Category: Art

Down the AI rabbit hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hungry gap slowly closes

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

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

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

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

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

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

St Laurence church in Bradford on Avon.

Is a hedgerow really the site of an endless struggle.

Druce Cranesbill, Geranium X Oxonianum. The markings remind me of Henbane – another (poisonous) stunner.

I don’t really get the idea that nature is an unending struggle for survival – red in tooth and claw – and all that violent guff which gets pressed into service to provide an ideological scaffolding for behaving in greedy and vile ways – as if Tennyson were a fan of the dark satanic mills. This isn’t a sudden insight brought on by a dose of Cornish spring (although life feels a lot better when the sun shines). We’ve had five days wandering the footpaths and hedgerows of the Roseland peninsula; photographing and recording plants as we go, and this time I was paying particular attention to the succession of plants; especially the carrot family, the Apiaceae, as they emerge one by one in the spring.

I remember the first time I tried to get to grips with this family of lookalikes. I’d noticed the plant known as Alexanders – almost always the first to emerge with its shiny celery-like leaves and an umbrella-like flower head of creamy yellow-white. I’d just bought my very first flower book, published by Warnes, and I went about finding my plant in the traditional beginners’ mode; turning the pages one by one until I found an illustration that looked right. So far so good, but fired with enthusiasm I went on to look at the others in the same family and when I came across some fine drawings of the seeds (alarmingly similar) which were the ultimate key to naming them all; I sighed, shut the book and didn’t open those pages again for years.

Six decades later I know a little bit more (not that much!) and it’s all very interesting, because there’s a distinct succession of these plants every year. Alexanders is usually first to appear as a handsome plant, but soon starts to yellow off and look very tatty. Then comes Cow Parsley – an unfortunate name for such a dazzlingly white and beautiful plant with lace-like leaves; shortly followed by Hogweed and all the others, and yes – it’s quite hard to tell some of them apart because they rarely grow side by side simultaneously. They go on mucking me about, popping out for their brief lives one by one until October and then there’s only the seeds to identify, and they are so beautiful when you look at them through a hand lens; ridged and horned as if carved by a miniaturist sculptor. They emerge, flourish, flower and die but I’ve never ever heard a Hogweed beating up a Cow parsley plant in the dead of night while no-one’s supposed to be about. I’ve never seen a Pignut abuse a Wild Carrot or cheat a Sanicle of its inheritance nor a Hemlock Water Dropwort leave its stream to poison some Rock Samphire and spoil a forager’s day. I just can’t see any evidence that there’s a battle for survival going on out there unless it’s to develop some resistance to chemicals.

The plants – not just the Carrot family – seem to have evolved a scheme to allow all of them to flourish and complete their life cycle in relative peace apart from the predation of cows, hogs and numerous small bites from insects. They grow to different heights; the later ones being generally taller than the early ones and pop their clogs before they become a burden to their neighbours – and I’ve never heard any moaning about the brevity of life from the depths of a hedge or a ditch. By and large they seem enviably contented, if that’s not a category error. We humans like to whinge about the way our happiness has been stolen (always someone else’s fault) when in fact we’ve hidden it because we don’t want to own it. Before long, the safe place where we concealed it is forgotten and we can relish the tragedy of our lives over a couple of bottles of cheap wine. Plants don’t do that.

I have the great fortune of meeting a teacher who’s thought deeply about this and whose work crosses many borders that are patrolled by legions of gatekeepers – a brave soul. He explains the fruits of his labours as “Natural Inclusion” – as against Natural Selection in its purest and darkest form. You can Google the phrase and you’ll see who he is in much more detail, his name’s Alan and he’s a great teacher. He uses scientific conceptual language, but he also uses poetry and painting to express his ideas.

Basically, and dangerously simplifying, with a little help from Google Gemini here’s a very concise summary of an important antidote to lazy evolutionary thinking that plonks us down in the middle of a merciless battle. If ever we needed to visualize ourselves as a working and living part of nature it’s now. There are many threads that have joined together to create our bondage to greed and exploitation as if it were something natural, and we have a few decades at best to cut through them and set ourselves and the ecosystem free before it’s too late.

