Category: Art

A Melancholy River: Severnside II.

A riverside culvert between the River Severn and the Sharpness Gloucester canal.

No I haven’t got the numbering wrong – Part One of what looks like it might be a series is yet to be written; I’ll do it today because like all writers I’m driven by the material which has been demanding that I set it down since I retired ten years ago

I’m not even quite sure what started my imagination boiling but it may have been this photograph, or rather me standing on the banks of the Severn wondering whether it would ever be possible to create image rich writing, linking words and photographs in a way that tells a story but leaves it up to the reader to decide where to start and where to leave. In those days, 20 years ago, The technology was difficult to use and demanded a skill set I never possessed and much more powerful hardware than I could aspire to.

But what I couldn’t show in a single photo was what was behind me on the riverside. It’s a raw and often windswept landscape up there on the Severn. At the point where it joins the Bristol Channel it’s a bleak industrial wasteland and the river itself is unreachable, hidden behind a railway line, giant storage silos, abandoned flour mills, a maze of conveyor belts and gas tanks. For the first mile or so north it continues in much the same way. Huge windmills rotate slowly and, nearby, a pair of gas power station chimneys steam and occasionally belch cumulus clouds that you can see from the motorway which runs two or three miles away along the ridge. You would have to possess a perverse imagination like mine to find much joy in it. There’s even a signposted “Smoke Lane”; there are cement works, lorry depots, warehouses, garages and tyre services and if, like me you have a long memory you could see where Imperial Smelting once stood; and the site of the Albright and Wilson chemical works that blew up after a paperwork mixup united two incompatible and dangerous chemicals; shut down the two motorway bridges and locked the occupiers in thousands of homes as the noxious fumes spread. Further on, the place where the Philblack (later Sevalco) works once covered the landscape with black carbon dust which is an important ingredient of car and lorry tyres.

Gradually as you drive further on, the river appears beyond a narrowing strip of shrubby grassland; the falling tidal flow brown and thick with the sediment it’s picked up on its long journey from the Pumlumon Fawr range in Wales where it begins, so I read, as a hard to find series of small springs. It’s as ugly as sin is alleged to be, and yet, maybe, I’m the greater sinner because I love it. These industrial landscapes are something! Every time I drive along that road I hear the voice of Bob Dylan singing Hard Rain.

I know, I’m not selling it very well but post industrial sites are my thing; dramways, abandoned coal pits, lead and manganese mines all have their botanical survivors and the aficionados who hunt them. The grim road continues north towards the two Severn bridge crossings, passing Severn Beach where birders find a great deal to interest them including Little Owls and all manner of migrating birds. Severn Beach was also, once upon a time, a destination where the single track railway brought thousands of visitors to paddle in the muddy water, bathe in the Blue Lagoon (well actually it was painted blue) and shelter from the wind in rented beach huts. There was even an amusement arcade and cafe owned by a traveller family that I subsequently got to know. One elderly lady I used to visit in Bristol had black and white photographs of the family beach hut on her mantlepiece.

This 25 year old picture of me was taken near the turnstile of the Aust Ferry turnstile where Bob Dylan departed for Cardiff on his controversial electric tour.

Onwards and northwards through Pilning, past the now closed but still a bit whiffy rubbish tip, the old road to the ferry terminal which, when the ferry closed become a favourite dogging spot (I’m told!), and into the more salubrious ruralities like Aust who refused to allow me to take responsibility their church after an unfortunate interview with the churchwarden and his wife who took an instant dislike to me. It was a happy escape for us all. The end of the M48 bridge was where my parishes began and ran upriver to the diocesan border to somewhere near Oldbury on Severn. I had skin in the game!

So why do I call myself Severnsider? given my lukewarm enthusiasm for its tidal estuary. Good question. Here- maybe – is part of the answer

One of the scuttled vessels at the Purton ship’s graveyard.

