I can’t claim too much about the plant in the photo except to say that I’m almost certain it’s a wild Tulip, Tulipa sylvestris – hiding in plain sight among hosts of dandelions and what will soon be equal numbers of Oxeye daisies and Rough Hawksbeard. Talk about a needle in a haystack! I’ve sent off some more photos and measurements to the Magisterium for confirmation but I’m fairly sure of my ground.
Our discovery was purely accidental – we arrived back from our holiday on the Lizard and 24 hours later Madame was in hospital having a Knee replacement. It’s essential to exercise (sensibly) after the operation, so we took ourselves off for a very short walk in the Park and in the absence of any mown paths so early in the year I took the opportunity of scouting around for special plants. Later in the year we’re almost certain to find Bee orchids, Early purple and pyramidal orchids too, but this year has already been strange – climatically – so an early expedition made sense and almost immediately I noticed this plant which stuck out like a sore thumb amongst its neighbours.
Until I’d spent a few hours with the AI apps and then the field guides I had no idea either that a wild tulip even existed. However it escaped from a garden in the 17th century and has set up shop in a sparse set of locations across the south. I hesitate to use the word rare, but it’s certainly uncommon. However the bad news is that my specimen was badly infected by Pulcinella (probably) rust fungus and may well not flower this year. Richard Mabey says (In Flora Britannica) that it often fails to flower in any case so I’m not holding my breath. I’ve been visiting an equally unusual Mullein plant on the Canal for almost a year now waiting for it to flower, so although patience is not a virtue I possess much of, I’m used to waiting.
The supreme irony, of course is that the Park was overrun with visitors to the formal gardens which were hosting a Tulip Mania event. Dare I confess that I’m not overly fond of tulips but clearly thousands of people are, and the car park was completely rammed. However our favourite parking spot was empty as ever and we barely saw another human being as we discovered the ancestor of all those blowsy showoffs down in the formal gardens. It looked like a modest and rather sickly leek, but a single sniff confirmed that it wasn’t a member of the allium family.
So there it is – we await the verdict of the Magisterium whilst drifting spores have infected the most important non-exhibit in the show. I really hope it flowers because it’s very pretty in the modest way of wildflowers compared with their steroidal and silicone plumped offspring.
Today Madame and i went to have her dressings taken off, and we both received our Covid boosters. We should get the campervan back this week after the new engine has been fitted and then the summer stretches out before us like a magic carpet. Summer never felt so inviting!
St Georges’s Day – April 23rd; traditionally peak dandelion day.
Madame holding one of our faintly miraculous crop of cauliflowers
It’s been an extremely odd few weeks, what with the campervan van engine blowing up after a service error which was meant to keep it on the road. “All repairs will be under the warranty”, the nice mechanic said, after he realized that I wasn’t going to scream at him. Then there were the two weeks in Cornwall during which we identified over a hundred new-to-me- species and then, on Monday morning we bowed to the inevitable and shipped up to the local hospital for Madame’s second knee replacement. We reported at seven and by eight the same evening we were driving home again clutching sticks, an embarrassingly obvious commode and a bag of pills – most of which looked either dangerously addictive or dangerously laxative ……. who knew?
And so I straightened my nurse’s hat and buckled down to a routine that only fitted our quiet and orderly lives where it touched. It turns out there’s a very short distance between tired and tetchy and in pain and tetchy with a fuse that can be lit by the most innocent roll of the eyes. The drug routine was so complicated I had to make a spreadsheet to explain all the timings, and we soon abandoned a couple of the drugs which made Madame puke. We are model patients – eschewing the morphine in favour of a couple of paracetamols and a scant diet of pride and anxiety – chewed over fifty times and swallowed painfully. However progress has been good and today I appointed myself chief occupational therapist and we went to the allotment to see how things are going. And they are going very well indeed. Not least the cauliflowers which we’ve been growing for over fifty years and never really succeeded with. Today every plant carried a perfect small cauliflower – just right for the two of us. It was like a botanical Easter egg hunt except it was me crawling around and Madame directing the search from her comfortable chair.
So in between nursing duties I managed to complete the plants spreadsheet having trawled through 17,000 photos, most of which were useless – lacking useable data – and boiled it all down to 6oo verifiable records and 400 species; in terms of bang for buck I think it would be hard to justify! I was chatting late last year with a retired recorder who though he and his wife might complete 1,000,000 records this year. Awesome!
Getting old is a bit of a pain. Bits drop off and long relied upon faculties like hearing and sight start to deteriorate, but all the same it gives you time to think. And I think a lot about this current fashion for “being in nature”. It does seem to me that if 100,000 people passed Moses’s burning bush in tourist buses – in all probability not a single one of them would have seen what he saw that day. I’m more and more convinced that there’s some kind of hierarchy in the simple act of noticing something. As a first draft I’d venture – first passively looking; then noticing; then seeing (perhaps for the first time); then contemplating and finally beholding. The truly life-changing bit of being in nature doesn’t come without some real effort and concentration and to behold nature is to relinquish all control and become part of what some call The Tao. As any half decent artist will tell you, you don’t reach your best work by learning tricks, you reach it by stepping aside.
