Category: Eudaimonia – flourishing

There’s no business like slow business

Ah yes – the idyll continues. Or maybe it doesn’t because in the UK it rains in the autumn; not necessarily in what’s come to be called biblical amounts and should really be called climate catastrophic amounts, Exxon Mobil or BP amounts; but you get the picture. The kind of rain that laughs at the equally misnamed technical clothing. Today it even penetrated my untreated and decidedly non-technical Welsh wool polo neck which still smells like a sheep but feels mercifully warm even when it’s wet.

We’re travelling extremely slowly along the Kennet and Avon canal; so slowly in fact that we learned today that we had infuriated a robustly built Welsh boater who we’d already allowed to overtake us once and who was the first of our little traffic jam to discover that the Canal is blocked by a fallen tree just beyond Dundas aqueduct. He passed us bad temperedly as he returned to Bath in sodden shirtsleeves and (so the mechanic told us) shouted at them for ruining his life. I did eventually speed up once I’d mastered the speed wobble – I didn’t confess my part in all this to my informant who was at the end of the traffic jam. It took me right back to our Morris Thousand days.

I mentioned yesterday that our induction talk was brief; very brief as it turned out when the heater failed to start this morning. The briefing hadn’t – for instance – included the important fact that the Webasto heater in the boat is designed to run on 24V and the system runs at 12V so, it’s imperative – we were told – to run the engine fast whenever we start the heater. That said, three conversations and three engineer visits later we’d discovered that the Webasto heating unit had reached the terminal care point and that the fake solid fuel fire was disconnected because of the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. In the end the three engineers on site conducted a mini Council of Nicea and they collectively concluded that it was water in the diesel and they would have to “fit a new part” . However it was also true that the posh iron stove had just been turned off somewhere in the engine compartment, and so we gathered around while it was ignited with a rolled up cigarette paper. So after a day in which we managed to travel about a mile in freezing cold and rain, with a roof that leaks like a sieve and our clothes wet through we are finally moored at Dundas and ready to move on as soon as the engineer comes to fit whatever it is .

And it was all our fault. Apparently those of us who hire boats are far too well educated but lack any common sense and insist on fiddling with the equipment. I knew it! When it all boils down most customers will back down with a bit of technical gibberish and a half decent narrative. As a founder member of the South West Awkward Squad I must disagree.

Potwell Inn afloat!

Ah bliss!! We’re back on the Kennet and Avon canal but this time we’re in a rented narrowboat for a few days after a brief handover session that didn’t quite convey the disconcerting slalom that such a long boat performs when the driver is a bit of a novice and oversteers. All the same, we settled down after the first 90 minutes and pulled over to moor up while the sun was still shining. The key to avoiding wild swerves seems to be to read the water resistance against the rudder through the tiller and not to overcompensate before the boat has had time to respond.

The internet signal, though not great, is good enough and the weather forecast is pretty awful so I can see some serious work on the database coming along. I’m slowly working through thousands of photographs of unidentified plants to see if any of them can be given reliable names and locations. Madame, after forty years of implacable resistance to the very idea of a narrow boat holiday has finally given in on the condition that she doesn’t have to do any work involving locks or swing bridges, so our youngest is our acting first mate and general muscle. The plan was originally to moor up at Dundas Aqueduct, but tea and home-made Dundee cake lured us to the bank and we feasted on some readymade paellas which burst into flames when we put them too close to the gas burner. We’re sandwiched here between the main road, a railway line and the river, so it’s all beguilingly muddled up because we can’t see anything except trees. Our first challenge of the morning is to get through a swing bridge that we gave an initial inspection before we closed the shutters on our first night. Our first lock is in Bradford on Avon and Madame is filled with dark forebodings but has kindly volunteered to make a video. I hope it will be very boring and won’t involve the Fire Brigade.

Everything is so slow on a narrow boat, you have to get your head into a different gear altogether. We are constantly overtaken by runners, swans, ducks, and even walkers, so our initial estimate of how far we’d get on this trip already looks wildly optimistic. We’re all looking forward to crossing the two aqueducts. There’s a decent pub next to Avoncliff if I remember correctly but Madame thinks it may be closed. The second, at Freshford is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays so the First Mate is relying on bottled cider. We spotted our first Kingfisher near the pub at Bathampton.