Behind the culvert in my first photo there is this hulk, plus many others, scuttled on the river bank. I used to go fishing on the canal. Pastoral work can be pretty punishing and after a particularly hard funeral – children for instance – I used to go there, more to sit quietly than to catch anything. Canal fishing is a difficult and specialised skill. In parish ministry you become the lightning rod for a lot of horrible situations and there’s no-one you can tell or talk to. The river runs alongside the canal at Purton and this mysterious collection of dead boats on the river intrigued me. In my imagination a catastrophic downturn in trade, or the coming of the railway or some other market crash led to the scrapping of the boats. There are lots of them and they make a melancholy sight which often chimed with my mood. Here are some more photos:

The real reason for this mas extinction event was that when the river broke its banks – as it often does – the destructive power and speed of the tide (the second highest tidal range in the world) threatened the integrity of the canal bank and by extension the canal itself. So these ships which included Severn trows, concrete and steel barges were towed to the spot and sunk in order to protect the canal. Some of the boats are now protected sites due to their age and rarity. My fascination with this stretch of the river never went away. There was more to it, though. My grandfather determined early on that I was going to read Dickens, and was always ready to lend me his own copies. Is it at all significant that the two favourite authors of my early reading life were HG Wells (hence the Potwell Inn) and Charles Dickens (hence the identification with Ham Peggotty, and upturned boats? These were the geographical heftings of my young imagination and so finding them in real life was a kind of homecoming. Magwitch, Peggotty and Polly haunted my dreams and still visit me now.

There’s so much more to write about the Severn and next time I’ll be remembering the last putcher and kype fishermen, ending a tradition that lasted from the 5th century, and elver omelettes of course along with a new and revelatory understanding of why the salmon developed lesions.

The Severn further upriver near Arlingham where you can see (and hear) the Severn Bore

Across a crowded pavement

Seaside Daisy

I really did meet someone who fell in love with someone they’d never met before, across a crowded room; or at least in that instance a crowded airport departure gate. The outcome was a bit messy so I won’t enlarge on the story any further. But is it, however, appropriate to use the expression in relation to a plant?  If love is redemptive, is it alright if the redemption looks back at a single pub lunch that was an unrelentingly miserable betrayal of cooking; the corpse of the idea lying dead in a shroud of soggy batter and a fish stew in a Cornish fishing village whose contents contained nothing but tasteless cornflower water and a handful of imported jumbo prawns. That is something that takes a bit of getting over. 

The god of surprises on the other hand must have had that redemptive moment in hand already as we walked back to the little park overlooking the bay. It won’t come as a shock to anyone who knows me, especially to Madame, that I’ve become a bit of a stalker in spite of all that I’ve written about trainspotter botanists recently. The Fleabanes are an attractive quarry precisely because they’re quite hard to identify. Some of them are regarded as weeds, but the upside is that some of them grow near us in Bath. I took a look in Stace IV (he who must be obeyed) and he lists thirteen species and subspecies, two of which grow in the pavement outside the flat and one in Charlie Stirton’s garden just down the road. The challenge is just that they have an inclination to cross-breed and unlike the ones that grow under supervision in a botanical garden, they rarely if ever show up in the same place and at the same time, and so it’s hard to get a detailed understanding of them. Of course there are a number of other Fleabanes that aren’t in the family I’m most interested in, so to be more precise I’m hunting the Erigerons – and that is the end of the Latin lesson. 

So I’ve found four members of the family within walking distance and there are a couple more slowly making their way up the river. But one I’ve never seen before is not often referred to as a fleabane because it’s commonly called the “Seaside Daisy”  and after my dyspeptic walk down the road from the pub – there it was! – growing and obviously naturalised alongside the narrow pavement. The pavement isn’t really that narrow but there are always builders vans and SUV’s which are too corpulent to fit their allotted spaces.  

Of course it immediately raises the issue about whether it’s a true native so to be clear: it’s not; it’s a boat plant you might say which – like most of the residents of the depleted local population – blew in from somewhere else like London or Birmingham. You know this because the local Spar shop sells sourdough bread and wines at £30.

Anyway, to return to the redemptive moment, the second I set eyes on it I knew exactly what it was – the photo is, as always, at the top. I can’t begin to express the pleasure of seeing that little outsider; outrider of a plant. A naturalized neophyte boldly asserting possession of a yard or so of someone’s garden.; someone who had the good taste to let it be. Somewhere down that little harbourside road there’s a gardener with vision, running a mission to those with eyes to see that even weeds and gnarly incomers have their beauty. I still haven’t forgiven the pub, but the takeaway memory of the day is of the seaside daisy; petals faintly purple like Michaelmas daisies, succulent salt resistant leaves in rosettes making the best of an Indian summer’s day overlooking the bay. Love at first sight. 

The imagination doesn’t work with footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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One for sorrow two for joy ….

