Not being a birder of any merit, I couldn’t tell you which of the Widcombe herons this is. There’s a substantial heronry just up the road from Prior Park nursery and it’s not unusual to see one anywhere along the Kennet and Avon Canal between Deep Lock and – let’s say – Dundas aqueduct. I’ve never forgotten seeing my first heron take off unexpectedly from just behind a hedge. My heart almost froze as it cranked itself into the air like a pterodactyl entering my world through some kind of worm hole into the past. Today’s creature was less impressive as it perched on the rope bumper waiting for us to leave and toppled into the canal after a half-hearted attempt to fly away. Later it flew away down the canal in that nonchalant way that we humans adopt when we’ve done something really stupid.
I think Madame and me both needed a break from weeding on the allotment – I mean I quite enjoy hand weeding but hour after hour of its punishing effect on our backs and knees makes the prospect of a straightforward walk all the more attractive. This particular walk is one we’ve done many times because we developed it during the COVID lockdown; a circular walk of almost exactly 10,000 steps using the river and the canal towpaths and passing through Sydney Gardens and Henrietta Park and back through Widcombe.
The advantage of repeatedly following the same walk is the way we get to know the plants and birds. I suppose you could over-egg it by calling it a transect but it’s really much more informal than that and we include sinking boats among our objects of interest along the way. The regular floods we’ve been experiencing wreak havoc with moored boats which – if their mooring lines are too short – turn turtle and sink. Here’s one from September 2022
-and the same boat today:
You may notice that the Buddleia has now been joined by a big group of Purple Loosestrife and the wreck is gradually turning into a small nature reserve as the cabin roof gradually rots away. On the far side of the bridge pier a sunken narrow boat rests dangerously beneath the surface, the roof rail with which it was obviously hitched has torn off and is all that’s now visible except for a big yellow buoy to warn passing boat traffic. At least it makes a pleasant change from stolen pushbikes and supermarket trolleys, but you have to wonder whether there’s a rusting fuel tank hidden inside, waiting to leak into the already polluted river. It costs thousands of pounds to remove these sunken boats.
I was on the lookout for a Soapwort that usually shows itself on the canalside, but it was a tad too early I think. I was so absorbed in photographing narrowboats that I passed a site where Marsh Figwort grows. I’ve always wondered where the name Figwort comes from and I’m indebted to my new favourite book for telling me that figs is one of the names the herbalists gave to piles – which judging from the herbals was an extremely common affliction in the past.
Our last find was a group of Musk Mallow growing in a little wildflower area at the end of Widcombe High Street. Unlike many such little created reserves, this one has nothing but native plants in it, and they seem to be enjoying themselves. I think they’re really beautiful.
I said to Madame yesterday while we were walking through Bath – “I think I’m living in the 1940’s and 50’s”. She, being an avid reader of history and biographies, knew exactly what I was saying. She’s presently finishing the last of C J Sansom’s Shardlake novels and living in the Tudor period. Not having to explain things is one of the great blessings of our long relationship. Of course the imagination can play tricks and too lax an attitude towards truth telling could lead all the way to prison or even to 10 Downing Street; but in the manner of a psychoanalytic session – by allowing the mind to range freely and without comment, connections of the utmost significance can be forged.
So, if you’re a Potwell Inn regular you’ll know I’ve been thinking about and researching Geoffrey Grigson – author of “An Englishman’s Flora” and husband of Jane Grigson the great food writer. Chains of thought often take us on a journey and in this case it involved reconnecting with the village above By Brook where we lived for two and a half years while we were at art school; and a hairy drive over to Slaughterford in search of a pub that was actually one village further upstream on the little trout river which runs for around twenty miles between Castle Combe and the Avon at Bathampton . In the course of our day and in subsequent reading we discovered that Slaughterford is probably not the site of a famous battle between Alfred the Great and a small army of Danish raiders. and that the name probably derives from the Anglo Saxon term for the crossing near the place where the Blackthorns grow.
