilst harvesting, hoeing and weeding have improved my balance. Gardening has made me feel well, and that soaks into my mood. Having plants to care for and particularly having agency in planning it, really is good for the soul – whatever that might be! And of course the allotment produces food; fresh lovely food uncontaminated by any chemicals at all and in all kinds of ways; once again the cooking and eating makes us feel good. So ten out of ten for doctor allotment. On a day like today with the sun on my back there’s no better medicine than preparing a patch of warm earth where we’ll grow winter squashes and a giant pumpkin for the grandchildren at hallowe’en .

The other work; reading, researching and recording the plants especially the waifs, strays and sturdy beggars that eke out an urban living between cracks in the pavement, keeps the brain active, curious and grateful for the sheer diversity of nature in cities. My childhood was spent playing on bombsites and derelict houses, old coalmines and abandoned brickworks so these plants were my first hefting. My second hefting took place in the very centre of this deindustrialized neighbourhood – on Rodway Hill, where I went to school and I explored an entirely different environment on the tiny cap of old red sandstone which, I now know, hosted a rare patch of lowland acid heath – the name of which I only discovered a few months ago. I was so delighted to discover that the harebells were diagnostic of habitats I grew to love in other places without ever knowing the reason they were related by an accident of geology. Yes, wild places are good for us as long as we allow ourselves time to wonder why they are as they are.

The key to it all is complete engagement with the wild and the reward is those flow moments when the world stands still and we escape our restless minds and let the earth do the talking. Whatever it is – this strange capacity of nature to bring us to our senses – it’s relational. Rather like falling in love we have to relinquish ourselves, step aside from our neediness and make space for the other. And that’s as far as I’m prepared to go down the narrow path to spirituality. True flourishing is so much deeper than simply doing well for ourselves. All of Aristotle’s virtues are learned and practiced through relationships and our biggest mistake is to believe that money and success can be a substitute for real happiness. That we can somehow shortcut around the messy and difficult business of relationships and avoid thinking at all about our place in nature. We are in nature, we are of nature and like the earth herself we are vulnerable and needy. If that thought troubles anyone I’n sorry; but if you find it comforting then you’re halfway there already!

It feels as if I’ve been scraped by a random bot!

A red digital camera with a black strap, a Garmin Etrex handheld GPS, a smartphone with a cracked screen, and a small microphone with a furry windscreen, all placed on a wooden surface.
Miniature waterproof camera with macro lens capacity, knackered Pixel Phone 6a,;cheapest available GPS (phone GPS is very inaccurate and unreliable and field microphone with “dead cat” windshield and receiver. In the other pocket and not photographed, hand lens, 6″ mm ruler and extending carpenter’s tape.

Sitting in bed reading during the week, Madame emitted a noise somewhere between a screech and a hoot and waved her Pixelbook at me. “Look at this!” she said, with a great grin. I leaned over and with the wrong glasses on completely failed to interpret the page or draw any conclusions from it. Then she said “I just typed in a question about Mexican Marigolds – Tagetes minuta and up came the Potwell Inn alongside the RHS and Sarah Raven. I felt like the little child at the pantomime who gets chosen to go up on the stage and help Buttons find his hat. Such is the indiscriminate nature of AI bots that I was swept to prominence simply writing something about it recently. The RHS will have warned about its aggressive nature, and Sarah Raven sells the seed so she thinks it’s alright. All I wrote was that it’s certainly not a miniature it’s a six foot monster that will leave thousands of seeds in your soil if you let it flower. However it has a reputation for deterring pests and even (and I’m crossing myself here) – deters bindweed. In this drought we’ve had a badger digging up our wood chip paths in search of food every night and even he leaves those devil’s guts behind. So when it comes to organic pest control, we’re staging the battle of the giants on our allotment!

