Category: Food

Castle Class 4-6-0 No 4079 – if you can name it you probably need professional help.

In the plant world there are the exact equivalents of famous railway engines worth hanging around at the end of a windy and wet platform for hours, and then, of course, there are the weeds. Steam engines still give me the shivers even seven decades after my first illicit cigarettes on the Pines junction waiting for the Cornish Riviera express to fly past. There’s a Castle Class plant in this gallery of rogues; in fact it may even be a Pacific Class but of course, because it was expressing no clouds of steam or haunting whistle I must have walked past it and failed to notice it for nearly fifty years before I finally put the time in and found it, sharing the moment with Madame – windswept and even eager to find it so we could go down to the cafe and get warm. It’s a very rare Quillwort so if you’re a fellow trainspotter you’ll know exactly where we were.

Sometimes these excitements just happen. I’ve had to stop any work that involves bending over (so no weeding or watering) while my cataract procedure heals, and so I was watching Madame weed a raised bed of carrots as she pointed to a tall but familiar looking plant poking through the crop. We both knew it was a nightshade of some sort, but there was something odd about the flower. Putting all doubts aside, I chucked it in the bucket with all the other weeds (mostly Fat Hen) and consequently there is no photo for the record and I have to consign myself to never being able to prove its identity. * but see postscript below

Later I realized that what was odd about it was that the flower wasn’t purple and yellow like its cousin Woody or its great aunt Thorn Apple, always blowing her own trumpet or Henbane with her lace collar and Deadly whose name exaggerates her gifts a bit with dull brown flowers but still as murderous a family as you could ever hope to avoid. This shy little assassin was a Black Nightshade with white flowers who hides her poison in shiny green berries which, joking aside, are a bit safer to eat when they’ve actually turned black, and I’m furious that I failed to take a photograph because it would have been (still is I suppose) a first for me.

Before I wrote this I thought I might try to work in the metaphor of trophies and tramps but it seemed a bit of a forced image and I’ve already been rude enough about the militant trainspotting tendency. (It takes one to know one)! But the whole idea for this little piece sprang precisely from my wilful failure to notice something growing on the allotment that we couldn’t eat; threw away without a thought and yet – given a bit of a reverse ferret – turned out to be really very interesting. How many other plants live and die under the radar because they have no immediate value to us. Just for starters, many of these little treasures have had a long and valuable life as herbal remedies – phytomedicines – if you must – before they were overtaken by big pharma who may have done us all a disservice by eliminating every molecule that wasn’t on their power list. And never think that herbal remedies should be eliminated because they can be poisonous. Just think of Paracetamol; and while we’re on the subject, don’t assume that herbal remedies strip the planet of protected species because I ran a check comparing the British list of rare and protected plants with the plants listed in the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia and there was just one single species listed as appearing in both lists. We are talking for the most part about what we now call weeds. It correlates well with being old (like me) which some younger people seem to believe is contagious; crossing the road to avoid the possibility of an outbreak of wrinkles and boring stories.

There’s a whole layer of cultural history down there at our feet, and ripping it all up or poisoning it because there’s no profit in it is ecological vandalism. As we consider this growing season just ending, and the five heatwaves that turned our legumes into lectin factories making them inedible and dangerous to eat raw, it’s a moment to consider our relationship with the earth. Is it purely instrumental? or is it something more. A history; a culture recorded in remedies and songs, times of plenty and times of starvation? are we too clever by half assuming that the shelves in Sainsbury’s will always be full? What does it say about us that we’re so content to destroy the lives of plants whose names we don’t even know and whose gifts we will never be able to benefit from; new cancer treatments, undiscovered strengths and properties that might give us some understanding of plant stress and how we can overcome it?

We live as if our allotment has just two layers – food at the top and dirt at the bottom. But what about that third layer that we simply ignore. Even the earth layer has its own lively presence, teeming with microscopic life and miles and miles of fungal threads, and the surface between earth and profit deserves better than being treated as if it were a plague of squatters. Nature hates bare earth and will always fill the bare patches with plants from across the world that have names and histories and gifts to give. Even dogs know that Couch Grass has valuable uses, and Ground Elder isn’t just a pest if you’ve got gout. We have to think that in tolerating weeds we may be entertaining angels unawares.

  • Postscript

So today we went up to the allotment to do a bit of harvesting and I made sure I took my phone so I could at least photograph the wilted remains of the Black Nightshade and now it will eventually reach the official database.

Dissecting a canary

Yes I know it’s not a canary exactly, but on the allotment it seems to be bringing a canary style announcement to the coal mine. The tomatoes on our allotment, although they looked OK (with a great deal of watering), and tasted fine even though it has been a much reduced crop, have no seeds; no descendants; no progeny. The canary is lying dead on the bottom of the cage and suggests that although they remained just about alive during the five consecutive heatwaves, they were suffering greatly and couldn’t stand the temperatures. They weren’t the only casualties this season. The legumes either failed altogether or failed to pollinate well. There’s a reason for all this; apparently pollen gets sticky in the heat and doesn’t transfer so easily from plant to plant leaving them seedless.