Alan Rayner proposes a new concept called natural inclusion which challenges some aspects of traditional evolutionary theory. Here are the key points of his ideas:

  • Natural Inclusion (NI): This is Rayner’s core concept. He argues that nature fundamentally works through inclusion, not separation. Boundaries between things are seen as dynamic interactions, not fixed lines. Imagine the difference between walking through a doorway (inclusion) versus hitting a brick wall (exclusion).
  • Questioning Natural Selection: Rayner believes natural selection isn’t the whole story of evolution. He proposes that the process of change is more about the flow of energy and the dynamic interplay between organisms and their environment.
  • Nature as a Guide: Rayner suggests looking to nature for moral guidance. He proposes honesty, reasonableness, and kindness as core values because they reflect natural processes.

Rayner uses art, alongside writing, to explore these ideas. His paintings serve as a way to connect with people who might not be drawn to scientific explanations.

St Francis talked about the sun, the moon and the stars; the animals and the earth as our brothers and sisters. I found the Geranium in the photo on the footpath leaving Portscatho. It probably escaped from a garden somewhere nearby and I instantly fell in love with it. If our current worldview doesn’t allow us to fall in love with a plant, we need to get another world view!

Common Vetch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

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

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

Perfumed field near Percuil

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

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

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

Aaaargh! Spring – please slow down, just a bit!

Clockwise from top left- the canalside view with Pen y Fan in the background; then Common Dog Violet, Wood Sorrel, Maidenhair Spleenwort, Ramsons, Greater Stitchwort, Reflexed Stonecrop and what I think must be bracken growing very close to the water. There were many more – too many to list without annoying Madame!

The rewards of Spring are everywhere at the moment, notwithstanding the cold nights which are keeping our tender plants blocking the hallway as they harden off. There’s so much going on I hardly know where to begin. On the allotment – after the usual despairing survey of the weeds, the waterlogged ground and the mounting sense that nothing good will ever come of it; we got our heads down two or three weeks ago and felt instantly better. I’m a bit suspicious of the received wisdom that gardening is good for the soul. Couch grass and Bindweed could test the patience of a saint and I’m certainly not one of them. At the weekend while Madame sowed, I finally cleared the asparagus bed which had been on probation for ages and we knew it had to go because it was too far down in the frost pocket on our sloping site plus the asparagus had been weakened by repeated invasions of Asparagus beetle and couch grass from the unattended plot next door. Four barrow loads of weeds and feeble/floppy/extinct roots later I had a backache worthy of a third rate wrestler but a decent empty raised bed much enriched by previous additions of seaweed, compost and sand and with around 18″ depth of topsoil. We’ll grow carrots there this season. We’ve thrown so much money at the asparagus bed over the years, we could probably afford to buy fifty bundles of Chinn’s finest English and still be in pocket.

I was greatly assisted by two almost hand tame Robins who were obviously feeding chicks. Between them they took away many dozens of larvae, centipedes and other insects. Interestingly they weren’t very interested in worms; certainly not as keen as a blackbird would be. I was dazzled by their capacity to hold two wriggling bugs in their beaks and still pick up a third without dropping the first two; they were far better pest controllers than any chemical insecticide.

Inside the polytunnel the experimental crop of broad beans is thriving in the absence of any really hot weather, and the strawberries, all taken from runners in late summer, are flowering and setting fruit. Of course this means we’re already watering inside the tunnel; but the 12V water pump we bought last summer has already showed its worth and helped us avoid carrying heavy watering cans back and forth.

The photos above were all taken on a short trip to the Monmouth and Brecon canal near Brecon during the week. It was here, many years ago, that I saw my first Kingfisher – so beautiful in the sunshine that I thought I was hallucinating. We had hoped to go for a pub lunch with our friends who keep a smallholding almost 100o feet up on the hill, but they were in the middle of lambing so we had a picnic lunch there while they went outside every twenty minutes or so to keep an eye on a ewe in the midst of a long and difficult lambing. Fortunately the ewe and her twin lambs all made it through, although I think that will be her last time. Farming can be heartbreaking as well as hard work.