But this turned out to be much more than an antiquarian story. Immersing ourselves in a landscape in which we’d lived the early years of our relationship stirred up the strata of many memories. The melodious sound of the small river, for instance became the river that runs through the Potwell Inn garden in HG Wells’ novel – “A History of Mr Polly” as well as being the real place where we’d attempted unsuccessfully to poach brown trout and where I’d spent days drawing a tangle of tree roots. Being an artist or a writer seems to involve a huge struggle to lay hold of something significant. That laying hold rarely seems to work and we are left empty handed. The poet RS Thomas brilliantly describes it as being like placing your hand in the warmth of a hare form which a hare has recently fled. The creative life is full of almost and not quite.
Standing next to the river, memories resurfaced of moments in galleries and museums when suddenly, as if a flare has gone off in the mind, you can see clearly for the first time. Once, unexpectedly bursting into tears in front of a Renoir painting I’d only ever seen poorly reproduced less than the size of a postcard. Being young, passionate and raw the memories never leave you. The paintings that had given us a whole expressive language floated through my head and so in a wild yomp through the unconscious I remembered John Minton and, the imagination being capable of leaping over impossible fences, suddenly brought a roomful of associations – Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, MFK Fisher, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Davidson; who would all have known one another. Geoffrey Grigson would probably not have figured in too many Christmas card lists having been rude to, or about, so many people.
I’ve got a proof/review copy of Francis Spalding’s biography of John Minton “Dance ’til the stars come down” * which I bought quite cheaply because I couldn’t afford the original. It has no illustrations but in searching the secondhand booksellers today the book came up with his familiar self-portrait on the cover. Completely unexpectedly I almost welled up with grief as I recalled his melancholia, alcoholism and eventual suicide. A man I never met evoked a sense of loss that took me completely by surprise and the terrible thought came to me that this, perhaps, was the beginning of the end. The moment when the dark forces of conservatism began their fight back against post-war optimism and freedom. Since then they’ve synthesised joy and sold it back to us by subscription – one trivial experience at a time. We seem to have lost touch with the ordinary, everyday moments that used to make us dance ’till the stars came down. Art’s now a business, patrolled by curators and gallerists, and art schools run courses on keeping accounts, tax returns, building a website, networking effectively and staying in touch with the fashion of the moment.
I’m filled with the need to go and sit quietly on the bank next to the river once more to listen to what the spirits of the place still have to say to me. They, at least, have not been silenced by the self appointed magistrates of taste!
Postscript
The title of the Minton biography is a borrowing from W H Auden’s poem, which is itself a representation of the medieval “Danse Macabre” and equally a working of Stravinsky’s 1910 Firebird. The idea was very much in the air and was echoed in all sorts of media, not least in Bernard Leach’s rediscovery of 17th century English slipware. I’m thinking of the pelican in her piety. With two world wars in mind, there’s less hope in Auden’s poem – “not to be born is best for man”. A kind of mad defiance in the face of an overwhelming threat is his prescription.
Dance, dance for the figure is easy, Â Â The tune is catching and will not stop; Â Â Dance till the stars come down from the rafters; Â Â Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
By Brook seen from the lawn of the White Hart in Ford
I’m wrestling with half a dozen recalcitrant strands of an idea that just might make a story. Of course it might also just make a WTF? mess – only time and a patient reader will tell.
So the first strand is this. I mentioned last week in The Potwell Inn blog that my copy of Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellously useful book “An Englishman’s Flora” is falling apart and I’d have to buy another copy. My clapped out paperback is a 1975 reprint of the original hardback published in 1958 and the pages are now turning brown and are foxed. The glue binding is breaking down and it’s just at the point where the pages start dropping out. I bought it for next to nothing in an Oxfam shop and I see that the cover price was less than £2 when it was new. Anyway, prompted by my resolution it went into our very small bathroom where I rediscovered what a magnificent resource it is and immediately searched out a hardback secondhand version for £17, presently on it way from another OXFAM shop in Harrogate. That’s thread one.
Thread two emerged when I was browsing through the book and randomly came across the entry for Dwarf Elder which is given no less than seven pages by the gloriously erudite Grigson. Married three times, his last wife was Jane Grigson the food writer who – I discovered today during my flurry of research – believed that food is such an important component of being human flourishing that it deserves the same high standard of writing as any other form of literature. Of course she was absolutely spot on which is why I’ve got a shelf full of her books. That’s a side issue, though for the purposes of this piece of weaving, but what a family they must have been!