A hedgerow Elm in seed on the Lizard; a memory from living in Wiltshire more than 50 years ago jolted me into recognizing an old friend I thought had died.
You may call it a filed – I call it a pollen machine!
This is going to be a short one. With internet speeds in the dizzy 2Mb region, even with a good router and aerial; not to mention raging hayfever – see those trees above – it’s been a struggle to carry a chair down the garden. I’m wondering if searching for wildflowers in the open is the best occupation for me at the moment. Anyway, nothing daunted and looking like a man who’s just been told his dog has died – eyes and nose running with snot – we’ve ventured out each day in the warm sun and found a blessing in every verge. So far we’re up to 92 species with a couple more botanising days to go. This is paradise! Luckily the place we’re staying at on the Lizard is – as it were – at the hub of a series of wonderful spokes, each comprising a footpath, bridleway or hidden lane. We walk down one and come back up another. It’s more than enough for us since Madame is about to have knee replacement surgery next week in any case.
Botanising like this isn’t all about wandering through bosky dells in a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe. I photograph anything and then spend hours checking ID’s using AI apps, books and very very slow internet searches. If I’m on form I can securely name about ten species an hour. Then when we get home I’ll have to spend yet more time recording everything on the big spreadsheet/database – often even slower than stage two. Here’s my favourite find so far – a pencilled cranesbill- absolute stunner, growing with half a dozen other naturalized neophytes
As an occasional and not very good botanical artist I marvel at the subtlety and complexity of the flower and would struggle to paint it.
Two figures from the tympanum at the abbey in Conques, above the river Lot
Sorry – this one’s a bit heavy, but it’s been burning away at me for many years and it needed to be written.
This is probably a sideways compliment to the Buddhist saying that if you meet the Buddha on the road you should kill him, but sadly, the Christian churches capitulated long ago to the temptations of systematic theology and mansplaining exactly what God was supposed to do to maintain their (his?) contract of employment. As for me and my heretical disposition, I stay committed to the idea that the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao. I remember asking the librarian one day in the library at theological college where I’d find the works of Thomas Aquinas. She looked heavenwards towards the mezzanine and waved a languid arm around the lines of shelves. Being an evangelical college, the lines of books were untroubled by readers.
I’ve absolutely no desire to write at any length about the rather bracing day that left me standing under a bridge in Hay on Wye watching the flooding river and knowing that in a kind of reverse baptism it wasn’t my sins that had been washed away but my beliefs. All I felt was a kind of relief that at last things were clear; along with an aching sense of the loneliness of a life without the distractions and consolations of what we used to call “stamp and circumponce“. I could abandon the comfort of the old dictum ex opere operato that says as long as you get the ritual and the words right it doesn’t matter how mendacious, greedy, ambitious, stupid or corrupt you are; the sacrament is still valid. That was the bishops’ favourite defence in the promotional chess game.
When I was a curate I stood in occasionally as a chaplain at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. I was called on one day to perform an emergency baptism on a severely burned child who was not going to survive. When I got there I discovered that the child was so swathed in bandages there was nowhere it was safe to baptise conventionally, so I improvised with a couple of drops of water and a smear of oil on the bandages. The memory still haunts me. My boss; who was a stickler for the correct procedures – criticised me in front of the whole chapter at our next meeting and announced that the child had died unbaptised. Forty years later I cannot even begin to fathom the cruelty of valuing the blather of ritual over compassion for a child and his grieving parents. Things never really got better.
I treasure a talk I once attended, given by a very ordinary (that’s a compliment by the way) – man called Ian. He was neither wealthy nor clever and he’d saved up for ages to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Galilee. He told us how, on a blisteringly hot day he’d queued in the sun to visit the empty tomb in Jerusalem and when he eventually got to the front he noticed a sign that read (in several languages) “He is not here, He is risen”. In a completely artless way he described the sense of disappointment that swept over him as he realized that, in an experience he still hadn’t grasped huge depth of, he’d found exactly what he’d come for. Faith can only begin where belief lies dead on the floor
I’m sorry about the quality of that picture but in this instance it really was a snapshot from my phone – in spite of the fact that I was carrying a far more respectable Olympus. I was just feeling a bit lazy and pissed off because I had been struggling with the menus on the GPS unit and consequently feeling a bit technophobic. Yesterday was the day I was intending to give a first run to a new workflow plan, but even on the simplest and cheapest Etrex I could buy I was still getting banjaxed by the multiple choices I needed to go through to find a simple grid reference and speeding up my plant recording had failed its first test.