“A difficulty is a light, an insurmountable difficulty is a sun” – Paul Valéry

Is it too perverse to say that I love naming plants? and the harder they are the greater the reward when I finally get there. I’m exhilarated by the explosion of plants in the spring and early summer, and it’s agony having go forego plant hunting for allotment duties, but there’s no alternative so we just get on with it. I was pondering where this love of plants came from, and during one of my regular 2.00am wakeful sessions – it happens a lot – it occurred to me that I owe a huge amount to Henry Williamson (I’ll come to the reservations in a moment). Of course I read Tarka the Otter and the other nature books, but I also ploughed my way through four volumes of “The Flax of Dream” and fifteen volumes of “The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”. I was probably the only person who ever ordered them all up from Bristol Central Library in many years. Above all, I loved Williamson’s ability to describe wild plants in their landscapes; their names – English names – embedded themselves in my imagination and make the discovery of a plant in a hedgerow into a celebratory event, even fifty years later. Latin names and taxonomical exactitude; whilst essential for research, are feeble by comparison with the poetry of use and history.

But one of the greatest sadnesses of my life has been the discovery that so many of my literary and artistic heroes dabbled with and even collaborated in extreme right politics during the nineteen thirties and forties. TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis were all seduced by the big lie. Discovering that Williamson was an admirer of Adolph Hitler irrevocably shut down my relationship with him, and I’ve never read a page written by him since; but the influence of his natural history writing still remains – it’s just forever tainted by the association.

Anyway, turning with relief to spring again, some flowers that you’d think were easy to identify – are more than a bit fiendish; not least the violet which comes with seven close cousins six of which you could easily bump into in the South West. No alternative, then, but to turn to the books or the apps. But when it comes to fiendishness, nothing comes close to ferns and for me, at the very beginning of this love affair, a chance encounter across a crowded room can lead to hours of agonising – just like the real thing (I’m told!).

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, I’m exploring the dizzy world of Artificial Intelligence in wildlife apps, and particularly in identifying plants. If you’re fortunate enough to know what a data point is – I wasn’t – it’s a single unit/dollop of data. If you’re still attached to pencils and paper, your notebook might contain a few hundred data points. A field guide could hold tens of thousands, but AI robots, though are voracious readers and can consume and store billions of them. Not only that, they can index and arrange them in pretty much any way you like.

So before we all get carried away by the idea of wildlife AI apps remember that the whole industry is based on text. I’ve been playing with Google Gemini but other flavours are available. These text engines can be based on anything up to (I believe) 8 billion data points – that’s a lot of text and a huge fund of examples to work from. The existing wildlife apps are still wallowing in the relative shallows and so they can be unreliable at the moment. I had three obviously wrong fern identifications (back to the books) while we were up on the Mon and Brec. They’ll get better very soon I’m sure. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland have access to over 50 million full records, and Kew Gardens are digitizing their entire herbarium records. iNaturalist also has something huge like 50 million although not all of them are verified, but even if all these records are verified and scanned in – which would be a huge volunteer operation – they would still be far fewer in number than the mighty text warehouses. Machine learning can achieve seemingly miraculous results but I don’t think we’ll be making human identification redundant any time soon, so don’t throw those field guides away!

Just to finish, though, I thought I’d wile away an hour asking Google Gemini to do some silly things for me. Question one – what are the distinguishing features of Dryopteris ferns? after ten seconds a very sensible answer. Then I asked it to write a sonnet on the subject of dust and once again a technically perfect but aesthetically clunky, sub Tennysonian sonnet emerged. Then finally I asked if it would re-write one of these posts in the style of Phillip Marlowe. The result was hilariously funny but quite unprintable here, being vulgar, deeply sexist and full of bad language.

Thank your lucky stars it’s just me writing this one!