For a while I thought we’d got the first mutation to seedlessness that ever happened on a tomato but I soon realized that Darwin would have sucked his teeth and shaken his head. If the seed merchants have the same trouble as us, there will be almost no viable tomato seeds next year and the price would go through the roof. I’ve seen internet reports of sunflowers with no seeds, and our own sweetcorn only managed a couple of viable cobs on each plant, and the potatoes were very small and sparse. The newspapers are being told by farmers that this year is the worst cereal season for at least ten years. You can ask what the outcome of all this will be, but you can only answer it by accepting that “the local supermarket” is not the correct answer. We, collectively, created this problem and as sure as eggs is eggs we’re going to have to do something about the way we live if we’re not all going to suffer serious privation when the prices rise and the shelves are empty. The canary is lying dead on the floor and I did the autopsy.

Charlie our neighbour gave us a couple of Sungold F1 cherry tomato plants in late spring and we planted them outside in a raised bed. They got the same watering regime as the ones in the polytunnel but they’ve had no cracking or greenback and the fruit is delicious. The problem is obviously high temperatures but anyone with a very small greenhouse or a polytunnel will know that they’re fiendishly hard to ventilate at night, while at the same time protecting them from the “shoppers” who climb over the gate in the late evening and reap where they haven’t sown.

But one plant which appears to thrive under the heat has had a great year both here in Bath and on the Bannau Brycheiniog, where we were last week. It’s called Fat Hen – Chenopodium album and it’s been a virulent weed in both places. Our friends keep sheep, pigs and hens – all of them free range within their field boundaries. They’ve got internet up there on their hillside and so we were able to discover that Fat Hen is capable of causing harm to animals and humans in spite of being consumed by us and our livestock across Europe and since neolithic times. Tollund Man’s last meal, we’re told, included Fat Hen but that wasn’t what killed him. Back home I turned to the books and worked out that the point at issue is how large a percentage of the diet comprises Fat Hen and how much you (or they) eat at one time. The take-home point is that in a field situation it’s better to cut a small amount and add it to the feed, rather than leaving it growing where the livestock can overdo it. Used in that way it’s apparently high quality food, and the oxalates and nitrates which cause problems are kept at a safe level.

But all this talk of poisonous weeds must have lodged in my mind and a strange dream carried me right back to the tomato family, the Solanaceae which gives us potatoes and tomatoes but also the Nightshades, Henbanes and Thorn apples all three dangerous if not fatal when eaten; and thorn apple, also known in the US as Jimson weed apparently had a loyal following among soldiers during the Civil War. I mentioned only a few days ago a T shirt I saw with the slogan “all plants are edible – some of them only once”. This was a property that was understood and often used by poisoners in the past.

Anyway, in my dream I was leaning against the wall of a pizza hut deep in conversation with one of our son’s ex’s trying to explain that something she was going to cook was extremely poisonous when another young woman turned up looking faintly odd; intoxicated and away somewhere else. She explained to me (with a voice from somewhere else too) that she had been preparing Thornapple for a meal. I begged her not to eat it and she replied that it was fine, because if you sang this song while you cooked it, the poison would be neutralized. Then she uttered this haunting ululating sound – the song – and then nodded as if to say “that showed you!”and wandered off.

Thorn Apple is an intoxicating hallucinogen with severe chance of causing death and whose hallucinations are widely spoken of by people who’ve tried it as horrible so it’s not likely to catch on. But it demonstrates that plants have the ability to synthesize good things and bad. Without them the earth would cease to have life in any form, but they also demand respect. For many years tomatoes were assumed to be poisonous precisely because of their relationship with Deadly Nightshade, Enchanter’s Nightshade and all the others and you have to wonder what brave soul took the risk of eating one and began the huge cultural change that brought the plant to its position as number one home-grown fruit in the UK.

Madame and me were walking one afternoon in Leigh Woods on the Somerset side of Brunel’s Clifton Suspension bridge, and a elderly man who looked like a rough sleeper came up to us in a state of breathless excitement and dragged us deep into the woods saying that he’d been living there for (if I remember right) ten years and he’d never seen a Purging Buckthorn before. I was right at the beginning of my interest in plants and after he showed us the bush, we shook hands and thanked him and went on our way. Purging Buckthorn – Rhamnus cathartica – is another of those plants it’s wise to get to grips with if you’re foraging in the woods. The clue is in both “purging” and “cathartica” if you think about it. A bilingual warning that all plants are edible, some only once.

But to finish on an entirely delicious and safe account of the tomato I’ve put a photo of the Italian dish Panzanella which I made to Anna Del Conte’s recipe but it’s capable of any amount of variation. It was while making this dish that I discovered that the tomatoes I’d harvested that day, had no seeds. Inside every silver lining, these days, there’s a cloud waiting to get out!

A quantum of hope

A little rain – and I mean little – more of a mist – fell earlier in the week and last night a little more. Madame woke up and we peered through the bedroom window and saw the first puddle in many weeks forming in the yard below . We’ve become weary of heatwaves with the need for early morning starts to water the plants on the allotment before the disabling heat blankets Bath. We say to one another how good it is to be up early but the enthusiasm has morphed from bright eyes to gritted teeth. Peasant life, we’ve always known, is no picnic. It’s small wonder that our ancestors spent so much effort on placating the weather gods and searching for the inadvertent sins that might have pissed them off. Blaming the victims has always been the first and best tactic, and getting us to blame our neighbours or ourselves is even cheaper and preserves the peace for the winners to pursue their wealth unhindered. Such gloomy thoughts with the cherry on the cake being the campervan failing its MOT spread through my mind and silence my imagination with introspective fog. I’m reminded of the 1950’s “ballad of the sad young men” – brilliantly covered by Mose Allison and The Who – and many others.