This is actually a photograph of some Sow Thistle flowerheads, I took it in June in Cornwall, but if you look carefully enough with the eye of imagination it might pass for an image of the two magpies squabbling over some nesting material that I once saw, squashed flat on the road joined beak to beak by the short length of dry grass they were fighting over. They were so utterly focused on their greedy rage that they failed to notice the oncoming (I like to think) bus. The image has never left me, and if I’d only managed to photograph it in those pre-mobile phone days I could have used it in a dozen ways. Think of the proverb He who goes out for revenge should first dig two graves – incidentally Confucius didn’t actually say it but it’s good advice in any case. Now, a couple of days on from the moment the memory popped uninvited into my mind, I honestly can’t remember the context. So much of what my mind throws up is like an out of context post-it note that’s been sitting on the fridge door for months. But there, a casual popup memory led to an equally casual flip though the photo files and suddenly I’m looking at the sow thistles and thinking about a literary character called Père Ubu, who was invented by Alfred Jarry in 1896, scandalized French theatregoers and launched Dadaism. Ubu is the kind of monstrous human who would casually take a life over a blade of dead grass. He is fat, ugly, stupid and psychopathic, which may remind you of a well known President but I couldn’t possibly comment. I wanted to write my compulsory thesis on Jarry when we were at Art school but the Principal, Clifford Ellis, who was blessed with a very linear imagination, told me that he knew everything there is to know about Jarry and there was nothing I could possibly write that would be of the least interest to him – and refused to let me write it. I went straight to the library and asked the librarian if she knew of any artist about whom there was only a single book and of whom I’d never heard. After a bit of bibliographical research she came up with Eugene Boudin. I had never seen any painting of his and the prospect of very little research combined with a surname that translated as blood pudding I was hooked. Sadly my Dadaist revenge passed unnoticed by the Great Man and even with a staggeringly silly deathbed scene I got an A grade. Some years later I finally saw Boudin’s paintings in the flesh and I loved them. All of which goes to demonstrate what a compost heap my mind is.

But to begin at the beginning (again), these two magpies managed to demonstrate that two does not always equate with joy and to stretch the elastic proverb even further Madame and I had three boys while I don’t recall ever seeing four magpies together. They’re such unpleasant birds – always ragging nests and killing fledglings. Their immaculate morning suits don’t fool me; they’re like right wing assassins dressed as gentlemen. Nature tells more than one story and some of them are very dark. The nursery rhyme who killed cock robin? fingers the sparrow but I reckon it was a hit by an anonymous magpie who fitted the sparrow up in order to start a riot in Cheltenham. It’s worth encouraging children to learn the nursery rhymes because they often love a bit of darkness, and in the process they’d learn the name of fourteen creatures not including one which is murderous but remains a shadowy behind the scenes wraith in my rendering. One for sorrow two for joy is a counting rhyme that might well appeal to a reluctant learner despite being slightly less accurate than Old Moore’s Almanac. Oranges and Lemons can give us a pigeons’ eye view of the parishes of central London – my granny was born near Bow and when I think of the rhyme I think of her, an orphan, and also the mysterious Bungalow Granny who lived in a wooden building behind the Crest, the cottage where my real granny lived. Could the solitary resident have been her adoptive mother or foster parent? There’s a story to be written even in a single name and location. The beechwood in which her shack stood is the mise en scène. Why were my sister and I never taken to meet her?

If my mind is a pinball machine it works in two ways. In flow moments I want the ball to blunder its way past every single coil generating thoughts and words as a tangible reward, but on bad days or in bad dreams I just want it do shimmy around every memory, lighting none and exciting no morbid connections. Consciousness is only suffering on the bad days. The Buddha was wrong. The good days are festival days where sweet apples fall into my hand and consciousness is joy.

I guess the world in which we live is as much made by memories, recollections and, above all, language, as it is by the processes of nature. The two processes, language and nature are indivisible. We can only understand the natural world by exploring it from the inside because we are human and therefore part of it. The disciplines we can use to find our way pay no attention to boundaries and no particular approach, whether scientific or creative, can claim squatters rights or legal tenure.

Isaac Newton was into alchemy, William Blake and JMW Turner seem to have got there through visionary gifts, Tracey Emin has gone deeper than most living artists in exploring what it’s like to be human, and what about Amsel Kiefer who walks the darker path? What is the nature of Nature? RS Thomas wrote memorably of finding a depression in the grass still warm from the body of an unseen hare. Perhaps the illumination always comes from the unexpected, from left-field, from stopping worrying, from putting aside ceaseless questions and waiting in silence. Sometimes it takes years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is green spirituality just the same old same old – without the dressing up?

The moon in Lleyn – no really!

