Category: Art

The aesthetic gift of plants

A stacked focus macro photograph of the prickles on the cactus that lives on my desk

This is turning into something of a series. On January 5th I wrote about the plants being markers of the passing seasons after walking down a lane towards the beach here in Cornwall; none of them rare in any sense but all capable of lifting your heart as an avatar of spring. On 6th January I wrote about plants and their properties as irreplaceable sources of as-yet undiscovered drugs; but I warned that they’re also the canaries in the environmental coalmine warning us clearly about the danger of our extractive and instrumental abuse of nature. Then on the 7th January I turned towards the difficulties but also rewards of a meditative relationship with plants and nature as a whole. Notwithstanding the difficulties of talking about “soul” and “spirituality” I asked whether a loosely Taoist spirituality can build a deeper relationship with the earth and creation without resorting to religious fanaticism. Is there a way into a green spirituality that honours Wittgenstein’s wise aphorism – * “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” ? or perhaps more simply, can we ever attempt to explain mysteries without distorting and diminishing them?

So today, in the fourth of these I want to address another gift that plants bring to us – their sheer beauty. Anyone who’s ever loved a William Morris wallpaper or fabric design will understand his debt to natural forms. Any ceramic artist must surely be especially inspired by the natural forms, textures and colours of fungi. Any painter could learn how to replicate the colours, and any sculptor the forms of these exquisite parts of creation that were growing here long before the first hominids evolved and will still be here and still evolving long after we’ve gone the way of the dinosaurs. I don’t write this as a knockdown stand-alone argument for preserving nature, but I believe that the aesthetic can’t be left out of the argument because it’s the aesthetic dimension that helps us to value those parts of life that can’t be reduced to money. If you ask the question “what is a Cowslip worth?” could anyone respond fully without mentioning its beauty, its history, its place in the scheme of things? The value of a wildflower meadow could never be expressed without including its aesthetic dimension except – I write this with a heavy heart – a property developer who might pay lip service to its “recreational value” by offering to build a playing field somewhere else – a promise that will be waived away by the local planning authority if the developer pleads that they can’t make a profit unless they build on the football field too!

And if I might sound off a little bit longer, if we all watched nature programmes on TV from dawn ’till dusk, seven days a week, we’d be in danger of being as ignorant of nature as we were when we were born. Television is inherently passive entertainment more or less presented as education. The real stuff is out there in the cold and rain or, with a bit of luck, on those warm summer evenings when once, in France, I grumbled because a churring Nightjar was keeping me awake in my tent. Real nature is sensual, tactile and mucky, and it demands patience and fierce concentration as well as some ultra rewarding book-work.

When I was learning to do botanical illustration (I never got very far but it taught me the value of close attention), I took dozens of close-up photographs of a Hyacinth so I could paint it using just three colours. This is a great exercise for anyone to try. I’ll never be a William Morris, but I’ll never again dismiss a Hyacinth from a supermarket as “just a Pot Plant”. As I went through my albums looking to pick some appropriate photographs for this post, it occurred to me that one other gift from the natural world to us is to inflame our curiosity. But that would demand a separate post.

*Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The Potwell Inn New Year quiz – answers below

First image – which kind of Wild Carrot is this?

Second image – what’s so fishy about this?

Third (Bindweed) what’s the significance of the little pointed bit between the two reddish leafy things?

Upper fourth – Which children’s’ book character shares a name with this plant?

Lower fifth – which word does this plant share with the one above?

Left upper sixth – What part of the body shares a name with this fern?

Left lower seventh – what’s wrong with this Strawberry?

Right eighth – where would you look for this plant?

Left ninth – What punctuation mark shares the name of this butterfly?

For the photo at bottom right, check out the tree label!

Answers – 1. Sea Carrot, 2. Oyster fungus, 3. !t’s the difference between Large Bindweed, where you can see it, and Hedge bindweed where you can’t. Gardeners hate both! 4. Marsh Woundwort. 5. Marsh thistle. 6. Hart’s tongue. 7. It’s yellow, still a strawberry but it’s inedible, 8 Sea radish. 9.Comma. 10. See nameplate.

Winter camping – here we come!

Pen y fan in February 2016

Did I mention that we love going to the Bannau Brycheiniog – the Brecon Beacons – or, according to the spellchecker here on my laptop, the “banana strychnine”. Every year as the clocks go back and it gets dark so painfully early, we try to squeeze in one last camper-van trip before we drain the water tank and pull the curtains. Summer is never long enough. It’s over now to fungi and ferns and we managed to fit in a walk around the woods on the Mendips last week which was disappointingly light on fungi but challenging on the fern front. I remember well the early days when I thought there were just Dandelions until I discovered that they were just a small part of a huge group. These discoveries always leave me equally exhilarated and depressed. On our walk, and with a good deal of hands and knees stuff, I confirmed what I already knew in my heart of hearts – that not all green and ferny looking things are called Bracken (any more than all overweight white middle class men in Rohan trousers are called Dave). At once, exhilarated and depressed, I lashed out on a couple (more) ferny books and settled down for a good read. I am abashed; vanquished; and breathlessly looking forward to a ferny bash in the Bannau.

