Category: About the Potwell Inn

Down the AI rabbit hole

Allotment asparagus autumn Camino campervan repairs climate change climate emergency composting covid 19 deep ecology economic collapse environment environmental catastrophe environmental crisis field botany foraging Fungi global climate crisis global heating green spirituality herbal medicine intensive farming locally sourcing lockdown macro photography meditation no-dig pickling and preserving pilgrimage polytunnels preserving raised beds rats regenerative farming rewilding Sourdough species extinctions spring technology urban ecology urban wildlife walking water storage weeds wildflower meadows

What I really wanted to do here was to produce a word cloud, similar to the tag cloud above; but using the names of all the wildflowers mentioned in “Dandelion Days”, the first of four novels comprising Henry Williamson’s sequence “The Flax of Dream” first published in 1930; rapidly approaching 100 years ago.

Now I know that some readers will be aware that Williamson’s reputation has been tarnished by his (brief) association with fascist ideology, but the four volumes of “The Flax of Dream” and the huge sequence of seventeen novels comprising “The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight” were an inspiration to me when I first read them 50 years ago; especially for their uncanny connection with nature. The writer of “Tarka the Otter” and all those other wildlife books seemed to understand -like a man outside his own time – that he was a part of nature rather than the evolutionary telos and heroic conqueror of it all. And, after all, Williamson wasn’t the only writer or artist to disappear into the dark rabbit hole of fascism. Ezra Pound; Wyndham Lewis; even the saintly TS Eliot and numerous members of the Royal Family and the nobility flirted with it too. Oswald Moseley spent time in prison for it and his wife, Diana, one of the Mitford sisters was an enthusiastic fascist.

I was once standing on the old bridge below Damery Lake in Gloucestershire when I had an extraordinary daytime vision. I was suddenly possessed by the spirit of a young army officer who, in the midst of some terrible First World War battle, had imagined himself standing in exactly the place I was, and longing for home. The stone bridge – which could once have been a narrower pack bridge over the Little Avon, flows north west without much enthusiasm towards Berkeley Pill where my old friend Dick England milled flour. Along its course are several reedy and tree lined ponds and lakes containing – they say – brown trout. A paradise of hunting, shooting and fishing for an Edwardian gentleman. That soldier could, in my imagination, have been the young Henry Williamson whose WW1 role was to drive teams of horses back and forth towards the lines with supplies of food and weapons; perhaps returning with the casualties. His whole subsequent life was troubled by those fond memories of childhood wrestling with the destructive madness of war.

And so, with that bit of background, off to the AI rabbit hole. My memories of the book were of it being packed with the names of plants, birds, insects and small mammals, and so it occurred to me that I could recover those names in some kind of list by using the awesome power of AI. With a lot of help from my son I worked out how, theoretically to do it and set to locating and downloading a PDF file of the whole book into my laptop. So far so simple. Next came the tricky matter of the question. How exactly should I phrase my end to what Gemini likes to call a conversation. The opener as it were.

  • Q. List the plants in “Dandelion Days ……” etc
  • A. “Dandelion”
  • Q. List the plants in the whole text of the novel in my file ###. pdf
  • A. There are no plants mentioned in ####.pdf
  • Q. Make a list of plants in Devon in the early 20th century
  • A. 3 trees and 4 plants and the enthusiastic claim that there were lots more of them.

It was becoming clear that AI couldn’t distinguish a plant from all the other strings of letters that comprise the novel and so I took myself and the original knackered paperback Faber book back to a quiet corner and discovered what I’d known all along ; that Dandelion Days is a botanical handbook of early 20th century wildlife as well as being an affecting account of a middle class childhood lived at one with the natural world.

So there will be no word cloud – not even a long list, unless I do it manually; but my memory is vindicated and I’ve found once again one of the wellsprings of my own imagination. In the near-century since publication the natural world has been irreparably scarred and impoverished and would have become unrecognisable by Williamson himself, by G M Hopkins, George Ewart Evans, Richard Jefferies and all the others; poets and painters of the old landscape that now lingers in the background of our imagination in the etiolated form of a vague love of nature.

Whether or not some kind of spirituality could be woven out of the dry remains of books like the Flax of Dream; a nest into which new life could be born, depends on whether we could reset our understanding of our place on the earth. Whether some understanding of natural grace could drive out the squat gods of greed with their fundamentalist credo, remains an open challenge to us.

But three things at least are clear – we won’t find it through politicians but by poets, musicians and artists; we won’t need a high priesthood of retired oil executives to keep us in our place and finally we sure as hell won’t get any help from AI!

Hemlock Water Dropwort – Oenanthe crocata. Step away from the poison!

Hmm

Whitefield in full flower

It’s been a sad roller coaster of a week with all the highs cancelled by some awful lows. Last weekend we were in the Bannau Brycheiniog – Brecon Beacons, staying with friends. I’d been in conversation with the doctor about my AF medication and she had contacted the consultant cardiologist for advice. Out of the blue I received a text message from her with a suggestion of a new drug whose side effects were even more severe (and dangerous) than the previous lot. The message said that this was the “drug of last resort” – well thanks! I’ve always wondered if doctors make you ill, but this felt like the threat of some serious iatrogenic harm. The Wednesday high was a field trip to Woodchester Mansion; a lovely but enigmatic unfinished building set in a magnificent Cotswold valley. I was leading (or supposed to be), but the group instantly split into birders, entomologists, trippers and botanists who all wanted to go their separate ways – notwithstanding my hard work on risk assessment maps and species lists – and so we threw in our lot with with the botanists and thrashed our way up and down 600 feet of steep Cotswold valley. The upside was a personal guided tour/tutorial where we found half a dozen rarities that we’d never have noticed in a hundred years and I discovered a whole pile of ideas about plant recording.