Immersive plant hunting

Two of our grandchildren playing in Dyrham Park

There was a moment on Tuesday’s fern hunt when a troubling thought occurred to me. “Why” – I wondered – “do I get so emotional about finding plants?” I think it’s a good question and a useful one. I remember we were once walking on Black Down (Burrington Combe) up at the top where the carboniferous limestone has been eroded away exposing the Old Red Sandstone underneath which is more acidic than the limestone everywhere else, and has an altogether different mix of plants. I was confused about this eccentric outcrop in the Mendips for years until it was explained to me how different the geology of that little area is. So there we were wandering along one of the tracks when suddenly a tiny flower caught my attention and I saw at once that it was an Eyebright, Euphrasia. As usual for me it’s not tremendously rare although it’s difficult to identify fully because it hybridises so readily. But what ran through my mind wasn’t the rational sequence of questions such as a professional field botanist might ask, as much as an explosion of joy; an anschauung, the intuitive understanding that comes with something discovered or revealed. No-one loves a list more than me, but that encounter involved a beholding such as might inspire a poet or artist; but when it comes to describing it, it’s just like trying to hold a writhing eel – trust me on that one, I’ve done it and failed on both counts!

The troubling moment on Tuesday came when I wondered if this emotional response might be no more than a form of sentimentality.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’
    ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
    ‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’

Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

Obviously you can take a fact and wrap it in sentimental drivel but it will always lie dead and cold on the page. On Tuesday the first fern we found was an almost perfect Rustyback; a textbook example if you really must but I’d prefer to think of it as an expression, an outpouring of natural energy which, when you give it its name, connects itself to you. The plants become my sisters and brothers – hence all the emotion – love, gratitude, respect not to mention aesthetic pleasure. The naming doesn’t create the plant; but it gives it an address, a point of reference to which I can return – named, and therefore capable of being found and greeted again in a way that makes the earth a bigger, more relatable place.

The Rustyback fern

What is undoubtedly the case is that my childhood was full of such moments because – especially during the long holidays – I wandered (unsupervised) for miles through the countryside with my friend Eddie; laid in the grass on Rodway hill and watched the wind as it swayed the harebells, swung on the trees in the big woods, fished for Sticklebacks in the Oldbury Court ponds and picked bunches of wildflowers for my Mum who always placed them reverentially in jam jars. I suppose we all have that sense of a lost Arcadia. If there were any clouds in the sky we would rarely notice. My Mum was a country girl and she knew the names of plants and taught me and my sister how to love them too as we learned their names.

So yes of course plant hunting takes me back into my happy place, not because I want to be ten years old again, but because it was my ten year old mind in which I first experienced what I came to know later as the “oceanic feeling” and which seems to occur more and more as we search for the ferns, plants and fungi out in what’s left of nature after Thomas Gradgrind has had his filthy way with it.

In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to “a sensation of ‘eternity'”, a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole”, inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics.

Romain Rolland (From Wikipedia)

The kind of earth we need to aspire to rediscover is not just a rewinding of the calendar to the nasty 1930’s; of Janet and John books, Ladybird and iSpy. More than anything else I’d just like to create the opportunities for our grandchildren to walk in the woods at night; count the stars and name the constellations; find and name plants and know some of their uses and qualities; feed the hens as my sister and me used to do in Stoke Row, and understand and practice the art of growing and harvesting. We need to rediscover and celebrate our relatedness to the earth, not in empty, sentimental, bound-to-fail aspirations but fully and deeply; surrendering any thoughts of domination. It is religion, you might say – but not as we know it!

You know the one – where the princess kisses a frog ….

Coltsfoot again – in the centre of Bath

It’s been a while, I know, but following the demolition of the Avon Street car park, many of us have wondered which building will take its place as the ugliest and most ill-advised building in Bath, and I’m delighted to announce that the top place (of my long list) goes to the old telephone exchange on the corner of Monmouth Street and Princes Street, built in the days when Crown buildings were not subject to planning permission. It’s always been a bit of a shady place as to its purposes, and it’s about to be anointed as Bath’s new police station – plus ĉa change etc.