So it’s been a bit of a week – two exhibitions; Paula Rego and Goya at the Holburne Museum and Rinko Kawauchi: “At the edge of the everyday world” at the Arnolfini in Bristol; an excellent talk by the Director of the Holburne at BRLSI and two films – “The Outrun” in Bath and “A sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” – both of them lovely; the second, showing at the Watershed was a biopic of Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham a shamefully neglected modernist artist. After the usual depressing few autumn weeks we felt like students again, bathing in fountains of glittering inspiration. Of course the payback came with exhaustion and an urgent call to the doctor when my heart rate went down to 45 and blood pressure to 92/61. I’d have to have been a saint not to laugh when the doctor told me that my symptoms were caused by the drugs I was prescribed to cure the symptoms! I don’t want to expire in a Kafkaesque cycle of thwarted goodwill.

Anyway, the sun’s shining and we’ve booked a spot alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal. I’ve also been sorting through hundreds of old flower photos but I’m held up by the absence of replies to emails requesting bits of information. If this army of citizen scientists is ever going to live up to its immense promise, the learned institutions need to get over themselves and answer emails from those of us without PhD’s. But then I’m a bit of a loner and the least clubbable person you could imagine. Madame is the only person who comes (dangerously) close to “getting” me – we even hold hands in bed: dangerous!

Finally, I’ve yielded to temptation and bought a black iron bread tin. I’ve had enough of pancake sourdough loaves. Tigger and Eeyore the two starters are going well, and so I’ll re-unite them during the week and start some experiments to create an organic sourdough loaf that stands up enough to make a sandwich with a soft enough crust not to rip the roof of my mouth or snap teeth off. Then when that’s done I’m going to write a long letter to Keir Starmer to explain that his job is not to shuffle bits of spreadsheet around like a junior manager in a shoe shop, but to reunite managerial competence with a bit of visionary leadership and some ethical backbone which he seems to have lost somewhere along the way.

Starter or non-starter?

I mentioned on Tuesday that I’ve returned to bread making after quite a long break, and re-started my sourdough starter. In fact the one I made from about 1/2 gram of dried starter flaked from the rim of the original container and given a couple of days feeding, has done so well I made a loaf with some (probably stale) leftover flour in the absence of a delivery from the mill. The resulting loaf in the photo above was pretty good,and so I’ve re-christened the two starters Eeyore and Tigger for fairly obvious reasons. The flour I’ve ordered is made from organic Maris Widgeon wheat which is less productive (50% less than Canadian hard wheat for example) and more expensive but is slightly lower in protein and, the millers claim, perfect for slow proving. I’ve been lowering the protein level by adding cake flour to the mix – which works after a fashion. Breakfast today was a joy!

But we’ve also been busy on other fronts as well. The allotment, mercifully, is pretty well closed down for the winter except for picking the apples; the winter crops will sit quietly in this awful weather. It seems that if you have about ten fruit trees you’re entitled to call it an orchard. We’ve got ten so we can talk about our orchard with a contemptuous toss of the head to those poor souls with only five. Yesterday Madame made a Dutch apple cake and we’ve had stewed apple every day for ages. The great thing about seasonal food is that it almost always runs out before you get sick of it.

Back in the flat I’ve been sifting through thousands of photos of unidentified wildflowers; giving them names, dates and locations – which is a massive undertaking – and then building a database. I’ve got a good memory for where I first saw a plant and so sticking a pin in the OS map for the ones that preceded phone cameras, isn’t as hard as it sounds. So far I’ve got 320 ram stamped entries, all double checked and accompanied by photographic evidence.

Last night we went to a lecture on modern art in Bath, given by the Director of the Holburne Museum. Apparently the City Council allowed a nationally important collection of craft ceramics including the Leach archive to go to Farnham and the national photographic collection to be taken to Bradford. What a huge loss to the city! In return we got the nationally trivial Crest Nicholson development south of the river which looks like a Russian bonded warehouse and was so badly built it’s pretty well bankrupted them with compensation payments which are a closely guarded secret because they’re trying to sell the business before anybody notices! Ah joy – Bath has a Director of Heritage but no head of cultural activities. They say it’s Jane Austin and the Roman Baths that bring the tourists in; but the traffic down Milsom Street towards the shops is always greater than the traffic in the other direction.

So there we are. All’s well with the Potwell Inn and tomorrow we’re off to the Mendips on a fungus hunt before it starts raining again.

Seeing and beholding

A rather neglected apple tree on the allotments. I’m thinking of Samuel Palmer.

Hardly anyone was drawing in the 70’s, when we were at art school. A few tutors paid lip service to it but basically it had fallen out of fashion in favour of a rather woolly notion of creativity. Observational drawing; life drawing; were so last year and the now was all about being. Stony ground, then, for those of us who persisted in the archaic study of form and structure. I remember a bit of a row with my Head of Department when I showed him a monochrome painting I’d made of an apple tree and suggested that apple trees had a particular structure that you could see through the distortions of wind, weather and pruning. He said that this was ridiculous and that all the trees were pretty much alike. He, of course, lived in an entirely uniform conceptual world whereas I was drawing the phenomenal. I felt puzzled and deflated by his negative response and yet -decades later – I can see that not only was I in the right, but that an understanding and recognition of these subtle structures would turn out to be absolutely essential when I began to love plants.

*On reading this back to myself the next day it seems I should at least try to explain what I mean about the structure of the apple tree.

