Category: About the Potwell Inn

Railway sidings, docksides, canals? I’m taken back into the past.

It’s a Mullein – can’t officially say which one until it’s been verified, but our local Country Recorder says that if I’m right it would be a great find.

I’m indebted to Clive Stace and Michael Crawley’s marvellous book “Alien Plants” for much of the historical perspective in what follows.

I don’t suppose anyone knows what a Lamp Boy did, getting on for a century ago; but back in the age of steam it was what we now call a gateway job into being a railway worker. Much of the menial and repetitive work on the railway was done by young people who would, today, be described as children. My dad – born in 1916, left school at 14 and among his first jobs he was a lamp boy. After a series of disastrous railway accidents; safety measures became part of the life-blood of the industry. I remember my Dad sitting at the dining table memorising every signal between Bristol and London or Derby (he changed regions several times). So polishing the lamps and lenses, replenishing the oil and trimming the wicks of the red and white lamps that were mounted front and rear of every train and all the points and signals across the country was the beginning of many a career on the railways; a high status job back in the day.

But of course there were plenty of other menial jobs that occupied young men and kept the country in profit in all our colonial pomp. International trade brought ships and their cargoes from around the world and sailors needed feeding. Most cargo ships carried supplies of food “on the hoof” as it were. Cattle, chickens and such like were often kept on ships and slaughtered to feed crews (or perhaps just the officers) on long journeys. The ships were loaded with fodder before they left and by the time they returned across the oceans they needed to be restocked with grain, hay and straw which, in those days before farm machinery, carried their burden of weed seeds back from abroad. When these ships docked – in Bristol, for instance, they were unloaded and then the holds were swept and all the manure was removed to the dockside where it would be sold off to local farms. The cargo would be loaded onto wagons or railway trucks and narrow boats for transportation to further places. The dockside, canal and railway sidings were a happy hunting ground for botanists like James White. These days we still find unexpected plants which are spread by passing lorries on roadside verges which, it seems, are especially attractive to salt-loving stowaways.

So drawing all those threads together we have James White publishing his invaluable 1912 book “The Bristol Flora” after hunting for all those casuals in the places they were spilled or blown; and one of the biggest railway sidings in Bristol was at St Phillips Marsh where my Dad polished his first lamps before a long career with the Great Western and London Midland and Scottish – still separate companies in those days. For all I know, he may have stepped over my plant or one of its nine cousins as he crossed the lines at work as a child. He once told me about a mass migration of rats from the stables when he said they were so many it felt like a moving sea. Freight trains were loaded at the dockside and passed through the sidings which were almost alongside the Feeder Canal which connected via a navigation section along the River Avon, into the Kennet and Avon canal flowing east towards London past our flat and just up the road from where the plant, mentioned by White, is (possibly) now growing over a century later.

So is my solitary plant a sighting or a history lesson? I like to think it’s both. Even so-called scientific disciplines are set within a broader culture

If you were to do a word search on this blog for “canal” (please feel free, it’s great fun) you would find many mentions of the Kennet and Avon because it’s now a significant part of the life of the Potwell Inn. We walk one section of the bank at least once a week and it never fails to deliver plants that I’ve not seen before. Some of them are medicinal herbs, probably planted by boaters in the past, who had little access to medical care. There is the usual brigade of thugs, vagabonds and chancers brought in by the wind, by birds, on the tyres of push bikes and the boots of generations of walkers. Some of them flower a couple of times and move on, or die in an unsuitable environment. Some set up permanent residence and some – Himalayan Balsam for instance – think to themselves whoopee! and raise families of thousands and tens of thousands. Lazy fly tipping by overtidy gardeners has led to Elijah’s revenge and we are whipped with scorpions. Then there are obvious garden escapes and plenty of native plants that just are – in all their beauty.

Then of course plants associate with insects and many other forms of wildlife and what we get – passing intact through many industrial, post-industrial and suburban areas are linear nature reserves of real significance. Abandoned railway lines; derelict docksides; old gasworks (too expensive to develop); post industrial sites polluted with heavy metals and land rendered unusable through flooding – they’re not pretty but in this age of industrial farming they probably furnish many of the richest wildlife habitats we can enjoy. Forget the SUV – you can probably walk out of your front door and abandon yourself to the wild in a walk of a couple of miles.

Cuckoo!

Beggarticks

Cuckoo – like dog or horse gets pressed into service in quite a number of flower names. I particularly like “Cuckoo Pint” – Arum maculatum – a spectacularly well hung (sorry) allusion to the presence of cuckoos in nests they oughtn’t be in – if you catch my drift. Among other folk names for the same plant we get Parson in his pulpit and also Lords and Ladies. Geoffrey Grigson lists a couple of dozen names – nearly all of them both vulgar and funny. In my innocence I always wondered where pint as in beer came from; but it’s actually a reference to a pintle, a long bolt that holds a boat’s rudder in place – need I go on? So perhaps the plant name should be Cuckoo Pint as in pin rather than in eye except I’ve never once heard it pronounced so. Anyway, there’s an exception to every rule and so the Cuckoo Flower is named after the fact that it appears at the same time as the Cuckoo is laying its eggs in a Reed Warbler’s nest. Sadly the last time I heard a cuckoo was several years ago on our friends smallholding near Brecon.