Friday was never going to be a fun day because we were going to an anaesthetist friend’s funeral. He died in the appalling way that only Motor Neurone Disease can offer. The church was full of consultants who radiated the kind of smooth skinned self confidence that my old friend never displayed; the vicar barked at us like a performing seal and I felt the meaning of life and death draining away between the medieval floor tiles. The consolation of old village friends just about kept me going but there were no tears accessible to me in the etiolated atmosphere. It seemed as if his widow and children had their grief airbrushed out as the torrent of worldly achievements, words and music shuttered the darkness away. As we left down the lane I found relief at last in a woundwort plant and crushed its leaves, releasing its powerfully unpleasant smell. Real; real! On Saturday an email announced the death of another college friend; news came of Michael Mosley’s disappearance and the brutal slaughter of hundreds more Palestinians in Gaza. Even the thought of an imminent election brought no hope . “Homini lupus est” – man is a wolf to man. Then from the sublime to the gorblimey I managed to lose my hearing aids and I was plunged into an underwater world of deafness.

By Monday Madame had helped me find the hearing aids in the communal dumpster in the basement and I cooked a curry. Those two clauses were not in any sense connected. We decided a trip to Whitefield would cheer us both up, and so we drove over to Dyrham Park and found three species of orchid within a riot of unimproved meadow plants. Pyramidal, Purple Spotted and Bee orchids – all of them very small this year. The field will soon be cut for hay, but today it was thrillingly lovely. Among the pictures, the Buff Tailed bumble bee is feeding on Rough Hawkweed; a flowering head of Crested Dog’s Tail grass; the field white and gold like the Milky Way, with Oxeye Daisies and the same Rough Hawkweed; and the three orchids

Thanks for the memory – it’s pretty wild out there!

The neglected pavement level view outside our flat

It was the Biting Stonecrop – Sedum acre – in flower, that caught my eye first; that’s the very bright green plant with thickened drought proof leaves and yellow flowers in the centre of the picture. We haven’t seen it there before. But when I looked at it on the larger screen at home I saw the Mexican Fleabane; some Canadian Fleabane gathering strength in the background; some unidentifiable out of focus moss at the bottom and above it the most lovely slime mould – which rarely gets this big on an urban pavement and has the gift of moving very very slowly from place to place. We had some on the fire escape once that took a leisurely six months to descend the steps and set up home on a road less trampled by human feet.

On the wall below the raised pavement we’ve got Wall Rue, a fern; Herb Robert, a geranium; then in a narrow crack at the base there’s Sowthistle, Nipplewort, Dandelion (of course) and half a dozen others, surviving historic dowsings with Glyphosate which was replaced by salt crystals and then the road sweeper’s scraper. Around and about the car park (ex builders’ yard), there are over forty species of wildflower – many of them tiny versions of their grander selves which live in less inhospitable environments. It’s often hands and knees botany in these urban settings.

When we talk about nature and wildflowers, insects and mammals our default setting is somewhere green and pleasant; somewhere we usually have to drive miles to get to, armed with expensive kit; GPS units, field guides and binoculars. However, if you were to ask me where you could see otters in Bath, I’d have to say under Sainsbury’s bridge. Red Kite? south of the river. Buzzards – anywhere if you keep your eyes peeled. Peregrine falcons? nesting on the spire of St John’s Church.

The shocking truth is that if you love the wild – and by that I mean the natural world that’s rather the bit neglected by humans than the exhausted and overmanaged bit that we call countryside, then aside from National Trust land, nature reserves and SSSI’s you’re more likely to be able to feast on it in the city these days.

Yesterday we walked over to Widcombe to buy some decent sausages. Our practice is to eat less meat but of better welfare standards and quality. We took the riverside path as usual, and in the process we passed the Bath Quays site which is very slowly taking shape. In the first year either the architects or the local council had specified wildflower borders in the flood control areas. They lasted for a single year, but because they were probably an imported seed mixture an incongruous jumble of flowers that would never normally be seen together in the wild; they died back and were replaced by the usual thugs and vagabonds which just loved the rich imported soil brought in from elsewhere. Ironically, behind the now unimpressive borders was the blighted site of phase two, a demolished car park. This thin, impoverished and fenced off building site is now blessed by a magnificent display of the genuinely wild. My favourite, the Vipers Bugloss has been shuffling from patch to patch as the park area has been “improved” and has now colonized and spread across quite a large area, but as we walked along the 200 metre boundary I gave up counting after I reached 20 species. There was Mugwort; two kinds of Sow thistle, creeping buttercup, Black Medick, Hedge Mustard, Wall Barley, Poppy, Rye grass, False Oat grass, Ragwort, Mallow and Oxeye daisy; and two or three Geranium species, Docks and Sorrels. There were Spear thistles and Creeping thistles and It was all quite overwhelming and I was prompted to wonder whether I should be using a voice recorder and transcription app on my phone to record the sheer variety. The heartbreaking truth is that these will all disappear under a blanket of flats, offices and retail units, leaving a perfect, manicured and expensive view of our grossly polluted river .

So here are some photos of the treasures that live in the most impoverished and sometimes squalid places beneath our feet. We should really value them much more than we do.

Vipers Bugloss.