So to begin at the beginning, the weather forecast was perfect, it was the first day of astronomical spring – (less tidy but more meaningful than the meteorological version which favours tidiness over aeons of history) – and Madame suggested we should go for a walk on Mendip. The campervan trip we’d planned for a 2 day visit to Priddy was cancelled because the news from the garage was much worse than we feared and the engine is going to need a complete rebuild including valve replacements and resurfacing of the cylinder head. Everything you could fear from a cam belt failure was actually caused by getting the old one replaced before disaster could happen. Incompetence, neglectfulness or the failure of brand new components will probably all figure if there is ever a full accounting, and the only consolation is that the garage has accepted full responsibility and will carry out the repairs under warranty.
So we took the car up to Priddy and parked at the end of the old drove that leads down to Priddy Pool. I’ve spent weeks prepping and planning the new plant recording strategy and so I was eager to give it a dry run early in spring before the first flush of wildflowers really begins. This is probably going to be deadly dull to all but a handful of gimlet eyed enthusiasts so I’ll keep it short. The plan is to get a full record of each new find on the spot. Photo, followed by initial ID using Flora Incognita or one of the other AI apps (if I didn’t know it already), and then a full and reliable grid reference using the Etrex handheld and backup photos for later then, finally, all that gathered information typed into the phone above the EXIF data for the pictures. This should be a bombproof workflow that speeds up the whole process both in the field and back at home. After a frustrating rehearsal I’d say it will need a whole lot of practice before I’m fluent enough to speed up.
Anyway I landed up taking just one photograph using the new method and it’s a narrow Buckler-fern, Dryopteris carthusiana; very common around the Mendips (and everywhere else) and you could find it in Nine Barrows Lane Priddy at national grid ref ST 53469 51927 which is accurate to about three feet either way. This is not an earth shattering find of course but I double and triple checked all the components and the most gratifying thing is that the grid reference is really spot on. The deceptive offerings of the mobile phone look impressive but over the past seven months of data building I’ve discovered they’re anything but accurate. One record of a similar fern made about half a mile away had it growing in a car park in Wells!
Enough! My next quarry is a similar looking fern called a Borrer’s male fern which apart from its name would appear equally dull to the neurotypical. But coincidence had it that Madame was doing a bit of background Googling while I was chatting about a botanist called Borrer about whom I know absolutely nothing. This is how she defends herself against my more obsessive traits. Much to our joy we discovered that William Borrer FRS – ( Henfield, Sussex, 13 June 1781 – 10 January 1862) was not only one of the leading botanical lights of the eighteenth century but – wait for it – he lived in a house called Potwell . This, obviously, is a sign!
I wouldn’t bother going to Priddy just to look at a fern you could probably see a mile from almost anywhere in Britain, but Priddy is a very beautiful village with an extremely decent pub that does proper meals like liver and bacon – so not for the faint hearted. It’s also a very particular ecologically rich environment on carboniferous limestone and sits above some fantastic cave systems which – in my reckless years – I loved to explore. These days it’s a gentle stroll on the surface that floats our boat. There are abundant droves and footpaths across the whole area and if you’re lucky you can enjoy moments of absolutely peaceful silence. Yesterday there were a few wildflowers in bloom, but most strikingly the Lesser Celandines were huge; the flowers were easily twice the diameter of their townie cousins in Bath. The weather forecast held to its promise of wall-to-wall sunshine and we strolled so heedlessly that we got lost at one point so we had to retrace our steps, fetching up eventually just above the entrance to Swildons where we leaned against a drystone wall and ate our sandwiches – bread rolls filled with ham and mustard and topped up with crisps.
It’s less than twenty miles from Bath and yet, 1000 feet higher, it feels remote; detached from traffic jams and stress. When I was a community arts worker the youngsters would come up here to collect magic mushrooms. This wasn’t a problem usually unless they were drinking rough cider at the same time, when they often got a bit unpredictable. Only my memories and the almost continuous stream of aircraft passing above on their way to and from Bristol airport remind me that there’s no escape from our folly.
Up at Newton Park farm shop the other day I spotted this Massey Ferguson tractor – identical to the one I used to drive when I was a groundskeeper about 100 years ago. I think it was a model 35 but I didn’t check this one. They were absolute pigs to start and so if you were selling one it would more easily find a buyer on the Mendips where you could bump start them with the benefit of a steep hill to run down in the morning. I once – with the help of a genius mechanic called Geoff – dismantled our 35 down to the last nut and bolt and then rebuilt it as a kind of winter project.
The database that didn’t know when to stop. On the monitor Tinder fungus in Henrietta Park
Yesterday, as I was typing the latest batch of plants into the database, it suddenly dawned on me that the Potwell Inn isn’t the only journal I keep. This is a long and rather meandering story, but after we retired and after a particularly stressful family Christmas, we took ourselves down to Cornwall and were leaning over the sea wall in St Ives watching the waders and gulls when I realized that I didn’t have a clue what any of them were called. With the inscrutable emptiness of any retirement plans lapping around in my mind, Imade a ludicrous resolution that from then on I’d refuse to walk past anything I couldn’t name. Of course – like all resolutions – it was broken before we left the beach, but what followed was a trip to the local bookshop and our first bird book.