Much enlarged photo x10

So taking up the theme, I have to say that I’m rather addicted to plants that show up in the wrong place. Once you’ve got your eye in, they stand out like a sore thumb and when I don’t recognise them – that’s to say almost always – I feel obliged to find out what they’re called and even, if they’re a bit rare, record them. Twice this week my eye lit upon an unexpected plant on the canal – one is called Beggarticks which was a little upstream of a new (to me) Mullein which I think will turn out to be Hungarian Mullein, Verbascum speciosum. Both of these are neophytes – newcomers – which have entered the UK during the last century on boats, or at least in ballast or escaping from wool shoddy carried by boats. Most floras don’t even mention these floral boat people, and it has to be said they’re quite hard to identify without a hand lens or a macro photo.

But they’re not all incomers. I also encountered a Fool’s Parsley plant growing through a weed control mat on a length of landscaped riverbank. It’s related to Hemlock and consequently rather poisonous, so I’m sure it wasn’t part of the designer’s plan but then, nature doesn’t read planning regulations – she makes her own rules.

How these plants got to where they’re now growing is a mystery; but it occurs to me that they may have been carried up the canal from Bristol on the shoes of narrowboaters. Most plants will stowaway given half a chance, but some, like Giant Hogweed, Russian Vine and Himalayan Balsam get thrown out of gardens when their owners realize what thugs they really are. Unfortunately, unlike teenagers, they don’t grow out of it and carry on terrorising towpaths and riverbanks the length and breadth of the country. Other strangers have replaced wool shoddy and ballast by commandeering birdseed as a means of transport, and among the upcoming means of getting about some are seeking pastures new by way of wildflower mixes. There’s no let-up for the prospective Cuckoo hunter. Apple of Peru – Nicandra physalodes– regularly pops up on the allotment.

Today was/is Harvest Festival day for the Potwell Inn. We cleared the polytunnel of tomatoes, aubergines and accidentally grown Scotch Bonnet chillies, and feasted on sweetcorn which has escaped the badgers this year by being locked inside the tunnel. Now there’s a mountain of pickling and preserving to climb, and we’ve plenty of Squashes to last the winter. It does seem odd that today is the first day of meteorological autumn when we’ve barely seen the summer, but climate damage is the cause of all this and lying in bed with the windows open at night reveals that more planes are flying over Bath than buses drive up the A4. I should think there’s a plane overhead coming in to land or taking off every ten minutes. The Local Council are doing their best – against some strong and synthetic opposition by people who don’t even live here – but it all seems a bit pointless when the pollution by aeroplanes is deemed too economically important to curb.

Uugh! aargh! get off!!

Bullwort

I turned the whole of last week over to a personal project that – like a treadmill – wouldn’t let me off; at least that’s my excuse for not posting for a while. I’ve been meaning to gather together all my untidy botanical records into a single spreadsheet for ages; but knowing it would be a bit of a struggle I put it off until it converged with another thread: self doubt in its most insidious form. I’ve got notebooks and photos (many not properly ID’d) going back over years and I am for the most part organised, but only for short periods like trips away in the campervan. Any qualifications I possess are completely unrelated to natural history and so if it’s not theology or ceramics I feel like a minnow in the shark infested ponds of botanical expertise. I know my place but I’d like to swap it for a better one because I really enjoy finding and identifying plants and – dare I say – I’m pretty good at it. However, not possessing a piece of paper with an “ology” on the top, makes me a bit of an insecure wallflower. My inner policeman urges me not to make a fool of myself (psychological code for venturing an opinion).

So I thought I’d make a list. I thought I might find a hundred plants that I know at best and that would be a confidence booster and so I set up a spreadsheet, opened up the notebooks and Google Photos and started to enter plants matched with photos wherever I have them and double check every entry against the field guides, excluding anything I might have got wrong. I soon reached 100, then 200 and then – running out of steam – got to the high 200’s with only a handful needed to cross the magic 300 boundary.

Meanwhile, back on the allotment it’s always busy and so watering, planting out for the winter and weeding also demands time. That’s OK for me because I can weed and look out for likely additions to my list at the same time and so I was taking a break and gossiping with our next door neighbour when I caught sight of a carrot family (Apiaceae) plant that I initially thought could be a Pig Nut and took a quick photo to check. I often use an AI app to quickly assess what I’ve found. They’re pretty useful for identifying the family, but less so at species level. Anyway it came back as a plant I’d never seen – Bullwort. So having told our neighbour that it could be unusual I went back ten minutes later to take more detailed photos and it had disappeared, presumably into his compost heap. It was such an interesting clash of cultures; for me a plant of interest and for him a pernicious weed that needed to be removed ASAP. In the event my first photo was good enough to confirm Bullwort and it didn’t take long to realize that it was at the edge of a scattering of wildflowers grown from a packet of supermarket seeds. So dilemma number two came up – should I record it as described by the field guides – an occasional stray from birdseed and seed mixes – when I remembered my copy of the 1907 Bristol Flora written by James White who haunted railway sidings and docksides in search of accidental introductions that fell off the back of a wagon or out of a torn sack. If he found them he recorded them – and so shall I!