The hungry gap slowly closes

Most non – gardeners would probably imagine that a hungry gap in the allotment year would come some time in the darkest part of winter; but it doesn’t. It comes around now -late spring and early summer when seeds are sown, plants raised and pricked out, but when there’s nothing much to eat. The potatoes were planted a month ago and are growing well; the tomatoes, aubergines and peppers in the polytunnel are all growing strongly but it’ll be some time before we can taste the fruits of our labours. Apart from overwintered Swiss Chard and a bit of spinach which are both looking a bit knackered by now but still taste good; and a few stored Crown Prince squashes, the first signs of the food year where we live is an early picking of strawberries and some broad beans from the polytunnel.

I wrote about growing broad beans in the tunnel a few years ago, and was a bit put off by a friend’s letter saying that if the flowering plants get too hot they would not set pods. That’s a good point, particularly after a succession of very hot early spring weather in previous years; but on the other hand, there’s a large element of gambling in gardening and this year we decided to risk a couple of dozen plants to the global climate emergency, and it looks as if our gamble has paid off, after a cool and wet spring. To be sure we planted successional broad beans outside, beginning with a November sowing, and they are all thriving obligingly and at different stages of growth but we had our first picking of tunnel grown beans today.

Our polytunnel container strawberries were doing well when we left to go to Cornwall for two weeks, but the watering arrangements seem to have broken down and we lost a few plants to drought; so we’ve been busy weeding and watering to try to rescue as many as we can.

Two weeks away has also given the bindweed a good start in the annual battle, but we’re as stubborn as hell, and although we never beat it, we certainly give it a headache. We’ve a half decent fruit set; the transplanted Blackberry is slowly recovering and the Tayberry is a mass of green fruit. Tayberry jelly is even more fragrant and beautiful than bramble jelly, but I didn’t boil last year’s batch quite long enough to set it well. Possibly it needs a bit of pectin. I think it would make a splendid ice cream – just as damson does.

Yesterday we took ourselves off to Bradford on Avon to meet some old friends for lunch. We always catch the train to our lunches so we can have a glass (or two) of wine. They took us to see a beautifully restored Saxon church dedicated to St Laurence. I suspect if you look at the photo below you’ll notice that there may have been a much bigger church there at some point – you can still see an old roof line and the imprint of what may once have been a clerestory. It’s a glorious jumble of original, later and restored stonework that offered the traditional steel offertory box set into the wall as well as a bank card reader for 21st century visitors. In places the stone floor and steps were polished by centuries of pilgrim feet. There was also what looked like an original Saxon font and possibly the faint remains of medieval painting. As we crossed back over the old bridge, now being hammered by continuous traffic, we were looking to see if the otters which had been spotted recently by our friends would put in an appearance, but I should think they are largely nocturnal. I absolutely love trains. My dad was a railwayman and we lived next to the railway line which once ran almost past our current front door. The river Avon which runs past our flat and also through the middle of Bradford on Avon flows through Melksham and then mysteriously turns north in the direction of Malmesbury. See how nature makes its own mind up about where rivers should flow.

Lunch was good, and the twelve minute train journey back home flew past twice as quickly as a boring and congested car journey.

St Laurence church in Bradford on Avon.

This is what a wild garden is capable of!

If you look carefully you’ll see the harbour rocks quite far below

I took five photos of this little garden overlooking the harbour and the village of Portscatho today and I just had to show one of them full size. We’ve been passing it for years ; we’ve even sat in it and rested on our way back to the campsite but – unbelievably – never stopped to examine the plants more carefully. The garden is, or may be, a little garden of remembrance. There’s certainly a monument to the soldiers who died in the Burma Campaign during the Second World War and there’s also a disarmed sea mine with a coin slot for donations to charity.

We’ve been here for two weeks of almost continuous fine sunshine apart from the mother of all storms the day after we arrived, and there isn’t a shadow of doubt that here on Roseland and across on the Lizard, when the sun shines the landscape is dressed like a bride; no expense of nature spared.

So we were there, sitting there eating chocolate and Madame said to me – “if we had a garden it would have to be like this”. Of course, we have the allotment but that’s somehow quite different; productive, perhaps even utilitarian. We sow a few wild seeds and encourage the less thuggish weeds to join the party but that kind of wild takes an enormous amount of time and hard work, and of course it’s about as far from any idea of natural as you could imagine.

Wild gardening is self-effacing. We watch the local plants and see where they grow and when they do best but they’re very much urban, city bound plants; miniaturised and tough as old boots. They flower and grow old fast to avoid the droughts of pavement life. Tiny, resourceful living plants eking out an existence on pavements and cracks in the wall. I’m not knocking them, but a garden is essentially an assembly, a gathering. A truly wild garden is only truly wild when it’s self-replicating.

Ignoring the tidy it up brigade is hard work. Those who deprecate the absence of straight lines of Primroses and Pansies can always nail their grids to their own gardens. It’s not anarchy, it’s a choreographed display of sheer self- organized plant cooperation. It wouldn’t be a silly idea to run a half-day introduction to field botany in that one small space – there’s so much to learn and I wondered if there might be a skilled botanist somewhere in the background.

