Category: Art

Mindfulness. “Walking in nature rather than through it”

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

Henry Reed, “Naming of parts” 1942

I love the way that, when I’m writing, images and ideas surface in my mind. My first thought when I sat down to write this post was that these four Cranesbills would have been exactly the species which inspired William Morris in his designs. Next I pondered for a while (it’s 5.00am after a sleepless night) on the extraordinary fact that in nature these closely related species are so plentiful. Do we really need twelve of them (Harrap’s “Wild Flowers”). Colin French’s “Flora of Cornwall” lists 34 species and subspecies; such an abundance that the only possible conclusion is that abundance, excess and diversity are somehow hardwired into nature. To return to a previous thought, if Nature is structured like a language then this abundance represents the dialects; the regional and environmental inflections of the same idea – like each one of us; all (potentially) beautiful if only we could break out of the prison we create when we each see ourselves as the only show in town.

And then Henry Reed’s poem plopped into my mind and I had the clearest recollection of myself in my early teens, sitting in a hot and airless classroom and gazing longingly out of the window as our teacher struggled to interest us in this poem. Not me, though. The poem sold itself to me in an instant. Here was another human being, feeling exactly like me at that moment and I took it to constitute permission to daydream. I’m quite sure that our teacher had no such aim in mind, but that’s the dangerous and disruptive power of poetry.

Peacock butterfly resting on a Charlock plant.

I’m indebted to Alan Rayner, by the way, for the idea of walking in nature rather than through it. It came up during a long conversation on a Bath Natural History Society field outing when we were overtaken by a runner pounding by us and seeing nothing at all. This last fortnight the experience repeated itself endlessly as we stood and watched a Kestrel hovering, or knelt in the grass delicately uncovering Spring Squills or – in this specific instance paused to photograph no less than four species of Geranium along a quarter of a mile of sunken lane bordered on both sides by Cornish walls as butterflies jazzed around tracing marvellous curlicues in pursuit of rivals, mates or nectar.

Without that special kind of relaxed mindfulness none of this diversity would have been visible. I suppose you could go out after a specific quarry – some rare or interesting plant – and cover more ground – eventually dragging your photographic elk back to the cave; but my favourite way of walking in nature is to move slowly, turning up all the senses to ten and let the plants do the talking. I’m not sure what practical use this kind of meditation has, other than cleansing the mind of thoughts about the endless dishonesty and stupidity of some politicians or the grinding anxiety that all this beauty is being threatened by the greed and selfishness of war and oil. Perhaps that’s the link with the poem about sitting in a stuffy room and learning how to assemble and fire a rifle in the context of the Second World War.

A wild Strawberry ripening on the warm top of a wall

Looking, seeing and beholding seem to me to constitute a hierarchy of mindful attention. For all the superficial similarities, each one of the Cranesbills is quite distinct. The shape of the leaves, for instance is crucial; compare the deeply incised lace-like divisions of the Cut-leaved Cranesbill in the larger photograph with the more modest Dove’s-foot Cranesbill in the centre of the strip of three to the left. Notice the fern like leaf of Herb Robert and the unusually pale flowers of the other * Dove’s-foot Cranesbill – each one an expression of the irrepressible creativity of Nature, and each one asking of us to name them because naming something – in a strange but powerful way – brings it into existence for us. The more we can name, the bigger the world becomes and the more intense our relationship with it. Even the word “Cranesbill” tells us something about the history of our language. If you look at the forming seed behind the flower at the top left – the Herb Robert – you might see the resemblance to a bird’s head and beak. But when was the last time that the sight of a Crane (the bird, I mean) was sufficiently commonplace to attach its name to a plant? Some centuries, I guess!

So it was farewell to Cornwall on Wednesday as we woke early and packed the campervan. This time we were on the Roseland peninsula, a very different place from the Lizard and a very different feel to the natural history as well. But we’ve already booked to return in September. Curiously, we were talking to our allotment neighbour when we got back and we discovered that without ever meeting one another we had been staying on the same campsite for over a decade. He was planning to drive down today for the half-term week. It’s a small world – worryingly and vulnerably small!

Back home, though, we turn our full attention to the allotment which – thanks to some good neighbours – survived the very hot weather, but urgently needs weeding and TLC.

*I submitted just one of what I initially thought were four species to the local BSBI Recorder – the marvellously skilled Ian Benallick for verification – and he corrected my identification earlier today, so apologies for any apoplexy caused by my mistake. His kind correction led me to double check all my ID’s in Tim Rich and A C Jermy’s “Plant Crib”. Geraniums, it seems, are a difficult group. Yet another example of the way we learn so much more from our mistakes than we do from our successes.

Having enjoyed every moment of sunshine on holiday, we spent some of today working at 35 C in the polytunnel which is now almost planted up with summer residents and looks lovely.

Towan Beach

Another postcard from paradise

Looking down the mouth of the Percuil river towards St Mawes and Falmouth

After my exhausting battle with language in the last post I thought, maybe, that I, along with any readers who follow this blog sequentially, needed a bit of a lie-down. Unfortunately most readers clearly don’t read it sequentially and so a very long and slowly unfolding idea will only be found by searching on the tag “green spirituality”.