Canals are invariably marvellous. When we lived in Stoke on Trent for a while it wasn’t unusual to see dead dogs floating between the supermarket trollies. Here, though, there is botanical interest everywhere -not so much in the autumn – but in the early spring flush there are all sorts of plants that would have been harvested by the barge people as herbal medicines.

Anyway, more (and hopefully more photos tomorrow) I can feel an early night coming on.

We’ve got the hots for the winter

It’s true to say that I don’t really like this time of year very much. The botanical fairground has packed up and gone, and I’m left standing in the midst of the yellow grass and the mud wondering if there will be another one next year. Of course – short of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), doing a quick U turn – there will probably be an improbably wet/cold, dry/warm/generally unpredictable winter followed by another floral circus some time between february and April. Plants seem to be much more adaptable than humans because we spend so much time wittering on about difficult ideas like normal we can’t see what’s happening in front of our eyes, and I for one have no idea how to run a successful allotment in somewhere as cold as St Petersburg – after a spell in Babylon with Deacon Starmer and the funeral band in charge.

So in times of botanical dearth I turn to cooking, drying and preserving. On the stove at this moment is a large batch of ragu – enough for a dozen meals – and a gallon of stock reducing down. It’s a very homely smell and it’ll all go into the freezer against those days when we really can’t be arsed to cook. Good stock is the pixie dust of the kitchen. In the left hand jar photographed at the top is half of a large crop of Habanero chillies, dried in the oven ; an entirely unexpected gift, as it happens, because the nursery label said they were going to grow up as sweet peppers but obviously weren’t. So this summer we were pepperless and this winter we will have to cook Mexican if we’re not going to waste them. They did smell rather beautiful as they dried – even if they made my eyes water! Alongside them is the usual crop of surplus tomatoes, reduced and turned into sauces and passata. The crusty looking layer is butter from our favourite Hazan number one sauce which, with a lump of chopped chorizo and some of the (small) crop of Borlotti makes a decent ribsticker meal on a cold day.

We’ve got a couple more outings to look forward to; a trip up the Kennet and Avon canal in a narrow boat and a long weekend in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) with our friends Kate and Nick and perhaps one last adventure in the campervan before Christmas – probably on the Monmouth and Brecon Canal. But the flowers just aren’t there any more and there’s nothing much to report on the allotment (another load of wood chip today – etc), so given that I’ve taken Trappist vows not to spend my time grumbling about the state of the world I’ve very little to get my creative juices flowing.

I know, I really do know, that this time next week I’ll be enthusiastically photographing fungi and going through my endless list of unidentified fern photos ready for next season; and perhaps it’s because Madame and I have crammed a whole years worth of vaccinations, dentist appointments, X rays, cardo assessments, scans and physio stuff, that we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by our vulnerability; but, to be honest, I’m feeling fitter than I have done for a year or more. The Cardiology department of the Royal United Hospital is on the third floor, up six flights of stairs, and I can now climb then without collapsing halfway. There’s a notice at the top that says “if you can read this you don’t need us!”– (that’s a joke, they’ve been great).

Madame had an unusual conversation with an old parishioner in the week. He must have seen or heard about this blog because he mentioned that we knew we were now running a pub (presumably the Potwell Inn) and living in a council estate. Wrong on both counts I’m afraid. There are no longer any council estates because all the council houses have been sold off – making a cultural stereotype redundant at the same time; and the Potwell Inn isn’t a pub, it’s a metaphor stolen from an HG Wells comic novel called “A History of Mr Polly”. I think I was banned from posting on Facebook because an artificially intelligent (stupid) algorithm decided I am a business. I wish! Anyway Chris – rest assured that we are fine and living near to some Georgian terraces in a cold concrete building with damp and black mould and this is not a pub but an HMO with a lively drug subculture outside on the green; always entertaining. The river outside is pretty but often quite smelly. We’ve always suspected that it’s got sewerage in it – largely due to the frothy schooners that float down from Pulteney Weir when the river floods. But a couple of days ago our friend Charlie posted a copy of a video sent to him by a scientist friend across the way, clearly showing a dense brown slick pouring from what is supposed to be a stormwater outfall. Worse still, the swans seemed to be swimming in it – I’ll never kiss another swan.

So just to cheer up gardeners and allotmenteers everywhere I’ll finish with a photo of everyone’s very favourite plant. Please welcome the Large Bindweed- cousin to the Hedge Bindweed, the Field Bindweed, the Sea Bindweed and the Hairy Bindweed. We used to have a couple of families like that in one of my parishes.