And so I crept and then tottered across the magic 300 with the assistance of a walk down the Canal which rarely fails to yield something interesting and also a photo of an utterly common weed such as often passes under the radar because it’s so common and I feel just a bit vindicated as well as tormented by the thought of the next target. All this is a bit too trainspotting for me, and yet the temptation is enormous.

Realistically the majority of field botanists are complete (but extremely competent) amateurs, and the professionals – with very few exceptions – are helpful, kind and considerate. There are also BSBI tests we could take to award a level of competency but the thought terrifies me, and so I’ll bumble on at my own speed and keep up the day job – writing and gardening and tonight, cooking a courgette risotto for Madame.

Finding the Heffalump!

From the top left: The canal today; Gypsywort: next line are Gypsywort and Skullcap growing together on the water’s edge, then two photos of what I hope will be confirmed as * Flattened Meadow grass; then on the bottom line Snowberry and Soapwort.

*Sadly that one didn’t work out.

It’s been the strangest week. For a start it was overshadowed by the prospect of endoscopy – I’ve had some dodgy cells in my oesophagus for way over a decade and so they make sure every couple of years that they haven’t gone rogue. Most of the time I don’t think about it but as the day approaches I start to imagine the worst. Ironically (gimme the sedation and lots of it!) it’s pretty painless and certainly not frightening, everybody is very professional and kind and I even get a cup of tea and a biscuit after the local anaesthetic has worn off and I can swallow again; but until I see the photos and get the first draft of the report, I’m sleepless and I worry. Happily, once again I emerged under the blue skies of a good outcome – pending the pathology results, that is.

So – thus reprieved – next day we worked on the allotment in the heat until we were so exhausted we could hardly stand and generally overdid the celebration of our fitness. Apart from Madame’s dodgy knee we were no worse than walking wounded but painfully reminded that we’re no longer in our thirties. The good news continued with my walking trousers being mended free of charge when one of the pockets fell off – and even better, Osprey provided, free of charge, a replacement for the lost waist strap for my rucksack, and so we were set for a celebratory walk. Madame guessed I was suffering from a bit of Mendip fever and so she suggested we might make for the hills.

Come this morning, however, and we had one of those pointless circular discussions (familiar to anyone in a long relationship) about whether we really wanted to drive for an hour to Priddy Mineries to look for a single rare fern. After three or four turns around the circuit – “look if you really want to go we can go …” – “But do you really want to go all that way ……?” – we both realized that neither of us wanted a long drive. Which left the “where” question wide open. Victoria Park? – No – Botanical gardens? – no – Henrietta Park? – no. Canal? hmmm, ummmm, why don’t we walk up to the George? DEAL!

There’s a real point in having some home territory. The Kennet and Avon Canal isn’t just a lovely place to walk, it’s the place where I almost always find at least one plant I’ve never seen before. Knowing most of the residents by name in – let’s say March or April, or perhaps December, if you like the perfume of Winter Heliotrope, doesn’t mean you’ll know them in May or – like today – in August. The towpath is constantly and astonishingly renewing itself month by month with fresh new growth pushing up through the senescent remains of the old. This miracle of renewal is happening just slowly enough to fool us that nothing much changes. In real life the canal banks put on a new set of colourful clothes throughout the year. Yes it slows down in the winter but even then, we find new growth in the rosettes of leaves that will flower later in the year. You’ve no idea how many shades of green there are in leaves alone, and when you add in texture and shape you can be lost in contemplation without a flower to be seen.

If we’d gone to Priddy as planned I would have yomped across the Mineries with my nose pressed into a GPS app and probably seen nothing. But on familiar territory that we’ve walked hundreds of times I found and photographed Gypsywort, Skullcap, and Soapwort as well as what I hope will be verified as * (wasn’t) Flattened Meadow grass growing on top of a rather famous Brunel wall. That’s three new personal records – and we found the Soapwort exactly where I remembered it from 2020 during the lockdown.

Back home I transferred all the photographs to the computer – the new camera does this wirelessly – and identified them all as best I could, calculated the National Grid references from the camera Lat and Long, using an OS app and turned to my old pal Mrs Grieve to see if her 1920’s herbal thought Gypsywort had any healing properties. She didn’t even mention it, and when I double-checked online, every single historical use for it has been deemed dangerous by science, so nothing to report there. Skullcap too passes under the radar but Soapwort root was once used to treat syphilis which neither Mrs Grieve or me have suffered from – all she can say in its favour is that it was thought to be “better than mercury“. Well thanks but no thanks – we’ll give that one a miss too. I often think the use of the word natural to bestow instant credibility is one of the quickest ways into A & E.

