Category: About the Potwell Inn

“Sir, I’ve lost me daps!”

This is a very rare photograph of Father Christmas’s footprints exiting the chimney about 14 years ago. You’ll also see how tired he must have been because he left the reindeer’s carrot behind although he drank the glass of wine and left a thank-you note on borrowed paper. What you probably won’t know unless you come from Gloucestershire, Bristol, North Somerset or South Wales is that he was wearing daps (you can tell by the shape of the prints) because – so my Dad told me years ago – he didn’t want to wake anyone up. Unless you come from one of those related areas you’ll have no idea what daps are in any case; they’re what posh people call plimsolls, thereby setting themselves apart from us. We are also almost the last redoubt of the glottal stop although we have no idea when the rest of the world lost it. It’s hard to learn but a decent speech therapist might (I mean might ) teach to to say bu’er instead of butter (the apostrophe is where you close your larynx and grunt against your vocal cords. On the Bristol edge of Gloucestershire we despise all words ending in “a” and substitute “l” for instance in Africal. He becomes ‘ee- the differences are minute but unmistakable. We use the words “gert” (big) and “lush” (nice) but never together as outsiders tend to do when they try to get alongside us. When it comes to the letter “r” the problem is not so much learning it, but for a local to say anything with an “r” in it without letting their true identity slip. It’s a well set snare for the Gloucestershire social climber. Lessons (in a small way) are available on the 39x bus to Bristol from Bath led by a recorded announcer who even manages to work a tiny glottal stop into Arno’s Court (as it appears in the timetable) but she says “Arnel’s Cor’t” adding the “t” as an afterthought to the minute g/s. I love her dearly and I would appreciate it if, next birthday, she would read me a bedtime story and make me feel young again. the Gloucestershire dialect is broad and generous, we even – and this is an absolute collector’s piece – have the soft mutation where the “t” in tram becomes “d” as in dram. A hangover from our surprisingly recent coal mining past.

This, of course is about the aftershocks of the cultural penny banger which followed my accidental lapse when speaking to a dog. In that piece – which is linked back above – I was puzzling on the extent to which my identity (most people’ identity) is tied up in language. I was born and brought up in Gloucestershire although the Local authorities conspired to move it into the Greater Bristol postcode, then Avon, and finally South Gloucestershire where it remains. So three different addresses without moving a yard. We who knew what daps were – and how to fox the PE teacher into letting you off games – were a people apart.

So what’s that all about? Well, a voice is a kind of signature; the signature of a local culture now barely audible except to eccentric wordsmiths like me. I don’t need reminding that AI can easily take my voice and get it to say unspeakable things; but if anyone who knew me heard me speaking that way they’d know it wasn’t me. I have a second password, and that’s my punctuation. You will notice that it’s really weird. Who uses so many hyphens, semi colons and far too many commas in writing? The semi colon is banned by every style guide except – I read somewhere – the Church Times. But through years of writing for radio slots, sermons and talks, punctuation has become the structure that glues the written content together. The punctuation manages the pace, the pauses and silences of my work so I can (as they used to say) “lift them off the page”.

At the top of each piece it says – “The Potwell Inn” a sort of anonymising conceit. Then if you hunt about a bit you’ll discover that this is written by someone who calls himself Dave Pole – but where’s the evidence? The evidence is in the voice, silly. It’s the one guarantee that this is written by me because it’s verifiable by anyone who’s heard me speak. This is by no means always a pleasure. I was once wandering around the supermarket chatting to people here and there when I was accosted by a women who said “are you Dave Pole?” Thinking she must have heard me on the radio I tried not to look too pleased that she’d recognized my voice. But she just said rather disappointedly – “Oh, I thought you were tall”.

I am not tall. I am short, old now, a bit fat and contain no silicone anywhere about my person so I wouldn’t feel confident enough to expose myself in visual form (yet). Video is a bit of a faff in any case, but the equipment I use for audio hardly weighs anything and sits on my desk next to the laptop which is very clever and frees me from the hard earned skill of cutting and joining bits of reel to reel tape together with a cutting block, razor blade and some special editing sticky tape.

So a slow move towards including a bit more audio in the Potwell Inn posts feels like a no-brainer. I started researching the kit I’d need in April, and it’s all sitting in front of me now. However, like the story of the Zen archer forgetting what a bow is, I can’t really start producing audio properly until I’ve stopped worrying about the kit and concentrate entirely on the words. But I’m as optimistic and excited as I was when I discovered clay – and Madame of course!.

For now it’s practice, practice , Practice while the Potwell Inn will meander on just the same like the river across the green but hopefully with less crap in it. .

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with a dog.

Well it wasn’t quite a conversation. I was holding a gate open for Madame when a dog – it was a Springer spaniel – rushed past me nose down, hoovering up a scent line as they do, head low and moving from side to side, tail held almost straight out in a don’t bother me, I’m busy – sort of fashion. I could see its owners about 30 yards back on the track and I said to the dog “Hello you”. The dog being otherwise engaged barely paused to look at me and stopped his forward dash, turned on a sixpence and ran back to his owners. I walked on with Madame and, maybe thirty yards later, a light went on in my head and I realized I’d not only spoken to the dog but I’d spoken in dialect. I was so taken by this slip (I’ve had many decades of practice at not slipping into dialect and I think it was because I was talking to a dog. “You” – used as a pronoun in Gloucestershire used to be confined to strangers and could be construed as faintly hostile. I worked as a labourer in an engineering company when I was about seventeen; after leaving school unceremoniously accompanied by the Headmaster who had me by the shirt collar. This company was in the process of moving from farm buildings to sheet metalworking and chemical engineering and highly skilled (coded) welders were worth their weight in gold. Twin brothers were the welding superstars; they’d both worked on pressure vessels in nuclear power stations and they were so indispensable to the company that they freely abused the managers with the most foul insults. I learned a great deal from them. Anyway, to get back to the point, they never addressed me as anything other than “you”. They would invariably greet me with a surly “alright you?” which absolutely did not require an answer.