All trees, of course, need light and soil and so they have evolved to make the best use of what light there is available which in turn suggests that branches and leaves are always arranged in the most efficient way to catch the sun in order to ripen their fruit/seeds for the continuation of the species. That’s undoubtedly true, but they all seem to do it in different ways and those different ways seem to be remarkably consistent from species to species. The apple, being a domestic fruit, grown for the benefit of humans, gets mucked about a fair bit by pruning for the best possible crop. The one in the photo has been very neglected and in a commercial orchard it would have had the central tangle of overlapping branches pruned out to allow light and air to the tree. But even amidst the mess I can see something of the familiar structure. The apple is a bit of a ballerina. I always think of a dancer on points, arms extended , curving slightly upwards and then downwards towards the lowered fingertips. The fruits, in the autumn, are like fairy lights; golden and streaked with red. They don’t need any notices to suggest “eat me” like Alice’s mushroom although too much cider from those same apples might have something of the same effect – and due to their propensity to cross breed promiscuously, every tree and every fruit – unless it’s been grafted – will be different. Some might be so full of tannin they’ll put your face into a rictus like pucker for the next hour and some so sweet you’ll fetch your penknife back from your pocket and peel another, and then another. While some trees sit solidly on their roots like cathedral pillars, the apple dances for the sun. It’s almost impossible to describe it in words but from winter buds to spring flowers and then ripening fruit it’s pure joy. It’s just a plant, you might say, but we truly know plants through all of our senses. We don’t just see plants we behold them. There’s aesthetic joy in seeing. We smell their perfume; we (when we’re sure of them), listen to them – shake a ripe Cox and you may hear the seeds rattling inside; taste them, dry them for the store and cook them. We can even turn them into alcohol and medicine.

Finding some botanical competency has been a long and pretty arduous journey through small errors and real howlers but just as we once learned to draw the human form by understanding how it articulates and holds together; the process of identifying plants involves genuine and deep contemplation of the tiniest details and the elimination of each false trail one by one until a family and then a species finally emerges. Often I’m defeated and I have to appeal to a higher authority – someone with more experience.

The upside of the experience is that – like the spokes of a wheel – explorations can take you off into all sorts of different disciplines, relationships and histories. Ecology, environment, global heating, folklore, cooking and medicine are just a few of the fields that can help to determine not just the name, but the meaning of a plant within human culture.

Autumn has slammed down the shutters on the prospect of long and warm days and tomorrow is offering a day of driving rain. At this time of year we turn towards the lovely world of fungi but darker nights and shorter days also provide the chance to go back over the hundreds of photographs I’ve taken during the season. This year I’ve been learning to use a new and very lightweight camera which offers in-camera focus stacking and eliminates the biggest bugbear of macro photography – very shallow depth of field. Now, for the first time, I can photograph a leaf and then, later, examine it at around x20 magnification; even down to the tiniest star shaped bunches of hairs. It’s all evidence when it comes to ID.

We’re soon off to Cornwall again in the campervan and so I’ve been hard at it in the kitchen preserving and bottling. Luckily our son has got a half-empty freezer and so some of the work can wait until we’re back. Later on we’re looking forward to a short trip up the canal in a narrow boat. The polytunnel is now clear apart from a couple of lunches worth of sweetcorn. I suppose it’s no surprise that we get so knackered. I’m massively disappointed with the Labour government but I never really expected anything more from them. Deacon Starmer and the Prophets of Gloom would make a great album for a funeral.

Being annoying isn’t just a personality trait – it’s a vocation!

Yesterday’s food from the allotment

City centre life is something of a competition between optimism and pessimism much of the time. Even in this impossible summer season the vegetables still grow and ripen; our best ever crop of Alderman peas – they grow vigorously to six feet and more and this year, for unknown reasons, we’ve escaped the usual infestation of pea moth. The pods are full of large, sweet, delicious peas of a quality that make you wonder if the frozen supermarket peas are even the same vegetable. The polytunnel tomatoes (Crimson Crush) are their usual vigorous and blight resistant selves, in fact the maincrop potatoes (Sarpo Mira) are also blight resistant and so we haven’t seen the ruination of the whole crop since we started growing them. We’re holding our nerve this year and growing all our sweetcorn in the tunnel – last year I transplanted them outside when they were 2′ tall and they too gave us a lovely crop because the badgers, squirrels and rats left them alone. The courgettes still try and rampage all over the allotment, but we’re ruthless with them. The only surprise is that pollintions have been generally good notwithstanding the desperate shortage of pollinators. We can’t claim any credit for the blackberries aside from training them along the boundary fence to deter night-time visitors. Unlike most garden cultivars the fruits taste great but the thorns are long and sharp enough to snag a rhinoceros.

That’s all on the plus side, but more negatively we have to cope with the usual inner city challenges thick and humid air; of night time overflights to Bristol Airport; constant ambulances and police cars driving past with warning sirens blasting; juvenile seagulls – temporarily grounded by their inability to fly back to their nests screeching for food from 4.00am, kitchen waste strewn across the pavements by urban gulls and foxes, noisy hen parties in the airBnb opposite with occasional glimpses of male strippers doing their thing, and then the ubiquitous semi conscious junkies, dealers, drunks and out of control dogs crapping unobserved by their owners who make sure they’re deeply absorbed by important business on the mobile rather than doggy business on the grass. Then, yesterday afternoon a squadron of jackhammers, bulldozers and heavy lorries started breaking up the foundations of the old Homebase site ready for another completely unnecessary block of overpriced and under spec flats. Promises to build doctors surgeries, primary schools and community facilities alongside low cost housing will be broken as always with the payment of a small fine to the local authority. The snagging for the redevelopment opposite has continued for years with missing damp courses, missing fire safety precautions, crumbling lintels, lime green slime mould on the faux Bath Stone walls, windows improperly installed or not fixed at all, and, (following a conversation today with a very upset owner) meaningless insurance. He couldn’t talk about it because it just made him emotional and depressed. Any word of protest will result in angry responses from landlords and Airbnb owners who would prefer you not to know that this is not quite the Paradise Regained promised by the publicity. Naturally, for a student of life like me, it’s a marvellous field for research and we wouldn’t want to live anywhere else! The weeds are fabulous.