Wild swimming is about as natural as it gets, and yet – looking at the top left photo of the canal, taken today, the spring water trickling in from the hill was very pretty – but I’d say there are a few unsavoury additions to the cloudy waterway – so however hot the day I’ll be keeping my trousers on.

Anyway, as far as Heffalumps are concerned, I’m more and more convinced that there’s no real need to be searching across distant counties until I’ve looked more closely and found all the available ones nearer to home. I understand that in the wildflower meadows of Yorkshire and Cumbria they stand shoulder to shoulder, and maybe one day we’ll get there. I do love a good Heffalump specimen, but I don’t always need to wear my tropicals and a pith helmet.

Dundas aqueduct – July 2017

Clack click; clack click – let’s think, let’s think – sings the passata machine.

High season for tomatoes (and Wrens)

We grow our tomatoes in the polytunnel on grafted rootstocks and with blight resistant varieties. It’s by no means cheap, but we haven’t lost a crop to blight in years, and having grown both from seed and from grafted rootstocks, the commercial ones, bought from a local nursery (so we can see what we’re getting) have a much higher yield and more than pay for themselves as long as we water them consistently and feed them with an organic seaweed based fertilizer. They ripen over a period which gives us plentiful fresh tomatoes in the kitchen but any surplus is quickly preserved. Freezing is very energy intensive, so we rely on reusable glass preserving jars with new metal tops every year so they seal perfectly. Our collection of Italian jars and bottles has been in continuous use for nearly ten years now. After several years of pushing the pulp through a sieve – which is very slow – we bought a cheap hand cranked passata machine which will easily mill six pounds of tomatoes in ten minutes, neatly removing skins and seeds which we don’t put into the compost any more because then we land up with hundreds of tomato seedlings!

The passata machine and the pulp. The pale yellow lumps are butter.

Depending on which part of the cycle the little spring loaded paddles have been assembled in against the sieve, the first few turns of the handle yield hesitant and irregular clickings. But as soon as the hopper is filled with peeled and chopped tomatoes and the process speeds up, it sounds to me something like “Lets think! Let’s think!” Each hopper goes through the machine five times, recovering first the juice and later the thicker pulp. Finally the skins go through because there’s a surprising amount of pulp still on the skins. At the end I have a deep pan half filled with passata and a shallow enamel dish filled with almost dry seeds and skin. It’s high summer and one of those grounding kitchen rituals which mark the transition of the seasons, just as marmalade making marks the end of winter and Christmas pudding, the beginning of it.

This kind of sauce making reduces our almost unmanageable crop of tomatoes to around a quarter of their original weight and prepares them for storage so they last more than a year. We make several kinds of sauce, but this one – which we simply call Hazan number one comes from Marcella Hazan’s marvellous book “The Essentials of Classic Italian cooking”. We also make straight passata and roasted tomato sauce from Pam Corbin’s River Cottage Handbook “Preserves”. Then there’s tomato ketchup from a 1950’s HMSO book and, if there are any leftover green tomatoes we make chutney from my Mum’s old cookbook. Nothing gets wasted at the Potwell Inn apart from (very occasionally) the Landlord.

Meanwhile Madame has been continuing with her years-long search for a ratatouille recipe that I’ll actually like. I was put off ‘rat’ by over-exposure to it on camping trips in the past, when it always tasted of methylated spirits from the Trangia Stove. However, because we’ve got all the fresh ingredients coming off the allotment at the moment, she has been experimenting from a whole pile of recipes and yesterday’s came from Delia Smith, but shares its DNA with a much earlier one by Jane Grigson. The whole aim is to create a dish that doesn’t look like pavement vomit. Simply boiling up all the ingredients into a wet and slimy sludge should be enough to get you a stiff fine for vandalism. Anyway, Madame’s latest iteration last night looks and tastes like the best yet.

But there’s more to it than that. “Let’s think ….. let’s think” sings the passata machine as I crank the handle.

I love this kind of seasonal cooking (and eating), and I learned about kitchen thrift from my mother and grandmother who understood food shortages from the experience of two world wars. But there’s more to it than that. “Let’s think ….. let’s think” sings the passata machine as I crank the handle. These seasonal earthings are incredibly important to both of us and at these times we work as a team in the kitchen. I suppose – if you suffer from the burden of believing that there are better or more important things to do with your time than press tomatoes through a sieve or make your own Hollandaise sauce – then you’ll miss the meditative thoughtfulness that repetitive kitchen work brings. The meditation strengthens the link between growing the plant, preparing the food and eating together.