The main thread concerns the Dwarf Elder because I only saw the plant for the first time this year on the footpath to the north of the lakes at Woodchester Mansion. According to the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 it’s in steep decline across the country; probably partly due to the fact that it’s no longer planted as a medicinal herb often in churchyards in order, they believed, to improve its health giving qualities.
So threads three and four join the river at this point because Grigson points out that it’s a stronger version of the Common Elder, the roots and leaves of which can yield a blue dye and a powerful purgative. We should bear in mind that for many centuries (this plant gets mentioned by Dioscorides in his first century pharmacopeia ) – plants were prized more for their medicinal usefulness more than for their aesthetic qualities. However the more intriguing point is that its local name is Danewort and it was believed – perhaps due to the colour of the berries and leaves – that it sprang from the bodies, or more specifically the blood, of Danish invaders. The bloody colour and the doctrine of signatures gave the game away – it was thought. So far, so fascinating I thought, but then I (metaphorically) sat up straight because he wrote that the plant could still be found in 1974 in the village of Slaughterford which straddles By Brook. Hold on to that thought because I’ll come back to it for another thread. As it happens, and as you’ll know already if you’re a Potwell Inn regular, we drove over to Slaughterford only a few weeks ago in search of a pub which turned out to be in the next village of Ford. If you were even considering duplicating our trip I’d strongly advise approaching the pub from the A420 because the connection between Slaughterford and Ford is not much better than a muddy track.
But why Slaughterford? You have to ask don’t you? Grigson quotes the 17th century Wiltshire historian John Aubrey and then dismisses his assertion that Dwarf Elder aka Danewort or even Danesblood which still apparently grows in Slaughterford is the sign that a battle between King Alfred and the Danish invaders was fought in the village and resulted in the rout of the Danes with much slaughter. A quick scamper around Wikipedia establishes that the consensus today is that the battle was actually fought some miles away in Edington.
But in the early hours of this morning, I was mulling over what I’d discovered about Grigson, and another fact that came up was that he’d lived in “North Wiltshire”. Might he have lived in Slaughterford? was the tantalizing thought which kept me awake. The answer, after an early start on the laptop, was no he didn’t. But he did live quite nearby on the other side of Chippenham.
Gradually the picture was emerging that Slaughterford was not the scene of a famous battle fought by King Alfred and so how on earth did it come by such a gory name? The truth turns out to be that the name is a contraction from the Saxon of Sloe Thorn – and so the village name really means the river crossing where the sloes trees (Blackthorn) grows.
There must have been many crossing points on By Brook. At one time there were over twenty mills working there and we actually walked up the river past the last functioning paper mill in around 1970. Coming upon it while walking the banks from Corsham was quite a surprise – a semi derelict industrial site in the midst of the most beautiful valley. I’m waiting for my newer and more durable copy of the book to arrive, but what a fascinating journey from a Greek botanist to a 20th century poet. The Slaughterford myth gets repeated even in quite recent herbals – Mrs Grieve’s 1920’s book “A Modern Herbal” quotes it without comment.
There are two further points about By Brook I could make. Firstly the photos I took from the pub garden strongly suggest that the water is far more polluted and eutrophic than it was when we first encountered it in 1970. You’d probably find it impossible to make paper there now, and the brown trout also need clean and unpolluted water. But secondly, there is strong enough evidence to make it to the Natural History Museum website, that there is at least one family of beavers living on the brook. Thank goodness the beavers are vegetarian and therefore no threat to the local trout. In fact the fly fishers commissioned a report on the condition of the brook which recommended some modifications to the river bed to improve flows and slacks to help with breeding the native brown trout. Maybe they’ll get their wish granted free of charge by nature. I’m sure beavers and brown trout have lived in harmony in previous centuries before the beavers were hunted to extinction.
Postscript
My secondhand book arrived today – big thanks to OXFAM in Harrogate. It’s wonderful – in excellent condition and properly bound to lie flat. I absolutely love it! The paperback version can go back for an honourable retirement in the bookcase.