But why the sudden “you”? was it because it still lives there unused in my everyday conversations? the bedrock language of my locality. It still seems very precious to me. When I go to the local sawmill to buy posts for the allotment, all the people on the counter speak like me – not like my dad who was Bristolian, or my mum who came from deepest Oxfordshire – but like the language of my childhood’ the language that A F Woodman our Music teacher would try to din out of us. “Boughten” was one of his pet hates. “Thee” and “thou” still had some lingering currency among our elders. When I hear it echoed today it moves me, makes me feel at home, because in its dropped aitches and extended aar sounds, in its you’s and thee’s and its overall timbre and slow pace it gives me a place, a location. Without a local accent of some kind, words are like bus stops without a grid reference – meaningless until you know where to find them. The minute particulars of pronunciation function like tags; they signal important information about the speaker and their message to any listeners who are attuned to the patterns. The last person I knew who spoke full Gloucestershire was Lenny Clark, a fine gardener who died a few years ago. The difference between you and thee , like the French tu and vous are important indicators of relationship and we’ve let them go, although the now redundant differences in speech still express the same divisions in society. Some like to imagine that people who cling to local speech patterns are slow witted and stupid. I think that those people who speak like politicians without giving any clue where they come from, and what background, what hinterland they have – are the true citizens of nowhere. When they appear on the national news I make tea because the voice of authority hides behind received pronunciation – it’s disembodied, bloodless. I don’t suppose there’s much trace of Gloucestershire in my voice these days but that’s where I come from.

There are two bits of data you need to plan any journey on a map. Firstly you need to know where North is but crucially you need to know exactly where you are, where the starting point is on the map. If a harbour is the place a hero sets out from, not knowing where you belong, where you’re starting from, means you’re lost as soon as you sail over the horizon.

I used to walk with a retired farmhand on the banks of the river Severn, and one day he amazed me by naming, with their local names, the fields almost a mile away on the far side of the river. When I speak, I speak with the ghostly voices of my dad, a railwayman; my mother, a dressmaker; my grandfather, a carpenter and smallholder; and all the people I’ve known – not least the already mentioned A F Woodman who taught me to love music, and Chris Levinson who introduced me to the Beat Poets. I went to a so-called technical school but listened to the voice of Chaucer read in its rich original dialect by another English teacher, and learned French from a teacher who seemed to have spent the war in France. There’s a lot of freight in a voice if you care to honour it, and none at all in the aetiolated speech of those who’ve left their history in the dustbin. Losing thee means we have no way of signalling a whole stage of human connection.

This is not in any sense an appeal to return to a kind of local tribalism but to escape the awful snobbery of the tribe which most often causes the trouble and whose dialect history has been brushed away by many coats of magnolia so they can advance in their social class. A truly diverse society wouldn’t insist on young people airbrushing their local dialects out of existence. We can all learn to hear each other. I barely speak a word of Welsh but even I can hear in a sentence or two whether the speaker is from North or South Wales , or Pembrokeshire, or somewhere in the borders west of the Severn, or from the Valleys where I once worked for a while running worker-writers’ workshops.

I called the dog “you” instinctively because we didn’t know one another. The dog, possibly understanding the nuance scooted back to its owner. I think that’s quite wonderful – how about thee?

The River Severn at Purton

The imagination doesn’t work with footnotes

We think – more of an informed guess, really, that this is an Arkansas Black apple tree. Very small but highly perfumed fruits.

In his famous 1961 book Weeds & Aliens Sir Edward Salisbury (1886–1978), an eminent British ecologist and a former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, described an informal experiment after returning home from a walk through the countryside. He noticed that the turn-ups of his woollen trousers were full of mud and burrs.

Instead of brushing the debris away, he scraped out the dirt from his trouser cuffs and planted it. Salisbury was surprised when the tiny amount of soil yielded over 300 individual plants representing more than 20 different species.

  • The answer to my question “who was it” – an AI question on Google Gemini

I thought I’d better own up to that bit of AI because it seems that some saddos enjoy knocking down writers because they’ve sailed too close to someone else’s writing. It seems that for that kind of tiny mind, every semicolon needs to be the sole unaided work of a single creative mind. Give me a break! the logosphere is one huge whirlpool of language forged and forgotten over millennia. I’ve been reading Alice Oswald’s new book “Rhapsody – a manifesto” and you would probably love it as much as me if you’re sick of the tired old clichés about solitary bohemians and geniuses and their entourages of critics, editors, gallerists and curators.

So I picked that story about Sir Edward Sainsbury’s trouser bottoms because it’s such a good illustration of the way in which creative minds really work. I go for a walk on the allotment with my mind open and alert while my metaphorical turn-ups fill with seeds for new posts. My botanical mind asks “who, what, where and when” but my creative mind asks “why”. Why has this Peruvian Apple landed on our plot and how did it get here? What does it mean? what’s it for?

We have robins which just love it when we break open the soil and expose grubs for them to feed their families. They’re very tame, and come to our feet unafraid even singing their minor key songs to us. Yes they’re highly territorial -we once had to evict a couple of fighting males from the fruit cage before they really damaged one another. There are many other birds on the allotment site and I speak to them all and clap my hands to scare off the pigeons from our cabbages. Occasionally a magpie will attempt to rag a nest nearby and the sky is full of spite and venom and alarm calls. One day I saw something moving in a hedge and I stopped to look closer. After a while a wren cautiously came to the edge and immediately hurried back into the shelter. I was taken aback by my unexpected love for it. I stop and consider that word, “love” – but enjoy; like; admire, don’t come close in intensity. It seems to me that most of those relationship terms demand reciprocation but it didn’t matter that my burst of love for the wren needed no response or even recognition on its part

Apples, on the other hand are a bit difficult because they’re so hard to give names to. Madame’s old boss, George Gilbert, could name the variety with ease – he’d lived and breathed them for a lifetime. For us, it means long searches in databases and through books written fifty or more years ago. The apple at the top was – we were told – a French variety called L’Abri Noir. We were never convinced, especially when I discovered that “abri” could be used for a carport. The romance rather drained out of that one . It was Belgian in any case. But the American Arkansas Black is a closer fit – and now we know its likely name it’s easier to treasure.