Growing food, cooking and eating together are fundamental to thriving; much more – dare I say – than commodified health and conspicuous consumption. Pouring damson jam into pots brings the trees and their fruits to the table in the depths of winter. Making a wish over the Christmas pudding mixture is – at its very least – a wish for a peaceful future. Beating a mayonnaise or mashing potatoes will give a few minutes respite from endless bad news about riots and hatred. Baking bread means committing 24 hours to something of more moment than gossip.

My thoughts – as I crank the handle of the passata machine – are the spiritual equivalent of Mother Julian’s prayer that – “all will be well and all manner of things will be well.” The seasons, the moon and the tides wax and wane without regard for our existential angst. Whilst anyone with a grain of common sense will understand that we really cannot be anything we want to be, because our lives are a continual negotiation with nature and circumstance; we can still thrive by immersing ourselves in the flow moments when we know what it means to be human rather than spend anxious lives doom scrolling on our mobiles. Maybe the wooden spoon should be promoted to first prize?

The bindweed in the background should remind any gardener that the devil is always lurking in the background, waiting for an opportune moment

My green age

Imperforate St John’s Wort – Hypericum maculatum – on the allotment and occasionally used to treat mild depression but interacts dangerously with several other prescription medicines.

My friend Charlie (Professor) Stirton – formerly Director of the National Botanical Garden of Wales – sent me yesterday a copy of a talk he’d given to the Church in Wales in 2002. As ever I got about four pages in and stopped because he’d just given me a big thought – you know, the kind of thought that forces you to stop and, well – think; really think. Charlie does big thoughts – which is probably why I enjoy talking to him so much. Anyway, in the course of his paper he raised the issue of the way in which the Church (and I think he had society in general in his sights) is not very good at celebrating the great turning points in life with ceremony; what we in the trade call liturgy. So far so obvious, you might think, but what he drew from that – the occasions demanding recognition – went beyond the usual births deaths and marriages and talked about growing old. The crises of life; being born; entering puberty; falling in love, and possibly dying too – (although as Wittgenstein pointed out – “death is not an event in life”) – are all catered for, but growing old certainly is an event in life and for the most part we turn away from it; refuse to think about it and regard it as if it might be contagious. Can you even imagine your friends and especially your children wanting to celebrate the “dying of the light“? And so it becomes the thing we can’t talk about and it becomes the one major life event we usually travel alone. Yes we have hospices and they do wonderful work, but I’m not writing here about dying I’m writing about the autumn that precedes it; the inexorable minor irritations that can make us grumpy; arthritic hands and knees, irregular heart rhythms, vivid nightmares and the memories of old hurts and failures, loss of vigour and suchlike. Wisdom, sagacity can be a poor reward for struggling breathlessly up a flight of stairs and in any case the last thing most younger people want is the benefit of your accumulated experience. Growing old; the period between retirement and senility can feel like the prologue to an ultimate redundancy without compensation. A mystery tour where you see immediately the driver is as drunk as a skunk and the satnav has broken. What – really what is there to build a celebration around in all this?

But first, here’s a phrase that sticks in my mind from a lecture I attended many years ago. I was working as an Art Therapist at an old fashioned mental hospital. This was in the early days before Art Therapy had been codified, given diagnostic references and its very own theology. We had a talk from a professor of gerontology (the study of old age) and his opening remarks have never left me.

“Remember this” he said “…. “miserable young people make miserable old people”.

In other words – don’t wait to sort your shit until it’s too late. Or as Aristotle and most of the great religious teachers might have said more philosophically – human flourishing depends on right habits. So if you’re in your mid thirties – let’s say – in the years of your pomp – but not really enjoying life as much as you thought you would when you went after all those promotions and bonuses; don’t fall into the trap of kicking happiness down the road because the road might not get you as far as bucket lists and dream retirements. Right habits can be acquired but also need to be practised day by day. For some odd reason our culture teaches us to denigrate habits (boring and repetitive) but glorify feelings. However – sincerely believing that a very stupid or immoral act is right because it feels right – however sincerely that belief is held – is profoundly misguided. Doing the right thing demands consistency and practice so it’s best to start as young as possible.

So once you have reached the age when your inbox is looking less crowded, I think one necessary thing is to absolutely refuse to play along with all the OAP stereotypes. We need to find a form of what the Roman Catholic church wisely renamed as reconciliation in the late 20th century, which doesn’t even think about absolving us from all the hurt and shitstorms we’ve created in our younger days, but reconciles us to ourselves, our victims and and our lost and abandoned lovers. The dying of the light can only be accomplished well with a mind at peace.

We must learn to live completely in the moment, opening our arms to the occasional joys that come our way. Yesterday we talked to a friend whose sister had re-found love after a fifty year marriage followed by bereavement, but even a returned smile can make the sun come out for us.

Today, on the allotment we harvested courgettes, apples, aubergines, tomatoes and basil and, as I write this Madame is in the kitchen preparing supper for us; but as any gardener knows, we also have to weather our failures as well as celebrate our successes. This has been a truly difficult season and there have been moments when we wondered whether it was worth all the disappointments. But coping with failure without going under is a tremendously important life-skill – especially when the wheels begin to drop off.