I just need to add one further dimension to a rather one-sided discussion by suggesting that the aesthetic is, in a peculiar way, another sense to add to the five more commonly accepted ones – sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. At its most basic, the aesthetic embraces all of the five, and often makes sense where the logical mind fails. I never could understand Madame’s passion for art until (I was nineteen and she was fifteen) I suddenly got it in front of a semi abstract painting of the back of a Georgian terrace in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. My conversion felt like a several gigabyte data dump constituting the key, and taught me in an instant the difference between seeing and beholding. That’s all I wanted to add to the previous post. If our unconscious minds really are structured like a language then the language is more likely to be musical, poetic or artistic than logical and scientific. To drag an ancient canard out of the confit, truth is beauty and beauty is truth – ask any mathematician.

Anyway one of the most visible plants around down here at the moment checks in at best part of six feet tall; it’s Charlock and in terms of beauty it’s way down the scale. The Book of Stace describes it as an archaeophyte and denizen. I had to look denizen up and it’s a plant that can compete with native plants and generally act as if it is a native. For goodness sake don’t let the Daily Mail get hold of this information or they’ll be organizing vigilante Charlock squads.

So Charlock is no beauty and yet if you should want to distinguish it from its multitude of close cousins who have been stowing away on grain ships since Roman times in order to pollute our pristine land with foreign genes; one thing you can do is stroke the stem and the leaves and if it’s five or six feet tall, let the sense of touch flush it out. It’s very bristly and rough. You have to look at the sepals – the tiny little leaves poking out directly beneath the flowers (which should be yellow) and if they stick out at right angles you can toss your head in disdain at this wretched jumped up weed. Or alternatively you could say “Good luck mate, I wish I had half your energy” .

I much prefer talking to plants and birds because there’s always the possibility of a silent conversation beginning, and who knows where that will lead? These moments of intense contemplation can be almost erotic in their intensity. I’ve spent days trying to capture the texture and form of a single Hyacinth blossom in watercolour. In the early days of my artistic adventures I remember seeing a drawing of Clevedon Pier by Peter Lanyon; a completely relaxed charcoal line that perfectly expressed the pier in a way that a prissy architect’s drawing could never have achieved.

So never neglect the aesthetic power of plants and flowers. They don’t have to be rare. I suppose there is a bit of the trainspotter in all of us, but the pleasure of finding (top left clockwise) Kidney Vetch and Sea Carrot growing in full spring colours was only marginally less than finding the Spring Squill and the Cut Leaf Cranesbill; or the little pathside explosion of Primrose, Buttercup, Soft Shield Fern and Ivy; the Cuckoo Flowers which I climbed over a fence to photograph and found a couple of hours later had all been mown off. A little bereavement. And then, finally the Pale Flax whose flower is so intense that you could spend an afternoon gazing into its depths and pondering how long it is since it was part of a valuable cloth industry.

So it’s been a wonderful couple of weeks. Yesterday we were sitting outside the campervan drinking a cup of tea and we recorded no less than seven birds strutting their stuff nearby. We heard a Robin, a Blackbird, House Sparrows, a Dunnock, a Wren, a remarkably faint Curlew, and the usual garrulous cries of Crows, Magpies and Jackdaws. During our walk we watched House Martins scooping mud up from a drying puddle to build their nests and saw sparrows having a noisy dust bath on the tinder dry coast path. All this on a day that I completely failed to find a single Sea Spleenwort after thrashing sweatily along every cliff and sea facing Cornish wall I could find – in spite of all my attempts to research it beforehand. That’s the other thing about nature: it’s always surprising.

Thrift, shale and sea beet. Do they share a language?

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas – from “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

I could go on, I suppose, but too many quotations (there are more to come) can make you look like a smartass rather than an intellectual – see Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees Mogg for abundant evidence of that! However I remember a piece of advice I received from a lovely retired priest when I was a curate that has all the patina of a much handled relic. “You should,” he said, “preach one very clever sermon a year, but never more, because that way the congregation will know you’re clever but won’t get bored to tears with you”. The second piece of advice was that I should never preach about adultery for fear of inadvertently landing a right hook on an unprepared penitent. I once recounted this as a very ill conceived joke in a sermon and leaned across to focus on the most impeccably virtuous person I could think of, upon which a deep burgundy blush rose from his throat to the top of his head. Months later it all came out. Lesson learned.

Anyway this might turn out to be my annual clever piece – I’ll do my best, anyway but even I don’t yet know how to express this rather complicated notion.

Walking is very good for philosophers; well it’s very good for thinking anyway – and one of the great things about our holidays in Cornwall is that they give abundant opportunity for walking and thinking. On Sunday we were wandering down the usual ecstatic bridle way on which I’d already amused myself by listing all the wildflowers I recognised; so I was enjoying a rather relaxed feeling as Madame tried to photograph an Orange Tip butterfly and I was wondering whether at least some of the Cow Parsley in the high banks was actually Hemlock. And then – apropos of nothing at all – the thought popped into my mind – “is nature structured like a mind?” Now these sudden thoughts often turn out to be a complete waste of time, but it seemed a good idea to write it in my field notebook. So I write it down and then – in a rather Pooh Bear moment added “Gaia”. Just to remind myself that I should be careful not to reinvent the wheel. Then, ten minutes later and a bit of chin scratching I added to – “is nature structured like a mind? …… four more words – “or like a language?”.