I didn’t count or list the plants, but they all exist harmoniously in that happy invention, the Cornish wall; a loose assemblage of stone and earth, slightly less than shoulder high and populated so perfectly it would make a Chelsea Flower Show garden look strained and artificial. Just from memory there were Hogweed, Cow Parsley and Hemlock Water Dropwort; Lilies; young self-seeded Echium pinana – the most spectacular members of the Borage family, ten or twelve feet tall like a giant Viper’s Bugloss and, in summer, alive with ants and bees; two species of Medick; Foxgloves; Red Campions; loads of Babington’s Leeks and more. All unadorned by seedsmen’s gaudy favourites and all perfectly adapted to their situation. Born neighbours. The lawn was a mass of daisies, the seats were warm and facing the morning sun and we, for ten the minutes or so that we rested there, were in some sort of paradise.

And, of course the whole garden was alive with insects. Later as we walked back we passed a couple of fields where hay was being turned and baled. Above us a group of four opportunistic Buzzards, attended by a mob of smaller birds trying to drive them away, were circling above the mown field looking for escaping mice. Once or twice they dropped behind the hedge in pursuit of some small victim and then, bored by the persistence of the smaller birds, flew off, mewing to one another.

I don’t know who’s responsible for the upkeep of that little paradisiacal space but they deserve a huge thank-you and a Chelsea Gold medal for standing back and letting it sing its uniquely Cornish song.

Taking a leek to avoid a mutiny by Madame

I know. Sometimes my enthusiasm for creating long lists can be a bit – or very -trying because listing every plant we pass and then photographing it can make a seaside walk feel like crossing a desert. On Thursday there was a mutinous atmosphere that grew above us like a thundercloud. The secret of a long relationship is to know when to give up; so that’s what I did and we concentrated solely on one plant; a wild leek which is pretty rare but which happens to be a resident of our two favourite places in Cornwall – the Lizard peninsula and the Roseland peninsula. It’s a variety of the “normal” wild leek which is, in itself, rare; but this one is known as Babington’s Leek. The two are very close, and it’s only possible to distinguish them when they’ve developed those natty allium spikes at the end of their season. Wild leeks are full of seeds and Babingtons contain bulbils – tiny little readymade clones of the mother plant which drop off and take root in the soil around her. In the collection of photographs at the top, you can see the plant at various stages shown from two sites and I think the tiny bulbils coiled together in their filmy cover are just a bit sinister. They look like Medusa’s haircut. Ironically, you can buy the bulbils online and try to grow them in your garden so long as it provides exactly the right soil, seasonal weather and temperature and all the other conditions they need. Alternatively you could take your holidays here and enjoy them in their wild state like we do. The colony we photographed here on Roseland was strimmed off some time in the last couple of days in order not to scratch the sides of some grossly polluting SUV on its way to a holiday cottage. Grrrrr.

We’ve been so lucky with the weather; fourteen out of fifteen days of sunshine and I’ve been testing some AI plant identification and recording apps for a talk I’m doing in the autumn. None of them are perfect and some of them come up with some wonderful howlers. One recording app I was testing managed to lose 25 of my 102 identified species which, sadly, I hadn’t committed to paper. None of them except one were at all rare but it was enough to make me resolve to keep parallel paper records for the time being.

I’ve no idea how or why I’ve developed such an attachment to field botany; it kind of crept up on me when I wasn’t paying attention. Forbidden to do any serious surveys over the weekend, I decided to clear up my personal muddles with four closely related white wildflowers. Disambiguating two Stitchworts and two Mouse Ears all with similar – (same Campion family) – flowers sounds like an odd way of finding joy but they all grow close to the campsite and nobody would think it odd if I spent my time doing crosswords. Mission accomplished yesterday we were able to spend our time lazing around and watching our neighbours. Holidays seem to be very stressful and we’ve witnessed a few smouldering rows and a walk out; we watched some young women set out on a club night. They made me feel like Wellington before the Battle of Waterloo, who said of his troops that he didn’t know what they’d do to the enemy but “by God they terrify me!” One of them had an American Bully dog which caught sight of a rabbit, pulled his lead out of the ground and set off at such speed his lead caught around his owner’s leg, dragged her along the ground and damaged the skin on her leg. It was almost like being at home – but without the clouds of weed. Anyway nobody died, and the girls came back quietly at 2.00am.

I’ve delayed taking my medication until after we’ve gone for our long walks in the cool mornings and I feel miles better. Today we covered just under five miles and stopped for a healthy bacon butty at the Thirstea Cafe. On the way around I found three plants to record very quickly and slipped on the wet grass to do a kind of nine step polka down the track, whilst attempting to regain my balance. Thank goodness no-one saw me.

Behold – the new ones (for me) left to right; Wild Clary, Beaked Hawksbeard, Spotted Medick and Spear Thistle. Incidentally I now know the Latin names for all these – I have to, in order to record them; but the English names are much more evocative – see Geoffrey Grigson’s “An Englishman’s Flora” for an encyclopaedic view of all the poetic names.

What do you mean – what does it mean? Botany as a sensual pursuit.

The narrow road down to Percuil harbour with the hedgerow in in full flower.

I know there’s a process underlying the transformation of a spring walk in the sunshine into a list such as the one in my notebook yesterday. There’s another page for Wednesday with different plants on it and together they total 50 plants identified, recorded and sent off to the national database. The process must look hilarious to passers-by – old bloke on his knees, ferreting through the bottom of a hedge and talking loudly to himself as his partner walks on, oblivious to the one-sided conversation. A bonkers display of eccentricity. “Is he alright there?” I can imagine someone asking. “Is he lost?”