Anyway, we were in the centre of town yesterday and as we passed the building I noticed this redemptive clump of Coltsfoot growing through the cracks in the neglected paving. As ever, Nature is quick to reclaim any neglected spot and I suppose we should record and enjoy this brief moment before it’s designated as a weed and summarily removed. Bath deserves its John Clare and I’m holding the place open until somebody better qualified turns up to celebrate the invisible residents of the city. In 2020, during the lockdown, I listed 26 wild plants growing in and around our car park – once a builders yard – and there are probably as many again waiting for someone to notice.

I know I write a lot about Cornwall and Wales and their wildflowers; but when push comes to shove there’s plenty going on in our own backyard – it’s just that the sunsets aren’t as good! As it happens it’s been a bumper year for Coltsfoot now I’ve got my eye in for likely spots. Their technical name is “ruderal” which means, well …… rude I suppose, in the sense of unkempt rather than wild; neglected rather than protected, and scarred rather than ploughed or dug. It’s the botanical equivalent of the favela or the refugee camp and it’s a great environment for dodgy characters to melt into the background. We even had a Sea Spleenwort hiding on the basement wall of the Guildhall – all washed up I suppose.

We’ve got a few guerilla gardeners in our neighbourhood too. Last summer we put some large compost filled pots outside the block and planted them up. This spring we see that invisible hands have planted tulip bulbs and even a bay cutting which seems to tolerate the extreme environment. The same invisible hands watered the pots when we were away in the campervan. Every year a solitary council employee hacks off the pavement squatters and sprinkles rock salt over the remains. Every year they return undiminished and sing their colourful madrigals to those with ears to hear and eyes to see them. It’s a dog eat dog existence for the rough sleepers of the plant world, but they seem miraculously to get by, and until you learn to distinguish one from t’other you won’t be able to understand their colorful histories. Railway trucks loaded with grain, bird seed imports, wool, and poorly tended compost heaps; even winter salted roads and lorry tyres all add their pennyworth to the diversity of the neglected environment. Old factories, mills and dyeworks cast off their workforce and their raw materials. These plants are evolutionary heroes, rapidly adapting to the new, often tricky places, where their better heeled cousins deign to set up home; on slag heaps, coal tips and mineworks; quarries, gasworks, docksides and railway sidings not to mention empty buildings like the old telephone exchange. Sadly, no-one is going to block the road marching for Whitlowgrass or Wall Barley, but they’re all part of the vast interconnected network of living things we call Nature – capitalizing the word although we have no idea if it really is a thing at all.

Still, we felt blessed by the Coltsfoot yesterday and celebrated with a pint at the Grapes; two old people drawing energy and hope from the crowd of young bar staff beginning their shift. We wish them the greatest happiness knowing, (as they have yet to discover), that in the end we’re all pavement dwellers.

Rue Leaved Saxifrage growing on the telephone exchange wall

” Try again. Fail again and fail better” (Samuel Beckett)

“Blanche” on the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railway

I had the great misfortune to waste a lot of time at art school having to battle against one of the great 20th century myths about creativity. This was the idea that creativity could somehow shape the material world and could manifest itself without the mediation of any discernible skills at all. Creativity was thought to be an epiphenomenon of being, and being was definitely the thing. If you could get enough being on board you were set up as an artist. Later on I encountered much the same mindset in some of the more gimlet eyed evangelicals who had an unshakeable belief in the inerrancy of their obscure beliefs. Nowadays it’s conspiracy theorists, climate deniers, brexiters and anti vaxxers but it’s all rooted in the same problem; the refusal to examine, to question, to test and to modify your own practices and beliefs in the light of the evidence. Put simply; how can you possibly get better at what you’re trying to do – whether it’s running a country, making a pot or identifying a flower if you start with the assumption that anything you do is beyond critical reach because it just is!

I’ve heard apparently sensible writers say that they won’t read other peoples’ writing in case it influences them. They’re often the ones who make Vogon sonnets look like literature. I’ve spent most of this rainy week in North Wales grappling with computer programmes associated with the identification mainly of plants and it’s been a revelation to discover some of the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). You might think it would have been a better use of my time crawling around in the pouring rain with water running down my neck, looking for Wilson’s Filmy Fern – (I know where it’s supposed to be but it’s up a mountain wreathed in rain and mist) – but there’s nothing virtuous about unnecessary suffering and a bit of study pays better in the end.