And so, in the midst of what must have looked like a shuffle up the road to the supermarket I met Wes, our neighbour, clutching a tall plant of Guernsey Fleabane which is having a bit of a moment this season. He was taking it to the waste bin having turned against it. During our conversation on the pavement outside his flat I looked down at the gutter and saw this little cluster of flowers which seemed to be raising the finger to the parched grass across the road. It was a single verbena flower(Verbena bonariensis), that initially caught my eye, and then when I bent down to look more closely there were others. Apart from the ubiquitous Wall Barley, there was Catmint, Lemon Balm, Dandelion, Procumbent Yellow Sorrel and Redshank not to mention Mexican Fleabane. That’s a garden of eight flowering plants in a strip of parched gutter seemingly surviving the heatwaves in the most arid place you could imagine. It’s hard to speculate on what might be keeping them going – maybe the cars parked there every day sheltering them from their south facing perspective. Let’s not get sniffy about the fact that several of them are garden escapes; the point is that these plants are truly drought resistant. Somewhere deep in their DNA there are genes that assist their survival as the global climate crisis becomes a chronic affliction. My heart was lifted and all day yesterday as I sat in a garage waiting for the van alongside the noisiest and dirtiest dual carriageway Avonmouth could offer, I kept remembering that little quantum of hope making its own way in a changing earth – that’s until one of our gentrified neighbours phones a councillor and threatens not to vote for them if they don’t get rid of the disgusting weeds. We have seen the enemy, it is us! Another thought came to me as I wandered back to the Potwell Inn in the direction of the river. There are large trees growing around and on the Green, and as I walked beneath them in their shade, the difference in comfort and temperature was striking. There’s a bench under one of them and it’s been in almost continual occupation since the heatwaves began. We need to be thinking about shade, and on the allotment this is perhaps the time to plant some fast growing shade producing trees to help us to keep our plants alive under the new weather regime. It’s against the rules to grow taller trees, and they are always blamed for depleting the soil moisture and yet there is some evidence of moisture exchange by trees into the upper 30cm of soil, and abundant evidence that shade reduces surface evaporation. So the case against trees on allotments and in gardens is not closed and we allotmenteers should, perhaps, be able to experiment with tree shade to see if it helps to reduce the prodigious amount of water we use to keep our plants alive.

Living through an age when we simply cannot rely on ‘the way we do things round here‘ to keep us alive. Agribusiness and big farming would have us rely on univented, energy hungry technologies to save the earth, and yet we know in our hearts that it’s their activities which have contributed greatly to the present crisis. British farmers are, by and large, a fairly conservative group of people and yet even they seem to be open to new ideas like regenerative farming as long as it helps them to run their businesses and feed the rest of us. Any allotmenteer will tell you that you can’t live on large courgettes and abundant aubergines the year round even if we do make a real contribution to feeding ourselves. However allotmenteers are a highly motivated bunch of potential citizen scientists who, with a bit of organization, leadership and help from scientists could conduct field trials on a scale undreamed of by the industry. Field trials of new varieties, new ways of increasing soil fertility and moisture retention, new methods of increasing water storage; the sky’s the limit, but only if someone trusts us enough to gather the data and process it so we can begin to understand what works on a small scale. Just one example that I can offer relates to composting. Over the years we’ve tried just about every way of composting our waste efficiently. Of all the methods we’ve found that the California Cylinder – which requires only a roll of stock fencing and a lot of large cardboard (eg bicycle boxes) is one of the best – especially if you grow enough comfrey activator – which is easier to do on a site basis. Does anyone know whether any dangerous and persistent chemicals are carried forward in grey water or human urine which, after all, mostly seems to find its way back into the rivers in about a day. We’ve used both but stopped because of our doubts. There are so many trials that we could participate in if only DEFRA would stop seeing allotmenteers as a bunch of tree hugging hippies or even worse terrorists. What about gathering and collating data on the most effective way of facing shed roofs for water gathering, or doing some controlled records on air temperatures and soil temperatures or soil moisture; and how about gathering information about diseases or crop yields or the best varieties for our soil. How about some soil surveys, insect surveys, or plant records. I think we’ve reached the point in our relationship with the earth where it’s a broken marriage which can’t be saved by saying “sorry” and carrying on as before. The sums of money involved in searching for a system that works would be trivial in relation to the cost of doing nothing, but it first requires government to lead. At present DEFRA has only 20 staff members out of 6,613 working on the problem. The danger (which most powerful legislators, corporations and oligarchs fear), is that opening Pandora’s box and encouraging cooperative structures to have our say would seriously hamper their activities. We need – with some help – to change a whole culture but that’s a challenge which many of the folks we garden with would be pleased to step up for.