At that stage I’d been keeping a journal for some years but it was locked and private because much of it referred to my work and troubling family matters. Then technology intervened; my computer kit refused to communicate with the app I was using and in spite of a bit of helpline raging I was told that my kit was ancient rubbish and I should spend several thousand pounds on renewing it or piss off into outer darkness where there would be less gnashing of teeth. I’d reached the point in my church work where I could hardly cope with any more grief and felt my ability to empathise was slowly shrinking. With retirement imminent and following a great deal of group therapy and several years of one-to-one psychoanalytic psychotherapy I made the crucial decision to go public and start a blog in which I could pay more attention to celebrating life and being human. The Potwell Inn, the blog you’re reading now is approaching its tenth birthday. WordPress was more tolerant of heritage kit and in fact in the ensuing years I’ve moved across three platforms and four computers without a hitch. The pleasing irony is that WordPress eventually bought out the self-righteous and surly Day One and honour was satisfied.
The Potwell Inn was always intended to be a safe place for me to work in. After decades (my whole working life|) of negotiating dangerous places like public schools, prisons, youth centres and psychiatric hospitals to the Church of England (which was by far the most dangerous) I was pretty much burnt out and I needed to find somewhere to be truly myself without having to pretend I was the fearless and fun-loving extrovert I was generally taken to be. Here in the Potwell Inn, with a few notable exceptions, I have no idea who’s reading about me and for the most part I don’t need to mask or self-censor. I still need to guard against oversharing, and this is probably an appropriate moment to remind readers that the Potwell Inn is a virtual pub whose concept is borrowed from HG Wells’ comic novel “A history of Mr Polly” which was a set text from school but which provided me with an imaginary safe place as I day dreamed and gazed through the classroom window on airless summer days. Very few people I’ve known have really got past my armour so my cherished hope is that the customers – i.e. the readers of the Potwell Inn – find something in common here.
As a child my escape strategy was books. I became a completely promiscuous reader of biographies, the complete works of Dickens, Wells, later Henry Williamson, and up into much later writers. I consumed poetry, particularly the Black Mountain poets. My first involuntary tic involved moving the book past my eyes as opposed to moving my eyes across the page. I would begin a new line with the book held level with my ear. Mr Jablonski the ophthalmologist apparently thought it was just an odd habit and I’d soon get over it. Well I did and I didn’t, in that the tic just moved elsewhere; I lost the disturbing reading habit and started twisting my mouth and neck painfully. Much later I discovered that with an effort of will I could sometimes move it to less visible places, at about the same age- maybe ten or eleven, that I started to feel unable to breathe when things were sprung unexpectedly on me. My diaphragm would tighten like a drum and I could only partially fill my lungs. My Dad had a laudable thing about never making promises he couldn’t be sure of keeping but he sometimes applied it in upsetting ways, for instance by never telling my sister and I when we were going on holiday. We would go downstairs and see the suitcases standing near the door and I would be thrown into a panic – having no idea what was coming next.
The second thread of this post is a lifelong love of lists. The first book I remember was a picture dictionary, rapidly followed by i Spy books, Observer guides and a never ending sequence of obsessions that my Mother would disparage as “fads”. I became an expert on the rigging of sailing ships which led to a lifelong interest in knots – the cue for binge reading Patrick O’Brian. I could list the later (almost always non fiction) books that captured me – “The Foundations of Wireless” by M G Scroggie, way beyond my comfort zone; “Writing Illuminating and Lettering” by Edward Johnston – whose house in Putney we stumbled upon last year; and then after studying “A Potter’s Book” by Bernard Leach, I got into Parmelee on ceramic glazes and now over sixty years later I’m sitting next to the fourth edition of Clive Stace’s “New Flora of the British Isles”. Every one of these books involved the writing and testing of lists – endless lists which, all bar the last ten years or so, are lost forever. I even crack jokes about “feeling a list coming on”, which I think only Madame understands.