My interest in Geoffrey Grigson (The Englishman’s Flora) has continued and I wanted to find out why exactly he’d managed to fall out with quite so many people. As someone who has regularly been told that I’m the rudest person they’ve ever met I thought he might have something I could learn to improve my technique. However it seems we are simply inveterate bubble poppers and can’t help ourselves when we’re confronted by mediocrity and dishonesty. His collected newspaper reviews* are tough going – far too prolix and dripping with anger aimed at other writers who are now (decades later) absolutely unknown – so they seem like a drastic waste of emotional energy. Far better to go for a walk and try to identify that tall Dandelion looking thing on the pavement outside. Most of the spanners, fruitcakes and halfwits will lose their reputations purely through the attrition of time. I’m aiming to disappear long before I’m dead, but the prospect of cluttering up the memory of a computer in the middle of the Mojave Desert with the Potwell Inn blog for all eternity amuses me, as I shall be asleep under a rock in a troutstream somewhere having completed my million words.

But hey, The Englishman’s Flora in spite of it’s Grandiose “The” in the title, rather than a more modest “An”; and its inappropriately sexist attitude to non male botanists is a really interesting and useful book that attempts (against all the odds) to unite the great ship of field botany with the other great ships of folk medicine, regional and local names and even witchcraft; all of which are heading off in different directions. It’s a book that hasn’t yet fallen for the daft idea that the pruinose texture of a Sloe in the autumn can be completely or even adequately described by a DNA string. Who’d have thought that there’s a member of the Stonecrop family called “Roseroot” which lives high in the mountains and whose roots smell of – obviously roses. Who’d have guessed that the odd looking Pineapple Weed, which lives in farm gateways where it’s guaranteed a regular hammering, actually smells just like a pineapple when you squeeze its flowerhead. For me this is not at all evidence of the hand of God, but of the awe inspiring, wasteful and aesthetically dazzling creativity of evolving nature.

  • Geoffrey Grigson – “The Contrary View” 1974

The stream of consciousness – a creative affliction.

Whitchurch Common, Dartmoor. March 2016

I said to Madame yesterday while we were walking through Bath – “I think I’m living in the 1940’s and 50’s”. She, being an avid reader of history and biographies, knew exactly what I was saying. She’s presently finishing the last of C J Sansom’s Shardlake novels and living in the Tudor period. Not having to explain things is one of the great blessings of our long relationship. Of course the imagination can play tricks and too lax an attitude towards truth telling could lead all the way to prison or even to 10 Downing Street; but in the manner of a psychoanalytic session – by allowing the mind to range freely and without comment, connections of the utmost significance can be forged.

So, if you’re a Potwell Inn regular you’ll know I’ve been thinking about and researching Geoffrey Grigson – author of “An Englishman’s Flora” and husband of Jane Grigson the great food writer. Chains of thought often take us on a journey and in this case it involved reconnecting with the village above By Brook where we lived for two and a half years while we were at art school; and a hairy drive over to Slaughterford in search of a pub that was actually one village further upstream on the little trout river which runs for around twenty miles between Castle Combe and the Avon at Bathampton . In the course of our day and in subsequent reading we discovered that Slaughterford is probably not the site of a famous battle between Alfred the Great and a small army of Danish raiders. and that the name probably derives from the Anglo Saxon term for the crossing near the place where the Blackthorns grow.

But this turned out to be much more than an antiquarian story. Immersing ourselves in a landscape in which we’d lived the early years of our relationship stirred up the strata of many memories. The melodious sound of the small river, for instance became the river that runs through the Potwell Inn garden in HG Wells’ novel – “A History of Mr Polly” as well as being the real place where we’d attempted unsuccessfully to poach brown trout and where I’d spent days drawing a tangle of tree roots. Being an artist or a writer seems to involve a huge struggle to lay hold of something significant. That laying hold rarely seems to work and we are left empty handed. The poet RS Thomas brilliantly describes it as being like placing your hand in the warmth of a hare form which a hare has recently fled. The creative life is full of almost and not quite.

Standing next to the river, memories resurfaced of moments in galleries and museums when suddenly, as if a flare has gone off in the mind, you can see clearly for the first time. Once, unexpectedly bursting into tears in front of a Renoir painting I’d only ever seen poorly reproduced less than the size of a postcard. Being young, passionate and raw the memories never leave you. The paintings that had given us a whole expressive language floated through my head and so in a wild yomp through the unconscious I remembered John Minton and, the imagination being capable of leaping over impossible fences, suddenly brought a roomful of associations – Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, MFK Fisher, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Davidson; who would all have known one another. Geoffrey Grigson would probably not have figured in too many Christmas card lists having been rude to, or about, so many people.

I’ve got a proof/review copy of Francis Spalding’s biography of John Minton “Dance ’til the stars come down” * which I bought quite cheaply because I couldn’t afford the original. It has no illustrations but in searching the secondhand booksellers today the book came up with his familiar self-portrait on the cover. Completely unexpectedly I almost welled up with grief as I recalled his melancholia, alcoholism and eventual suicide. A man I never met evoked a sense of loss that took me completely by surprise and the terrible thought came to me that this, perhaps, was the beginning of the end. The moment when the dark forces of conservatism began their fight back against post-war optimism and freedom. Since then they’ve synthesised joy and sold it back to us by subscription – one trivial experience at a time. We seem to have lost touch with the ordinary, everyday moments that used to make us dance ’till the stars came down. Art’s now a business, patrolled by curators and gallerists, and art schools run courses on keeping accounts, tax returns, building a website, networking effectively and staying in touch with the fashion of the moment.