Yesterday we went to see an exhibition at the Oriel, Glyn y Weddw in Llanbedrog involving the gathering, dying, spinning and weaving of wool – this is Wales after all. Here there was an abundance of art, technique and skill on show. Of course, all works of art begin with an idea – often very vague – but the real creative work is preserving and developing the initial vision through the processes that render it visible and never sacrificing the initial idea to showy skills. Great creative art is self-effacing about its means whilst being utterly dependent upon them. It’s not just musicians who have to spend so much time doing their scales. I couldn’t stop myself from getting down to nose-to-nose contact with one blanket just to see how the warp and weft was so skilfully woven that bright colours of the wools blended into the colours of autumn on the hills and mountains.

Upstairs in the same gallery is a permanent exhibition of porcelain, some of which was made at Nantgarw. My first degree was in Ceramics and I became fascinated by porcelain, and got to know and love the work of Thomas Pardoe – a decorator (I’d rather call him artist) of genius and William Billingsley a potter and decorator himself who ran huge legal risks by leaving Royal Worcester having signed the equivalent of a non-disclosure agreement by successfully arguing that the agreement didn’t cover the activity of making and decorating porcelain himself because he wasn’t disclosing any secrets. The technical expertise these and other working class potters displayed is awe inspiring. The process of manufacturing what was known as soft paste porcelain was wasteful, expensive and heartbreaking and neither man was a stranger to hardship and bankruptcy. The different styles of the two artists, though different, were so lovely I instinctively connected with them, and if they were alive today they would stand equal with the best natural history painters around. Pardoe produced some amazing botanical series, and Billingsley was so good at roses that Royal Worcester begged him to stay for fear of any competitor getting hold of him.

John Llewellyn, foreman – by William Jones Chapman, painter – in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

The 1800’s was an era when Wales was being stripped of the mineral wealth which was mined, forged and cast by men and women of real moral stature and turned into grand estates by their employers who often had none; or otherwise offshored the loot in English banks.

At art school, once again, we had a technician called Jack Pearce; a retired plasterer who could make plaster sing – he could speed the set or retard it and could feel the state of things in the bucket with his bare hands. Later on we moved to Stoke on Trent for a few months and saw the skills which were being discarded as the work was moved increasingly to China. Our mould maker Stuart, when he wasn’t recovering from a wild weekend, could cast anything – no matter how complex – and he helped to unload the last functioning bottle kiln in Stoke for the very last time as the industry died. As a child our next door neighbour Jim French was a glaze dipper at Pountney’s the Bristol Pottery where Pardoe worked for a while, and below our house was a marvellous allotment kept by Mr King – a fully Edwardian coal miner whose daily work involved walking to Parkfield Colliery in Pucklechurch and then walking back home hundreds of feet underground; only to repeat the walk in reverse at the end of his shift. I’d like to think that the Bristol Pottery kilns, pots glazed by Jim French, were fired with coal dug by Mr King’s forebears. My Dad was a GWR railwayman; I’m proud of my working class background

But what I’m doing here is not to promote hard work as a freestanding virtue, but to link it to the astounding creative achievements of these people; often poorly educated but who worked tirelessly to develop the skills which released and realized their creative abilities. At art school I was heavily penalized for spending too much time investigating glazes, clays and working techniques; but he who laughs last etc. If you want to be creative – I mean really creative – you’ll only ever be as good as your technique allows.

Falling in love again!

John Hoyland – “Voyage to Now”

If I were to create a soundscape of me walking through most of the exhibitions we go to it would go something like this:

  • Hmm
  • OK? (rising note on the K)
  • Yes but
  • Why?
  • WTF?
  • Hmm

The silences are usually punctuated by the sound of shoes on wooden floors and the rustle of prayer books, or should I say catalogues? Darkened rooms and silent introspection could suggest some sort of meditative process going on but (aside from the Rothko room in the Tate) it seems more often to occupy the empty space between two coffees.