My first wildlife lists were handwritten in scruffy notebooks and also in about 17,000 photographs; many duplicated, two thirds of which didn’t even have basic EXIF data. The jumbled and unexamined sediment of a white knuckle life lived in fear of being “found out” – although I never knew what for. I’ve mentioned my melancholic temperament several times in this blog, but it occasionally tips over into what one doctor called “phobic anxiety” and even depression. In my twenties I knew I was ill when I started to see the winter trees as the bronchioles and alveoli of dead people. My mood was only lifted by absorbing, sinking myself in technical detail – the more complex the better and so I emerged from my ceramics degree with more knowledge of glazes and firing than was thought proper by the faculty members who believed that creativity did better when it was uncluttered by any technique at all. I recall a testy exchange with the Head of Department when he saw a drawing of an apple tree which I’d made which attempted to express its characteristic form. All living things have distinctive forms just as they have their individual variations. Close, even meditative attention is the prerequisite of all of art and science. He denied furiously that there was anything distinctive about tree forms and I may have given a sharp reply. That capacity to start fights also followed me through life. I never could defer to flawed or undeserved authority; neither could I tolerate pomposity, and in the end I got fairly used to being called ! “the rudest person I’ve ever met!” to which I would sometimes reply “Well you’ve been lucky then!” One of the best teachers who really stretched me – Sid Harris who taught Sociology – would challenge my flights of fancy by saying firmly “that’s all very well David – but where’s the evidence???” Evidence, honesty, clarity and truthfulness are foundational to civil society. Neglect them and you land up with fraudsters, liars, rapists insurrectionists and racists running the country. My principal defence at school became what must have seemed a frighteningly quick gift of sarcasm. By the end of first year sixth form I’d come within a whisker of getting myself into real trouble and left school with my collar being felt by the Head Teacher whose neurotypicality would have won awards, and my first job was as a junior photographic technician at the university where they handed me a Leica and a box of film; showed me where the darkroom was and said “go and learn to use them”. It didn’t last long but I managed to get a City and Guilds qualification. After that I tasted the joys of unskilled engineering work and welding before Madame and I met when she was 15 and I was 18 and she persuaded me to go back to college. I was astonished when they offered me a place.
I could go on but there’s no point except to say that at some point last year I decided to sort out my photos. I was interested to see whether I could recognize as many as 100 wild plants. I started off with a very elementary database but the more data I typed in, the more possibilities for extending my understanding popped into my mind and the more complex it became until it became a thing of beauty; a second Potwell Inn journal expressed in a different language. The photos, mostly taken on a phone over the past eleven years had enough attached EXIF data to reconstruct the past in diary form. I could find a photo and its date and location and it would evoke the whole complexity of the moment of discovery. Other details were embedded in my memory; of smells, of landscapes, of my companions (usually Madame). The database soon had over 350 entries, some of the plants I’d entirely forgotten ever encountering. The referencing and identification is quite intense work but after a few hours spending time – even with people I know and trust on, for instance, a field trip – I need a few hours of solitude to recover. I slip into my study, turn the computer on and open the Floras I’m using and an intense feeling of safety and relaxation floods through me. Memories of holidays, walks and random strolls along the river and canal banks can repair all those stressed out neurons.
There’s a deep historical, maybe spiritual significance in the naming of things. In the Old Testament as the creation is described (this isn’t a religious riff by the way, I’m just pointing out how fundamental the naming of things is). So in Genesis 1 – the first of 2 creation stories – and not many people notice that there are two – God creates and divides the higher orders – birds, sea monsters, every living creature that moves and then generalizes every green plant for food (does that make God 1 a vegetarian? a poisoner?) – and feels rather pleased. Then in chapter 2, a second and different account, God 2 makes everything in its higher order and then after a bit of dangerous cultural faladiddle in creating Eve, invites Adam to inspect and name all the living things – thereby making him the first taxonomist. Orders, families, genera, species and eventually sub-species. Put briefly, we’ve been naming and ordering things from the very beginnings of written culture.
A single flower is a single dollop of data – enjoy it while it lasts in a jam jar. A photograph with an added date and location makes it ten times as useful to our understanding. My 17,000 uncatalogued photos (not all of them flowers of course) is a personal scrap heap, of no use or interest to anyone except me and the ever patient Madame. But when I extract just half of a percent of them and tabulate them in a searchable database with “who, what, where and when” – all verified then they become seriously interesting and useful. But not only useful. I would insist that these living libraries of accumulated knowledge are beautiful.
At the New Year Madame and I went on our usual walk and found 22 plants in flower. Our Bath Natural History Society group went out a day later and recorded 66. A couple of days later again the lists were published nationally and I discovered that a plant which I’d recorded as Canadian Fleabane, which grew profusely outside our flat two years ago; was this year recorded as two different species – the Bilbao Fleabane and Guernsey Fleabane. I just had to go and check my apparent mistake and so I went out on Sunday in a freezing drizzle and gathered some samples of what looked like very dead material brought them home to take measurements and macro photographs and after a lot of head scratching and turning of pages came to the conclusion that they were right and I was wrong. Good news and bad news because I got an extra record. The trainspotter trap is never far from the surface.
There was more good news when we spotted (left – Right) the first Celandine of the year, Butcher’s Broom in flower and Cow Parsley in flower too as well as some Snowdrops. Spring is just around the corner.
But perhaps the tree walk we went to on Saturday yielded the nicest surprise, because we were shown something which was visually completely uninteresting and yet reminded me of a time when this part of the world was full of enormous Elm trees. On the left is an Elm sapling. It won’t get much bigger because it will soon be struck down by Dutch Elm disease, but I understand that resistant varieties are being sought out and grown on. I’d really love to see just one fully grown and magnificent Elm back in Wiltshire where we were students and fell in love with the landscape.