But so far as Charlie’s challenge to find the equivalent of a marriage or naming ceremony to mark and celebrate the onset of old age as a distinct and potentially rewarding stage in life – that demands an enormous cultural reset. When I retired from paid work, I had a sweater made with the words “I’m not old, I’m experienced!” but Madame thought it was provocative (as if!), and I’ve hardly worn it.

So thanks Charlie – for an excellent question, and now I’ll get back to reading the rest of your presentation.

The lowdown on city centre streetlife

A local blogger posted a couple of pictures today rather like the ones above except that the left hand picture showed a pavement lined and ennobled by plants and the right hand saw the same picture with all the plant life taken out by the moaners and scrapers employed to humour tidy minded citizens. These two plants are respectively Knotgrass and Procumbent Yellow Sorrel, both eking out a living barely two centimetres above the pavement and inconspicuous with it – like all successful squatters; and you know how it is when someone passes a deeply upsetting remark without even realizing they’re being annoying. Like one of our neighbours who thought I’d be impressed by his decision to vote Reform in the recent election. I don’t think our blogger – one I follow and who is normally very sensible – thought for a moment that anyone would disagree with his settled opinion that “weeds” make the pavement look bad and upset the tourists. But urban plants are fascinating and I’d venture that they’ll get even more fascinating as the climate heats up and we all start to wonder what will survive global climate change. What lives on air, dust and heat ? What is it in their DNA that makes them such great survivors, and can we borrow a bit of it? Here are some more weeds.

So – left to right, Rue Leaved Saxifrage, Coltsfoot and the old Charles Street Telephone Exchange – all growing together. So tell me which of these three is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen? I’m all for uprooting the building which was built facing the end of a lovely Georgian street under crown privilege and therefore bypassing planning regulations. Our backyard – an old builders yard – featured 47 species of weed last time I counted. Every year a council employee comes along the street scraping them all off – he used to spray with glyphosate; then they tried rocksalt and now it’s down to a sharp hoe. For the sake of setting the record straight, the plants all regrow in roughly the same time whatever the council do. In Oxford a rogue urban botany group started to label the “weeds” so that passers-by could see that they had names and often uses too. Brilliant idea but I daresay by now they’re all banged up in prison for discussing writing plant labels on a zoom call intercepted by GCHQ.

Of course you might find the mean streets of central Bath so upsetting that you can only traverse them by blotting out the noise with headphones and adopting that curious mobile phone walk, head down with the phone held out ahead like the prow of a ship breasting hostile waves. The other day we were in Great Stanhope Street and we saw a Lesser Black Backed gull attempting to swallow a rat whole, shaking it around to try and align it into a suitable position; an operation which caused the rat’s tail to wave around rather upsettingly in the sunshine. On the same morning we saw a pair of pigeon’s feet on the pavement – pretty clearly the remains of the local Peregrine Falcon’s recent meal finished off by a fox or a carrion crow.

Throw away the mobile distraction unit along with the headphones and you too could enjoy nature red in tooth and claw; share the outrageous joy of the carousing teenagers on the green and talk to the flowers whose worldly experience as survivors exceeds all expectations. The countryside isn’t a nature reserve somewhere outside the city boundary, nature is right here and we’re part of it.

Sea Spleenwort – living off Pepsi can, crisp packet, dog ends and McDonalds tray.
NB – no sea!

Gardening for the longer term

[Interestingly, there’s an AI tool built in to WordPress which I seem to have turned on accidentally, and which persistently interrupts and chides me for long or difficult words! I credit my readers with more intelligence than that!!]

This tree was on the allotment when we took it on – an old neglected espalier apple which Madame has retrained (restrained maybe). And yes those curled leaves are concealing Codling Moth.

If you’ve never read Michael Pollan’s excellent book “The Botany of Desire” then if you ever intend to grow apples you should go and get it right now. There’s a section in the book devoted to apples and among the fascinating facts and legends there’s mention of the fact that as the settlers crossed America and staked their claim on parcels of land, there was a legal requirement for them to plant apple trees in order to demonstrate their long-term commitment to the land.

Trees, of any kind, are a long term investment – for instance I marvel at some of the arboreta in the great estates of the eighteenth century where the landowners would have known they would never see the mature fruits of their planting. On any allotment site you’ll see many different styles of plot. Many will be cleared as annual plants mature and will spend the remaining parts of the season or year under cover. In a culture that lives for the moment, the idea of a long-term plan for an allotment might seem fanciful. Who knows when the landowner or the local authority will see it as a cash cow and flog it off to a developer.

But somewhere between the bland assumptions of a Humphrey Repton, for instance, that it was perfectly sensible to plant for future centuries, and the panicked sense of catastrophe of a 21st century environmental campaigner there’s still a case to be made for a commitment to slow growing perennials like fruit trees.