Large Bindweed, Calystegia sylvatica

Traveller’s Joy

Old man’s beard, Traveller’s joy, Clematis vitalba.

This new database of mine is already driving me crazy. I’ve got thousands of photos of unidentified plants and hundreds of plant records – the ones I know I’ve seen in the past – easy ones like Elderberry – without any photographs. I try to keep a list of the photos I need to take in my head, but in reality I spot something I might need to photograph for the database and then go back to the laptop to check. It’s never too soon to get organised!

The love of nature is very peculiar. I’ve been vocal in my suspicion of the endlessly asserted factoid that nature is good for you and cures more human ills than the finest snake oil – but that’s just my sceptical nature. When I stop to think I can recall the first time I experienced what I later discovered was called an oceanic experience. The phrase was coined by Romain Rolland in a letter to Sigmund Freud.

“a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded”, a “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”

Harebells on Rodway Hill

Which is a bit grand for my unforgettable experience but it was real enough for me – aged maybe 11 – lying in the grass on Rodway hill, listening to the wind fingering the fine grass while I watched a group of Harebells swaying in unison. These days I understand the geology of the Old Red Sandstone and the acidity of the thin soil, but none of that grown-up knowledge comes close to explaining the experience. I’d just want to say that it’s the memory that sustains and inspires me and it’s vanishingly rare in my experience – it doesn’t happen every time I go out botanizing and it doesn’t cure my anxieties but rests there in my mind as a permanent reminder that it’s not all confusing and bad. There’s something indescribable but good under the chaos of events.

Two weeks in Cornwall with an average internet speed of around forty kilobits per second – really! – has tested my saintly patience! Anyway, I took the Old Man’s Beard photo on our last holiday walk and it suited my wicked purposes very well today as I started to write this, because the two words -“traveller” and “joy” were never more inappropriately joined together as we drove back from Cornwall. Our holiday had to be curtailed by two days because one of the components of the campervan water system had failed and we needed to stop off at MURVI headquarters in Ivybridge where it could be repaired. That entailed a considerable detour across-country from Roseland to the edge of Dartmoor via Plymouth; a pleasant drive avoiding any rush hour towns. We arrived on time and the job was done in half an hour by a brilliant fitter called (I think) Chris, who made it all look easy. Thereafter we were on the A38 and later the M5 travelling at about 20 mph all the way. This wasn’t due to flooding, accidents or even roadworks but sheer traffic overload. There was a long queue beyond every single slip road and we chugged along in a pall of pollution and bad tempered driving. It’s my proud boast that we kept up with a Ferrari all the way. Not bad for a 2009 campervan eh? By Saturday the motorway was flooded and the road surface of the new Severn Bridge had lifted so the bridge was closed. More huge queues. Is anyone planning for the impact of a global climate catastrophe? Peaceful demonstrators can get 5 years for protests which may be annoying, while children develop lung disease from pollution.

Comma butterfly in the lane

There are a number of familiar walks from the campsite we’ve been staying at for years. But our familiarity with the resident plants is always challenged by new finds – I wrote about some of them in the most recent post – and so we walk with our eyes wide, scanning the verges waiting for something to stand out. These lanes have plants you’d never see anywhere else and some of them are so shy and retiring we’ve walked past them for years without spotting them. Luckily in the past couple of weeks we’ve spotted something new almost every day. Alongside the Percuil river where we found orchids in spring, we stood and listened to the heartbreakingly lovely call of the Curlews.

We live in Bath which is also continually choked with traffic. Not only that but the size of cars (and therefore engines) seems to be increasing exponentially; driving behaviour is moving close to fairground dodgems – and speed limits? – don’t even ask. All this whilst lobby groups supported by deluded “locals” (they’re often not) are fighting tooth and nail for the human right to drive down narrow residential streets at whatever speed pleases them. It seems to have escaped their tiny thinking parts that the outcome of unrestricted and unregulated traffic is – wait for it – traffic jams. I once took this up with a campaigner waving a placard near to our flat and he admitted that he didn’t even live in Bath. And don’t come back at me about our campervan because it’s only done 52,000 miles in the past 15 years and we keep it in a compound way outside the Bath LTZ which is a price we’re prepared to pay for not clogging the streets or the air.