First the excellent book – written by Isabella Tree – which I read almost as soon as it was published; then an illustrated edition, more of a coffee table version; and now Wilding the film. The pond at the top, as they say in true crime fiction, was posed by models; in this case the lovely Priddy Pool on the Mendip Hills which is on one of our favourite walks. I loved the book and we loved the film too when we saw it in the Bath Picturehouse yesterday along with a half empty theatre and a mostly elderly audience which was completely in agreement with the thrust of the film – if the subdued nods and grunts of agreement were anything to go by. Why it’s become a thing to suggest that older people are mostly reactionary and conservative is a mystery to me; just another way the media frame the arguments by associating them with a bunch of cliches – tall tales without any real evidence.
So we loved the film in spite of the occasionally romanticised view of nature – the Attenborough effect – with some occasionally ravishing filming of misty waters at dawn. I very much hope that I’m right in thinking that the film-makers had one eye on a later television showing. It’s just about short enough to fill a single slot and it presents the arguments in favour of rewilding along with some compelling evidence.
There is, however, quite a herd of elephants skulking in the woods, and these are mostly about funding. How do we take a brilliant idea for improving a few thousand acres of depleted farmland and extend it across the whole country without the benefit of all that bankable collateral, inherent in owning an inherited estate. With next to no income the Knepp estate must have sunk eye watering sums of money into legal fees, infrastructure and last, but by no means least, fencing. With a moribund subsidy system in place; strong opposition from many local farmers and stolid lack of imagination from the government it must have been a terrifying journey at times and we have to applaud their tenacity.
But at times you had to wonder whether the financial pressures have led to a kind of theme park temptation. Safari rides, miraculous appearances of storks, Monarch butterflies and beavers ; the Painted Lady butterflies flying over the horizon right on cue like the visionary apparition of a saint and vanquishing the plague of Creeping Thistle in one season; glamping sites and so forth are more suggestive of Woburn than wilderness. The references to the Oostvaardersplassen rewilding scheme in Holland didn’t quite spell out the public opposition that forced a change of direction on account of the perceived suffering of sick and dying animals. The direct to camera segment about the so-called wood wide web, linking trees together in a sympathetic collegiate structure through mycelial links is by no means a done deal in scientific circles; the absence of any boring detail on the funding and income streams which any farmer considering this idea would need to know. I’m trying to be a critical friend here but such a wholesale upscaling from one estate to the whole country would need huge amounts of subsidy, review, research and feedback. The question asked by one farmer – “how are we going to feed the country?” demands a convincing answer which I don’t think DEFRA has really grasped; and with the average age of a British farmer nudging 70, many working almost single handed, how on earth are they going to cope without at least some telehandling and labour saving machinery?
I’d love to let more young people see the film if only to help them grasp the mess we’re in more completely. Knepp may only be a few thousand acres but it’s a few thousand recovering acres which are already attracting attention from a generally conservative constituency on farms all over the country, struggling to make a living.
What I’d really like to see is the development of many more farms, each exploring progressive, locally inflected ideas and reducing harmful practices including chemical use; soil compacting heavy equipment and enormous fuel costs. The agrochemical industry will howl and lobby furiously but – going forward (how I hate that phrase!) there’s no alternative. Knepp will be part of the answer and that’s a lot better than being part of the problem.
If you’re a regular visitor to the Potwell Inn you’ll know that this part of South Cornwall is one of my favourite places on earth, most years we visit two or three times to hunt for plants; but you also need to know that simply liking the place, buying a Guernsey sweater and a hat with an embroidered anchor will not; will never make you a local. Upcountry is an unsettling and wicked place which necessitates passing through Devon and nothing good ever comes through Devon.