We’ve now planted two short (five trees) rows of apples, plums, damsons and pears – one row six years ago and the other three. It’s hardly an orchard and, until this year, we’ve barely picked an edible fruit but this year the first row of five apple trees has had an excellent set of fruit which should, if we planned it right, give us a few fresh dessert apples until October. The second row has given us a few Victoria plums and a decent crop of Bramleys – while we have to wait for any Damsons (could take years) and Conference pears. You’ve no idea how much pleasure it’s given to watch them grow from whips to cordon trees on MM106 or similar rootstocks. That’s a local authority rule, by the way, standard trees tend to swamp the allotments as they grow ever taller. One of our neighbours bought some standard apples cheaply off the supermarket and is only just learning the error of his ways. You can hear them growling at night!

Sadly, though, the deer are back on the site and nibbling away – especially the lower leaves and flowers of runner beans which are only just picking up speed after a very slow start. However the delayed gratification of the fruit trees has brought a whole new dimension to the allotment. Somehow it feels more mature, more long-term and more sense of anticipation of seasons to come. I remember our keen expectation of the greengages on our grandparents’ smallholding. I don’t think they were ever great croppers, but what they lacked in quantity they more than made up for in sweetness and flavour.

In the midst of the first and possibly the only heatwave of the summer we’ve been getting up very early and grabbing a couple of the cooler hours before we’re driven back behind the shutters in the flat. Our project has been to demolish the fruit cage which – given what I’ve just written – may sound counterintuitive but we’ve lived and learned a lot about weeds and in particular Bindweed (Devil’s Guts in one local name). Looking at the allotment earlier this year we realized that Bindweed just loves climbing up fences or nets. That raises two issues. Firstly you can’t strim or burn the young shoots off without destroying the cages and secondly cages are just as good at keeping allotmenteers out as they are at keeping out squirrels, birds and other roving pests. So we’ve taken away their climbing frames, let a lot of light in and given ourselves space to move around for pruning, watering, feeding and picking as well as dragging the long bindweed roots out whenever we see them. We shall see ….. I think we were rather affected by a protectionist frame of mind when we started out, but we’ve come to see the truth of that old saying – ‘the best fertilizer is the farmer’s boot.’ Wherever there’s a too narrow path or an inaccessible bed , or even perhaps a row of stakes the purpose of which you can’t quite remember, that’s where the weeds will flourish because you’re not constantly walking past and yanking them out. If you’re constrained by a fence or a low net you’ll avoid hoeing and the associated backache and go somewhere easier. At the risk of sounding extremely bossy you should avoid dumping full buckets of anything on a narrow path because if it stays there for even a week it will claim squatter’s rights and you’ll be tripping over it for a whole season – oh and when you finally tip the water off the rotting weeds it will go over your feet and it will stink. Trust me – I’ve done it all. By all means let a thousand weeds grow for the pollinators because nature abhors a vacuum, but let that be a matter of deliberate choice and make sure you know what’s in that cloud of parachute seeds passing you. Willowherb is a monstrously successful coloniser!

You probably won’t have heard of Jabez Bunting

The River Wye – a bit polluted and clogged with weeds

This is not going to be a religious piece, I promise, but my early experience of Methodism was as a child in a “Prim” (Primitive Methodist) chapel and so – I suppose – my childlike view of being a grown up was inflected by men, (they were always men), shouting at us and going on a lot about fornication a decade before I needed to know. When I was eventually overcome by the hormones I also had to overcome the gift of embedded guilt – a trick that fortunately I learned pretty quickly.

Anyway, this pilgrim’s progress took me through the Wesleyan tradition because they had a brilliant youth club, run by the most patient people I ever met – although Mrs Round cracked once before a fancy dress party and said the expected I’d be ‘coming as the devil‘. After that I sank into the lukewarm waters of the Church of England where I was lost to the elect, as it were. God gave up on me about 100 yards above this stretch of the river Wye under a concrete bridge. It happened quite unexpectedly. I was a bit shocked but – like any failed relationship someone had to say something.

So to get back to Jabez Bunting, and I’d really rather not, but in my Wesleyan Days I really admired John Wesley. He had to manage with doubts and when he went to America he lost his faith altogether; fell out with the C of E because they stood in the way of his work of growing new leaders. He was a charismatic who must have had the loudest voice you ever heard and he made it all seem possible, even to the Cornish miners at Gwennap Pit and the now forgotten colliers of Kingswood and the North Somerset Coalfield. You might think he represented something of the enthusiasm and fire of Jeremy Corbyn (stop that hissing immediately! – they never asked you on to the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury). Wesley was succeeded by Jabez Bunting who grew the infant Methodist church into a powerful force by driving his steam roller over any charismatic or independent thinkers. Methodism became a monocultural institution which had some good bits but lost much of its founding enthusiasm.

Actually there seems to be a bit of a pattern here. When St Francis of Assisi died, having been pretty much driven out of the order he founded, he was succeeded by Giovanni Parenti who was – wait for it – a lawyer who tidied the order up, stomped on all that nonsense about not having possessions and grew the order into a mighty force using more force where necessary.