Click here if you want to see where these weird European thoughts came from – it’s not that bad I promise.

That was enough to set me off on what turned out to be a rather tortuous reflection on a famous (well a bit famous) quotation by Jacques Lacan whose impenetrable writings almost exceed Martin Heidegger (“That pellucid Teuton”) in obscurity. He wrote that “the unconscious is structured like a language” – an idea which, after several years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I think I have a tentative hold on. Then of course, remembered quotes fluttered around my brain like Hitchcock’s birds, and Wittgenstein “if a lion could speak we wouldn’t understand him”, joined Eliade with “We live in a story shaped universe”.

A hunch is just just a theory without footnotes

So, to borrow an image from police procedurals on the telly I started a kind of virtual mind-map in my head, as you might pin post-it notes on a screen. In no particular order, we now know that plants and trees really do communicate with one another; sometimes through the mycelial networks of fungi and sometimes through the release of tiny amounts of organic compounds; sharing food, sending warnings about pests. On the allotment we occasionally make use of these properties, for instance by sowing Tagetes (African Marigolds) to warn off eelworms. We know quite a bit about these functions but hardly anything about the finer detail. The point here is that interactions between plants; between the tiniest single cell organisms through and between all of the many Kingdoms up to and including ourselves could be described as languages, and one of the essential properties of language is that it’s structured; there are syntaxes, rules that need to be respected if successful communication is going to happen.

All that this suggests is that as clever humans we’re able to crack some of those codes – we know when the dog is angry or frightened, when the cat is hungry, when the bird is startled or just looking for a mate. Not all of these interpretations are founded in fact. The medieval doctrine of signatures denoted Lungwort as a cure for chest complaints because the spotted leaves looked rather like the nodules on diseased lungs. Some herbal remedies were founded in hypothetical links between appearance and curative properties; but some were well found in experience, which is why Big Pharma is scouring the earth looking for plants able to synthesise organic compounds as yet unknown to science. Just think of the current interest in Cannabis and Psilocybin. Here again, the active ingredients in both, have a powerful and often curative function in human medicine. These tiny organic building blocks in plants and fungi are miraculously able to lock on to molecules in our own bodies and change whole systems. It’s as if we were made of the same stuff.

You may wonder “what about poisons then?” I once worked in a satellite broadcasting studio and over the desk – you know, the thing that looks like an aeroplane flight deck – was a sign that read “In the event of equipment failure RTFM” I asked the engineer what it meant and he simply said “Read the manual”. The business of vegetable molecules locking on to our own is a serious matter, and however much Hemlock Water Dropwort roots look like parsnips they’ll kill you before you’ve had time to look them up in the manual. In the linguistic interactions between humans and other life forms there are melodious moments and grammatical disasters.

All of which suggests that we have a great deal more in common with other life forms than we often think. Those moments of ecstatic connection with nature are much deeper than nice feelings. They’re a recognition that we are made of the same stuff – how could it be otherwise?

Thrift, shale and Sea Beet all evolved into their present forms in a process so remote and complex it’s hard even to imagine. But if all creation evolved in an orderly way even through mutations and adaptation; if the theory that nature is structured like a language should be tenable, then maybe – just maybe – that language may be faintly communicable not through translation into any human language but through interactive imagination and moments of insight. Our unconscious may be a better listener than our rational selves.

I know this might sound like a return to tarot readings and astrology. I’m certain that many “regular” scientists would dismiss it as heretical nonsense. But even in my most recent floras, there’s always genetic information that describes how many sets of DNA the plants possess. The reproduction of plants is generally very rule-bound and when a new generation breaks those rules it is often infertile. Some genera get around that by reproducing without fertilization by another plant. As with Blackberries they’re nature’s little joke to keep naturalists off the streets as they struggle to identify hundreds of sub-species and write monographs about them.

Maybe you didn’t press the uncover button above, and missed Mircea Eliade’s quote that the universe is story shaped, and Wittgenstein’s famous statement about not being able to understand lion speech and finally Lacan’s assertion that the unconscious is structured like a language. Of course there’s a whole universe of natural language that will remain unintelligible to us because we are not trees or hoverflies. But we can know the circumstances under which trees and hoverflies and elephants thrive. The instinctive unity with nature which is gifted to some can be learned and must be learned if we are not to perish as the species that thought it could manage on its own.

Which brings me to the last post-it note. In a largely irreligious culture many people are unaware of the wealth of creation stories that our ancestors told one another to explain how we came to be. If I pick just one Old Testament story it’s because it’s a brilliant insight into the way of things. In that story God created the earth and all its creatures by speaking. There are many other creation stories across the world that reflect the astonishing thought that language is the substance and condition of our existence.