However, turning to Cadgwith once again, the tin tabernacle in the photo which is on the steep footpath from near the Todden and leading up to the car park is inaccessible except on foot. I took this photo in January 2022 – I’ve always loved these remnants of mission churches. We had one of them in Oldbury on Severn in the next-door parish to mine. There’s much more information about the Cadgwith chapel in the linked Guardian article published last week. The protesting cottage, also at the top of this piece is just a few steps further down the lane and reflects the majority view of the locals. When we grow old and forgetful it’s regarded as a personal tragedy but the mass influx of outsiders can just as surely drive out the community memories which are the glue that holds people together in shared experiences, and which is one reason why we were both so delighted to see that the little blue corrugated iron chapel has been given a grade 2 listing. Go inside and sit quietly on one of the blue pews and reflect on the courage of the volunteer lifeboat crew who, in 1907, went out to rescue 456 people from the stricken liner “Suevic” – and the vicar was a member of that crew.
Earlier this year we were having a pint in the pub on the Lizard and I noticed that one of the bar staff was wearing an RNLI pager. In Pembrokeshire last week we were on the Puffin shuttle bus going towards St Justinian when we had to stop to allow a car to pass and the bus driver stopped for a chat with the other driver – it’s that kind of bus route – and turned around to tell us that the man was, in fact, a member of the St David’s lifeboat crew; cue for a big cheer from the passengers! These things matter greatly. Community memories are hardwired into the whole landscape in these isolated places. Sustainable tourism demands a thoughtful attitude from those of us who are just visiting to ensure that we are not responsible for eroding and diluting those memories.
We’ll soon be back for another month in paradise – the campervan may be a bit cramped, but it’s like a holiday cottage on wheels once you’ve learned how to live like a submariner and put things away in the right place every time.
It’s not a great photograph for sure, but the family name Galinsoga triggered the memory of a story my dad used to tell about a wartime message which began as “send reinforcements, going to advance” and having been passed by mouth from messenger to messenger finally arrived at headquarters as “Send three and fourpence, going to a dance”. The trigger, of course was the similarity, when spoken, between Galinsoga and Gallant Soldier.
As ever I turned to Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellous 1958 book “An Englishman’s Flora” which lists Latin and English folk names, county by county for hundreds of familiar flowering plants. Galinsoga is something of an outlier in the book because it lists only one name by way of explanation to describe these “thin, long legged, little flowered daisies, ray flowers white, disc flowers yellow – annual, naturalised little cockneys in a waste corner or uncultivated garden” and makes the link between the plant name and the 18th century Spanish botanist Don Mariano Martinez de Galinsoga.
Many of the plants mentioned in the book have dozens of local folk names which would (at least the Oxfordshire ones) have been familiar to my mother. Every time I open the book I get a pang to think of the loss of local dialects; it only took a few turns of the page to discover that in Gloucestershire the Spindle tree was known as Skiver – which isn’t a name I’ve ever heard. But what about “Single Gussies”, “Smear Docken” or “Son afore the father”? What about “Arse smart”? The rich and earthy poetry of plant names has all but disappeared by now. I remember an old man in Pucklechurch delightedly telling my young sister that the Dandelion she’d picked was really called “Piss the Bed”. I can see the point of the Latin binomials if a native botanist of Gloucestershire was trying to compare Pulmonaria (Jerusalem Cowslip) notes with a neighbour from Herefordshire who called it Spotted Virgin” – but there’s a wealth of folklore and pre-scientific medical wisdom hidden within the local dialect names. It’s a great book to browse and I’ve almost worn my battered paperback copy out – I’ll have to shell out for a properly stitched hardback copy one of these days.
Oh I do love a traditional pantomime joke! I couldn’t resist taking this shot of a Southern Hawker Dragonfly on the allotment today, apparently stalking a Ladybird on the other side of the cane. We’d only just been talking about the absence of many of our familiar visitors during this very unseasonable summer, and then today we had 20C and sunshine, so they all came out to play. There were Damselflies in turquoise and ruby as well as this fierce but beautiful Dragonfly plus many other flying insects. We’ve even had our first newt in the pond.