Forgive me for retracing my steps here, because I can anticipate a thousand toes available to be stepped on and I’ve often restrained myself when it comes to writing about spirituality because I’ve got previous, and you might think I’m trying to slip a bit of surreptitious religion into a post. I’m not. Mainly because I’ve moved on and I’d like to move an insight forward a bit. It always seemed to me that spirituality is akin to a flowing stream and if it stops flowing it becomes stagnant and sometimes even poisonous. Trust me, when you’ve seen how poisonous a religious bureaucracy can be when it refuses to countenance change, you’ll want to cross the road and walk on by. I can’t claim any particular philosophical expertise except for discovering that I could never fit what I might once have been called a religious experience into a religious framework. However hard I tried I found myself hacking some really important components off in order to force it to fit.

This was the moment

Curiously enough this feeling came to a moment of crisis as I stood next to the River Wye under a bridge in Hay one day when it was in full flood and huge branches were being swept downstream past me. What overwhelmed me that day and still moves me as I remember it was the sheer relentlessness and awe inspiring power of the flow. The river passed the spot where I was standing, oblivious to my presence, and onwards to the sea. Completely unexpectedly I “knew” that I no longer believed in any kind of supernatural extraterrestrial being. It wasn’t necessary; it added nothing to understanding; all it achieved was to force submission to the censor of difficult thoughts like an anti-heresy shrink wrap constricting the circulation. That odd experience opened the doors of a cage and a thousand WTF moments flew back out into the grey, stormy sky into the world of the ten thousand things.

But this doesn’t mean at all that the roots I had grown down into all those old religious texts had to be abandoned. I could still (loosely) meditate on them because they’d all been written by other beings just like me out of numerous experiences just like mine. But the writings could be validated perfectly well by experience, ordinary human experience, and claiming that they’ve been signed off in some mysterious way added nothing to them. Years before the bridge moment I’d realised that religion doesn’t, can’t, change the facts – the everyday phenomena that sometimes – like a bush – could burst into flames. Spirituality can’t change the facts; it can only change the way that we see and relate to them. Spirituality – to put it in a simple phrase – is a perspective changing phenomenon.

Of course I’m by no means the only person to travel this path: there are many others better qualified than me to elucidate the gritty detail and join the dots. But the transformation of my perspective came when I realized that nature isn’t about anything; not an explanatory metaphor or visual aid for the theologians or a demonstration of supernatural power; it simply is! There’s no destination; no culmination; no rapture; no sheep or goats; no judgement and no heaven or hell; no reward and no punishment.

“In short, non-theistic spirituality is about experiencing the sacredness of reality as it is, grounded in human experience and the observable universe.”

“a commitment to investigating the nature of one’s own mind, and experiencing states of consciousness that are transformative, without accepting unfounded claims about the nature of reality.”

Sam Harris

Here’s a cobbled together list from a Gemini AI search on a non-theistic “Green Spirituality which spells out a number of human attributes and dispositions that don’t need any theological scaffolding to hold them up. States we can all experience without validation from an invisible God. I find this list a bit abstract but it means well as long as we don’t have to take it too seriously. For me the truest joys are in the awkward and chameleon everyday when a bush suddenly seems to burn without being consumed or a blackbird seems to be singing just to me or when the moon rises over the sea on the Lleyn peninsula. Here’s the faintly anaemic list:

  • Awe and Cosmic Connection:
  • Mindfulness and Presence:
  • Ethical Interconnectedness:
  • Meaning-Making:
  • Transcendence:

In moments of flow, of ecstasy, of vision; but also in the more mundane moments on the allotment; out foraging for blackberries and as the unexpected beneficiary of a glorious smile from a stranger. No dressing up required but we could use more storytellers, artists, poets, troupes of actors and dancers and more time to slow down and take it all in.

The sun breaks through storm clouds on the Lizard in Cornwall

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

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

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

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

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

A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold 1947

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

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

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

We don’t any longer know how to love

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

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

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

And so, back to the troubling garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the plants speak!

Our kitchen in August 2018 – nothing changes much except we’ve now got two functioning extractor fans taking the fumes and cooking smells up the built-in flue. Only took 10 years of arguments with the landlord!

It’s early August and apart from being sweated alive by the fifth heatwave of the year there’s another sense in which it feels like Christmas every day. In these repeated heatwaves the only strategy we can follow is to keep as many of the plants alive as possible, and so life pretty well revolves around watering, cooking and preserving – and it’s worked wonderfully. Plants need water, food and sunlight, and the abundance of sunlight, although a curse through forcing us to water so much is marvellous in helping our crops to covert the water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. Just imagine what a miracle that is; but some plants like peas and broad beans will never thrive in these conditions however hard we try to help out because, like Madame, the heat makes them feel exhausted and they give up. But others take to it like ducks to water and each day, after watering, we bring the ripened produce into the kitchen and scratch our heads over what to do with it. Fresh vegetables are an order of magnitude more tasty than the impoverished lookalikes that taste of nothing after their long journeys. Every day is Christmas day.