The Green in drought. Let’s call it the Brown

Plants can change our perspective too! – but only if we understand them

For ages I’ve wanted to broaden my approach to plants when thinking and writing about them, and I’d very much like to move a bit closer to Geoffrey Grigson (whose brilliant book “An Englishman’s Flora” is about to be republished as “A British Flora”. I really love this book for its breadth and scope; escaping the stamp collector’s view of field botany (the rarer the better) and wandering in his usual provocative way through the countryside picking up fragments of folklore, old country names, culinary and medicinal properties. You can still pick up a second hand copy very reasonably although the reprint is only £25. I’ve got a worn out paperback and a large format hardback – both treasured possessions. He’s not the only natural history writer who’s spread his wings in this way, Richard Maybe is another and there are more. I should include the early works of Henry Williamson and in the same breath dare to mention my Mother who was brought up in the deepest Chilterns and who once told us about her first encounter with a flush toilet which so scared her she couldn’t use it. I would dearly love which ‘Lady’s Slipper’ she mentioned as her favourite flower – and which could have been a geographically unlikely appearance of the now extinct orchid or one of six other more common wildflowers with similar names. Robin Wall Kimmerer gives a fascinating account of the encounter of western botany with First Nation Canadian ethnobotany. Thanks to Grigson I now know why Latin names are so important. There are such fields, known as ethnobotany, folk taxonomy, phytonomy or ethnoecology which is an academic way of recognising that plants have cultural meanings too. In our laser focused reductive way we might grudgingly accept that plants are useful for giving us clues to molecules which might be useful in medicine but fall way short of recognising herbal medicine as a legitimate pursuit. By the way, I had a text yesterday advertising a T shirt with the slogan “All plants are edible, some of them only once!” .

Anyway I hope you catch my drift. I was first fascinated by plants because they so beautiful, and the closer I looked the more beautiful they became. Several years ago when I was young (ho ho) there was a company in Kingswood which was quite a big supplier of medicinal herbs. A friend of mine once showed me a printed sheet of testimonials they sent out with their products (which included a specially formulated smoking mixture for asthmatics!) One of their big sellers was evidently a herb called Golden Seal and I mistakenly thought it referred to Goldenrod. One of the testimonial letters described how the patient, after only a couple of days of taking the remedy, claimed to have coughed up a substantial tumour. That’s not an easy to forget image. Today when I was mulling over this piece I had a look in Mrs Grieve’s 1931 “A Modern Herbal” and she, like Grigson, lists the alternative names of Golden Seal and among them she reveals that she’s actually writing about Turmeric root which these days is something of a supposed miracle cure, ‘though falling short of projectile tumour expulsion. Those sneaky scientists while all-along decrying herbal medicine, have been scouring the old herbals for patentable synthetics. Tomorrow I’m expecting a second hand copy of the almost unobtainable Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwestern Europe“. I get almost all my books secondhand these days. We’re soon off on another trip to the Bannau Brycheiniog and I’m hoping to persuade Madame to take a short drive to the village of Myddfai where I can breathe the same air as the famous physicians once breathed – hopefully without the addition of smoke particles from the fire around nearby Llangynidr Reservoir which we can even smell in Bath, fifty miles away. We have friends living just a few miles from there, and their smallholding narrowly escaped a previous very frightening wildfire.

There are a thousand extensions to plant hunting that can bring the plants alive for us. I’ve been recently mugging up on some of the science, having previously known nothing at all about DNA and molecular biology and it’s mind blowing and beautiful in the intellectual sense that scientists and mathematicians use. Reading the more controversial books of Stefano Mancuso, I didn’t know for instance that the animals – that’s all the animals amount to just under half of one percent of the total biomass of the earth, whilst plants amount to around 82% (90% before the industrial revolution), and we humans amount to …….. just 0.01%. We have seen the enemy, it is us!

I’ve been amazed at the lukewarm manner in which governments have brushed aside the statistics of global catastrophe. Now, here in Bath and in the midst of the fifth heatwave of this drought plagued summer we are advised to close our windows because of the health risks associated with PM 2.5 particles travelling in the wind from South Wales. Newspapers of a certain kind continue to write about the lovely summer weather while Madame and me, among thousands of other gardeners and farmers, have struggled to keep our plants alive, and the local media are filled with rage at the local authority whenever they try to reduce and control traffic pollution. I’m reminded of William Cobbett’s quip that “they demand change but without alteration”

God alone knows how many trips I’ve made backwards and forwards to the allotment water troughs with a two gallon watering can in each hand – that’s forty pounds weight – in the face of appeals to restrict our water consumption. The upside is that we’ve been feasting on the sweetest sweetcorn, the shiniest aubergines and the richest tomatoes not to mention all the other unobtainable herbs and vegetables. As the difficulties multiply, my admiration for the adaptability of our plants increases. Some of us have wondered in Sunday Schools what the biblical manna might have been, but the more I learn about it the more I understand that the plants which keep us and every other living thing on earth alive do it all by turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar. That beats Moses and his stick any day!

Let the plants speak!

Our kitchen in August 2018 – nothing changes much except we’ve now got two functioning extractor fans taking the fumes and cooking smells up the built-in flue. Only took 10 years of arguments with the landlord!

It’s early August and apart from being sweated alive by the fifth heatwave of the year there’s another sense in which it feels like Christmas every day. In these repeated heatwaves the only strategy we can follow is to keep as many of the plants alive as possible, and so life pretty well revolves around watering, cooking and preserving – and it’s worked wonderfully. Plants need water, food and sunlight, and the abundance of sunlight, although a curse through forcing us to water so much is marvellous in helping our crops to covert the water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. Just imagine what a miracle that is; but some plants like peas and broad beans will never thrive in these conditions however hard we try to help out because, like Madame, the heat makes them feel exhausted and they give up. But others take to it like ducks to water and each day, after watering, we bring the ripened produce into the kitchen and scratch our heads over what to do with it. Fresh vegetables are an order of magnitude more tasty than the impoverished lookalikes that taste of nothing after their long journeys. Every day is Christmas day.