The warm, wet weather has led to a plague of weeds and so since we got back from St David’s we’ve spent hours every day pulling them up. As it happens I really enjoy hand weeding so it’s not so much of a chore and – being a bit obsessive – I get a kick out of making a good job of it. The downside in the polytunnel today was that it was so very hot, approaching 30C with very little wind to stir the air. There was another find, as ever not in the least rare, but I’ve never seen it before. There are two members of the Galinsoga family in the UK – known by the English names “Shaggy Soldiers” and “Gallant Soldiers” this one was the hairier and scruffier version . The yellow flower also appeared out of nowhere – it’s one of the St John’s Worts this one the “imperforate” form, which is to say there are no little holes to be seen when you hold the leaf up to the sun. We think it must have come from a packet of wildflower mix that our son gave us. Madame remembers broadcasting the seed probably three years ago and it’s finally popped up in two places. Weeds are fun; very diverse and surprising, and Imperforate St John’s Wort is suitable (like Pot Marigolds) for making a very good antiseptic cream.
The other notable thing about the Dragonfly picture is how superior the focus, exposure and depth of field it is when compared with my phone camera. It’s a bit trickier to set up a shot than the point and press phone, but the reward is an altogether better and more useful picture. Sometimes the identity of a plant depends on a few glandular hairs that need really detailed shots.
After the tunnel was weeded I fed all the plants with liquid seaweed fertilizer and picked our first ripe tomato – delicious but only the one between us. Tonight we’ll be eating here with another of our sons – we’ve got three – and we’ve got our own home-grown peas, broad beans courgettes and potatoes plus home grown fresh herbs. Tayberries and strawberries for pud and a glass or two of wine I don’t doubt. We sometimes moan about the hard work and the bad backs; but the flavour of our own vegetables is outstanding – this is no place for modesty – and everyone should at least try to grow a few veg even if it’s just a few herbs and a tomato in a pot outside the front door. I promise you’ll want more. Last night we went over to Bristol to see our grandson in his year 6 leavers play – Robin Hood with some outstanding performances and lots of fart jokes. The fact that loads of dads turned up on the same night as the England v Holland match teaches something about love! Life can be very beautiful. Even the dreaded Chickweed – in the right place.
Read on for the full story of accidental good luck
So we’re back in one piece from St David’s after two weeks of sun, biblical rain and gales. This souvenir photo is of a big moment when I finally found a plant I’ve been looking for, misidentifying and hunting for years. As you see, it’s on the side of a road – freshly surfaced with very sticky tar and gravel which got into my shoes and on my trousers – and regularly traversed at speed by eager tourists hunting for somewhere to park 20mm closer to the sea. Whilst I was on my knees and elbows trying to photograph the plant the farmer whose house I was outside drove out and asked if I was alright. Two carloads of eager puffin hunters paused and wound down their windows to see if I was alive – all in a day’s work for a plant hunter – but I was sustained by my excitement at finding a not particularly rare plant that over the past two weeks we’d walked miles looking for. I’d even been told that it was there by the local County Recorder but three holidays later I’d still never seen it.
Not being a mild natured and placid sort of person I’d taken the previous knockbacks to heart, gracelessly cross with myself but more determined than ever to nail it and on the very last day of the trip I was crossing the road next to the campsite to empty a heavy cassette of – you don’t need to know – when in the midst of the hedgerow chaos I spotted a single white flower clinging on within inches of the traffic, the tarmac and the predation of strimming. Here it is:
It’s a Dwarf Mallow – not a Common Mallow or a Tree Mallow or a Musk Mallow or any of the several closely related Mallows – including the Marsh Mallow (yes really!) that I’ve found in the past. But Malva neglecta. Who says field botany isn’t exciting! I reckon getting the pictures, closing the ID and cataloguing the plant was a lot more rewarding than hunting for seabirds that aren’t there and getting seasick for £25 a pop. I may be wrong but apart from the obvious dangers of getting run over and ruining a decent pair of trousers, that single chance encounter whilst holding an over-full cludger was one of those unforgettable moments. In fact I can remember the exact places where I found its cousins; the Musk Mallow in July 2016 on the canal side, the Tree mallows on the clifftops in Wales and Cornwall, the Common Mallows which gave me so much grief, on the coast path down to Whitesands beach, because they vary so much in height and general jizz according to their situation. So after miles and miles of walking, it turned out to be 100 yards from where we’d parked the campervan. I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s little couplet:
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.