Dropping the mask has been quite a challenge – just as coming to terms with my own occasional oddness has been equally challenging. Possibly, my friends might say, the effort has been entirely theirs but diversity is the very essence of nature. Every living being, every plant, animal, insect or fungus is largely the same as every other of its kind – and yet different somewhere deep in its recesses. I wouldn’t swap with anyone else for the world. As a lesson from nature it’s irreplaceable and, for me, so are the lists which offer the safety in numbers that I mentioned in the title. Almost every wildlife programme we watch wants to suggest that nature is healing – that going for a walk in nature somehow fills us with an invisible miasma that makes us whole again. Well that may be partly true but I’d love to see it tested in some scientific way because my own thought is that it’s not just walking through it that does the trick but engaging deeply with it. It’s the engagement that makes us well – and the deeper the better!
A stacked focus macro photograph of the prickles on the cactus that lives on my desk
This is turning into something of a series. On January 5th I wrote about the plants being markers of the passing seasons after walking down a lane towards the beach here in Cornwall; none of them rare in any sense but all capable of lifting your heart as an avatar of spring. On 6th January I wrote about plants and their properties as irreplaceable sources of as-yet undiscovered drugs; but I warned that they’re also the canaries in the environmental coalmine warning us clearly about the danger of our extractive and instrumental abuse of nature. Then on the 7th January I turned towards the difficulties but also rewards of a meditative relationship with plants and nature as a whole. Notwithstanding the difficulties of talking about “soul” and “spirituality” I asked whether a loosely Taoist spirituality can build a deeper relationship with the earth and creation without resorting to religious fanaticism. Is there a way into a green spirituality that honours Wittgenstein’s wise aphorism – * “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” ? or perhaps more simply, can we ever attempt to explain mysteries without distorting and diminishing them?
So today, in the fourth of these I want to address another gift that plants bring to us – their sheer beauty. Anyone who’s ever loved a William Morris wallpaper or fabric design will understand his debt to natural forms. Any ceramic artist must surely be especially inspired by the natural forms, textures and colours of fungi. Any painter could learn how to replicate the colours, and any sculptor the forms of these exquisite parts of creation that were growing here long before the first hominids evolved and will still be here and still evolving long after we’ve gone the way of the dinosaurs. I don’t write this as a knockdown stand-alone argument for preserving nature, but I believe that the aesthetic can’t be left out of the argument because it’s the aesthetic dimension that helps us to value those parts of life that can’t be reduced to money. If you ask the question “what is a Cowslip worth?” could anyone respond fully without mentioning its beauty, its history, its place in the scheme of things? The value of a wildflower meadow could never be expressed without including its aesthetic dimension except – I write this with a heavy heart – a property developer who might pay lip service to its “recreational value” by offering to build a playing field somewhere else – a promise that will be waived away by the local planning authority if the developer pleads that they can’t make a profit unless they build on the football field too!
And if I might sound off a little bit longer, if we all watched nature programmes on TV from dawn ’till dusk, seven days a week, we’d be in danger of being as ignorant of nature as we were when we were born. Television is inherently passive entertainment more or less presented as education. The real stuff is out there in the cold and rain or, with a bit of luck, on those warm summer evenings when once, in France, I grumbled because a churring Nightjar was keeping me awake in my tent. Real nature is sensual, tactile and mucky, and it demands patience and fierce concentration as well as some ultra rewarding book-work.
When I was learning to do botanical illustration (I never got very far but it taught me the value of close attention), I took dozens of close-up photographs of a Hyacinth so I could paint it using just three colours. This is a great exercise for anyone to try. I’ll never be a William Morris, but I’ll never again dismiss a Hyacinth from a supermarket as “just a Pot Plant”. As I went through my albums looking to pick some appropriate photographs for this post, it occurred to me that one other gift from the natural world to us is to inflame our curiosity. But that would demand a separate post.
*Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Potwell Inn New Year quiz – answers below
First image – which kind of Wild Carrot is this?
Second image – what’s so fishy about this?
Third (Bindweed) what’s the significance of the little pointed bit between the two reddish leafy things?
Upper fourth – Which children’s’ book character shares a name with this plant?
Lower fifth – which word does this plant share with the one above?
Left upper sixth – What part of the body shares a name with this fern?
Left lower seventh – what’s wrong with this Strawberry?
Right eighth – where would you look for this plant?
Left ninth – What punctuation mark shares the name of this butterfly?
For the photo at bottom right, check out the tree label!
Answers – 1. Sea Carrot, 2. Oyster fungus, 3. !t’s the difference between Large Bindweed, where you can see it, and Hedge bindweed where you can’t. Gardeners hate both! 4. Marsh Woundwort. 5. Marsh thistle. 6. Hart’s tongue. 7. It’s yellow, still a strawberry but it’s inedible, 8 Sea radish. 9.Comma. 10. See nameplate.