So now I come to Brother Keir Starmer who comes across as a worthy successor to Giovanni Parenti and Jabez Bunting; cheerlessly obliterating hope whilst imposing order and discipline on a much depleted congregation.

But there is always a point of light. Back in the day I took a funeral service as a favour for a family from the South East who had no church connections in Bristol. As I left the crematorium an elderly woman hurried up beside me and said “Hello David it’s lovely to see you, how’s Jenny”(My sister) I made the usual lame excuse about not recognising her and she said “I was your Sunday School teacher in Staple Hill” (The Prim chapel). I do remember a teenage girl from the Sunday School, but mostly I remember the shouting of the preachers and the noise of the cattle and sheep awaiting slaughter behind the butcher’s next door – a brilliant and inexpensive soundtrack to the hell and damnation we were being promised. It was so nice to make her acquaintance after all those decades and the nicest thing of all was that in spite of all that dark religious stuff she’d evidently lived a full life of ordinary, everyday goodness.

As I said once in the Cathedral to an ordinand standing in a long line waiting to process in to kneel in front of the bishop – “You know this is only alright as long as you don’t take it too seriously”. She looked terribly shocked, so I hope she figured it out before it was too late.

A hot day in the kitchen

Every year the processing of tomatoes comes around; always surprising, always rewarding but always knackering. The polytunnel is a tremendous asset on the allotment, but the crops inside it seem always to ripen almost simultaneously, leaving us with a challenging glut. Our small flat has limited storage space so the more reduced the crop is, the easier it is for us. This year, fortunately, we need to make tomato ketchup which reduces 2 Kg of tomatoes to three small bottles. The ketchup is intense and – dare I say – much better than the commercial ones and tomatoes are the only crop in which we’re almost completely self-sufficient. I could write volumes on the sheer impossibility of total self-sufficiency which could only ever function well in a close community with a tradition of barter – the kind of community that only a small handful of us now live in. Having lived in a couple of comunes we would say that they’re no kind of primrose path to happiness and contentment. There’s always at least one person who refuses to work!

That said, before we could get going in the kitchen there was heavy work to be done on the allotment because we have decided to remove the fruit cage which has become a climbing frame for bindweed and serves no useful purpose except choking and shading our soft fruit. The forecast had the temperature rising to the low 20’s by mid day, so we went out early to break the back of the job. Two hours later we’d removed the roof and three of the four mesh walls and rolled them into giant builder’s bags to take down to the tip. This should open up the space and make watering, picking and pruning much easier. We were pleased to find, once we’d fought through the jungle, that our mulch of sheeps’ fleece and wood chip has completely suppressed the weeds around the plants, but of course bindweed travels aloft and laughs at mulches.

Back at the Potwell Inn; hot and sweaty, I popped shallots, chopped garlic and sliced tomatoes, sprinkled them with herbs from our little pot garden on the pavement, drizzled olive oil and shoved them in the oven to roast. As I’m writing they’re cooling down and later I’ll put them through the passasta machine – which is the most useful piece of kit for anyone who needs to process a lot of tomatoes. Honestly I’ve spent so many hours trying to push tomatoes through a sieve doing a job that now takes minutes. Later again I’ll unite the passata with some cider vinegar, sugar and all the spices, reduce it down and bottle it.

With later harvestings we’ll make straight passata and two kinds of readymade pasta sauce which we use as a base for anything else that needs a shot of tomato umami. It looks likely to be a punishingly hot week so we’ll have our work cut out with watering and finishing the fruit cage. Early starts are the only way to get it all done before the energy sapping city heat takes charge.

Next on the tomato agenda is one of our favourite Italian recipes panzanella made to the recipe in Anna Del Conte’s wonderful “Gastronomy of Italy”. I’ve never been fond of raw onion, but her suggestion of steeping thinly sliced red onion in iced brine for an hour in the fridge transforms the sulphurous heat into something altogether more lovely.

While all that cooking was going on, I’d brought home a small piece of the (inedible) Stone Parsley I found next to the shed door so I could take some macro photos of it using the focus stacking facility on the new camera and the big tripod arranged over the dining table (my desk). The tiny compact camera, only 50g heavier than my phone looks a bit ridiculous on top of the full sized tripod, but camera shake would ruin the macro focus stacking. I was really pleased with the results – especially when I used some sharpening to clean them up. The photo is below and, for reference, the flowers are only about 2 mm diameter – so we’re almost in microscope territory. Not necessary for identifying this plant because one of the diagnostics is a strong – some say unpleasant – smell of petrol when you bruise the stem. I can certainly vouch for that.

Last night I slept for nine hours and woke up dreaming I was paddling the kayak down a small river. What a glorious start to the day!

Stone Parsley, Sison amomum photographed with an Olympus TG-7 using in-camera focus stacking and a bit of sharpening applied later.