To recap for a moment – if Nature is structured by some form of broadly considered language; and if the unconscious mind is also structured like a language, then mind, language and nature have this in common. We are one with nature not out of some voluntary act on our part but because that is the way of it. We can ignore it but we certainly can’t change it.

In a worldwide culture which has lost its way in greed and selfishness and where the consequences selfish and destructive behaviour can be airbrushed away, we need good stories more than ever because, in a sense, Eliade is saying that to tell stories is to shape the universe; so to contest and reverse an ecological disaster we need stories that answer the most terrible question ever asked of a human by a god, when the Hebrew God demanded of Cain – “What have you done?” and Cain, whose hands are wet with his brother’s blood, answers “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The answer – is “Yes Pal – you are!”

“Are you one of the Somerset Poles?”

Dundas Aqueduct
Part two of yesterday’s post about the Somerset Coal Canal

I’ve already written about Saturday’s walk along the remains of the SCC which enters the Kennet and Avon via a large pound next to John Rennie’s marvellous Dundas Aqueduct, pictured in the photo. Having got stupidly lyrical about a few rusty nails and some collapsing masonry yesterday I wanted to write something about the Cam Brook, and indeed the several large streams, brooks and rivers that have created a landscape so lovely it puts me in mind of Samuel Palmer’s visionary paintings. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the end of a rainbow wasn’t permanently held there by a flock of Turtle Doves holding it still with golden threads.

Anyway, even a less ecstatic walker would have to agree that it’s a rather magical place notwithstanding the crooks who extracted the wealth of the North Somerset coalfield with levels of neglect and cruelty that this extractive age is only just reinventing.

My father occasionally talked about a motorcycle journey he made to visit a couple of old unmarried great aunts who made cider “somewhere near Wells” – he was never specific apart from the fact that the huge fermenting barrels sounded ‘like a swarm of bees’ – and also that he’d drunk too much of the cider which resulted in his legs becoming paralysed, and left him no alternative but to drive into a hedge bank and wait until he sobered up.

I never knew very much about my dad’s side of the family because he’d had a falling out with his own father and moved into lodgings at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Any contact with his brothers and the older sisters who’d cared for him as a child during the years his father was fighting in Afghanistan (really!) was spasmodic to say the least. So nothing more than hints of a Somerset branch of the family existed in my mind.

I had of course heard of a Pole line in Tudor times when Margaret Pole became a powerful force until she chose the wrong side but apart from the humorous thought that I might be distantly related, I never joined those two bits of information together. Then, one day when I was doing a funeral visit to an elderly lady in my parish she said to me “I think we’re probably related”. She too was a Somerset woman and during a long conversation it became clear that the story about my old cider making relatives rang a bell with her and for a short while we forged a connection which was soon broken by her dementia.

But earlier in my career I’d been asked a strange question which I misunderstood, thinking instantly about the hypothetical Tudor ancestors. “Are you one of the Somerset Poles?” was something I’d never been asked before so I was a bit taken aback when a very smart middle aged woman who looked and sounded as if she might have ridden a horse to church and left it with a groom, approached from out of a large crowd of local dignitaries after a carol service. Of course I had heard of the wealthy and powerful Poles but in the absence of any knowledge of a less lofty branch of the family I think I rather rudely dismissed her with a quip about being one of the Staple Hill Poles.

So our walk on Saturday began in the village of South Stoke and went sharply downhill by a series of footpaths towards the remains of the Somerset Coal Canal and we were completely entranced by the landscape – as I’ve already said. By Sunday we were already planning a return visit and so we were busy researching the area and some of its grand (like £8 million) houses, and went to Toppings Bookshops to buy two of the excellent local guides written by Andrew Swift. But during our mammoth Googlefest Madame stumbled on the PDF of a typewritten manuscript published by the local South Stoke history group. As she read this paragraph out to me it made the hairs on the back of my head stand up.

1794 October 16th Bath Chronicle: Richard Pole at Southstoke has ten hogsheads of last year’s cider for sale at 92 per hogshead.’ (This is an old local name. There were Poles at Monkton Combe and Southstoke before the Reformation).

John Canvin, local historian.

I traced my Mothers side of the family back to the mid eighteenth century without much difficulty – the male line were all carpenters as was my grandfather. But my Dad’s side was much harder partly due to the fact that a Jewish connection had been concealed at some time in the past – I’ve no evidence to suggest why. But this Somerset connection looks and feels absolutely right. I do just remember being taken as a child to a very scary institutional place with green iron railings to see what could have been a great grandmother and I discovered that one of my Dad’s more recent ancestors had died in the Workhouse in Stapleton but details are few and far between.

So there it is; walking can be a perilous activity but – just maybe I might soon be able to establish my credentials as a genuine peasant. More than a few people I know probably came to that conclusion many years ago!

Hell’s Mouth lives up to its name

Porth Neigwl beach in a fierce onshore gale yesterday.

Here on the Lleyn peninsula we’ve had to cut our cloth according to the southwesterly weather systems that (as always) brought periods of blissful sunshine punctuated by rain-bearing fronts that threw everything bar the kitchen sink at us. The gale even found the resonant frequency of the steel chimney and periodically filled the cottage with the sound of a full Brahmsian symphony orchestra tuning up. It was quite unnerving until we worked out what it was.