Today it was the turn of the aubergines and after a test run in our youngest son’s commercial pizza oven I felt sure I could replicate the burn in our kitchen, with no danger of the smoke alarm going off due to the new extractors. And so it turned out to be – the fruits – still hot from the sun – blackened and smoked gently as the insides cooked at 275 C and, as they cooled, virtually peeled themselves leaving the pale, faintly smoky flesh waiting to be united with garlic and tahini. We’ve got more tomatoes, cucumbers, figs and new potatoes than you could shake a stick at, and it’s so exciting that I just put the apron on and relish every moment as the cupboards fill with winter stores.

It hasn’t always been that easy. Something of a turning point in my life was the day (just before we had an extremely low-key wedding), when we picked 40 lbs of blackberries on Rodway Hill. There were a couple of outcomes from that day. The first was that we made a huge amount of completely horrible blackberry chutney – so bad we couldn’t even give it away. The second outcome for me was the overpowering feeling of gratitude which (being a fervent convert to extreme atheism) didn’t fit at all well because there seemed to be no-one or nothing I could thank for the generosity of those spiteful bushes. Sixty years later I’m still struggling with that conundrum having tasted some of the off-the-shelf options without being convinced by any of them.

But I can dimly see a way through the desert by repairing and joining up the broken fragments of our polarized and fragmented culture. Let’s take plants as a beginning. We casually divide them into arbitrary categories (food; wildflowers; weeds; rarities; orchids and ragwort etc.) often entirely based on usefulness to humans or potential for monetization. But all plants come from the same tree of life as we do. Some time, millions of years ago, humans, dinosaurs and plants took different paths and we’ve evolved to live very different lives but notwithstanding Darwin’s troubles for suggesting that we share a great deal of our history with the great apes, for instance, and regardless of the religious arguments about it, we all came from the same single celled organism which contained the first few chapters of the library of life which have evolved, adapted and now reside in each of us inside every cell of our body; our six feet of tightly coiled DNA. The library is the same library which mothered (each with its own chapters) the butterfly, the tiger (Tyger?) the earthworm, the edible mushroom, the lichen and last of all, you and me. It’s not necessary for us to strive to unite with nature because we are already one with her. Hugely diverse and adapted; a coat of many colours you might say but a single one and not the atomised billions of homo sapiens who dare to think of ourselves as individuals.

So after years of seeing my passion for field botany, for gardening, for writing and spirituality for anthropology and for ceramics, for science and for cooking as separate “interests” I can see that they’re all more like spokes on a wheel at the centre of which is the big question –“What’s it all for?” – and when I ask myself the big question that way I can answer with another question which, for me, removes the thorn of the first. “Why does it have to have a meaning or a purpose at all?” We could invent a multitude of possible answers to the big question but I can’t see what useful purpose it would offer.

Just out of interest I should say that this far from sudden insight was triggered by my instinctive dislike for any kind of Magisterium which almost always exists to promote its own version of an answer and to persecute in the most cruel and heartless manner anyone who offers an alternative or sometimes even a slight amendment. The lightbulb moment came from binge reading about molecular biology and the latest plant taxonomy research in order better to understand DNA and one or two obscure (to me) statistical methods. Once, however dimly, I began to understand the beauty and complexity of what goes on in both plant and human cells; I began in an almost religious way, to see all of my interests bonded together by their common structure.

The icing on the cake has been to read about the work of Stefano Mancuso who runs a research programme at the University in Florence which he provocatively calls “Plant Neurobiology”. He and his colleagues across the world have come in for a great deal of flak from the old guard because plants don’t have neurons and couldn’t possibly have brains like ours but they are able to sense problems and respond to them; communicate with and “listen” to other plants and synthesise astonishingly complex molecules. All this has brought it home to me that writing about plants as if they were part of a giant but insensitive stamp collection is doomed. Without plants there would be no trace of the human and yet plant life would go on – probably less destructive. Plants are worth so much more than being pressed into herbaria and to even begin to understand what they are, we need poets and visionary science; we need anthropologists, herbalists, first nation men and women, collectors cooks and artists. I fear that we will never find a sustainable space for humanity on the earth unless we accept that we owe it all to the plants.

Messy thoughts, messy stove

I guess it’s safe to admit, ten years after I retired, that I would occasionally climb the steps to the pulpit with no script but just a cluster of ideas whirling around my brain and praying that I could somehow thread them together into a sermon. This risky strategy evolved from the Franciscans who understood that the genuinely authentic sermon came out of knowing your stuff and assembling your talk like the pieces of a jigsaw until the last piece, the big reveal, showed how it fitted together all along. Some of my congregation loved the excitement and learned to be patient. I never believed in the spoon feeding of platitudes taken verbatim from a commentary. Others were kind enough to describe it as a waste of time, and insult to their intelligence (what intelligence?), or told me they hadn’t understood a word. Actually I agreed with all of them – but for different reasons.

At this time of year I have similar problems with cooking. There are only two of us permanent residents at the Potwell Inn, so what the hell do I cook with all these aubergines/ courgettes/ figs / tomatoes and beans? What with the drought, the successive heatwaves and the weeds it’s a wonder that we’ve got any crops at all but we decided early on to prioritise the watering and we’ve kept most of our plants alive – hence the surpluses. There’s a deep satisfaction in harvesting just as there is in cooking, although standing in front of the stove sweating and cursing all day when it’s well over 30C is less than fun. Growing, harvesting, cooking and eating are like a genetic sequence; they always belong together and as such they’re a part of ‘the way we do things round here‘; our culture and the meanings of our lives.