Well, in a manner of speaking I am lost. Ecstatic. Taken out of myself to another level of consciousness. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that I’m a bit of an outlier when it comes to plants. I know plenty of able bodied and perfectly sane (they might say) academics whose interest in plants can only be expressed in the incomprehensible private language of a Magisterium which exists to defend the McGuffin, or at least its McGuffin; plenty of others are available. It’s easier to learn Icelandic than discern the subtleties of polyploidy, or find the exact term to describe the shape of a leaf. I wish them no ill, I just wish they’d drag themselves away from their scanning electron microscopes and get out there amongst the plebs, (the) hoipolloi; the thugs, weeds and escapees; the abandoned pre-industrial feedstocks, the temporary residents doomed to rapid extinction, the ones threatened by foragers, collectors and developers and the ones that can give users visions, paranoia and even end your life in grisly ways.

My grandfather, who was both well educated and self-taught (they’re not mutually exclusive) had a set of encyclopedias; and one photograph has affected my whole life. It’s a photo of a bloke in a brown warehouse coat – ie working class; the properly educated scientist would have had a white lab coat – standing next to a pile of buckets, jars, beakers and test tubes each containing the correct quantity of some element or compound thought at the time to be essential to life. You might call it Frankenstein’s larder. The caption assured us that this was everything necessary to make a human being , except that the great mystery of the animating principle that drew them all together in the form of a living, breathing – let’s say – poet was not even hinted at. Although I never knew it at the time, this is a form of reductionism, which can be helpful if used properly as a metaphor for understanding complex phenomena; but lethal when used as a slam dunk proof that nothing is greater than the refuse from the pathologist’s table.

Yes to DNA if it helps us to understand the mysteries of relatedness in living things; yes to scanning electron microscopy when it helps us to visualise the pollen grain, the fungal spore and the bacterium; but plants embody so much more. Forgive me for mentioning my earlier life but to worship the partial and ignore the ineffable mystery of the whole is the classic definition of idolatry. We need to take that kind of science out into the world, on to the streets of a ne’er do well culture where it can have some sense knocked into it and its sense of wonder restored.

The supreme irony of all this is that so many people – insultingly known as ordinary – already get it. They go for walks in the sunshine and pause to look at the plants and flowers and absorb something important, as if there were an invisible energy there, flowing back and forth between the hedgerow and the walker. When I first began to encounter flowers and plants as a child I valued their immediate impact – bright as a Daffodil, blowsy as a Gladiolus, tarty as a Dahlia. The plants our Mum grew in the garden. Wild plants often lack that degree of egotism. These days as I learn more about them, I have come to love their complexity. The humble Buttercup has at least nine closely related forms; the Dandelion approaching 300 and don’t even mention the Blackberry . I don’t understand and can’t unravel a fraction of it, but that cloud of unknowing does nothing to diminish my joyful wonder at finding the most common plant hiding amongst its taller neighbours on the side of the footpath. Madame walks on the moment she hears me say HELLOOO in my best botanical voice, and carries on alone, while I’m chatting to my new friend.

I love the way that the plant world can even finesse a colour. This week the Stitchwort and the Cow Parsley (Queen Anne’s Lace is a much nicer name), are shining out from the hedge with an intense white that reproaches the very slightly creamy Hogweed and the distinctly yellowish Alexanders. As a not very accomplished botanical artist I really struggle to find a way of expressing the dynamic range of the hedgerows and meadows. The intense blue of the Germander Speedwell is not better than the pale blue of the Pale Flax; just another note in the huge overarching colour cloud. The colour, shape and pattern of plants are as much an inspiration to the artist as they are data to the taxonomist – look no further than William Morris, Claude Monet and Ivon Hitchens among hundreds of others. And the colours go beyond what we can see into the ultra violet. The honey bee may be seeing something very different than we do.

Taste and flavour are a whole new botanical delight. Let’s put gin aside for a moment; but even poets get in on the act. Here’s William Carlos Williams poem “This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

It’s a fair bet that the plums in the fridge weren’t just large sloes. Which of us hasn’t tried to convince one of our children that the sloe is as delicious as any plum in order to teach them a memorable lesson in plant identification. There are occasions when the taste of a plant – like the real plums in William’s poem can transport you. As children we used to nibble the young leaves of Hawthorn – we called them bread and cheese. Yesterday I found some Scurvy Grass and I nibbled it. It tasted like fiery horseradish and I was immediately filled with the thought of a barrel of the filthy tasting pickled plant being served to sailors as a preventative for scurvy. With care, and above dog pissing height I often take a bite but never forage except for field mushrooms, oh and sloes which transform gin into something lovely if you’ve got the patience to wait – or sloe vodka which is just as nice but does it a bit .quicker

Smell and taste being closely related, the obvious candidate for this category would be Ramsons (wild Garlic) or Three Cornered Garlic but yesterday offered an altogether quieter but deeper pleasure. As we emerged from the footpath through the woods where we’d feasted our senses on Early Purple Orchids and bluebells, we stepped into a field beside the Percuil river that was full of Sweet Vernal Grass in flower. The books will tell you that the scent of Sweet Vernal Grass is “new mown hay” – and it is; except for the fact that 97% of the wildflower meadows that would once have been cut for hay have now disappeared in favour of Ryegrass and Clover leys. Hardly anyone makes hay in any case so to most young people the “new mown hay” smell is about as meaningful as the smell of moon dust. I’m lucky not to be in that unfortunate group because putting up with knackered knees and all the other indignities of age is the price of knowing that intoxicating perfume, described by the reductivists as Coumarin, because as a child my sister and me onced helped our grandfather make proper hay on his smallholding in the Chilterns. You could spray Coumarin on silage, haylage or concentrated cattle feed and it would still smell horrible. Sweet Vernal grass is the intoxicating perfume of Spring and on Wednesday it swept across us in sweet waves, evoking haunting memories of the lost sensuality of the historic countryside.