But it wasn’t the end of the world – or our break – because we both had indoor things to do; sharing the dining table, with me identifying plants from photos and Madame drawing. Just how interesting this is for anyone else is a moot point at the moment because the bill for the next two years of the Potwell Inn blog just arrived and I have been thrown into introspective maunderings as I try to interrogate my own motives.

If raw visitor numbers were the sole criterion the decision would be easy because I know that this is one of those niche blogs that tend to disappear beneath the waves of controversy and narcissism. I’m not, and would never want to be an “influencer” of any sort, neither would I dare to set myself up as an expert in any of the subjects I write about. I’ve covered over the years, for instance, the allotment; cooking – especially baking sourdough bread; growing, harvesting and preserving food; wildlife, especially wildflowers and then a few branches in the road towards art, poetry, philosophy and especially global climate catastrophe and ecological destruction. Not quite in the – “an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own” category – I’m rather proud of it in fact – but by no means essential reading for saving the earth. My unspoken aim since I first started this as a private journal nine years ago, was to try to reflect the arduous business of being human at a time when our humanity, our survival is under threat; and lest that sounds too worthy by half I’m bound to say that I just love writing. Three quarters of a million words don’t seem nearly too many to me. I’d like to get up to a million but ………. here’s the thing …….. I wouldn’t want to get there by just focusing on my most popular subjects because – frankly – I’m easily bored. I’m a grown up and I’m sure that my loyal readers are grown-ups as well, and can cope perfectly well with a bit of complexity. I even like to think that my occasional literary or philosophical references are part of the fun. And so my readership increases at the glacial pace that would make a sloth feel pleased with itself, and I’m denied the egotistical pleasures of boasting about my immense popularity.

However, that doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in numbers. The challenge, for me, is to give myself and my interests (OK obsessions!) space to evolve and mature. Right now I’m pretty busy with naming plants, but I’m nowhere near competent enough to set myself up as an expert. I rely on a whole network of fabulously competent people to referee and mentor my efforts. They could easily write their own field botany blogs but my interests are slightly divergent from the mainstream. For instance I’m enchanted by the English common names of plants, and today as we were waving goodbye to our son I caught sight of a ferm I didn’t recognise – a very small thing. So I turned to the books and came up with Black Spleenwort. Isn’t that just beautiful? Just as Vipers Bugloss, or Lungwort and Wolfsbane are beautiful, evocative and poetic words weeping with historical associations. But if I add the Latin names to them is that off putting to non specialists? – or should I press on with them because they add a whole new depth and dimension. As my interest and knowledge deepen I’ve had to learn about huge databases, ecological niches, brownfield and polluted sites – not to mention geology, and so it goes on.

A bellringer once tried to explain method ringing to me. We were in the kind of pub that – back in the day – had nicotine dripping from the ceiling when it got crowded. In order to explain his passion for bellringing, he upturned the ashtray on to the table and drew in the slurry with his finger to illustrate the sinuous complexities of the method. I was utterly lost after the first couple of sentences. That’s just what I don’t want to do! On the other hand I once drove a blind bellringer to a tower in Winford and they rang a method which I probably misremember as Bristol Surprise and which – like the song of a blackbird – almost broke my heart with its beauty.

How far do you go to communicate that intense feeling? Well I think I have half an answer to that question. I’ve never forgotten a “joke” cracked by Canon David Isitt while I was training. We were planning a service soon after our ordination, and he said “I want you each to bring a symbol of your ministry – I’m bringing a condom!” He was so right about all too many people except himself. Too much of any kind of ‘ology’ can shut an audience down in seconds. My (entirely personal) theory is that technique and deep technical understanding are absolutely essential to creative work – BUT they should always remain hidden. No-one needs to be told how clever you are, and showing off is fatal. On the other hand the best teachers draw you into their world and encourage you to try for yourself.

So the future of this blog is under consideration, but meanwhile here are some photos of the Black Spleenwort – Asplenium adiantum-nigrum, but don’t worry too much about that. More to the point is the fact that – with a small magnifier – the world becomes ever more intensely beautiful as you look more closely. British summer time began today. Make the most of every precious moment!

Orion over Buckland Hill

This weekend we took the campervan to the Brecon Beacons for a couple of nights – just to test all the repairs we made over the winter. I know I write a lot about Snowdonia and Cornwall and if you follow this blog you’ll know that many of my favourite places are wild, lonely and close to the sea, but there’s another side to my landscape yearnings and it’s right here in Breconshire. I took the photograph from the campsite in Pencelli, just up the road from Buckland Hill. It was so clear I was completely foxed for a while as I tried to find my way around a sky unexpectedly full of thousands of visible and perhaps millions of invisible stars – so numerous and so beautiful they felt like a kind of blessing. I know it’s fanciful but sometimes I can almost hear them singing an ethereal Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis transposed many octaves upwards. I guess I hear them through my heart. You might think that’s all a load of spam in allium but this place has that kind of effect on me. It excites me to know that J R R Tolkien stayed for a time in the village of Talybont, immediately below Buckland Hill – while he was writing “Lord of the Rings”.