Of course it takes a bit of practice to acquire the skills in all four disciplines, but compared with the times we started it’s a doddle. You couldn’t buy garlic, olive oil, any imported foods unless there was a deli nearby (we were lucky because we had two deli’s but we could barely afford to shop in either of them and in one of them they treated you as if you’d been brought in on someone’s shoe. Food and class are another complex that should be more familiar to anthropologists than they are. I was taught to cook by Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and others. Even in the swinging sixties, Penguin books i.e affordable books were still printed on the cheapest paper and were rarely if ever illustrated aside from the wondrously evocative line drawings by John Minton and others which, while failing completely to convey much sense of what a dish was meant to look like, resonated with the culture of which it was a part. You could learn the ingredients of a dish – let’s say an omelette – but never be repulsed by some disturbing image, glistening like like a rabbit’s freshly drawn guts such as feature so widely today in food-porn coffee table books. Then you were lucky if you got more than “get some eggs, break them and whisk them, put a knob of butter in the pan and cook the omelette whilst stirring (?) and shaking it. Turn it out. When you learned to cook French food from ED you absorbed far more of the regional geography and culture of France that you ever learned about cooking an omelette. But you certainly knew what to cook it in. The first part of her books tended to be about “The batterie de cuisine” and in Clifton where we lived there was a shop that sold good pans that we couldn’t often afford anyway. Jane Grigson, another writer of real heft, was the same. No pictures to speak of but cultural wisdom hovered like a graceful miasma around every page. Her daughter, also a cook, recalled that she occasionally might find a dead pig in the bath waiting to be dealt with. That’s my girl! Jane’s partner Geoffrey Grigson was a polymath poet, writer and botanist who wrote one of my favourite books – “The Englishman’s Flora” which I discovered only an hour ago is soon going to be re-published by Doubleday under the more appropriate title “A British Flora”. Geoffey Grigson’s extensive research goes beyond listing plants by adding fascinating material on their uses and local names. Once again a Grigson book comes close to being a cultural anthropology of plants rather than a dry list.

Anyway, on the stove in the picture at the top – fig compote cooking down slowly until it become a dark, sticky and fragrant mass – (representing the lower strings section in the flavour orchestra) and the lighter woodwinds represented by Marcella Hazan’s marvellous no.1 tomato sauce which is indispensable to the Potwell Inn kitchen. We make pounds of it and bottle it to last through the year. The peapods are going to be part of a vegetable stock to give some hinterland to a french style vegetable soup.

Regarding the climate crisis we went for a wander around Bath a couple of days ago and I photographed this lovely Georgian street running down towards the river from Walcot Street. I’ve mentioned before the fanatical opposition to any move by the council to reduce traffic in Bath. More than fifty years ago when we lived here, the Local Authority when not occupied with demolishing fine houses on Snow Hill and replacing them with Tower blocks, also commissioned the Buchanan report which proposed demolishing much of Walcot and building a tunnel to link the north to the southbound routes. This plan would have involved the demolition of all of the houses you see. When the houses were empty it planned to set fire to one of them so the Fire Brigade could practice putting out fires in Georgian buildings. The sensible citizens of Bath rose up against the whole plan which would have left Bath without one of its finest parishes and the city remained clogged and polluted by ever growing traffic. The traditionalists seemingly grew attached to the noise and the choking fumes and every time a remedy is suggested which involves walking or cycling they rush, screaming like banshees to the high court to defend the ancient right to drive at 40mph in a 20mph zone , to park on the pavement and to treat zebra crossings as suggestions that you might care to stop but if, on the other hand you don’t feel like it you may menace pedestrians without fear of tiresome legal proceedings. Most amusingly the High Priest of rage oftens begins his letters to internet groups by writing “I’m not normally one to complain”. We really don’t deserve him!

Where’s the door? This is our friends Al and Helen’s old caravan. We once followed it from South Gloucestershire to Avignon on a camping trip. I’d know it anywhere.

It’s a good job I’ve got no badgers among my followers

Only someone who’s attempted to grow sweetcorn in the open will know that they need a high ring of steel around them to keep the badgers out, – because so acute is the badger’s sense of smell they can judge exactly when the corn is at its sweetest and ripest exactly 24 hours before you planned to pick it. We think we may have solved the conundrum this year by growing them in the polytunnel with an improvised half door to ventilate the tomatoes and by surrounding the entire tunnel inside and out with African Marigolds whose strong scent masks the rapturously tempting sweetcorn. The Marigolds were meant to be Mexican Marigolds ,Tagetes minuta, but we received a mislabeled packet of seed this year. Actually we receive mislabeled plants and seeds almost every year; last year the red peppers turned into Scotch Bonnet chillies and we now have a lifetime supply of them, dried and in a jar.

It’s been a tough season, much of the blame for which lies with weak government and the unregulated greed of the privatised utilities. Why are we forced, like Oliver Twist to ask – “Please Sir can I have some more?” when the oil companies continue to promote a global environmental catastrophe and the overseas owners of privatised water companies, trouser the proceeds of their monopoly and conceal them overseas. As always, we – the despised customers – get the blame and pay the price. It’s our profligacy; demanding to keep clean, flush the toilets, water the plants and make a cup of tea, that’s causing the water shortage. Heaven forfend that we should prevent a 10 gigawatt data centre from sucking the life out of a small town.