Apple trees have a distinctive shape. You wouldn’t think this could conceivably be contentious but I once had a bit of a row with a lecturer who scoffed at any thought that they had a distinctive form and rejected my black and white painting in house paint on a piece of cardboard. But he was wrong. There’s a distinctive downward curve in the branches that could be caused by the weight of apples season by season, or might be a genetically determined feature. Whatever the cause, it’s easy to pick out an apple tree by its shape – and a world in which creatures and plants are known and loved by name is a better place.

All of which comes back to Sir Edward Sainsbury’s trouser turn-ups. Of course we can take a walk; enjoy the sunshine and breathe the fresh air, return home and think”that was nice”. But a walk with the senses screwed up to eleven never returns home empty handed. Half the fun of writing a blog like this is opening the box of remembered treasures and stringing them together into some form of story. Narrative; the spinning of yarns, poems, songs, prayers and laments is fundamental to our humanity. Overheard remarks, captured glances, rich gossip, all contribute to our sense of who we are and occasionally comfort and hold us safe in times of crisis

The point of all this is that the creative imagination doesn’t work with rules, templates and footnotes. The creative mind is shamelessly jackdaw-ish. Always happy to take someone else’s insight and work it into something new. I always try my best to give credit to the originator of a borrowed phrase or idea, but sometimes they just come out of the flow. I’m pretty sure that some of my pieces have taken on a second existence on someone else’s site and I know for sure that the entire million plus words and thousand plus postings have been scraped into the large language AI models. It would be nice to have some acknowledgement as a source but I’d love it if it was shared with a credit and link to the Potwell Inn.

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I suddenly realized that this tree could be Granny Perrin’s Nest.

Looking out of the bedroom window yesterday morning I had a small scale revelation; nothing huge but more of a bicycle tyre lever, gently easing an old memory off the rim in search of a leak. There’s a tall tree, a couple of roads north of the flat, and which rises above the roof line. I’ve no idea what species it is; it could be a Lombardy poplar – but without ever hauling it into consciousness I’ve been using it for years as a weather forecaster. There’s a companion met office rival a bit further away; the church clock on Julian Road which you can only hear chiming in a northeasterly wind. But yesterday, and returning to the tree, I could see it being bent by a gusty southwesterly wind – and that simple observation is the gateway to a great deal of useful information to a gardener. In itself that’s a mundane thought but a moment later the phrase “Granny Perrin’s nest” popped into my mind and my memory dropped into time travel mode.

Granny Perrin’s nest is an expression my Mum used to use when my sister and I stayed in our grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns. Mum would look up at some unfathomable point in the sky and say – “there’s rain over Granny Perrin’s nest”. As a child with a seedling poetic imagination it was a phrase of great beauty; pregnant with incomprehensible meaning but clearly something I would need to understand if I was ever going to be a grown-up. Yesterday I looked it up on Google Gemini just in case – in my eightieth year – it might finally crack the code and print the admission ticket.

I was completely taken aback by the result. This is a phrase that I’ve mentioned a number of times in this blog, and – here and there – I’ve mentioned childhood memories of The Crest – the cottage my grandfather built and the smallholding where I learned about nineteenth century farming at first hand. As I looked at the computer screen every word I’ve ever written about it had been scraped and stored by AI and, far more troubling, augmented by some local information and kneaded into a narrative with a completely spurious authority. My childhood memories refined and curated by a machine and spewed out as facts. I felt a bit violated to be honest; as if the AI had forensically scraped my childhood off the pavement and reconstructed an unwise night out at the pub. All the bits were there but they weren’t me. No lights lit up. I would never have joined those dots in the way that the machine did because there was none of the fuzzy logic of the mind. My Mum was missing; my grandfather with his unbuttoned shirt and jacket full of burn holes from the roll-ups that lived in the corner of his mouth; my Granny sweating and cursing over the paraffin stove; the chickens, Charlie the toad in the greenhouse. I suppose I should give credit to the suggestion that Granny Perrin’s nest referred to a tall elm, and support for my memory that there were still a few red squirrels but none of these were my memories. I only remember the grey squirrels which my grandfather would knock out of trees with a weighted stick so he could claim a bounty on the tails. I dread to think that some innocent enquirer might, one day, unleash these curated memories as if they were facts.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn? We worry about the power of AI but it seemed to me that it’s not behaving like an organised crime syndicate (at least at the information gathering level) but as a kleptomaniac or shoplifter criminally entering my mind and indiscriminately shoving everything into a bag marked swag, to be sold on in the dark web of plausible untruths.

Granny Perrin’s nest is, and always was a metaphor. My mum never for a moment thought that there was a real nest up there at the top of the tree, with an elderly lady living in it, issuing weather forecasts. It was a piece of folklore with a useful predictive truth about weather. The world of story and song is full of these instances and they can travel, even as far as a city like Bath so that I can listen out for the church bell which always brings cold winds, or the bending of the tree which tells me about atlantic weather approaching.

The great elm trees would have been used by the bodgers in the nearby woods who made the most wonderful Windsor chairs and other fancies using elm, which doesn’t split, for the seats and beech or some other locally available timber for the other parts. We would often walk through the woods to Margaret’s beer shop as our parents delicately named it, and eat crisps and drink cherryade. My grandfather was a carpenter whose family had lived in the same village since the 18th century. He made us rainbows with a stirrup pump and a bucket of water. My Granny was a cockney, brought up within earshot of the Bow Bells as an orphan. We never knew how she was brought up and cared for. Layer after layer of meaning that resonates for me, reduced to a handful of gradgrindian facts by heartless machine learning. And yet I often come across myself in some more or less caricatured form on the internet. My God I’ve lived an interesting life, I think as Madame and I lie in bed holding hands and dreaming. Our mother loved her plants and she would never visit a garden without indulging in a bit of harmless larceny; these memories gather around me like an incandescent ball of fireflies; immune to capture. Let’s not call it intelligence any more – it’s not spreadsheet knowledge it’s more of an address book for locked rooms which no AI agent will ever be able to enter. No one reading them off a screen in the future will be able fully to enter their world. All it will tell is where you might begin to look for your own story.