Perfumed field near Percuil

All of which brings me to sounds. When I was a teenager I used to cycle over to Dyrham Park, climb over the wall and just lie in the long grass of what’s still called Whitefield. If you want to know what a real wildflower meadow looks like you won’t find a better example this close to Bath. The sound of the wind in the grass and trees is one of the great pleasures of solitude.

So here’s to the benighted idiots of the past. The ploughmen and apothecaries, the wise women, the monks in the infirmaries and the witches; the alchemists, dyers and weavers, the poets and artists who loved plants and flowers but allowed them to be so much more than the sum of their parts. I’ve been filling in the records for all these plants, but apart from the obvious questions like what’s your name? how dare you record this plant you peasant? what’s it called? where was it? was it in flower? ……. I can’t find anywhere the most important question of all – what does it mean? – to you? to the earth?

Early Purple Orchid – smells of Lily of the Valley when young but then of blackcurrant (cats’ pee!) later on.

A catch up on the allotment and a warning to be careful what you wish for – just in case you get it!

So here, at the end of a heavy duty week on the allotment are some of the fruits of our labours after a long and difficult winter. Crops are growing; even broad beans in the polytunnel are in pod and fattening up – which was especially nice when we saw that they were selling at £7 a kilo in the supermarket yesterday. Spuds are pushing through and the tunnel strawberries are about to begin their ripening. Spared any early frosts this year the trees have had a good fruit set. The bottom right photo is of a hybrid blackberry that languished in the fruit cage for three seasons so we took a chance on moving it to a better position with more light and air. Eight years after taking over an overgrown field, the plot is finally looking established. There’s a settled feel to it that; after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing; suggests that the allotment has accepted our guardianship. There’s a profound difference in the progress of happy plants over unhappy ones and any successes we have are down to noticing what the plants like best and making sure they get it. The strawberries, for instance, have runnered all over the place and made their way to a narrow bed beside the polytunnel where they are protected from winds in any quarter, and bask in its radiated warmth. It would be the last place I’d have chosen to put them! – but the earth is kept moist from rain runoff, the sun passes happily through the polythene cover and it’s one of the few low-traffic areas on the plot.

Gardening takes up a lot of time and energy, but I’m a great believer in texture and so we’ve tried hard to keep going on other things – like botanising and taking trips in the campervan. I’ve written before about the degree of planning that I do before a trip and I’ve made great use of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s magnificent databases and distribution maps. But one thing that’s always frustrated me in the past was the fact that ordinary members of the public (like me) only got limited access to the detailed information contained in 40 million records. This meant that if I wanted to check the location of a plant I was interested in I could only get an approximate 2X2 kilometer square on the map. Trust me, scouring 4 square kilometers of bare countryside for a tiny clump of flowers doesn’t half slow you down. There is one particular plant that I’ve been looking for for three years.

Anyway this last week the database was opened up to all BSBI members, with some provisions for protecting especially rare and endangered plants and this gave far more detailed locational information. I’m much more interested in the kind of unthreatened plants which are especially fussy about their environment whether that be pavements or lead mining slag heaps. I had to apply for access and rather to my surprise it was granted. I fell on the database like a hungry wolf and quickly discovered how close I’d been to finding my three year quarry – that’s a trip for the next couple of weeks. But then we’d also been to a lecture on ferns a few weeks ago and one difficult to find plant had cropped up in the midst of one of my favourite places on earth; not pretty but, let’s say, post-industrial. So a quick search online and within seconds I’d got a reasonably precise location. But instead of the adrenaline rush I’d expected I felt a bit ashamed of myself – as if it was cheating. That’s one to resolve later but it feels as if I enjoy hunting more than finding.

My research into AI wildlife recording applications took another step forward when the BSBI released a phone recording app at the same time. Good for them! Of course we shot out for a walk as soon as it stopped raining and I entered a record on the hoof, as it were, with a minimum of fuss. Coincidentally I’d been tasked to produce a precis of several longish reports on the work of the Natural History Society that we’re members of. I always swore that I’d never go to another meeting after I retired but I relented in a moment of weakness. So – and here’s a major confession – I fed all three long reports into Gemini, the Google AI machine and analysed them one at a time and then it took less than half a minute to produce a brilliant summary of all three, of a quality it would have taken me days to produce. My personal prejudices, likes and dislikes played absolutely no part in it because it was produced by a deep text machine with no knowledge of which ideas I liked and which I hated. All my work was focused on asking the best possible question and setting the task in logical and unambiguous terms. You might call it a scientific approach.

I presented the report to the committee and one member kicked off about the absence of the term “research” that wasn’t in any of the contributory papers. I could see that the discussion wasn’t going anywhere and backed off, but I left the meeting feeling that I’d been the victim of gaslighting. My hard work was being dismissed because -well because what? Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political theorist distinguished between organic and traditional intellectuals; the first group theorizing from a world of lived experience and the second (such as philosophers and clergy) giving history and tradition the whip hand. Give me the wisdom that comes from lived experience any day!