And so we were up at six this morning trying to keep the allotment alive. It’s too hot to weed during the day and so we’ve had to prioritise the crop and worry about the Rosebay Willowherb and Dandelions shedding their ever virile seed next season – and bang on cue the so-called neighbourhood rage website hots up its campaign against anything that makes life in our traffic choked city more tolerable. For any of its contributors who read this – I doubt if I’ll get much flack, I wouldn’t think many of them can read – the whole trashy enterprise is run by the Mirror Group who’ve taken over local journalism like a metastasizing tumour.

Anyway, let me revert to real life and offer the picture of a plant that shows how strong is the will to live in nature. I’ve given it a full sized picture as a kind of prize. We bought this blackberry in 2020 and planted it at the edge of the fruit cage. To say it failed to thrive there is something of an exaggeration. It wilted, the leaves fell off and I can’t tell you how many non religious prayers were said over it. For three years it survived as a barely living stump. until it was accidentally amputated by a wildly inaccurate bit of pruning. I’m not blaming anyone – but it wasn’t me. However I couldn’t give up on it so I moved it into another border (I had visions of making a living fence out of it. I have to be careful because anything that actually looks like a fence is explicitly forbidden in the rules. Another three years have passed and I tended it like a sickly child – much to Madame’s amusement, until it grew several leaves in year two and this year, six years later, it’s suddenly taken off. I can almost hear it growling “Feed me now!” I’m thrilled to report that it’s well on the way to becoming a blessed nuisance. You’ll notice the Field Bindweed underneath it. Field Bindweed never seems to have a bad year

Even in a difficult year, a couple of post-dawn hours on the allotment is a special joy even though carting 30 gallons of water down a tricky path is a test of the ankles. I was thinking about – well, feeling miserable about how complicated life is in a drought accompanied by a heatwave. Our crops have either perished or are romping away, ripening early and behaving as they’re back in their home countries. Deep in the plant genes there are expectations that may or may not be honoured in real life. Plants can adapt, but not that fast. It’s we the gardeners who must learn to adapt but the harvest rush seems to have arrived about three weeks early and we’re flooded with far more vegetables and fruits than we can eat. There’s a crop drop scheme on the allotment site and at this time of year it’s mainly populated by marrows – otherwise known as neglected courgettes. We’ve cleared the freezer(s) in anticipation, and the bottles and kilner jars are all assembled ready for jams pickles and chutneys which at least improve with age (unlike us). There will be less tomatoes to process into ketchup, sauces and passata this year because they hated the second or was it the third heatwave. They’ve just started flowering again on the fourth and fifth trusses so we might get a late crop. The biggest challenge is making substantial changes to our diet to accommodate all the fresh veg. Harvest and cooking go hand in hand but you soon discover that the passion for courgettes and aubergines doesn’t take you as far as eating them every day; almost to the exclusion of all the other veg. And so we muddle on and I occasionally wonder if I should be spending more time on the blog and I’m reminded of the Brother Lawrence saying which suggest that the best road to contentment begins exactly where you are. I also remember hearing my mother saying (on one of the rare occasions she actually stood still) “Well this won’t get the baby a new coat” turning again to the sewing machine where she worked as a dressmaker or measuring up the local ladies for new corsets. (So now you know just how old I am!). I am content, I really am! But I’m also knackered; longing for a couple of weeks continuous rain and hoping, (probably hoping against hope), that this shitstorm of weak government and corporate greed will end before I do.

It’s alright!

Dunno why this random group of plants caught my eye yesterday, but there they were minding their own business on top of the little freezer and they seemed lovely, I mean really beautiful. A bunch of Basil leaves- they’re for a panzanella; the remains of the Dill we used in making dill pickles this week and two South African plant cuttings from our neighbour Charlie. Madame’s an avid collector of house plants.

Just a kitchen snapshot

There’s a strongly aesthetic side to growing and cooking. We do both, and the uniting of the plants we grow with some jiggery pokery on the stove always feels like alchemy. Something emerges which is even more than the sum of its parts. Our neighbour on the allotment grows figs, and we exchange successes – like her lovely figs in return for our shining aubergines. Knives, pans and chopping boards occupy the same place in a culture as the brushes and palette knives of the artist or the laptop and camera of the writer or the secateurs and the spade on the allotment. Technique (and I’ve paid a price for this principle) is the invisible foundation of all creative work. The whole point is that technique should never be sufficiently in focus to be noticeable. It should be obvious that grandstanding around the world like a carpenter, wearing a belt filled with tools for all to see is not necessarily a sign of giftedness.

I’ve had a few days off to do some intense reading which is easy(ish) to do up to 25 C but if the heatwave gets any worse my brain just gives up at 26 C. I was studying DNA in a modest sort of way because I never had the faintest idea how it worked or what it did. I was curious to address the vacancy, but the books I was reading all seemed to mention, or even to major on the thorny subject of plant intelligence. I’ll spare you the technicalities but during my searches, I came up against a word, a conceptual word – “Qualia” which is the quality of experiences which are just so difficult to express to another person. As for plants and their feelings the jury looks set to die of old age! I’ve stolen the word from the Magisterium but they’ll never know because they think I’m the cleaner. When I talk about eating a crab for instance, I’m filled with the memory of a day we ate a crab on the beach at West Bay; breaking it up with a couple of heavy pebbles and washing it down with a bottle of wine we’d floated in the sea on a length of string. Or up in North Wales the memory of a long conversation with an old lady who patiently explained to me why crabs are seasonal and how to tell the difference between a cock crab and a hen crab. Or of the time when Madame (being pregnant) was suffering from pica – in this case instanced by crab meat, and my efforts to meet her needs with hardly any money. Would 2 oz do the trick I wondered . Mercifully it did.