Today it was the turn of the aubergines and after a test run in our youngest son’s commercial pizza oven I felt sure I could replicate the burn in our kitchen, with no danger of the smoke alarm going off due to the new extractors. And so it turned out to be – the fruits – still hot from the sun – blackened and smoked gently as the insides cooked at 275 C and, as they cooled, virtually peeled themselves leaving the pale, faintly smoky flesh waiting to be united with garlic and tahini. We’ve got more tomatoes, cucumbers, figs and new potatoes than you could shake a stick at, and it’s so exciting that I just put the apron on and relish every moment as the cupboards fill with winter stores.

It hasn’t always been that easy. Something of a turning point in my life was the day (just before we had an extremely low-key wedding), when we picked 40 lbs of blackberries on Rodway Hill. There were a couple of outcomes from that day. The first was that we made a huge amount of completely horrible blackberry chutney – so bad we couldn’t even give it away. The second outcome for me was the overpowering feeling of gratitude which (being a fervent convert to extreme atheism) didn’t fit at all well because there seemed to be no-one or nothing I could thank for the generosity of those spiteful bushes. Sixty years later I’m still struggling with that conundrum having tasted some of the off-the-shelf options without being convinced by any of them.

But I can dimly see a way through the desert by repairing and joining up the broken fragments of our polarized and fragmented culture. Let’s take plants as a beginning. We casually divide them into arbitrary categories (food; wildflowers; weeds; rarities; orchids and ragwort etc.) often entirely based on usefulness to humans or potential for monetization. But all plants come from the same tree of life as we do. Some time, millions of years ago, humans, dinosaurs and plants took different paths and we’ve evolved to live very different lives but notwithstanding Darwin’s troubles for suggesting that we share a great deal of our history with the great apes, for instance, and regardless of the religious arguments about it, we all came from the same single celled organism which contained the first few chapters of the library of life which have evolved, adapted and now reside in each of us inside every cell of our body; our six feet of tightly coiled DNA. The library is the same library which mothered (each with its own chapters) the butterfly, the tiger (Tyger?) the earthworm, the edible mushroom, the lichen and last of all, you and me. It’s not necessary for us to strive to unite with nature because we are already one with her. Hugely diverse and adapted; a coat of many colours you might say but a single one and not the atomised billions of homo sapiens who dare to think of ourselves as individuals.

So after years of seeing my passion for field botany, for gardening, for writing and spirituality for anthropology and for ceramics, for science and for cooking as separate “interests” I can see that they’re all more like spokes on a wheel at the centre of which is the big question –“What’s it all for?” – and when I ask myself the big question that way I can answer with another question which, for me, removes the thorn of the first. “Why does it have to have a meaning or a purpose at all?” We could invent a multitude of possible answers to the big question but I can’t see what useful purpose it would offer.

Just out of interest I should say that this far from sudden insight was triggered by my instinctive dislike for any kind of Magisterium which almost always exists to promote its own version of an answer and to persecute in the most cruel and heartless manner anyone who offers an alternative or sometimes even a slight amendment. The lightbulb moment came from binge reading about molecular biology and the latest plant taxonomy research in order better to understand DNA and one or two obscure (to me) statistical methods. Once, however dimly, I began to understand the beauty and complexity of what goes on in both plant and human cells; I began in an almost religious way, to see all of my interests bonded together by their common structure.

The icing on the cake has been to read about the work of Stefano Mancuso who runs a research programme at the University in Florence which he provocatively calls “Plant Neurobiology”. He and his colleagues across the world have come in for a great deal of flak from the old guard because plants don’t have neurons and couldn’t possibly have brains like ours but they are able to sense problems and respond to them; communicate with and “listen” to other plants and synthesise astonishingly complex molecules. All this has brought it home to me that writing about plants as if they were part of a giant but insensitive stamp collection is doomed. Without plants there would be no trace of the human and yet plant life would go on – probably less destructive. Plants are worth so much more than being pressed into herbaria and to even begin to understand what they are, we need poets and visionary science; we need anthropologists, herbalists, first nation men and women, collectors cooks and artists. I fear that we will never find a sustainable space for humanity on the earth unless we accept that we owe it all to the plants.