Top centre is Pen y Fan in mist

The (definitely non politically correct) smell of wood fires never smells sweeter and more homely than here between the river Usk and the hills and peaks like Pen y Fan. The Buckland of the saga jumps off the page in the narrow strip of small farms between the River and the accompanying Monmouth and Brecon Canal under the shadow of the misty mountain. The sounds of sheep, and the early spring birdsong all add to the music. I saw my first kingfisher here many years ago. The Mallard in their breeding plumage never looked more incandescent and for a few hours, instead of walking head down looking for plants I could have leaned on a gate and just gorged on the sounds. Even as we drove towards Abergavenny we spotted a Kestrel hunting the hedge alongside the road as well as a Buzzard and a red Kite. The three raptors were just a taster of the riches to come. This landscape is far closer to my personal psychogeography than all my other post industrial hotspots, roaring seas and austere mountains. Celandines in abundance announced that Spring really is here and we drank pints of magic to celebrate in the local pub.

Finding any kind of lyrical inspiration these days, demands we mine it from granite with our bare hands. Every dark hole has a poet at the bottom of it.

Royal Oak at Pencelli – highly recommended for paroled melancholics

Forget what these plants are and think what artists they may have inspired.

Exploring the links between nature and art.

If you asked me to nominate one invention that changed the world irrevocably for the better it would be the lens. My friend Chris Lee uses a telescope lens and some pretty fancy software to make the most thought provoking images of space. Most of us use cameras of one sort or another and they’re dependent on lenses of course, but today I was using nothing more sophisticated than a clip-on macro lens attached to my Pixel 6a to reveal some of the secrets of the Common Polypody fern. Those are the pictures at the top and I ran out of magnifying power at the last one which really needs at least a x100 microscope.

The others are all photos I’ve taken in the last ten days and as we looked at them we were both excited by their capacity to surprise and inspire us – not as botanical specimens at all but as objects of beauty. So the fern makes me think instantly of the Victorian fashion for the terrarium and the wonderful images of ferns made by botanical artists across the centuries. The middle row has an impenetrable blackthorn bush at Kynance Cove today which surely must have influenced Graham Sunderland in his tapestry of the crucifixion in Coventry Cathedral, but equally seems uncannily close to Jackson Pollock. The stonecrops could be models for the roof bosses of a thousand churches and if ever William Morris needed inspiration for his wallpaper designs surely the Buckshorn Plantain and the leaves of Mugwort would have served him well. The little Sea Campion has an uncanny resemblance to Tiffany glass; the rosettes of emerging Hedge Mustard are a glorious reminder of symmetry and the catkins – well I just love the colour. Nature’s palette is incredibly restrained and yet limitless in its applications. Whilst I was learning some botanical illustration, we did an exercise of limiting ourselves to three colours and I never subsequently saw the point of using more.

Almost exactly seven years ago I set myself the challenge of painting a Hyacinth in flower. I took hundreds of photos and practiced drawing the flowers from every angle; above, below and from the side and with light falling on them from different directions. I still have the practice drawings and paintings but I abandoned the painting because it was just too complex.

The take home point for me was that minute attention to the detail of a plant, whether flower or leaf was both meditation and scientific exploration and linked deeply with the creative process. Hard, then, not to attribute natural form to some benign guiding hand. But these days I think that’s a shortcut and a cop-out. I’m happy with not knowing because for me, doubt was always the beginning of faith. The lens takes us to places we never even suspected to exist and that’s why it’s my nomination for the world’s greatest invention.

  • and a postscript to this piece. As we walked up the valley from Kynance Cove we spotted what looked like a (too) small buzzard sitting high on the crest of the rocks. We tracked up the footpath and came level and behind it and we could see from its beautiful chestnut brown back that it was actually a kestrel as it set off in a zigzag hunting flight across the valley. There was a bitterly cold northwest wind and it must have been puffed out viewed from below, but there was no mistaking its colour as it set out with what Gerard Manley Hopkins described as its “wimpling wing”. Cue “Windhover” – one of his finest poems.

Spring in my step at last

Sea Campion, Silene uniflora -photographed near Gunwalloe church 18th January 2022

It really shouldn’t be a surprise because it happens every year, but suddenly the thought of another year’s joyful plant hunting is filling my mind. The photograph – taken in Cornwall – is proof that spring is just around the corner and I am so looking forward to it; sorting out the books and maps and planning our visits to try and maximise our chances of finding one or two rarities amongst the old friends. When we go out plant hunting in the company of the vastly experienced Bath Natural History Society leaders I can only marvel at their sharp eyes and encyclopaedic knowledge, but they are so willing to share their expertise I’ve realized that half the battle is learning to access the databases that are available to anyone with an interest in plants, so now we go out equipped with maps and lists which save endless wasted time looking for plants that just aren’t there.