Anyway, here – spread over at least ten years are some family photos
As I write this I’m watching the picture load extremely slowly at the top of the page. It may not sound particularly glamorous to take a two week holiday in the midst of a bog/marsh/mire (all of them feature) but the advantage is that there’s a completely different flora here; one that I’m not very familiar with, so every walk is revelatory in some way. Yesterday, as is the manner of Wales, it rained and blew a hoolie all day and I spent many happy hours in the campervan, cataloguing and identifying all the plants I’d photographed. However the downside of a bit of remoteness is that the internet ran unbelievably slowly, and I don’t mean just less than the 100 megabits we’re used to – I mean 50 kilobits max. This is turning into that famous good news/bad news Chinese proverb because yesterday was also UK election day and so we spent the whole day sans telly, sans politics and sans anything that makes me bang my head on the wall. On balance it was better that way. Our friends in Bristol had an election party going on – attended by some high profile politicos. We’d bowed out because we were here in the campervan, but the party, they said this morning, failed to ignite because at the very moment Rees Mogg was ejected (cheers) Farage was elected (boos). And so for fear of being misinterpreted by the citizens of Clifton and Hotwells the massive explosion was not ignited. Then there were the supporters of Thangam Debbonaire who lost their MP and a few greens who gained one. Ah life ….. always complicated. We went to bed after the exit polls were announced but I still woke at 6.00am pretending to myself (unsuccessfully) that it didn’t matter.
Of course it mattered. And after a day processing the news it’s obviously better that a Labour government have taken over, and obviously better that the Lib Dems (left of Labour) did so well, and still obviously better that Ed Miliband has replaced Therese Coffey at Environment, and even more obviously better that a number of independents had shown the door to their labour predecessors over Gaza. It’s taken 24 hours for me to relax a bit and feel safer for the first time since Thatcher was elected in 1979. I don’t count the Blair government because Tony Blair was just Thatcher Lite, although Gordon Brown -aside from the hugely expensive PFI contracts – was in the right place. It’s so good to feel that at last the global environmental crisis might come up on the UK agenda, and that UK citizens have voted so decisively for ordinary decency over windbag oratory. Of course the knuckle draggers deserve their place in the sun and then we can all laugh at them and ring a rejuvenated NHS to warn them that they’ve come off their medication – but if anyone ever needed a full brain transplant it would be good to get hold of an unused model – a top of the range Farage for instance.
Here in the van,though, I discovered the cause of the internet breakdown (flat mobile router battery) and fixed it (turned it on); only to discover that it was the signal that was feeble. And so I write this with no expectation that it will escape the marshes of St Davids. But – message in a bottle style -I hope it finds you well. We sent postcards to our grandchildren and the Post Office staff in St David’s seemed almost absurdly grateful today. We also once found a Spanish lottery ticket in a bottle washed up in the bay across from here. I never did anything about it and it’s still tucked inside my first Welsh Dictionary. Hardly anyone speaks Welsh here.
This is the kind of place where I go after plants like a dog might go after smells. The new OLympus TG-7 camera is excellent with just a couple of quibbles. The GPS takes a while to log on to the satellites but if you leave it on the whole time it runs the battery down. But the picture quality is much better than my Pixel 6a. As ever I need to work out a suitable workflow. Today we rested in the warm sunshine. It was good!
Seed head of Jack go to bed at noon aka Goat’s Beard – Tragopogon pratensis
I was pondering the other night concerning our instinct to describe nature in terms of quietness, peacefulness , meditative tranquility – none of which (for me at least) even begin to express its dynamism, ceaseless movement, busyness and fantastic, inexpressible diversity. Not the disconnected series of aesthetic ooh’s and aahs of the kind that so many TV natural history programmes seem to promote, but something more connected. When we got rid of the idea of god creating everything, we somehow lost the matrix that held everything together. In any case the old idea was redundant and too useful to the wrong kind of people but at least there was a coherent story about where we fitted in. Now the prevailing ideology has exploded us into a billion monads. One attempt at a remedy is to reduce nature to an aesthetic experience. I completely understand where nature as art gallery is coming from and I’ve got many thousands of photographs to prove it, but when we’re out walking together searching hedgerows and marshes; muddy tracks and field edges for flowering plants and suchlike, the overwhelming feeling I carry is of rhythm and flow, of complexity, timbre and key; of pace and time signature; of dissonance and assonance and the larger divisions of …….. spit it out! of music.