Back in the real world, I read two articles that seemed to treat plant recording as a kind of Ian Allan trainspotter discipline – more was clearly better. I get very fed up about this kind of thing, because it puts the amateur naturalist at a tremendous disadvantage. In one instance a recorder had submitted 135 thousand records to the big database. A little bit of basic maths suggests that with 3,500 plant species in the UK you’d have to find every one of them almost 40 times to amass such a score. The real scientific impact of such a magnificent effort is not in the gross total, but in building our knowledge concerning the distribution of plants across the country, their seasonality and preferred environments, the variations in their appearance and whether they are increasing or decreasing in number or in danger of disappearing altogether. Ten thousand records of a single plant – let’s say, bluebell hybrids made right across the length and breadth of the country could be tremendously useful. Amateur naturalists can be a vast army of potential volunteer recorders who, with targeted and appropriate help from the professionals, would get better and better at identifying plants and therefore contribute to the data that scientific research depends upon. There’s no hierarchy needed here; no need for anyone to feel intimidated or inhibited from having a try by the thought that they might get laughed at or patronized. The academic gatekeepers, far from preserving the integrity of the discipline are holding it back; squeezing the life out of it.

But hey! we’re off down to beloved Cornwall in the campervan and I’ll be testing the apps, looking for plants, doing a bit of recording and hopefully some sunbathing too, alongside a few trips to the pub. Here at the Potwell Inn, we celebrate the life ordinary. This weekend an old friend died of Motor Neurone disease. I have no idea how to process that.

An evening in the campervan with an excellent documentary series on Frida Kahlo. I really didn’t notice she wasn’t wearing much when I took it. Madame was consulted and she approved before I included this photo!

The asparagus season gets underway

It’s ironic, really , that we dug up the asparagus bed on the Potwell Inn allotment pretty much on the first day of the official season. I’ve already written about its lack of productivity and in the end borrowed time has run out. Ours was barely 10′ x 5′ but we were down at the Lost Gardens of Heligan a couple of years ago and they had lost a very long bed. For reasons unknown to us, these beds will suddenly turn their faces to the wall and there’s nothing to be done about it. Luckily, there is a Worcester business run by the Chinn family who grow the most fabulous English asparagus no more than 50 miles from Bath. The long plane journey from Peru or wherever else is not just polluting, the flavour really deteriorates and if you, like us, can no longer grow your own it’s really worthwhile getting your hands on the local product. Then you need to make Hollandaise sauce, or at least learn to make it because again the commercial supermarket version is overloaded with chemicals and stabilizers. There’s a reason for that, because the sauce splits very easily – made properly it’s like hot mayonnaise with butter beaten into the egg yolks instead of oil. Life threateningly good for just a brief few weeks of the year; certainly not a dish to eat too often! Traditionally you add a teaspoon of Tarragon Vinegar (very easy to make your own) to the eggs at the beginning and that very faint perfume really brightens the whole dish. Our youngest son used to prep the Hollandaise by the gallon in one restaurant he worked in.

The downside to asparagus depends on your DNA because it makes your urine smell dreadfully sulphurous regardless; but only some of us can actually smell it. Like being able to curl your tongue, the rich odour of asparagus wee is a genetic gift. We had an old friend who was a member of a London club and who swore that there was a notice on the wall, begging members “not to piss in the umbrella stands during the asparagus season”. Oh how they live, the powerful! Anyway the Potwell Inn allows no misbehaviour of that sort, you’ll be pleased to know.

Actually asparagus is marvellous steamed just on its own with a dollop of butter and/or a curl of parmesan; but on high days and holidays we serve it as “Délices d’Argenteuil” in a recipe by Simon Hopkinson – you can find it online and it’s a bit of a faff but very grand as well. The combination of pancakes, Parma ham, Hollandaise and English asparagus is lovely. Then there’s the flan which Madame loves and finally the BBQ. With those four ways of cooking it and a season that lasts not much more than six to eight weeks, you’ll never get bored.

Alas, much of my time has been spent on the computer when it rains. My research into AI is very slowly gaining ground and it’s almost scarily efficient at doing those boring repetitive jobs that I so dislike. Whether or not it’s a threat to life and civilisation is almost irrelevant because Pandora’s box is open and bad actors can always find a way of exploiting new discoveries for personal gain. Our best defence is to understand the technology and use it enough to recognise the dangers when (as they inevitably will) – they emerge.

An update on the asparagus flan

24 hours later, having scoffed half of the flan for supper I feel I should report on a completely unexpected outcome. Somehow I forgot to start the timer when the flan went into the oven complete with its filling, so when I realized my mistake I had to finish cooking it by eye and instinct. Flans are simple enough to cook, and I really enjoy making them but over the years I’ve discovered that they can go from bloom to blown in two minutes. I’ve also, thinking back on it, fallen into the habit of going for a firm set of the custard which is always useful if the flan is for a picnic and going to be carried around in a box; and of course if you’re baking 20,000 a day in a factory. However, yesterday I had to make a decision without benefit of the clock, so as the top began to take a bit of colour I fetched it out of the oven and put it aside to cool. When it came time to eat it we discovered that the usual firm set middle was still a bit runny, faintly but not oppressively cheesy, unctuous and smooth; like home-made custard. The combination of crisp pastry, firm and very fresh asparagus and the unctuous sauce was absolutely lovely – an accidental discovery made in heaven. I’ve made up my mind to make a cauliflower cheese, not sauced as usual with a cheesy bechamel, but with a cream, eggs and cheese custard. Then we’ll see whether happy accidents can be turned into enjoyable insights.

The spuds are in at last

Madame wielding the rake with the Couch grass growling just outside.