Is this sudden shift in mood just down to day length? Is there – somewhere in my brain – a sensor that, just eleven days after the winter solstice, sends a signal to somewhere else in my brain, telling it (telling me) to clear the decks? Is there a causal relationship between day length and the fact that I just opened Google Photos and searched for images taken in January? Is there an underlying hormonal link between this rain soaked day which lasts just a few minutes longer than it did a fortnight ago? – because I’m quite certain that it wasn’t opening the application that led to the shiver of anticipation but the reverse. Opening the photo album merely confirmed what I already knew – somewhere deep inside – that Coltsfoot, Celandines and Sea Campions will be there waiting in a couple of weeks when we return to Cornwall. I remember, one December, visiting my Spiritual Director, a truly radical Roman Catholic Sister. I was full of woe and feeling thoroughly sorry for myself and she told me that I probably just needed some sunshine.

Now we’ve moved into a (very small) city there won’t be any Plough Monday celebrations and I’ve no idea whether the Littleton Cider Club will organise a Wassail in the orchard behind the White Hart that Madame once helped to plant; although I have heard that the cider apples were very small this year, and so full of sugar the resulting cider is fearfully strong. I’m sad that I’m no longer involved in all those ceremonial markers of the farming year but it seems that my mind is still ahead of the game without any need for dressing up or handmade prayers.

It’s New Year’s Eve. We shan’t be up late – but tomorrow morning the old year will be vanquished in all its economic and political stupidity. Half our Christmas cards this year have contained critical remarks about the state we’re in, and that’s something I don’t think I can ever recall happening before. Is the serpent awakening? Tomorrow looks grey, with more seasonably cold weather returning, but Monday will be sunny, briskly cold and we’ll be out like plant hounds – sampling the air with cold noses and thick sweaters and greeting each tiny promise of new growth with hoots of pleasure.

I’m tempted at this point to quote Mother Julian’s “All will be well and all manner of things will be well”, but there’s got to be a caveat because of course unless we change course, things will not be well at all. The government will tell us that there’s no alternative but only a fool would believe them. Madame and I have the tremendous advantage of being old enough to have lived some of the alternatives to the way we do things around here (one of my favourite definitions of culture). There’s no state sponsored cure for the challenges we face because turkeys don’t vote for Christmas (or Thanksgiving)! The answer may feel as if it’s occluded by anxiety and sorrow but it’s there, waiting to be rediscovered and it looks a lot like a successful human community rescued from the debilitating clutches of the Gradgrinds, the curators and gallerists and all the other gatekeepers defending the system against artists and poets. We’ll banish the ambitious and the greedy and those who have never even discovered their own shadows, let alone learned to live with them. We shall only escape the tyranny of spreadsheets, efficiency curves and economic growth when we refuse to play that game and return to joyfully experiencing of the riches of nature without giving anything an economic value. We’ll get back to singing, dancing and feasting together in ways that defeat all the categories of sponsored division and to a community where Jacob Rees Mogg and his pals will have to make a thin living as pantomime dames, being laughed at in village halls and impromptu community centres all over the country: what a wonderfully cheerful thought.

Here are some more January 2022 photos – Happy New Year.

A ray of light

Hazel catkins beside the River Wye at Hay on Wye

I haven’t written for more than two weeks, which is an unusually long silence. There’s no particular reason apart from seasonal ennui and the slow collapse of our culture into angry senescence – OK so that’s a rather big reason, and the most dangerous of all. Whilst in Hay on Wye this weekend we scoured the bookshops and I came across a marvellous volume of essays titled “The Welsh Way – Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution” – which I devoured mostly sitting in bed in our hotel room because the drains in the building were blocked and the trenchant smell of sewage forced us us keep the window open, in spite of the outside temperature being -3C. It all somehow reflected my mood. Even on the drive home the sun struggled to shine and just hovered us like a black and white pastel drawing of a poached egg. Our dirty weekend had turned out dirtier in a different way than either of us ever imagined.

The book, on the other hand, is brilliant and gave me much food for thought hinging, as it does, on the continued fantasy of Welsh radicalism examined against its actual deployment over the past 50 years. “Could do better” hardly describes it. But the book also brought home how the individual and separate crises of our time are nothing more than related symptoms of the single malignant disease known as Neoliberalism. The book also gave me an unexpected metaphor expressing two ways of living with the crisis drawing on a structure I know well from the inside. Huw Williams writes of the contrast between the old independent and baptist churches that they were:

…… reformed beyond recognition by the Methodists. To [Iorwerth Peate] the Methodists performed a corruption of tradition, in particular in their aspiration to engage with the world, reform it and transform it. The true spirit of the original nonconformity was to distance oneself from the world, seek salvation in the next life, and carry the burden of this life with dignity and patience.”

Huw Williams; The New Dissent: Page 105. Neoliberal Politics and the Welsh Way

I was almost born into Primitive Methodism and later moved into the Wesleyans and from there to low church and then Anglo Catholic Anglicanism. A long path through the traditions that taught me a great deal about the ancient rift between the activists and the withdrawers. I learned well that withdrawal from the world, whilst it might feed the religious ego, just allowed the devil free range. Where’s the virtue in finding some new cruelty or horror to turn away from and ignore every day?