Sea Carrots – Daucus carota ssp gummifer

Of course autumn has its own unique pleasures, not least to look at plants that are more easily identified by their seeds and seed heads – this applies particularly to the large and confusing carrot family. I don’t know how you could distinguish wild carrots from sea carrots if it weren’t for the fact that senescent wild carrot flowers shrink and bend into tiny old fashioned wicker lobster pots or perhaps bird cages, whereas sea carrots remain fairly open. Then the scarlet fruits in the hedgerows could be Black Bryony, or Woody Nightshade, or Honeysuckle – it’s fun to know the difference.

Coming back home to the crowds and the drug dealers outside on the green was a painful reminder that all is not well in our country. Part of the A36 has fallen down the hill in Limpley Stoke and is closed and on Saturday the students all moved back into their accommodation which effectively closed the lower Bristol road all day. The new Labour government is already weakening environmental regulations and abandoning their election manifesto commitments at the behest of lobbyists and shady donors. Am I cross? Hell yes!!

Blue Moon over the sea

But I’m desperately sad for the young woman and two young men who sat on the bench outside on the green, smoking crack, slumped over; their hopes of better lives draining slowly away.

Upsides and backsides of camping

If you look carefully at the right hand photograph you’ll see a little jet of water, reminiscent of a Brussels fountain, exiting a split in a plastic pressure vessel used – so the blurb says – to equalise the water flow at the taps in the campervan. It’s OK, I suppose, but it means keeping the pump turned off unless you want to fill a kettle because it will make loud pumping noises all day and night if you don’t, and it will also empty the main tank very quickly; not a disaster but a bit irritating. Not nearly as irritating, though, as the almost complete absence of internet signal down here near St Anthony’s Head in Cornwall.

Turning to the good bit, we’ve managed to get out into the weather nearly every day and we’ve eaten well and finished up all the sweetcorn, runner beans and tomatoes that we brought with us. We’ve also carried on our exploration of a lane that goes down to the beach from our campsite and turns, about halfway, into a sunken lane which has got a delightful array of unusual and even rare plants – so I’ve been practicing using the new camera to which I’ve added a flash diffuser ring which makes a huge difference to extreme close-ups and macro photos. I’ve also been using a new, cheapest money can buy, GPS, which is actually very good for recording accurate grid references and saves me recording plants in the middle of the sea. Both the camera and my phone boast that they give grid references in the EXIF data but they can be hopelessly unreliable.

The yellow flower at the top is of the unaccountably named Dark Mullein that we found growing on what must be a collapsed Cornish wall. In the same short stretch we’ve found Red Bartsia, Hedge Woundwort and Babington’s Leeks alongside all the usual suspects, and just up the lane we found a single flower among hundreds of Yellow Flowered Strawberries, known as Yard Strawberries in the US and which I’ve been assuming were common wild strawberries for years. We followed a man accompanied by half a dozen female fans, down the lane on a foraging walk. I hope he didn’t make the same mistake as I have for years. Apparently they’re inedible if not poisonous. I’d never have discovered that from tasting them because I’m very suspicious of the impact of foraging when it goes too far. Down here whole lanes of Wild Garlic have been stripped and sold off to posh restaurants. As if you could gain any esoteric knowledge or benefit of the wild by eating it?

The rest of the time has been spent revisiting some old (plant) friends, now in seed, to tie down their exact names. I’ve been looking at a clump of wild Radish for three or four years, trying to distinguish them from Sea Radish and yesterday I got the evidence I was looking for; an unmistakable string of beads seed capsule and a single yellow flower to seal the deal. I made some progress with the same problem of Wild Carrot/Sea Carrot and comparing the seed heads I’m nearer to understanding which is which.

If you can seriously enlarge the right hand picture you’ll see the exquisite spiked seeds of the clifftop carrot – a sculptor’s gift! As for the wild Leeks, the seed heads have now become balls of fully formed bulblets, like tiny onion sets. I picked up a few and we’ll see if we can grow them on the allotment.

Apart from all that, reading, and ten hours of sleep most nights, I’ve been working on my database of plants, their locations and photos – hence the frustration with the internet. Yes I’m aware this all sounds a bit eccentric but it’s my happy place and that’s not up for negotiation!

Ivy in flower – a late treat for the Ivy bees on our allotment or, in this case a pair of Drone Flies – Eristalis tenax

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uugh! aargh! get off!!

Bullwort

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the Heffalump!

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

*Sadly that one didn’t work out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dundas aqueduct – July 2017

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

High season for tomatoes (and Wrens)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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