I wrote, only a couple of days ago, about having to change all my saved database dates to the American standard – month/day/year – and here’s why. If you look at the picture, I set my new Olympus TG-7 to time and date stamp my photos so it would be easier to reference them. It’s no big deal really unless it happens to be the 11th September when the associations with 9/11 spread like a dark stain on the calendar. Converting the dates keeps taking me back to the twin towers.
But there’s another anomaly about date-stamping. It speaks of the seventh of January as if time were frozen at that moment – and in one limited sense it was. At exactly 12.51 GMT I was sitting on a very wet seat on the sea wall, looking at the waves rolling in, when I turned around and there, was a whole botanical life story. The roots, the leaves and the senescent remains of last season’s flowers couldn’t be sliced up like a supermarket cucumber; they were – they are indivisible. A little to the left I found another plant which was (improbably) flowering, out of season. Entirely out of time and out of season these plants would – if he’d had any sense at all, have thrown Thomas Gradgrind (See Dickens’ “Hard Times”) into a rage of doubt.
Later in our winter walk we found Gorse obeying the rules and Knapweed breaking them shamelessly. Plants, as I never tire of saying, don’t read textbooks and consequently don’t obey our imposed human attempts to regulate nature.
There’s a line in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus where Dr Dysart, a psychotherapist who is attempting to understand/treat an adolescent man who has blinded six horses says “Without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that. And when have I ever galloped?” Dysart, reflecting on his own timid suburban life is grappling with his envy. but also the cost to his 17 year old patient, Alan, of returning him to something that’s called normal but lacks all fervour and intensity.
That line, lament – if you like – “Without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that. And when have I ever galloped?” has lurked in the back of my mind for many years. Occasionally I mark these posts with the tag “Green spirituality”, and a couple of days ago I used the word “soul” which I never feel comfortable doing because I couldn’t say exactly what they mean. Alan, the adolescent in the play, has built up a whole theology around his passion for horses, and there’s the problem. Religion attracts dangerous pathologies like moths to a flame. Why would I want to risk adding to that number?
So I seem to occupy the somewhat purgatorial space between the instinct to worship and the urge to run a mile from anyone who claims to have the secret; but the plants can still (quite literally) bring me to my knees. I could have chosen any number of plants to illustrate this. Yesterday we found loads of extremely infant Wild Carrots and – because sometimes the youthful forms of plants can be very different from their grown up parents, they’re hard to identify. But their presence in all their life-stages, mirrors our own so marvelously that I can look at the senescent remains of the old rock samphire amid the fresh green leaves of the younger and feel a powerful sense of belonging. The gulf between me and what the Taoists call “the ten thousand things” is bridged by that sense of solidarity. The same wisdom teaches that “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao” Any kind of theology to try to explain that unity is destined to fail. Like all theologies it is no more than suffocating waffle, and I’ve heard a bit of that, believe me!
In a previous post I wrote about dialects and suggested that the plants which grow in particular environmental niches are a kind of dialect which we – as observers and often users of landscapes can learn and understand. So today I want to take a small step further and suggest that the philosophical distance between ourselves and the plants, indeed all of the ten thousand things which has created an epidemic of blindness, must be overturned if we are ever to become fully human. Nature speaks, mostly inscrutably. You might think of the spring flush as a song of outpouring joy but I should say that the predominant tone of most natural history programming falls into the pathetic fallacy trap. We don’t feel like plants and animals and neither do/could they feel like us. We meet as strangers and we can either lock them into our own conceptual prisons, or make the effort to learn their language. The earth speaks in her own way and we respond in ours – for good or ill. That’s a conversation
What I am sure about is that the shock of recognition that comes with stumbling upon a new plant is as close to worship as I need to experience. Botany is not at all like trainspotting!
While we didn’t exactly come down to Cornwall to search for spring – after all it’s barely January – what you certainly notice is that everything’s at least a couple of weeks ahead of Bath. I listed a few early starters yesterday; none of them in flower but all putting in an appearance. So, in the depths of this grey and dreary weather I thought it would be nice to show a couple of plants from today that cheered me up no end. On the left Allium triquetrum, three cornered garlic, and on the right Poa annua annual meadow grass; both cheap as chips, common as muck and mutton dressed as lamb if you like, but lovely. I must have a slut’s eye for the local weeds.
Sea Spleenwort in Bath city centre!
My mind was actually set on higher things because I set out with a grid reference that I hoped would lead me to some Sea Spleenwort. We’ve walked miles along this bit of coastline looking for it but if it’s there it’s no more than a millimetre tall (which I know isn’t true because I’ve seen it growing in Bath). I know it was here years ago because it was recorded by an impeccably qualified botanist, so I guess it may just have died out – like so many species in these times of climate and wildlife destruction.