So the photograph at the top was taken – as the caption says – on the banks of the River Wye; now polluted almost to extinction by intensive chicken farms which have proliferated along her banks and which pour many tons of phosphorus and nitrogen from poultry manure into her water every day. The ray of light is that the tree was growing just a few yards upstream from the bridge under which I finally and suddenly realized that I had lost my faith somewhere along that long journey.

It’s December 14th and in just a week we’ll celebrate the winter solstice which signals the return of the earth from the darkness of the declining days and I remember the words of Mother Julian of Norwich ; ” … all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

Advice for bloggers. There’s always the shop that sells expensive notebooks and watercolour paint

Sunset, looking west across the northern tip of Ramsey Island

That’s certainly true in Bath where you can easily spend over £100 on a posh notebook and fountain pen and release your inner Jane Austen during the length of a single rainy day.

I write – as ever – of myself; and my inner Jane Austen who remains captive in spite of the deskloads of notepaper and must-have pens which I’ve bought over the years to no effect at all. Even a set of six French manufactured coloured inks failed to remove the large stone rolled in front of the creative sepulchre.

For a while I convinced myself that it was the sheer expense of these accessories that was holding me back and so I started writing on torn up sheets of absorbent lining paper. There you go! we all have our little rituals which – although they have no impact at all on what we write – are strangely enabling of the act itself. John Masefield apparently liked to write with a box of rotting apples under his chair and Stanley Spencer memorably enjoyed the smell of human poo which seemed to get his creative juices going. Not for me, thanks. The seaside, with its smells of tar, salt and suntan lotion usually does it for me but these days I eschew all the tics of the past and write on my Chromebook wherever I happen to be.

For ten years I taught creative writing in the Welsh Valleys and in a notorious outer urban fringe estate, and it was there I learned that absolutely anyone can write. If there’s a problem it doesn’t lay with the (worker) writers but with the education system and the publishing business that sets the parameters of what we’re allowed to experience, think or express in writing. Of course the greatest enemy of many writers is self-doubt, but again this has its good side. Words don’t often come easily and it’s no bad thing to hesitate before putting your turds of wisdom before the public at large.

My own approach to writing was developed by having to meet deadlines. When you’ve got a deadline – even a self imposed one – you can forget all the faff and self delusion about waiting to feel the creative flow before committing. Sit down, turn on the laptop, write something and as it emerges you can correct, revise and edit as you go along. Oh and although it’s a good idea to have some thoughts on your potential audience, don’t let that be a straightjacket. In a blog format like this you can write for more than one audience and hope that some readers will like a bit of green spirituality as well as gardening tips. Never be afraid of pissing your followers off by failing to pander to their prejudices. You win some. And don’t pay too much attention to blogging advice on how to monetize your pages or get more hits. If you make the audience king you’ll land up being a servant.

For years I’ve honed my technique to deliver around a thousand words of reasonably stimulating, challenging ideas, backed up by experience and a lot of hard reading. What I haven’t learned is the very different skill set of gathering and editing those ten minute pieces into a larger format. Developing the significant themes into theses requires a larger view and a longer focus than I’m used to working with.

So we’re taking a two week post-harvest break in the campervan near St Davids, overlooking Ramsey Sound, and with a weather forecast that only differs in the predicted intensity of the rain for the next fourteen days. What could be better than repurposing some of that reading time to try out a larger format – say 10,000 words long? Well, coincidentally I packed Robert Graves’ “The White Goddess” to re-read, and this morning I made a start on it. Apart from his poetry and the book I have a single point of contact with him because I took the funeral service for a woman in his Majorcan circle who typed up some of the draft copies of the “White Goddess”. By the time I got to meet her she was near to death and not going gentle into that good night. Not that she ever spoke, but she was passing restlessly into unconsciousness. I sat with her daughter as her mother lay dying and asked the obvious question – “Why don’t you read her some poetry?” She was aghast at the very thought. Her mother – who sounded like a real martinet had always hated and criticised the way that her daughter read poetry aloud. Cue for a lifetime of repressed longing for someone, anyone, to offer any small praise.

As I started to read the book again I couldn’t get that picture out of my mind. Graves comes across as a slightly paranoid, obsessive old monster; absolutely determined to have his say and drive his point home like a stake through the heart. It’s my way or the highway. Anyway I soldiered on through the introduction and eventually found an example of an old Welsh poetic form called Cynghanedd that Graves had written to illustrate what he calls a “burdensome obsession”. I thought it was an absolutely wonderful use of words:

Billet spied,

Bolt sped.

Across fields

Crows fled,

Aloft, wounded

Left one dead

Robert Graves in a footnote in “The White Goddess”

That’s a wonderful encouragement to be bold with words; but the real takeaway point is that in his eagerness to press home every single obsessive point by wrestling it into the ground, Graves managed to write what even he thought was a difficult book that would be completely unintelligible to the “stupid and silly” people who would never be able to understand – because they weren’t proper poets. That should be a warning to anyone attempting to write in longer forms. Good writing flows like a river not a stream with prostate problems, and being right will in no way protect us from being bad.

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