Thank goodness this drought is slowly losing its grip and we’ll soon be released from the chore of endless watering. Given the season we’ve been keeping dozens of seedlings and transplants alive under temperatures in excess of 30C, and I’ve still got to join four more 250 litre tanks together to store water when, (not if), we’re plunged into another one. Sorry about that dreadful pun. One of my favourite occupations on the allotment is a bit of civil engineering.

So things are going reasonably well tand we’ve been getting the work done very early in the mornings while its still cool. Our family seem to have come out on top of all their crises with one having the best weather ever for a family seaside holiday, another being promoted to the kind of job he’s always dreamed of after a period of great uncertainty, and the third finding a lovely flat after being evicted in the rush of Section 21 orders. If there is a hell, it’s going to be crowded with greedy landlords.

Meanwhile I’ve been focusing on developing a completely new way of recording plants, combining new technologies of lightweight cameras, GPS systems and a tiny field speech microphone and transmitter to organise all my plant data into one place – rather than spread over half a dozen notebooks (mixed up with shopping lists and telephone numbers) and constantly lost pens; photos that have to be searched for individually among the thousands and a persistent failure on my part, to record half of the details I need to make a proper record.

Typically, on my first dress rehearsal on the allotment yesterday, I talked too quickly for the recorder to transcribe, the lanyard of the camera kept banging against the microphone, I didn’t follow my own procedure and jumbled up the notes and never even thought of establishing a temporary ID using an image recognition app because I ran out of hands. You might call it a learning opportunity but I’d have to hit you because I knew a glorious and hilarious cock-up when I read the transcript back. Notebook LM (AI) – which was supposed to do the heavy lifting simply shrugged and walked away claiming that without more contextual information there was nothing it could do.

Ah well, I’ve been through this before. Computers are very single minded and can’t make silk purses from sows’ ears, but like all new technology, they demand practice. Luddites, and there are many, dismiss the whole idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence without understanding that it requires the user to formulate exquisitely focused questions; and these can only arise out of a deep understanding both of the subject and the way the computer “thinks”.

This is anything but taking the lazy option, because every plant observation that’s properly recorded, then has to be thoroughly tested against the standard texts i.e. the old way because we’re not yet at the stage where the new technology is 100% reliable. In fact it probably never will be. It’s all very exciting, but it all begins with catching a glimpse of an unfamiliar plant, or of a familiar plant with an unfamiliar detail and knowing that it’s worth investigating.

We’ll soon be off to West Cornwall where I can test and practice the new methodology, hopefully without annoying Madame too much. It reminds me of a story about a famous pianist who was once praised by a fan who said “you’re lucky to be so talented.”-his reply was “- and the more I practice the luckier I get!” Amen to that.

So basking in my quite undeserved online reputation I’ve abandoned the pointless attempt to win the approval of the magisterium and grown my hair almost as long as when I was young and annoying my Dad. To my great surprise it came out curly – and white – and distinctly mad looking. This final thought comes from a much used catechism in church circles.

Question – what are the last six words always spoken in a church that closes down?

Answer – we always do it this way.

Back in the day there was an Anglo Catholic theological college (now closed down) whose motto was “Guard the good deposit” a quotation from St Paul, which was emblazoned on all of their china; including the chamber pots. Change really is in the air, and it’s always helpful to examine the good deposits – we all have funny habits – but really we should be prepared to replace them when they’re wrong and before they start to smell.

Finally some photos from yesterday’s disastrous rehearsal with part of its its unedited transcript. Beta minus I think – could do better.

Cut these cranesville then. This. Oh yeah, it’s got a huge leaky one really long six millimetres. So this one is Rough Meadow cross.

25th May 2010

Scenic countryside with lush green fields, grazing cows, and rolling hills in the background.

So it’s sixteen years since Andrew and I reached the highest point on the Aubrac Hills in Southern France. We’d – well I’d – failed to realize during the planning, that following a river can be a bit of a nightmare because every tributary makes its own valley and the line on a map becomes a relentless combination of long downhill valley-sides and punishing climbs to the crest of the next. We’d also failed to realize that the Camino has been monetized like everything else and was crowded with trippers who filled the cafes restaurants and refuges while we were carrying our rucksacks and all our possessions and often struggled to find somewhere to sleep, We did a lot of trespassing!