Hard questions of the third kind

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

Following on from the previous post; I have no doubt that we can occasionally understand when someone – usually an artist – has produced a work in a deep way; I’m thinking of this kind of work in terms of beholding or revealing their experience as opposed to just explaining it; It’s ferociously hard to explain how such a thing can happen and yet William Carlos Williams’ poem “This is just to say” takes an utterly banal idea and transforms it into a shared moment. “I have eaten the plums” Is surely a love letter to an unseen lover (the assured “forgive me“) who’s not yet awake; about a liberty taken – stealing their breakfast – and then almost a haiku (delicious, so sweet and so cold) .

William Blake could venture the possibility that we might see “the world in a grain of sand” in what feels like a poetic manifesto. It’s the expression of “The hard question”. How are the sense impressions we all experience every day – cold plums from the fridge; running sand through our fingers and idly watching them fall – how are these turned into “qualia” – or as Thomas Nagel puts it “what they feel like”. The hardest question of all is how can we communicate those feelings to another person – ever? Think of the struggle we have to explain a pain, for instance, to someone else.

I used to take our oldest son, then just a toddler, up Hope Chapel Hill in his pushchair when we lived at the bottom of this tremendously steep road. Often I’d let him walk up and he was always drawn to the cobblestone gutter where he would find treasures. The tops of ring-pull tins, cigarette ends, sweet papers, leaves, pebbles and grains of sand. It could take hours and yet he was completely absorbed by them.

When we were at Art School I became equally absorbed with By Brook which is the little river that runs through Castle Combe and on through Slaughterford until it reaches the River Avon. It runs through a very lovely steep sided valley and there used to be a little pumping station – ruined by the time we found it; sitting in a clearing of boggy ground, and further upstream a disused paper mill. In those days the river ran gin clear and there were small brown trout that, once or twice, we tried (unsuccessfully) to fish for. The whole area was keepered for a pheasant shoot and there was a water bailiff that we made sure never saw. I was having a hard time and this empty spot had a healing effect on me.

I was particularly fascinated by the contorted and interlocking roots of the trees on the sides of By Brook, and made many drawings of them (bottom left above). The top left photo was taken almost sixty years later and you can see that the water is now milky and probably eutrophic from farmland runoff.

I’ve never forgotten the experience of being there but I’ve never found a way of expressing it; the sound of the breeze in the Hazel bushes, the occasional staccato alarm call of a pheasant, the rich smell of the grass and the water and my struggles to make pencils and heavyweight paper speak it all. I’ve returned there in my memory so many times and although for me it’s an effortless transition in time to revisit the memories, the expression of them in whatever form always seems to slip through my fingers. On Tuesday our visit to the Victoria Gallery to see Norman Ackroyd’s exhibition The transience of light was both deeply moving and extremely challenging. How did he pull it off?

So after a great deal of huffing and puffing and moody introspection we went up to the allotment to tend our thirsty plants today and I came upon a whole collection of squashes and pumpkins which had been fattening up relentlessly, hidden by leaves and just out of sight the whole time, and then a kind of resolution to my challenge was staring me in the face. The poems and the photos seemed to arrange themselves and the whole argument is there in cryptic form at the top of the page. It says ‘stop trying so hard!’

It all reminds me of a time when against all odds I threw a large raku pot – nearly a foot high, using crank mixture – a clay that’s so full of grog (fired clay sand) that it takes the tips off your fingers. I can remember every moment of that experience, and what seemed most miraculous to me was that I just instinctively stepped aside from it and let it form itself. These were still my own fingers but they were not moving at my behest but that of the clay itself. I can remember the sense of wonder as it grew taller and thinner. It seemed to me on reflection that the harder I tried the less likely it was that I would succeed and so I discovered how stepping aside could be the final flowering of technique.

The idea of never ceasing to try but never trying seems more like a Zen koan than a piece of serious advice and yet there’s much wisdom in it. It’s like St Augustine’s much misunderstood saying “love, and do what you will” which, when it’s properly unpacked actually means that if you love – I mean really love – then you will always want to do the right thing. What it categorically doesn’t mean is do whatever you want in pursuit of love. Whether it’s eating a cold plum, throwing a pot, growing a pumpkin or drawing a river sometimes – no, almost always – it’s best to get over yourself and let the experience speak for itself without you feeling you need to explain it or help it along. Maybe, and this is just a wild thought, what sometimes happens is that “what it feels like” can pass between us through the work of ghostly resonances where we are more often content with mouthfuls of dust.