I don’t want to inflate this metaphor like a party balloon until it bursts; but I want to hold it there while I write about being here in West Wales and about being human – but most of all being human in nature. I want to put aside any thoughts of saving the earth or restoring lost species and any long lists of rarities in favour of that hoary old retreat favourite – of being in nature. Being in the moment is all the rage, but for me that’s like trying to listen to Bach one note at a time.
Small Scabious Scabiosa columbaria
Sheep’s Bit – Jasioni montana
Devil’s Bit Scabious – Succisa pratensis
Do these three look the same? They certainly do if you’re walking too fast; but don’t worry because these three photographs were taken in three different places over a period of seven years, and you’d be vanishingly unlikely to see all three side by side in one place. If you’re curious to know, it’s all in the stamens. Learning the plants takes years and is full of blind alleys and wrong ID’s, but what that teaches us is that being in nature is a process in which no single place is better, cleverer or more virtuous than any other and also that every place is full of possibilities even if you could count the plants you could name on the fingers of one hand. Where I was today at a field edge and finding a Bugloss plant, I was flooded with endorphins, a runners’ high. This was the place – to pinch a line from TS Elliot – that
“You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid”
There are thousands of plants I’ve never seen and probably never will; but we mustn’t differentiate between the rare and the common as if rarity bestowed some kind of patina of significance. I’ve been out botanizing with some folks who fire Latin names at one another like paintballs and boast of their thousands of records. Each to their own, I say. Since we can only attend to the Great Symphony of nature with all our senses; of sound and touch and taste and sight and smell – and here I’d add memory and imagination because nature works so slowly that some of her works are beyond the reach of the conventional senses; then it follows that every part of our mind is engaged. It’s the complete opposite of emptying the mind, it’s allowing it to fill with something other than ourselves. Embracing the Great Symphony is the work of a lifetime; many lifetimes.
Sea Carrot
Take a typical hedgerow, for instance. Those weeds at the front – the ones with heads comprising many small flowers sitting at the ends of umbrella spokes. Unsurprisingly they’re not always the same plant, they’re a procession of cousins from early in the year; each one pushing past its senescent relative in glorious green livery – one of them has the English name Queen Anne’s Lace -flowering and then setting seed, signalling its own disappearance until the next year. Depending where you live you might see Alexanders first, and then Cow Parsley, Hogweed and then (a bit trickier) Rough Chervil or Wild Carrot – there are dozens of them – some exceptionally rare and subtly different but each one challenging the false idea of the a solitary moment in an unchanging natural world. Searching for a musical comparison I came up with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. One aria to begin with – that’s the family, the genus if you prefer – and then the thirty variations each using exactly the same notes but changing the tempo and key whilst maintaining the theme. Listening to the Goldbergs right through is something akin to following the life of a hedgerow through a season. But then there are the grace notes – like the Stitchworts’ little shining highlights; Bluebells, Campions, Dog Roses and Honeysuckle. Later there are berries and some of them are delicious whilst others might kill you. There’s a restlessness and dynamism in nature. Tides and seasons; the length of days and the rising and setting of the moon can never be stilled by putting a pin through them and mounting them in a cabinet, and neither can we step out of that fierce river because
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas
If the aim of meditation is to back out of the flow of life, then I can’t see the point of it. If the initial premise is that we are always prey to living a shadowy half life working all day and satisfying our delinquent desires at night in front of the television, then I completely agree that something urgently needs doing. But the cure isn’t to hide but to embrace the flow, to step out into earth life and add our own bit of the song to the natural music that birthed us and will take us back again when we reach our own senescence. So seeking, identifying but above all enjoying the plants, the birds and insects; the mammals and the fish for themselves and as part of our own nature, is – quite apart from making lists and showing off to your companions – a form of fully engaged meditation which leads us gently away from seeing nature as a business opportunity.