Yesterday we went to the Royal West of England Academy with our friends Tony and Glen to see a couple of shows which were untypically given space to breathe. Madame was especially taken by some drawings by Denny Long. I wandered among some very late sculptural works by John Hoyland which seemed to me to be 3D maquettes for paintings. Then Madame disappeared for a minute and came back through the glass door of a darkened room which I’d concluded led to nowhere in particular. “You’ve got to come and see this!”

The four of us have been friends for more than 50 years. We met on what might have been known as a happening back in the day, and nowadays – in the era of curators and gallerists who, like half assed bodhisattvas sacrifice their own meagre creative gifts to help the rest of us to understand stuff properly – would be known possibly as an intervention; you know – the kind of thing where a scouring pad is accompanied by a three page artist’s statement. When we get together we all too easily slip into geriatric misbehaviour. Yesterday we found a box of dressing up clothes in the gallery and felt obliged to try the tiaras out.

Me, Glen and Tony – photographed by Madame

One of the great benefits of being old is getting away with misbehaviour that would have you thrown out if you were thirty. Anyway, we went through the glass door into the darkened room and there it was; a large painting by John Hoyland called “Voyage to now”.

It’s very hard to describe what’s happening when you fall in love with a painting. I’ve seen John Hoyland’s work over the years and found it interesting, bright, colourful and all the other lukewarm adjectives you could apply to a painting. But this was very different. This one spoke, or rather sang! – and the song was full of joy as well as full of echoes. The first thought that came into my mind was of lying on a real Freudian style couch with my psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Robin, sitting silently behind me as I spoke and re-arranged the furniture in my house of memories. Robin was the master of silences which were never in the least hostile, but warm and safe silences that seemed to be saying “go on, don’t be scared”. Then came echoes of more paintings remembered from previous encounters. These resonances, of Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Samuel Palmer; the 20th century British ruralist movement; Paul Nash; Turner – the list of artists goes on; all of them lyrical.

I must have encountered the phrase “music of the spheres” when I was very young, and having no idea of its mathematical connotations I thought that if, at night, I listened intently enough I’d be able to hear it. I had unconsciously turned a theory into a physical manifestation. Many years later I discovered that this is what artists do; gifted ones at any rate. There’s no crime or failing in references and quotations. One of the great gifts of modernism was to set artists free from the doctrine of absolute hardcore originality. I’m thinking of poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and others like Basil Bunting. Full of quotations and remembrances of half sung ancient rhymes and mysteries. I’m thinking of musicians and weavers and potters. The untalented have their theories and then illustrate them, but the greatest artists think with their fingers and eyes and bring the intangible showings within their minds into plastic, tangible life. If any piece of art needs an artist’s statement to work, it’s a wrong’un!

And so I couldn’t tear myself away from this painting. I jokingly asked the attendant if he’d mind if I nicked it. I even offered him the £2 coin in my pocket if he’d just look away. He thought this was vastly amusing but said his lowest price was more than £2 – so I got Madame to take a photo instead, and now it’s in my head glowing with life and inspiring connections and thoughts as a fruiting fungus might shed spores.

Maybe, just maybe, this was just the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Dragon for me too. As we walked up to the Gallery we passed the most enormous queue outside the Museum. It snaked up the road and around the corner, some of its members in fancy dress – we saw at least one panda. In total around 4,500 people apparently went to celebrate the festival yesterday and they were by no means all Chinese. This year is said to be highly auspicious for births and standing in front of John Hoyland’s painting, being infused with its joyful light I could faintly understand what it was saying. Maybe I’d never really got Hoyland’s painting before because I just wasn’t ready. There’s an ancient Chinese proverb that goes like this:

To teach someone who is not ready is a waste of breath

not to teach someone who is ready is the waste of a person.

Maybe it was just my time.

The three graces – a rainy day job

Left to right –

  • Devil’s-bit Scabious, Succisa pratensis, Porthor beach, Lleyn.
  • Sheep’s-bit, Jasione montana, Martin’s Haven, Pembrokeshire.
  • Small Scabious, Scabiosa columbaria, Bannerdown Common. Bath.
  • At least I think so!