I’m filled with the need to go and sit quietly on the bank next to the river once more to listen to what the spirits of the place still have to say to me. They, at least, have not been silenced by the self appointed magistrates of taste!

Postscript

The title of the Minton biography is a borrowing from W H Auden’s poem, which is itself a representation of the medieval “Danse Macabre” and equally a working of Stravinsky’s 1910 Firebird. The idea was very much in the air and was echoed in all sorts of media, not least in Bernard Leach’s rediscovery of 17th century English slipware. I’m thinking of the pelican in her piety. With two world wars in mind, there’s less hope in Auden’s poem – “not to be born is best for man”. A kind of mad defiance in the face of an overwhelming threat is his prescription.

Dance, dance for the figure is easy,
    The tune is catching and will not stop;
    Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
    Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

W H Auden – Death’s Echo

Bloodstained Juggling with six balls

By Brook seen from the lawn of the White Hart in Ford

I’m wrestling with half a dozen recalcitrant strands of an idea that just might make a story. Of course it might also just make a WTF? mess – only time and a patient reader will tell.

So the first strand is this. I mentioned last week in The Potwell Inn blog that my copy of Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellously useful book “An Englishman’s Flora” is falling apart and I’d have to buy another copy. My clapped out paperback is a 1975 reprint of the original hardback published in 1958 and the pages are now turning brown and are foxed. The glue binding is breaking down and it’s just at the point where the pages start dropping out. I bought it for next to nothing in an Oxfam shop and I see that the cover price was less than £2 when it was new. Anyway, prompted by my resolution it went into our very small bathroom where I rediscovered what a magnificent resource it is and immediately searched out a hardback secondhand version for £17, presently on it way from another OXFAM shop in Harrogate. That’s thread one.

Thread two emerged when I was browsing through the book and randomly came across the entry for Dwarf Elder which is given no less than seven pages by the gloriously erudite Grigson. Married three times, his last wife was Jane Grigson the food writer who – I discovered today during my flurry of research – believed that food is such an important component of being human flourishing that it deserves the same high standard of writing as any other form of literature. Of course she was absolutely spot on which is why I’ve got a shelf full of her books. That’s a side issue, though for the purposes of this piece of weaving, but what a family they must have been!

The main thread concerns the Dwarf Elder because I only saw the plant for the first time this year on the footpath to the north of the lakes at Woodchester Mansion. According to the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 it’s in steep decline across the country; probably partly due to the fact that it’s no longer planted as a medicinal herb often in churchyards in order, they believed, to improve its health giving qualities.

So threads three and four join the river at this point because Grigson points out that it’s a stronger version of the Common Elder, the roots and leaves of which can yield a blue dye and a powerful purgative. We should bear in mind that for many centuries (this plant gets mentioned by Dioscorides in his first century pharmacopeia ) – plants were prized more for their medicinal usefulness more than for their aesthetic qualities. However the more intriguing point is that its local name is Danewort and it was believed – perhaps due to the colour of the berries and leaves – that it sprang from the bodies, or more specifically the blood, of Danish invaders. The bloody colour and the doctrine of signatures gave the game away – it was thought. So far, so fascinating I thought, but then I (metaphorically) sat up straight because he wrote that the plant could still be found in 1974 in the village of Slaughterford which straddles By Brook. Hold on to that thought because I’ll come back to it for another thread. As it happens, and as you’ll know already if you’re a Potwell Inn regular, we drove over to Slaughterford only a few weeks ago in search of a pub which turned out to be in the next village of Ford. If you were even considering duplicating our trip I’d strongly advise approaching the pub from the A420 because the connection between Slaughterford and Ford is not much better than a muddy track.

But why Slaughterford? You have to ask don’t you? Grigson quotes the 17th century Wiltshire historian John Aubrey and then dismisses his assertion that Dwarf Elder aka Danewort or even Danesblood which still apparently grows in Slaughterford is the sign that a battle between King Alfred and the Danish invaders was fought in the village and resulted in the rout of the Danes with much slaughter. A quick scamper around Wikipedia establishes that the consensus today is that the battle was actually fought some miles away in Edington.

But in the early hours of this morning, I was mulling over what I’d discovered about Grigson, and another fact that came up was that he’d lived in “North Wiltshire”. Might he have lived in Slaughterford? was the tantalizing thought which kept me awake. The answer, after an early start on the laptop, was no he didn’t. But he did live quite nearby on the other side of Chippenham.

Gradually the picture was emerging that Slaughterford was not the scene of a famous battle fought by King Alfred and so how on earth did it come by such a gory name? The truth turns out to be that the name is a contraction from the Saxon of Sloe Thorn – and so the village name really means the river crossing where the sloes trees (Blackthorn) grows.

There must have been many crossing points on By Brook. At one time there were over twenty mills working there and we actually walked up the river past the last functioning paper mill in around 1970. Coming upon it while walking the banks from Corsham was quite a surprise – a semi derelict industrial site in the midst of the most beautiful valley. I’m waiting for my newer and more durable copy of the book to arrive, but what a fascinating journey from a Greek botanist to a 20th century poet. The Slaughterford myth gets repeated even in quite recent herbals – Mrs Grieve’s 1920’s book “A Modern Herbal” quotes it without comment.