I’m wondering if it’s me that’s heritage!

Is it me? I wonder, as I sit here surrounded by cables and what the tech industry chooses to call “heritage” equipment. A few weeks ago I was involved in contributing to a podcast on Zoom and had a few anxious moments when I discovered that the camera on my laptop was broken and the tablet I brought in as reserve refused to play. In the end I did it with my phone and it was fine; but it left me with a gnawing sense that I should sort it out. First stop was to enquire about mending the laptop, but it turned out that it would cost £180 just to take the screen off. Meanwhile my room is filled with a collection of old and new cameras – all capable of video – indeed my friend Phil Peel has made whole films on his Panasonic GH2 in the past. The video quality would be miles better than a cheap webcam and I’ve already got a radio mic so being a thrifty kind of person I dropped into a rabbit hole of competing and conflicting standards in search of a way to join the dots and build a recycled webcam setup.

I quickly discovered that my box of carefully curated bits and bobs was full of kit that fought like rats in a sack. This was – I learned- due to problems with “handshake”. The IT malarkey is a very vocabulary extending business. I also fought my way through multitudes of standards, connectors and Papal encyclicals while I began to run up a hefty connector bill with Amazon. It would have been easier to understand if everyone else wasn’t speaking Greek while I was speaking Latin but a week’s onscreen work, with my eyes very sore from a cataract operation, produced something like the Nicene Creed which only worked then because absolutely no-one understood it and I – like a blind man given a Rubik’s Cube – fiddled about randomly changing around the plugs from my growing collection until sulk by sulk the camera talked to the laptop; the hub found the sound and by a miracle it all found its way across the wild waves to the front room where Madame was waiting patiently for my ghostly face to appear, connected to a voice. Most of the previous hour we’d just been shouting to each other across the corridor.

Thrift is hard work. Another old friend, Harry Griffiths gave a wonderfully funny off the cuff speech at his 90th birthday when he finished a long excursus on apple trees and thrift by saying that the trouble with eating up the windfalls all the time was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The fact is, I’m not that interested in the IT at all. I begrudge the amount of time I spend learning new skills and new programmes because what I really want to do is get on with writing. The thrift is an ethical stance against premature obsolescence and waste. One of the main reasons I kicked the Apple (computers) habit was because I couldn’t stand the way that a 14 year old counter assistant curled his lip at me and said I should get a newer model when all it needed was a battery.

But now I’m almost there; just one new ‘Dp’ cable away from having to unplug and replug the old HDMI lead every time the laptop shuts itself down- so last year! – and then I can carry on experimenting with adding some video to the Potwell Inn feed. The biggest obstacle is getting the technicals under my belt to the point where I don’t even think about them. I’m used to “getting the script off the page” on the radio and I’ve got years of microphone technique under my belt. I once helped out with a recording of the Bible when – for a very small fee – I played the devil; typecast as always. They told me it went down a storm in Africa where they loved my accent. I had no idea that the devil came from Gloucestershire.

My biggest worry is that my readers will hate my voice and recoil from my weathered and ancient looks and frankly wild hair and turn to more sculpted and siliconised bloggers, but I cling to Samuel Beckett’s wise words –“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. Meanwhile I need to tidy up the clutter on my desk and ring the garage yet again. The campervan, having failed its MOT, is still baffling the experts with its record breaking emissions. Meanwhile here’s a nice picture of what my phone tells me is Ceylon spinach – growing in our neighbour’s polytunnel. Oh what a tangled web ….. etc. Then I’ve added some cautionary photos of leads in boxes. It should keep you awake. It did me!!

Castle Class 4-6-0 No 4079 – if you can name it you probably need professional help.

In the plant world there are the exact equivalents of famous railway engines worth hanging around at the end of a windy and wet platform for hours, and then, of course, there are the weeds. Steam engines still give me the shivers even seven decades after my first illicit cigarettes on the Pines junction waiting for the Cornish Riviera express to fly past. There’s a Castle Class plant in this gallery of rogues; in fact it may even be a Pacific Class but of course, because it was expressing no clouds of steam or haunting whistle I must have walked past it and failed to notice it for nearly fifty years before I finally put the time in and found it, sharing the moment with Madame – windswept and even eager to find it so we could go down to the cafe and get warm. It’s a very rare Quillwort so if you’re a fellow trainspotter you’ll know exactly where we were.

Sometimes these excitements just happen. I’ve had to stop any work that involves bending over (so no weeding or watering) while my cataract procedure heals, and so I was watching Madame weed a raised bed of carrots as she pointed to a tall but familiar looking plant poking through the crop. We both knew it was a nightshade of some sort, but there was something odd about the flower. Putting all doubts aside, I chucked it in the bucket with all the other weeds (mostly Fat Hen) and consequently there is no photo for the record and I have to consign myself to never being able to prove its identity. * but see postscript below

Later I realized that what was odd about it was that the flower wasn’t purple and yellow like its cousin Woody or its great aunt Thorn Apple, always blowing her own trumpet or Henbane with her lace collar and Deadly whose name exaggerates her gifts a bit with dull brown flowers but still as murderous a family as you could ever hope to avoid. This shy little assassin was a Black Nightshade with white flowers who hides her poison in shiny green berries which, joking aside, are a bit safer to eat when they’ve actually turned black, and I’m furious that I failed to take a photograph because it would have been (still is I suppose) a first for me.