This little botanical odyssey began for me in July 2017, approaching seven years ago. I suppose a flora written by an extremely inexperienced botanist would find very few buyers, and sorting this group out has been a long job for me, foxed -as I’ve always been – by the similarity in colour. They all look a bit like the Scabious my mother loved and grew in the garden. Now; looking at them side by side on the page it’s obvious that they’re different but I’ve never seen even two, let alone three of them side by side in the same place. They were all separated by years and distance across a line between Bath and Snowdonia; each to its own preferred habitat.

Anyway it’s been raining for two days, limiting any outdoor attractions, and three big ideas came along like buses. The first idea was that I’m probably not going to die – at least not yet. This idea – call it the Black Dog if you like – has been haunting me for more than fifty years. The first and worst occasion nearly got me thrown out of art school for not showing up. We were living in an idyllic cottage above Bybrook and doing the things we were most passionate about, and yet I was tormented by the spectre of death – winter trees became veins and lungs, I felt permanently exhausted and without any hold on the future, no vision; no comfort at all in nature. In the end, and under threat of being expelled, I went to the doctor and, refusing to give me antidepressants, he prescribed regular trips to the pub.”You need people, not pills” he said. He was right, and soon afterwards a wonderful revelation was given to me. “Yes you are going to die, but not yet!” So bus number one came back this week and I realised that the phobic anxiety I was diagnosed with all those years ago had returned and then gone away again.

Bus number two was the annual discussion with Madame about whether we should sell the campervan. When she suggested it would be better to get it repaired and perhaps even take ourselves away for a whole month of walking, drawing, writing and botanising I felt my heart leap – for once in a good way.

Bus number three was the impulse buy I mentioned in my last post – “Frustrating Flowers and Puzzling Plants” by John M Warren and published by Pelagic Press. After a couple of months of being unable to do any serious botanical study, the book lit me up and I suddenly felt that spring and summer were truly on the way and calling me outside to meet all those precious plants again. Even better was the fact that the illustrations in the book were not only excellent but also looked very like a series of studies I once did of Hyacinth flowers. It suddenly occurred to me that what this little group of three – but could be half a dozen pale blue Scabious like flowers - needed, was a highly detailed set of drawings of their heads, including blowups of their reproductive bits, to help me – and perhaps others as well – get our heads around identifying them apart. I knew I could do it. A hand-holding guide to avoid being made to feel small by an expert. I once said to a very experienced botanist that I found grasses difficult. They simply said “Oh grasses are easy!” I was so incensed I spent months crawling around in fields trying to sort them out and three years later I’m nowhere near good, but improving.

So the oppressive cloud suddenly lifted and I felt a happy place opening up between now and the unavoidable fact that one day the wheels will fall off – but not yet! Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

All this led to a deep dive into my photos. My usual practice is to photograph plants – which is a skill in itself; knowing what you’ll most wish you’d noted when you’re back home with the books. However my enthusiasm for pressing the shutter – which takes moments – is countered by the time it takes to put names to the plants. It can take hours, days or even years to make a secure identification, and the more you practice the harder it seems to get. The photos are just the beginning of the process. The three graces at the top of the post involved a fascinating excursus around the sex life of the Devil’s-bit scabious when I realized that my photos were nowhere near good enough to make any visual sense of the meaning of gynodioecious, thrown at me by the Book of Stace (IV). That knowledge will go forward with me because I now have a plan to revisit all three plants, and any more cousins I can find – in order to become a bit of an expert at some perfectly ordinary and common plants. Naming things is the most tremendous fun. It turns nature into an old friend and makes every walk and adventure; and if I make a mistake – well, nobody dies and the worst that can happen is that I feel a bit silly for a moment: but then field botanists are some of the kindest and most helpful people you could hope to meet. Mostly.

I don’t joke about my old enemy the black dog. It can really mess you up, but if that’s you too, take heart in the truth of the moment. The beauty at hand will always drive out the dog on the horizon.