There are two further points about By Brook I could make. Firstly the photos I took from the pub garden strongly suggest that the water is far more polluted and eutrophic than it was when we first encountered it in 1970. You’d probably find it impossible to make paper there now, and the brown trout also need clean and unpolluted water. But secondly, there is strong enough evidence to make it to the Natural History Museum website, that there is at least one family of beavers living on the brook. Thank goodness the beavers are vegetarian and therefore no threat to the local trout. In fact the fly fishers commissioned a report on the condition of the brook which recommended some modifications to the river bed to improve flows and slacks to help with breeding the native brown trout. Maybe they’ll get their wish granted free of charge by nature. I’m sure beavers and brown trout have lived in harmony in previous centuries before the beavers were hunted to extinction.

Postscript

My secondhand book arrived today – big thanks to OXFAM in Harrogate. It’s wonderful – in excellent condition and properly bound to lie flat. I absolutely love it! The paperback version can go back for an honourable retirement in the bookcase.

Natural Music

Seed head of Jack go to bed at noon aka Goat’s Beard – Tragopogon pratensis

I was pondering the other night concerning our instinct to describe nature in terms of quietness, peacefulness , meditative tranquility – none of which (for me at least) even begin to express its dynamism, ceaseless movement, busyness and fantastic, inexpressible diversity. Not the disconnected series of aesthetic ooh’s and aahs of the kind that so many TV natural history programmes seem to promote, but something more connected. When we got rid of the idea of god creating everything, we somehow lost the matrix that held everything together. In any case the old idea was redundant and too useful to the wrong kind of people but at least there was a coherent story about where we fitted in. Now the prevailing ideology has exploded us into a billion monads. One attempt at a remedy is to reduce nature to an aesthetic experience. I completely understand where nature as art gallery is coming from and I’ve got many thousands of photographs to prove it, but when we’re out walking together searching hedgerows and marshes; muddy tracks and field edges for flowering plants and suchlike, the overwhelming feeling I carry is of rhythm and flow, of complexity, timbre and key; of pace and time signature; of dissonance and assonance and the larger divisions of …….. spit it out! of music.

I don’t want to inflate this metaphor like a party balloon until it bursts; but I want to hold it there while I write about being here in West Wales and about being human – but most of all being human in nature. I want to put aside any thoughts of saving the earth or restoring lost species and any long lists of rarities in favour of that hoary old retreat favourite – of being in nature. Being in the moment is all the rage, but for me that’s like trying to listen to Bach one note at a time.

Small Scabious Scabiosa columbaria
Sheep’s Bit – Jasioni montana
Devil’s Bit Scabious – Succisa pratensis

Do these three look the same? They certainly do if you’re walking too fast; but don’t worry because these three photographs were taken in three different places over a period of seven years, and you’d be vanishingly unlikely to see all three side by side in one place. If you’re curious to know, it’s all in the stamens. Learning the plants takes years and is full of blind alleys and wrong ID’s, but what that teaches us is that being in nature is a process in which no single place is better, cleverer or more virtuous than any other and also that every place is full of possibilities even if you could count the plants you could name on the fingers of one hand. Where I was today at a field edge and finding a Bugloss plant, I was flooded with endorphins, a runners’ high. This was the place – to pinch a line from TS Elliot – that

“You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid”

There are thousands of plants I’ve never seen and probably never will; but we mustn’t differentiate between the rare and the common as if rarity bestowed some kind of patina of significance. I’ve been out botanizing with some folks who fire Latin names at one another like paintballs and boast of their thousands of records. Each to their own, I say. Since we can only attend to the Great Symphony of nature with all our senses; of sound and touch and taste and sight and smell – and here I’d add memory and imagination because nature works so slowly that some of her works are beyond the reach of the conventional senses; then it follows that every part of our mind is engaged. It’s the complete opposite of emptying the mind, it’s allowing it to fill with something other than ourselves. Embracing the Great Symphony is the work of a lifetime; many lifetimes.

Sea Carrot

Take a typical hedgerow, for instance. Those weeds at the front – the ones with heads comprising many small flowers sitting at the ends of umbrella spokes. Unsurprisingly they’re not always the same plant, they’re a procession of cousins from early in the year; each one pushing past its senescent relative in glorious green livery – one of them has the English name Queen Anne’s Lace -flowering and then setting seed, signalling its own disappearance until the next year. Depending where you live you might see Alexanders first, and then Cow Parsley, Hogweed and then (a bit trickier) Rough Chervil or Wild Carrot – there are dozens of them – some exceptionally rare and subtly different but each one challenging the false idea of the a solitary moment in an unchanging natural world. Searching for a musical comparison I came up with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. One aria to begin with – that’s the family, the genus if you prefer – and then the thirty variations each using exactly the same notes but changing the tempo and key whilst maintaining the theme. Listening to the Goldbergs right through is something akin to following the life of a hedgerow through a season. But then there are the grace notes – like the Stitchworts’ little shining highlights; Bluebells, Campions, Dog Roses and Honeysuckle. Later there are berries and some of them are delicious whilst others might kill you. There’s a restlessness and dynamism in nature. Tides and seasons; the length of days and the rising and setting of the moon can never be stilled by putting a pin through them and mounting them in a cabinet, and neither can we step out of that fierce river because

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas

If the aim of meditation is to back out of the flow of life, then I can’t see the point of it. If the initial premise is that we are always prey to living a shadowy half life working all day and satisfying our delinquent desires at night in front of the television, then I completely agree that something urgently needs doing. But the cure isn’t to hide but to embrace the flow, to step out into earth life and add our own bit of the song to the natural music that birthed us and will take us back again when we reach our own senescence. So seeking, identifying but above all enjoying the plants, the birds and insects; the mammals and the fish for themselves and as part of our own nature, is – quite apart from making lists and showing off to your companions – a form of fully engaged meditation which leads us gently away from seeing nature as a business opportunity.