I see from the newspapers that the national potato crop is in trouble again. On our way back up from Mendip last week we took the motorway and passed two heavy tractors attempting to plough a couple of sodden, clay rich fields on the Somerset Levels. The resulting mess was disturbing as it combined the pointless destruction of the soil with the consumption of a lot of diesel fuel. The grass pasture on either side of the hedges was looking green and fine. A bit wet for grazing, maybe, due to the probability of poaching the ground, but nonetheless recoverable. How anyone can claim that this terrible unseasonable weather is not connected to climate breakdown angers me. The Guardian reported that this is potentially the smallest potato crop since the last crisis in – wait for it – 2020. Separating out two events four years apart as if they were random acts of god, and seen in the light of record breaking temperatures with crazy winds and rainfall. In my book that’s not two short crises but one long one. Figures of speech like ploughing on make themselves ridiculous first and then redundant soon afterwards.

So I was almost pleased to see that George Monbiot had written a piece in the Guardian on beef farming. I say “almost” because almost every time I read his pieces I find they make me crosser and crosser. Here’s a writer who – on the face of it – should be a firm supporter of campaigns to de-intensify farming but instead completely loses the plot and shrieks at potential allies like a fundamentalist preacher. He starts badly enough by insisting that anyone who fails to agree with him must be the victim of some kind of sinister neuro linguistic programming conspiracy. Not, you see, someone who has also done their best to examine the facts and come to a different conclusion. Having sawn any possible objections off at the knees (a non vegan metaphor I’m afraid but I can’t find a comprehensible alternative); he then goes on to attack regenerative farming by claiming there is no acceptable (that’s a key qualification) scientific evidence to back any of its claims. Here’s a little bit of incontestable evidence that should encourage Monbiot to decide whose side he’s on.

Jeremy Padfield and his business partner Rob Addicott, farm about 1000 acres of the land under Higher Level Stewardship Agreements of which 80 acres are specifically conservation managed for wildlife.  Their combined Duchy farms became LEAF demonstration farms in 2006. Over subsequent years soil organic matter averages out at around 5%; no insecticides have been used within the last 5 years; weed killing is targeted only reactively; antibiotic use has been reduced by 58% and  plastic use is down by 60%. Minimum tillage leads to a 68% drop in fuel consumption; water is intensively managed and stored, and solar energy meets much of the needs of the farm buildings. As well as wider wildlife field margins, Stratton Farms have been experimenting with skylark plots and wide strips of wildflowers and companion plants sown through the crops. Additionally, 20 acres of trees and 2000 metres of hedgerow have been planted. 

Notes on an indoor meeting of the Bath Natural History Society, written by me.

This isn’t, by the way, a kind of bucolic lament for the blue remembered hills. They achieve this by using extremely high tech equipment and it’s that convergence of scientific know-how with boots on the ground that makes these farms profitable. Monbiot, on the other hand takes up what I like to think of as the Amos Starkadder position. I sometimes think he’s got a bit of an Old Testament prophet in him; possibly a new Jeremiah – I suspect he’d like to think of himself as a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness; but in the end he’s always going to be Amos Starkadder – the fundamentalist preacher to the Quivering Brethren in Stella Gibbons’ lovely 1930’s novel Cold Comfort Farm. Amos Starkadder was unable to distinguish between the sins a bunch of small-time village dwellers and the inhabitants of Dante’s inferno. I’m always delighted, by the way, that Dante enlisted the first circle of hell for the eternal punishment of those people whose sin was not to give a shit!

Anyway the price of separating Amos from his flock was a small Ford van to travel the country and trouble thousands of moderately innocent souls who might once have cast a lustful glance in the direction of the squire’s son. or daughter (oh go on then, wife)! and then worried too much about it. George Monbiot makes the sixth form debating society’s error of allowing the perfect to drive out the good. Far from encouraging small and achievable gains to fight climate destruction, he treats a 30 acre mixed smallholding as identical to 50,000 head of cattle in a gigantic American feedlot, and then denounces the both of them with his shrill rhetoric. The thought of going after the biggest threat first seems not to cross his mind, which suggests to me that his views on farming are -to misuse an old Marxist term – overdetermined by a prior commitment to veganism and the memory of an unsuccessful attempt to live the rural life in Wales. He implied that the farmers didn’t take to him and the locals treated him rather dismissively in Welsh! How very dare they! They’re all dammed!

The haunting premonition of a vegan future leaves me shivering amidst 100.000,000 lonely wind lashed trees surrounded by huge industrialised vegetable farms and stainless gloop tanks all operated by (who else?) Monsanto and Cargill. I’m not badly disposed towards veganism, but I’m in no sense attracted by it. We’re walking up in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) this week and the local pub does excellent faggots at half the price of the cheapest steaks. The slaughterhouse is a ten minute drive away. There’s a lesson in sustainable living, somewhere in there.

But finally I want to draw your attention to the quality of the allotment earth. It’s been mollycoddled, sheeted , hoed and fed for nearly 8 years now, during which time it’s changed from intractable and shallow alluvial clay and stones to deep, black, friable soil. The 10X4 beds that took a week to clear of couch grass and nettles when we took the plot on can now be shallow tilled in a few minutes. Of course it’s not going to save the earth, but there are probably 300 allotments on the whole site and half a dozen sites in Bath. Every day we see bicycles delivering organic veg to cafes and restaurants around the town and regenerative farms getting going everywhere. So I’ll end with a question. Hi George do you really believe that all this is a waste of time and a greenwashing campaign by shadowy industrial finance? Is it all a distraction? or have you been out eating too much rich spring grass and got blown.