Before I wrote this I thought I might try to work in the metaphor of trophies and tramps but it seemed a bit of a forced image and I’ve already been rude enough about the militant trainspotting tendency. (It takes one to know one)! But the whole idea for this little piece sprang precisely from my wilful failure to notice something growing on the allotment that we couldn’t eat; threw away without a thought and yet – given a bit of a reverse ferret – turned out to be really very interesting. How many other plants live and die under the radar because they have no immediate value to us. Just for starters, many of these little treasures have had a long and valuable life as herbal remedies – phytomedicines – if you must – before they were overtaken by big pharma who may have done us all a disservice by eliminating every molecule that wasn’t on their power list. And never think that herbal remedies should be eliminated because they can be poisonous. Just think of Paracetamol; and while we’re on the subject, don’t assume that herbal remedies strip the planet of protected species because I ran a check comparing the British list of rare and protected plants with the plants listed in the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia and there was just one single species listed as appearing in both lists. We are talking for the most part about what we now call weeds. It correlates well with being old (like me) which some younger people seem to believe is contagious; crossing the road to avoid the possibility of an outbreak of wrinkles and boring stories.

There’s a whole layer of cultural history down there at our feet, and ripping it all up or poisoning it because there’s no profit in it is ecological vandalism. As we consider this growing season just ending, and the five heatwaves that turned our legumes into lectin factories making them inedible and dangerous to eat raw, it’s a moment to consider our relationship with the earth. Is it purely instrumental? or is it something more. A history; a culture recorded in remedies and songs, times of plenty and times of starvation? are we too clever by half assuming that the shelves in Sainsbury’s will always be full? What does it say about us that we’re so content to destroy the lives of plants whose names we don’t even know and whose gifts we will never be able to benefit from; new cancer treatments, undiscovered strengths and properties that might give us some understanding of plant stress and how we can overcome it?

We live as if our allotment has just two layers – food at the top and dirt at the bottom. But what about that third layer that we simply ignore. Even the earth layer has its own lively presence, teeming with microscopic life and miles and miles of fungal threads, and the surface between earth and profit deserves better than being treated as if it were a plague of squatters. Nature hates bare earth and will always fill the bare patches with plants from across the world that have names and histories and gifts to give. Even dogs know that Couch Grass has valuable uses, and Ground Elder isn’t just a pest if you’ve got gout. We have to think that in tolerating weeds we may be entertaining angels unawares.

  • Postscript

So today we went up to the allotment to do a bit of harvesting and I made sure I took my phone so I could at least photograph the wilted remains of the Black Nightshade and now it will eventually reach the official database.

Dissecting a canary

Yes I know it’s not a canary exactly, but on the allotment it seems to be bringing a canary style announcement to the coal mine. The tomatoes on our allotment, although they looked OK (with a great deal of watering), and tasted fine even though it has been a much reduced crop, have no seeds; no descendants; no progeny. The canary is lying dead on the bottom of the cage and suggests that although they remained just about alive during the five consecutive heatwaves, they were suffering greatly and couldn’t stand the temperatures. They weren’t the only casualties this season. The legumes either failed altogether or failed to pollinate well. There’s a reason for all this; apparently pollen gets sticky in the heat and doesn’t transfer so easily from plant to plant leaving them seedless.

For a while I thought we’d got the first mutation to seedlessness that ever happened on a tomato but I soon realized that Darwin would have sucked his teeth and shaken his head. If the seed merchants have the same trouble as us, there will be almost no viable tomato seeds next year and the price would go through the roof. I’ve seen internet reports of sunflowers with no seeds, and our own sweetcorn only managed a couple of viable cobs on each plant, and the potatoes were very small and sparse. The newspapers are being told by farmers that this year is the worst cereal season for at least ten years. You can ask what the outcome of all this will be, but you can only answer it by accepting that “the local supermarket” is not the correct answer. We, collectively, created this problem and as sure as eggs is eggs we’re going to have to do something about the way we live if we’re not all going to suffer serious privation when the prices rise and the shelves are empty. The canary is lying dead on the floor and I did the autopsy.

Charlie our neighbour gave us a couple of Sungold F1 cherry tomato plants in late spring and we planted them outside in a raised bed. They got the same watering regime as the ones in the polytunnel but they’ve had no cracking or greenback and the fruit is delicious. The problem is obviously high temperatures but anyone with a very small greenhouse or a polytunnel will know that they’re fiendishly hard to ventilate at night, while at the same time protecting them from the “shoppers” who climb over the gate in the late evening and reap where they haven’t sown.

But one plant which appears to thrive under the heat has had a great year both here in Bath and on the Bannau Brycheiniog, where we were last week. It’s called Fat Hen – Chenopodium album and it’s been a virulent weed in both places. Our friends keep sheep, pigs and hens – all of them free range within their field boundaries. They’ve got internet up there on their hillside and so we were able to discover that Fat Hen is capable of causing harm to animals and humans in spite of being consumed by us and our livestock across Europe and since neolithic times. Tollund Man’s last meal, we’re told, included Fat Hen but that wasn’t what killed him. Back home I turned to the books and worked out that the point at issue is how large a percentage of the diet comprises Fat Hen and how much you (or they) eat at one time. The take-home point is that in a field situation it’s better to cut a small amount and add it to the feed, rather than leaving it growing where the livestock can overdo it. Used in that way it’s apparently high quality food, and the oxalates and nitrates which cause problems are kept at a safe level.

But all this talk of poisonous weeds must have lodged in my mind and a strange dream carried me right back to the tomato family, the Solanaceae which gives us potatoes and tomatoes but also the Nightshades, Henbanes and Thorn apples all three dangerous if not fatal when eaten; and thorn apple, also known in the US as Jimson weed apparently had a loyal following among soldiers during the Civil War. I mentioned only a few days ago a T shirt I saw with the slogan “all plants are edible – some of them only once”. This was a property that was understood and often used by poisoners in the past.

Anyway, in my dream I was leaning against the wall of a pizza hut deep in conversation with one of our son’s ex’s trying to explain that something she was going to cook was extremely poisonous when another young woman turned up looking faintly odd; intoxicated and away somewhere else. She explained to me (with a voice from somewhere else too) that she had been preparing Thornapple for a meal. I begged her not to eat it and she replied that it was fine, because if you sang this song while you cooked it, the poison would be neutralized. Then she uttered this haunting ululating sound – the song – and then nodded as if to say “that showed you!”and wandered off.