That’s what I mean by Natural Music.

Dancing in the bog!

Ragged Robin – Silene flos-cuculi

Ragged Robin is one of my favourite wildflowers; it’s so exuberant, so punky and so unnecessarily lacking in any evolutionary credentials for the disorganised petals of its flower that seems to be a message from nature to remind us that plants have never been there to massage our aesthetic sensibilities. Close-up like this, the petals suggest the dancing fingers of a group of witches. I’m reminded of Matisse’s Dancers but perhaps more by Roger Hilton’s famous 1964 painting “Oi Yoi Yoi”; so in-your-face and so Dionysian in its darker sense. This one was growing on the far side of a ditch and I was so keen to get the photo that I had to be rescued by Madame when I lost my balance and feared a muddy, and probably smelly, dive. I’ve fallen in a few rhynes (that’s a Somerset word for a drainage ditch, pronounced reen) in my time and wouldn’t recommend it for the faint hearted.

Anyway that was all a slow intro to the theme of this campervan trip to the far west of Wales overlooking Ramsey Island. I’ve brought a new camera with me – it’s an Olympus TG-7, the latest of six previous iterations, the first of which I took on the Camino. This isn’t a review; I paid for the camera myself and bought it on the back of many other reviews by people who know what they’re doing. It’s shockproof, waterproof to about 30 feet, and fully featured when it comes to aperture, shutter speed and ISO setting so very much a technical step up from the Pixel 6A phone I’ve been using for nearly everything on this blog. In fact it’s only 50g heavier than the phone so it’s supercompact, with built in geotag and GPS unit and for me the most important feature of all, it has inbuilt macro facility and offers in-camera focus stacking. On paper this is a serious piece of kit for a very clumsy person who falls into ditches trying to photograph perfectly common wildflowers and fungi. Of course other cameras are available – I’ve got a Panasonic G2 with a Leica macro lens but it weighs a ton, doesn’t do muddy ditches and takes ages to set up for a shot.

My first discovery on trying out the macro/focus stacking is that it really does need a tripod, but mine – a Manfrotto carbon fibre job with a magnesium ball head looks impressive but is just too heavy and vulnerable to life outside a studio so I’m looking around for something light and bombproof that can get the camera down to 1 cm above the ground facing directly downwards. I took this photograph of the seed head of a Rough Chervil plant in the van with the big tripod and it gives some indication of what macro + focus stacking will bring to the table.

We’re camping at the far end of the peninsula and the weather has been – let’s say – very Welsh; but when the sun shines all day, as it did yesterday and the sky is China blue, as you might see on the best porcelain; and the wind gives a brief respite from the storm the previous night (which pretty much emptied the campsite) then this place is as close to heaven as we’ll ever get. Yesterday we did one of our favourite walks across the fields to Whitesands Bay and dropped in on many of the plants which specialize in this kind of environment because we now know where to find them after many visits. There are numerous bogs and marshes hereabouts and one of the most important botanical lessons I ever learned centred on the importance of understanding the ecology of the place we were searching. We find Ragged Robin and Yellow Bartsia here because of the wet ground. Bogs and dunes – our cup was full! Yesterday we found Dwarf Mallow, thriving on a dry and sandy footpath along with Sand Spurry, both in their happy place. There were Southern Marsh and Pyramidal Orchids – although it was difficult to be sure of the first without entering the marsh; Purple Loosestrife, Kidney Vetch, Lady’s Bedstraw, Sea Carrot, Navelwort and the ever elusive Scarlet Pimpernel which has changed its family name from Anagallis to Lysimachia to avoid detection – but we were ahead of that knavish game.

But perhaps the most exciting find was the Stoat that crossed the patch immediately in front of us. Madame didn’t see it, and just as I was getting excited and pointing to where it disappeared, to my great surprise it came out and crossed the path again; a tiny cigar sized assassin – not about to be deterred from its business by two huge inedible shadows with the sun at their backs.

Is that the reason we love nature so much? Its capacity to redefine beauty? Like a beetle flying past, flashing iridescent green like a flying emerald, or the powder blue abdomen of a Broad Bodied Chaser dragonfly – hunting the shallows of a pond? or a Stoat in pursuit of its prey?

As we waited for the bus home, we watched groups of long limbed teenagers learning to surf and playing football; falling in and out of love thirty times a day and trying to figure out what exactly being a grown-up entails. My heart says “it’s not what you think!” but I’m ill-inclined to march along the beach spoiling their best ever day with my old-man truths. When the bus finally arrived our driver took a minute interest in our various destinations and ignoring such minor inconveniences as bus stops he dropped us all off exactly where we wanted to go, (anyone for the supermarket?) He stopped for a pee in one of the caravan sites – because the council have closed all the public toilets in the town – a major problem for drivers on a ten hour shift – and then made an unscheduled diversion to pick up some passengers at St Non’s Well, whilst passing a free dog sweet to some walkers on the side of the road.

Goodness knows we have our own human parasites, predators and Dionysians; controllers and exploiters – many of them wolves pretending to be grannies – Red Riding Hood is, after all a story about humans not wolves; and the present election has been sheer torture as they strut their stuff – it’s been good to escape for a while.