It’s been freezing cold and wet here since we arrived and I was thinking that if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) should change direction (which is a real possibility with global climate change) we shall have to stop pretending we live in a warm and temperate climate and put up with living at the same latitude as St Petersburg. At the moment we’re in denial about the effects of climate change. We dream of uninvented, uninventable technologies coming over the hill to save us, like the Seventh Cavalry in an old cowboy movie but the bad news is that they’re not there.
Maybe we focus too much on the loss to science with species destruction. OK there are a million reasons why we might need to learn from life-forms we haven’t yet even discovered; powerful drugs to be discovered and so forth, but the sheer loss of beauty that comes with species destruction is a loss to our souls (and don’t ask what I mean by “soul” because even though I couldn’t say what it is, it’s still an important intangible something which raises our humanity above the instrumental.
The weather here, even in the far South West, has been pretty awful, although not as bad as it’s been further north, but those flowers (even grasses have flowers) are a kind of token that we know will be redeemed as February turns to March and our hearts begin to thaw.
It was, after all, slightly counterintuitive – to escape a yellow weather warning yesterday by driving towards the problem – but we figured that if we drove down to Cornwall early enough we’d arrive before the approaching warm front hit the coast and turned the cold air that’s been squatting like a toad over us for days, into snow and hail; giving us time to unload the car before the heavy stuff began. I was so excited about my plan that I woke up at 4.00am and couldn’t get back to sleep; so I got up at 4.30am and made tea. There was nothing we could do about the 7.00am grocery delivery except pack everything up and get the car ready to leave. It was -3C when we left and the temperature rose slowly as we headed towards Cornwall in the gathering dawn light.
And it should have worked if it weren’t for the caretaker at the cottage we were going to. The rules – she pointed out – were not to arrive before 4.00pm and we were far too early having almost beaten the storm’s landfall. It rained fairly hard for the last couple of miles and we had hoped for a less belligerent welcome. The temperature had collapsed again and Madame suggested (in the absence of anything resembling a warm fire) that we go for a walk.
Now we both love the Roseland peninsula – we’ve been coming here for decades – but yesterday didn’t feel like one of those old Great Western Railway posters; the blue skies, the seagulls and sandcastles on the beach. The sky was slate grey and mantled a freezing gale which carried sharpened slivers of ice that sliced away at our faces. Unbelievably there was a party of litter pickers working across the beach – I wondered if they were the Portscatho Bloods doing a bit of community payback. “What fun” said Madame as the rain ran down her trousers and into her boots – but I didn’t think she was being completely honest when I looked at the photo. The sea was – as they say around here just before the boat capsizes – “a bit lumpy!” and with a couple of hours to while away, I wandered off plant hunting and found the only thing on the beach with a smile on its face. In fact I couldn’t quite believe how healthy the Buckshorn Plantain looked, clinging to its crack in the shallow cliff. I had been hoping to find a Sea Spleenwort – I know they used to be here but after several years of hunting I’ve never found one, and nor has anyone else for the last 23 years according to the wonderful BSBI database, so I’m not going to beat myself up too much. By the time we got back I was so cold I couldn’t open the cottage door; we were both soaked to the skin and – if I’m completely honest – I was a tiny bit grumpy; warming my corpse fingers in a pair of heated gloves. When we finally got the kit inside we turned on so many heaters they probably had to start up a power station somewhere and ate ultra processed pizza (breaking several rules at once!). We don’t travel light when the Potwell Inn goes off on an expedition. Cameras, binoculars, books and computers; power units and leads and spare batteries, walking sticks and just the one tripod this time; oh and drawing equipment in case we run out of things to do.
We were in bed by 9.00pm and then this morning, Madame was reading aloud extracted best moments from the internet when she came across some excellent naughty bits which included a video interview with David Hockney where he was talking enthusiastically about spring – his favourite season. “It’s like an erection” he said. “Everything is upright, and primed to go – but it doesn’t last very long”. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Outside in the lane we could see the beginnings of the spring erections. Alexanders, Cow parsley and even Hogweed were already shouldering one another aside in the great competition for growing space. Pennywort has sprinted away from the blocks, and the Sea-radishes have reached their moment of ravishing beauty before it all goes wrong and they leave their rosettes aside to go for broke in the dune margins. There were even a couple of impoverished looking Red Campions in flower, like ragged beggars waiting for a hot meal.
So today it’s still raining and we’re resting. Madame is reading and as soon as this is finished I’ll go back to the soul-destroying boredom of converting my database dates from English to American format so that the software can list accurately by date. I’m sure there’s a way of automating the process but it would probably take longer to learn how to do it than to amend each (of 350) dates manually. I’ve almost finished sorting the wheat from the chaff in Google Photos so that just leaves all the photos I took in 2022, 23 and 24 to be identified and catalogued. This path is not lined with primroses!
Looking across Gerrans Bay in May 2023 on a sunnier day. This time we’re on the far side of the bay on the right hand edge of the photo. Invisible, sadly, because of the sea mist!