Thorn Apple is an intoxicating hallucinogen with severe chance of causing death and whose hallucinations are widely spoken of by people who’ve tried it as horrible so it’s not likely to catch on. But it demonstrates that plants have the ability to synthesize good things and bad. Without them the earth would cease to have life in any form, but they also demand respect. For many years tomatoes were assumed to be poisonous precisely because of their relationship with Deadly Nightshade, Enchanter’s Nightshade and all the others and you have to wonder what brave soul took the risk of eating one and began the huge cultural change that brought the plant to its position as number one home-grown fruit in the UK.

Madame and me were walking one afternoon in Leigh Woods on the Somerset side of Brunel’s Clifton Suspension bridge, and a elderly man who looked like a rough sleeper came up to us in a state of breathless excitement and dragged us deep into the woods saying that he’d been living there for (if I remember right) ten years and he’d never seen a Purging Buckthorn before. I was right at the beginning of my interest in plants and after he showed us the bush, we shook hands and thanked him and went on our way. Purging Buckthorn – Rhamnus cathartica – is another of those plants it’s wise to get to grips with if you’re foraging in the woods. The clue is in both “purging” and “cathartica” if you think about it. A bilingual warning that all plants are edible, some only once.

But to finish on an entirely delicious and safe account of the tomato I’ve put a photo of the Italian dish Panzanella which I made to Anna Del Conte’s recipe but it’s capable of any amount of variation. It was while making this dish that I discovered that the tomatoes I’d harvested that day, had no seeds. Inside every silver lining, these days, there’s a cloud waiting to get out!

There must be a story here but I don’t know where to start

So here we are back in the Bannau Brycheiniog, thirteen hundred feet up the side of Mynydd Bychan on a hill farm which is emphatically shouting “history, history” in my ear. There’s an odd feeling that this place is peculiar; not quite right by the culture of the surrounding hills. We were in desperate need of a bit of peace after months of building work on the flat during which we’d had to move out several times and equally tough times on the allotment with the heatwaves and drought which I’ve already written about; not to mention the continuing saga of the campervan engine. That’s a very inelegant sentence but it perfectly shows how stress gets inside our heads and muddles them.

I brought four books with me apart from the usual Potwell Inn clutter of cameras and notebooks, and they are respectively “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold; “The Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwest Europe” by Julian Barker and, “A History of Wales” by John Davies which is a real 750 page clonker; also “Joseph Banks” – the biography by Patrick O’Brian. I grabbed the first one, the Sand County Almanac off the bookshelf as we left the flat to drive here and I’m so glad I did. The Flora was a chance find of the out of print volume which hardly ever comes on to the market second hand so I jumped on the only available copy on the internet. The history of Wales isn’t the most up to date or indeed the most radical; less fun than Jan Morris’ – “The Matter of Wales”, less political than Carwen Graves’ “Tŷr” and less focused on hill farming than David Elias’ “Shaping the Wild”. I’ve left out William Condry’s New Naturalist volume “The Natural History of Wales because I haven’t read it yet but I’d recommend the first five without reservation, and you need to read all of them plus the poems of RS Thomas too even to catch the flavour of the debates that still burn underground like peat fires. The Banks biography is the sole English representative because I wanted to get a feel for the plant hunters of his era.

Normally I’d be out there on my hands and knees searching for plants to record; I’ve even printed off lists of possible sightings but I seem to have hit a bit of a parting of the ways – I want to explore not just the names but the science, the habitats, the uses and the whole culture. In fact it increasingly seems to me that I need to focus on the meaning – in the broadest possible sense – the meaning of plants in our culture. Hence the disparate choice of reading for our break: Davies for historical context, Banks for the beginnings of scientific botany; Barker for the many uses of plants and Leopold who – even almost eighty years ago – was asking the most profound philosophical questions about conservation in a world where even back then species were disappearing and humans were becoming increasingly detached from the natural world under the cover of progress.

….. each [professional]n his own way is a hunter. And why does each call himself a conservationist? Because the wild things he hunts for have eluded his grasp, and he hopes by some necromancy of laws, appropriations, regional plans, reorganization of departments, or other forms of mass-wishing to make them stay put.

A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold 1947

So let’s be clear. Without plants we’re all dead. No oxygen to breathe, no food to eat and an empty windswept desert instead of a green and pleasant land. The glossy prospectus of life support under a big tech dome is a fraud; there is no white coated Seventh Cavalry hiding behind the hill, and without nature we would cease to exist; without meaning or purpose.

We were children, my sister and me, walking back along the road to Pucklechurch from the Rose and Crown in Parkfield with our parents. We were replete with red lemonade and crisps. Jenny was picking dandelions and we came across an old man, possibly a farm worker or miner who could have come direct from a casting agency as a typical peasant. He stopped us with a wave and asked her if she knew what the flowers were called and she told him dandelions. He tittered and leaned in conspiratorially -“we calls em piss the beds!” Our parents made conventional end of conversation noises, gathered us up into a safe huddle and we walked on towards the bus stop. I might have been eight years old and that experience felt as if a gap had opened in the evening sky and another world revealed.

Plants and memories have a powerful aggregating force between them; they’re sticky and accumulative. Only yesterday we were walking along a narrow lane towards an area of boggy heath called Rhos Fach which I’d read about and seen on the OS map when I spotted a harebell and some lesser Hawkbit among strangely familiar grasses beneath a bank on which, fifty years ago there could have been a hedge of hawthorn; now just a few elderly horizontal branches surviving from the last laying. Somewhere deep in my brain the neurons made instant connections and I was the same child just a couple of years after Pucklechurch, lying on the same grasses on Rodway Hill, gazing at the sky and feeling, well, ecstatic. The two experiences connected by a powerful force with no name other than memory in which every sense is stored and released – colours, smells sounds; every subtlety every nuance encoded like messenger RNA searching out its target and – once found – springing into life.

We don’t any longer know how to love

Needless to say, back at the cottage I turned to the AI and quickly discovered soil type, bedrock conformation, a series of predicted NVC classifications and a list of plants recorded there; oh and the national grid reference finally to drive the pin through the thorax. I was reminded of the fictional artist Gully Jimson’s priceless comment in Joyce Carey’s “The Horses Mouth” – “It’s like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?”