Down the AI rabbit hole part 2. Dandelion Days

Dandelion – Taraxacum agg. Harder to identify fully than you’d ever think possible

Late yesterday evening my son emailed with a far more comprehensive list of the wildlife mentioned by Henry Williamson in the novel Dandelion Days – grabbed up with his pro version of Google Gemini which is much better than my basic version when it comes to extracting text from the photographed PDF I found online. Far longer and more comprehensive but still nowhere near complete. It looks like the only reliable way of achieving a good result will be manually, which raises an interesting question. How important are lists anyway?

The point of trying to create a word cloud was to use it as a tool for unpacking Williamson’s relationship with the world of nature. I might think of it as a kind of Venn diagram where the two fields of interest – human and natural – overlap rather than glower at one another across a chasm of difference.

Lists are important to science of course, but plants have a good deal more interest than placing them in abstract and endlessly changing families. Plants can bring us almost to tears with their extravagant beauty; they can feed us, heal or poison us with equanimity. They can calm us or make us hallucinate; they can signal a whole culture (think leek or thistle), and signal the beginnings and ends of seasons, furnish feasts and famine, promote cooperation and strengthen community; signify the beginning and the end of life; bring us clothing dyes and shelter. Plants – and animals too – are among the most complex signifiers we have; from the scent of a madeleine to the smell of boiled cabbage in an evangelical theological college. To return to my imaginary Venn diagram, we humans are so deeply mutually inscribed with nature that the two circles meld into one seamless interdependence. Our history, geography and environment are mutual – The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / drives my green age (Dylan Thomas)

The Plough Monday that’s still celebrated in Elberton – one of my old parishes – is very different from the one below. It takes place in the parish church and the Ransomes plough (which had to be shortened to get it through the door) is carried in to be blessed by the Young Farmers. Some years ago I asked a local farmer if I could have a small quantity of corn to bless on the night, but when it turned up I was advised not to touch the bright blue grains because they were coated in a powerful systemic insecticide. Nonetheless the sense of community was always there – even on a freezing cold January night, as we celebrated the beginning of the farming year – more notional these days since many spring crops are sown in the autumn.

PLOUGH MONDAY was celebrated in the village in the third week of the new year, and Phillip on his last afternoon was able to see the strange procession. This rite had been held in Rookhurst ever since the walls of the first cottage had been raised from a mixture of straw, cowdung, mud and stones.The Ploughing Matches were held in the morning. At the far end of the field away from the spectators, behind the teams with their straw braided manes and tails bound with coloured ribbons, many birds screamed and wheeled; the gulls graceful and soaring, alighting with grey pinions upheld on a glistening furrow suddenly to seize a worm or a beetle-case; the rooks jostling and flapping sable wings, the starlings chittering and running with eagerness. Sweet chirrupings in the wake of the turmoil were made by the dishwashers, some of them winter visitants with slender breasts of daffodil, and all joying in the food turned up in the gleaming furrows. Bill Nye the crowstarver, and Samuel Caw his mate, a still smaller boy, were enjoying themselves during the Ploughing Matches, for repeatedly from the spinney in the Big Wheat-field, where with other boys they had a roaring fire, the clappers sounded with the clang of the rail, and the beating of tins and sometimes the hollow voices floating in the air.

Rookhurst rejoiced in the afternoon. It was a half holiday, and all made merry. The crowstarvers left their fire and turfed hut and clappers, and joined the revellers. Dressed in the skins of donkeys, and harnessed to an old plough with an applewood-share, they started off for the annual round of the cottage thresholds. Big Will’um, the bailiff, tall and gaunt and heavy- booted, guided the barefooted pair. He himself took long, loose strides; a boyhood in the heavy winter fields, dragging feet from the sticky clods, had given him a slouch. Every aged cottager, clad in best clothes, hobbled to his doorway. ‘Whoa, now, growled Big Will’um. The pair pattered to a then wheeled several times before the cottage, drawing the plough after them. The old people beamed, and nodded, and their gratitude when the corn-spirit had given its blessing. Now the garden would be in good heart for the year’s potatoes, beans, onions, cabbages, lettuces, the roots of rhubarb in the sun-warmed corner. The long black pig not get fever, but fatten well and perhaps reach a weight of twenty score. [400 lbs]

From cottage to cottage they passed, making as to furrow the ground before each one. George Davidson carried a blown-up pig’s bladder on the end of a stick, with which he belaboured grinning labourers and the padding donkeys alike. Ribbons were wound round his body, and a red paper cap was on his head. About a hundred children, men and women, many with cameras, followed the procession, accompanied by dogs of all sizes and breeds. Everyone was happy. Bill Nye had never grinned so much before, enwrapped as he was in the ass’s skin. He knew that a big good meal was at the end of it, and, with luck, a packet of fags and a pair of boots.

Willie felt proud that this was his village, so impressed was Phillip, who declared that he had never heard of such a glorious idea before. Neither Jack nor his cousin was able to tell him why the asses’ skins were always used by the boys who drew the plough. ‘It’s only done in this village, having died out elsewhere,’ said Jack.

‘It’s a jolly old custom too,’ remarked Willie. ‘At least as old as Doomsday Book.’

It was a survival of the rites of the corn-spirit practised since the first thought of man was to put the idea of a god into stone and food. Likewise at the harvest to eat the first-fruits was to have within the body the power of the corn; a survival, possibly, of instinct combined with early human reasoning: the practice of eating the conquered and, therefore, possessing his strength and cunning. 

From Chapter 20 of Dandelion Days by Henry Williamson, first published in 1930

April 2019 at the Lost Gardens of Heligan