A winding dirt path through green vegetation, leading to a panoramic view of rolling hills and valleys under a clear blue sky.

But the hard work was redeemed by the wonderful scenery, the wildflowers (spring comes late in these high places) and a chance encounter with the transhumance – the seasonal festival that accompanies the movement of the cattle from their winter quarters in the valleys to the high pastures. If you look closely at the photograph you’ll see the cattle and their horns decorated with flags. We heard the clanging of bells and the sounds of celebration from miles away. Festivals in France have deep, deep roots and with many of the local villages quite isolated, the chance of a gigantic piss-up feels like all their market days in one. We watched from a distance and camped outside the towns where the riotous fun seemed to go on all night. The maximum height of the Aubracs in the Massif Central is around 3000 feet but I think we must have climbed it half a dozen times before we finally dropped down to Cahors. Somewhere up there I overheard a conversation between a couple of immaculately turned-out women from Nice when they spoke in tones of horror about a couple of elderly farmers we’d seen . “La France profonde!” one of them said.

As it happens I like La France profonde for exactly the same reason I love Wales. The culture is often a bit obscure to outsiders but its very isolation has protected it from withering away, and even ceaseless promotion by the tourist boards can’t seem to erode the central power with which it feeds a deep connection with the past, present and even the future. It ain’t cute, that’s for sure, but it’s the cultural matrix that frames life in a harsh place.

25th May 2026 – the same canicule, but a couple of decades later

Here in Bath we grow some, at least, of our own food in the centre of a Roman city which feels – today in the unseasonable heat- increasingly like Avignon. We shall call it Sulis en Provence and – like them – lay down our tools some time in July and spend the next six weeks in idling, chasing bulls down the streets trying to catch them by the tail, wearing white T shirts stained with red dye as a form of simulated bravery and getting very drunk whilst eyeing up the adoring girls and presumably boys as well. We should join the festivities and play football with the plentiful melons by the light of thousands of fireflies and breathe in the wine infused night air as if we might live forever whilst the gammon faced elders scream abuse into the internet because they couldn’t find anywhere to park their Range Rovers on the pavement. Ladies and gentlemen – at the risk of being thrown into prison by Sir Keir and the Brigade of Goons I’ll quote Eldridge Cleaver – “If you’re not part of the solution you must be part of the problem”. Interestingly when I verified that quotation on Google Gemini I got a little homily on the middle ground . Sadly the middle ground is on fire. The time for discussion, committees and forward planning seems to have passed us by.

In any case, we’re keeping a Provenĉal timetable here at the Potwell Inn. Rising at five followed by two or three hours on the allotment – mostly watering at the moment – and then breakfast followed by cooking, preserving and bottling as required and then writing; after which it’s eating and telly, avoiding the poisonous news and early to bed. Nil Carborundum is our motto. I’m celebrating my inner peasant.

Finally some photos of various places in France including a small chapel just beyond Le Puy en Velay, A park in Uzes near the Roman aqueduct to Nîmes, The Musketeers outside the cathedral in Albi and below that, the fortified Cathedral. Then there’s a scorpion that came to play, the bridge at Cahors, a street corner in Nîmes – that’s from memory; the beach at Collure, and a couple more from Uzès.

It’s said that figs prefer stony ground and produce more fruit when you prune their roots. Maybe that’s it. The aqueduct that crosses the Pont du Gard and goes through Uzès and on to Nîmes was sealed with the juice of figs. Maybe if I think of myself as a kind of fig, that story makes me feel better because some good comes out of the pain and – as Jung said – we’re most creative where we’re scarred. Perhaps spiritual energy really does flow like water in a thirsty place. I had my roots pruned on 20th June 2016. My European passport has since expired and I didn’t bother to renew it. I was rendered a stranger in a place I once felt at home and it was my own folk that did it.