In the clash between the instrumental and the aesthetic there lies our culture’s dirty secret: we don’t any longer know how to love. It’s too nebulous, too fragile, too open ended, and like apomixis (that’s the way blackberries do it), just too bloody complicated.

This isn’t an attack on botany or botanists, but it is a serious warning about the dangers of idolatry (which should never be consigned to arguments about religion). Idolatry worships the part rather than the whole; in fact you might characterise it as the all too human root of reductive thinking which in turn is the cause of so many human tragedies. A form of ethnobotany could be a way around the mountain.

And so, back to the troubling garden

It seems that there is a real story behind the uneasy feelings that the surrounds of the cottage evoked. Walking around yesterday we found sheds, a couple of abandoned rotavators, a steel shoe tree, a lead model of a horse next to a horseshoe; any number of bird boxes and seats wrapped around out of place trees, a broken beehive, empty bird cages, and an overgrown vegetable garden; walkways mown through the site but with little sign of walkers. There is a strong sense of something abandoned. It didn’t take much research to find that this was once the site of a much loved Edwardian guest house run by a woman called Rita who was also a formidable gardener. She created an arboretum, dug a lake, planted an orchard and made a gathering place for walkers drawn to the Bannau. We are among the tail enders. Everything has a lifespan, even (or perhaps especially) gardens. They’re our attempt to bring nature close and under control on our own terms which is, sadly, both beautiful and fruitless. The circus moves on; the power and beauty of the hills is stronger than our dreams of upstaging them.

A quantum of hope

A little rain – and I mean little – more of a mist – fell earlier in the week and last night a little more. Madame woke up and we peered through the bedroom window and saw the first puddle in many weeks forming in the yard below . We’ve become weary of heatwaves with the need for early morning starts to water the plants on the allotment before the disabling heat blankets Bath. We say to one another how good it is to be up early but the enthusiasm has morphed from bright eyes to gritted teeth. Peasant life, we’ve always known, is no picnic. It’s small wonder that our ancestors spent so much effort on placating the weather gods and searching for the inadvertent sins that might have pissed them off. Blaming the victims has always been the first and best tactic, and getting us to blame our neighbours or ourselves is even cheaper and preserves the peace for the winners to pursue their wealth unhindered. Such gloomy thoughts with the cherry on the cake being the campervan failing its MOT spread through my mind and silence my imagination with introspective fog. I’m reminded of the 1950’s “ballad of the sad young men” – brilliantly covered by Mose Allison and The Who – and many others.

And so, in the midst of what must have looked like a shuffle up the road to the supermarket I met Wes, our neighbour, clutching a tall plant of Guernsey Fleabane which is having a bit of a moment this season. He was taking it to the waste bin having turned against it. During our conversation on the pavement outside his flat I looked down at the gutter and saw this little cluster of flowers which seemed to be raising the finger to the parched grass across the road. It was a single verbena flower(Verbena bonariensis), that initially caught my eye, and then when I bent down to look more closely there were others. Apart from the ubiquitous Wall Barley, there was Catmint, Lemon Balm, Dandelion, Procumbent Yellow Sorrel and Redshank not to mention Mexican Fleabane. That’s a garden of eight flowering plants in a strip of parched gutter seemingly surviving the heatwaves in the most arid place you could imagine. It’s hard to speculate on what might be keeping them going – maybe the cars parked there every day sheltering them from their south facing perspective. Let’s not get sniffy about the fact that several of them are garden escapes; the point is that these plants are truly drought resistant. Somewhere deep in their DNA there are genes that assist their survival as the global climate crisis becomes a chronic affliction. My heart was lifted and all day yesterday as I sat in a garage waiting for the van alongside the noisiest and dirtiest dual carriageway Avonmouth could offer, I kept remembering that little quantum of hope making its own way in a changing earth – that’s until one of our gentrified neighbours phones a councillor and threatens not to vote for them if they don’t get rid of the disgusting weeds. We have seen the enemy, it is us! Another thought came to me as I wandered back to the Potwell Inn in the direction of the river. There are large trees growing around and on the Green, and as I walked beneath them in their shade, the difference in comfort and temperature was striking. There’s a bench under one of them and it’s been in almost continual occupation since the heatwaves began. We need to be thinking about shade, and on the allotment this is perhaps the time to plant some fast growing shade producing trees to help us to keep our plants alive under the new weather regime. It’s against the rules to grow taller trees, and they are always blamed for depleting the soil moisture and yet there is some evidence of moisture exchange by trees into the upper 30cm of soil, and abundant evidence that shade reduces surface evaporation. So the case against trees on allotments and in gardens is not closed and we allotmenteers should, perhaps, be able to experiment with tree shade to see if it helps to reduce the prodigious amount of water we use to keep our plants alive.

Living through an age when we simply cannot rely on ‘the way we do things round here‘ to keep us alive. Agribusiness and big farming would have us rely on univented, energy hungry technologies to save the earth, and yet we know in our hearts that it’s their activities which have contributed greatly to the present crisis. British farmers are, by and large, a fairly conservative group of people and yet even they seem to be open to new ideas like regenerative farming as long as it helps them to run their businesses and feed the rest of us. Any allotmenteer will tell you that you can’t live on large courgettes and abundant aubergines the year round even if we do make a real contribution to feeding ourselves. However allotmenteers are a highly motivated bunch of potential citizen scientists who, with a bit of organization, leadership and help from scientists could conduct field trials on a scale undreamed of by the industry. Field trials of new varieties, new ways of increasing soil fertility and moisture retention, new methods of increasing water storage; the sky’s the limit, but only if someone trusts us enough to gather the data and process it so we can begin to understand what works on a small scale. Just one example that I can offer relates to composting. Over the years we’ve tried just about every way of composting our waste efficiently. Of all the methods we’ve found that the California Cylinder – which requires only a roll of stock fencing and a lot of large cardboard (eg bicycle boxes) is one of the best – especially if you grow enough comfrey activator – which is easier to do on a site basis. Does anyone know whether any dangerous and persistent chemicals are carried forward in grey water or human urine which, after all, mostly seems to find its way back into the rivers in about a day. We’ve used both but stopped because of our doubts. There are so many trials that we could participate in if only DEFRA would stop seeing allotmenteers as a bunch of tree hugging hippies or even worse terrorists. What about gathering and collating data on the most effective way of facing shed roofs for water gathering, or doing some controlled records on air temperatures and soil temperatures or soil moisture; and how about gathering information about diseases or crop yields or the best varieties for our soil. How about some soil surveys, insect surveys, or plant records. I think we’ve reached the point in our relationship with the earth where it’s a broken marriage which can’t be saved by saying “sorry” and carrying on as before. The sums of money involved in searching for a system that works would be trivial in relation to the cost of doing nothing, but it first requires government to lead. At present DEFRA has only 20 staff members out of 6,613 working on the problem. The danger (which most powerful legislators, corporations and oligarchs fear), is that opening Pandora’s box and encouraging cooperative structures to have our say would seriously hamper their activities. We need – with some help – to change a whole culture but that’s a challenge which many of the folks we garden with would be pleased to step up for.

The Green in drought. Let’s call it the Brown

Plants can change our perspective too! – but only if we understand them

For ages I’ve wanted to broaden my approach to plants when thinking and writing about them, and I’d very much like to move a bit closer to Geoffrey Grigson (whose brilliant book “An Englishman’s Flora” is about to be republished as “A British Flora”. I really love this book for its breadth and scope; escaping the stamp collector’s view of field botany (the rarer the better) and wandering in his usual provocative way through the countryside picking up fragments of folklore, old country names, culinary and medicinal properties. You can still pick up a second hand copy very reasonably although the reprint is only £25. I’ve got a worn out paperback and a large format hardback – both treasured possessions. He’s not the only natural history writer who’s spread his wings in this way, Richard Maybe is another and there are more. I should include the early works of Henry Williamson and in the same breath dare to mention my Mother who was brought up in the deepest Chilterns and who once told us about her first encounter with a flush toilet which so scared her she couldn’t use it. I would dearly love which ‘Lady’s Slipper’ she mentioned as her favourite flower – and which could have been a geographically unlikely appearance of the now extinct orchid or one of six other more common wildflowers with similar names. Robin Wall Kimmerer gives a fascinating account of the encounter of western botany with First Nation Canadian ethnobotany. Thanks to Grigson I now know why Latin names are so important. There are such fields, known as ethnobotany, folk taxonomy, phytonomy or ethnoecology which is an academic way of recognising that plants have cultural meanings too. In our laser focused reductive way we might grudgingly accept that plants are useful for giving us clues to molecules which might be useful in medicine but fall way short of recognising herbal medicine as a legitimate pursuit. By the way, I had a text yesterday advertising a T shirt with the slogan “All plants are edible, some of them only once!” .

Anyway I hope you catch my drift. I was first fascinated by plants because they so beautiful, and the closer I looked the more beautiful they became. Several years ago when I was young (ho ho) there was a company in Kingswood which was quite a big supplier of medicinal herbs. A friend of mine once showed me a printed sheet of testimonials they sent out with their products (which included a specially formulated smoking mixture for asthmatics!) One of their big sellers was evidently a herb called Golden Seal and I mistakenly thought it referred to Goldenrod. One of the testimonial letters described how the patient, after only a couple of days of taking the remedy, claimed to have coughed up a substantial tumour. That’s not an easy to forget image. Today when I was mulling over this piece I had a look in Mrs Grieve’s 1931 “A Modern Herbal” and she, like Grigson, lists the alternative names of Golden Seal and among them she reveals that she’s actually writing about Turmeric root which these days is something of a supposed miracle cure, ‘though falling short of projectile tumour expulsion. Those sneaky scientists while all-along decrying herbal medicine, have been scouring the old herbals for patentable synthetics. Tomorrow I’m expecting a second hand copy of the almost unobtainable Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwestern Europe“. I get almost all my books secondhand these days. We’re soon off on another trip to the Bannau Brycheiniog and I’m hoping to persuade Madame to take a short drive to the village of Myddfai where I can breathe the same air as the famous physicians once breathed – hopefully without the addition of smoke particles from the fire around nearby Llangynidr Reservoir which we can even smell in Bath, fifty miles away. We have friends living just a few miles from there, and their smallholding narrowly escaped a previous very frightening wildfire.

There are a thousand extensions to plant hunting that can bring the plants alive for us. I’ve been recently mugging up on some of the science, having previously known nothing at all about DNA and molecular biology and it’s mind blowing and beautiful in the intellectual sense that scientists and mathematicians use. Reading the more controversial books of Stefano Mancuso, I didn’t know for instance that the animals – that’s all the animals amount to just under half of one percent of the total biomass of the earth, whilst plants amount to around 82% (90% before the industrial revolution), and we humans amount to …….. just 0.01%. We have seen the enemy, it is us!

I’ve been amazed at the lukewarm manner in which governments have brushed aside the statistics of global catastrophe. Now, here in Bath and in the midst of the fifth heatwave of this drought plagued summer we are advised to close our windows because of the health risks associated with PM 2.5 particles travelling in the wind from South Wales. Newspapers of a certain kind continue to write about the lovely summer weather while Madame and me, among thousands of other gardeners and farmers, have struggled to keep our plants alive, and the local media are filled with rage at the local authority whenever they try to reduce and control traffic pollution. I’m reminded of William Cobbett’s quip that “they demand change but without alteration”

God alone knows how many trips I’ve made backwards and forwards to the allotment water troughs with a two gallon watering can in each hand – that’s forty pounds weight – in the face of appeals to restrict our water consumption. The upside is that we’ve been feasting on the sweetest sweetcorn, the shiniest aubergines and the richest tomatoes not to mention all the other unobtainable herbs and vegetables. As the difficulties multiply, my admiration for the adaptability of our plants increases. Some of us have wondered in Sunday Schools what the biblical manna might have been, but the more I learn about it the more I understand that the plants which keep us and every other living thing on earth alive do it all by turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar. That beats Moses and his stick any day!