So when I talk about eating crab; my side of the conversation is filled with happy memories which I don’t explain because you might die of boredom. You on the other hand might have eaten a wrong’un years ago and can think of nothing except a long night of retching. Short of a game of verbal ping-pong there’s no way in a normal conversation to convey the “quale” – pronounced kwaalay – in anything like a satisfactory manner. But that, of course, is precisely what the poet, the artist or the writer is attempting to do every day whilst always knowing that the dice are loaded against success.

However today we went to an exhibition of Norman Ackroyd etchings and drawings in the Victoria Gallery in Bath, and I was quite overwhelmed by his work. Let the phenomenologists, the philosophers and the brain scientists tug each others beards like their counterparts did at the Council of Nicea as they argued fiercely about the exact wording of the Christian creed before they agreed on a solution that nobody understood which completely resolved the issue. For my part I believe that Ackroyd had worked the magic in spite of being dead for two years and I was able -for an hour or so – fully to engage with his experience of the light, the sea and the rocks around the Scottish isles. These wonderful etchings are not “about the sea, the sky and the rocks”, neither are they two dimensional renderings of the landscape; they are accounts of the artist’s inner experiences, the “Qualia” of those journeys which by some miracle I was able to access. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it always leaves me tearful. Being human – and that’s what this blog is all about – is difficult and at times incredibly lonely. More often than not our conversations are hit and miss – mostly miss – approximations in which, on reflection, we say too much and too little at the same time. His was the skill we’re all reaching for; the skilful act of communicating the qualia, the boring everyday moments on which a sharp ray of sun suddenly falls and illuminates a vision that lingers forever in the memory. Great art isn’t ever about anything its raison d’etre isn’t teaching us anything new, it’s about the certainty which comes mysteriously in music, in art, in poetry and song; in cookery and gardening and in walking that in spite of all the evidence it’s alright.

Botany on the Damascus Road

We’ve just got back from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) and things are getting desperate. Our friends, 1000 feet up in the hills, have already seen one major fire come perilously close to their smallholding which has hundreds of trees that they’ve planted and a small patch of ancient woodland. Despite two large water cisterns, and a smaller tank they came close to running out of water for their allotment, for their house and for the sheep, pigs and hens they keep last year, and things are worse now. Back at the Potwell Inn the allotment is suffering. The legume crop was a write-off, although a climbing french bean is hanging on in there and the polytunnel tomatoes have stopped setting fruit after the first truss. We’re having to contemplate a complete reset of our crops in the face of the inevitable heatwaves and droughts to come. We’re all living fear of the water to the troughs being turned off because we’re a third of the way through our stored water and most allotments have no stores at all. What’s clear is that the heat loving plants – cucumbers, aubergines, courgettes and squashes are loving it but the cool temperate plants are suffering.

There’s talk of forest fires joining up in France, but this is really about global warming and economic and societal breakdown and the last deadly throes of neoliberal greed as exemplified by the brutal and illegal wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. There is a very disturbed young man in our street who will lean out of his first floor window and scream at the top of his voice “the earth is burning” for hours . Sometimes the dog walkers and picnic loungers on the green will join with the sunbathers and shout abuse at him. But he isn’t wrong and taking an ostrich attitude isn’t going to turn away the wrath of the damaged ecosystem.

So, it being too hot to do anything much more than keep the plants alive I’ve been forced into a big think. My lifelong passion for plants was really rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of their lovely forms and colours. Later on I got interested in identifying them, photographing, painting and writing about them and of course growing and eating them. But I’ve always had a particular love for the urban rogues and weeds; the plants that love to send their roots into places other plants just couldn’t tolerate. I love the survivors who cling to life by modifying their life-cycles and surviving as seeds and underground rhizomes during the hot and the frozen seasons.

So I’ve paid particular attention to the plants that grow outside our flat in the most hostile positions on and below a tall south facing wall. They survive not only drought and frost but inundation with weedkiller, vinegar and salt not to mention the attentions of the local council workers who scrape them up with metal tools; but still they grow back with almost heroic stoicism. The kind of stress that would send tender F1 Hybrid into seizure and death seems to be an accelerant to these guerilla weeds.

Over the years I’ve been so focused on the identity, form and appearance of wildflowers that I’ve barely thought about how they do their thing. I was aware that the study of plant DNA has driven any number of family changes as we realize that relatedness isn’t all about appearances and so many different species might share the same evolutionary outcome without actually being related at all. So a couple of weeks ago, and totally fed-up at my ignorance of anything to do with DNA or the difference between chromosomes and genes I resolved to find out more.

There were two slightly different results of my binge reading. Firstly there were proper eureka moments as I began dimly to understand how plants reproduce, grow, deal with attacks, weather and soil differences with the truly breathtaking assistance of their DNA. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it became impossible to see the life of plants in the same way, once I understood that they possess amazing powers of sentience with which they are able to negotiate with their broader environment, I could almost feel the tiny electrical charges flowing through the plants and triggering the needed response through a series of chemical, biological interactions initiated by a jigsaw like connection between the smallest molecular components of cells. If you think plants are wonderful to look at, knowing something about their invisible inner lives will blow your mind.

I talk about this almost as a kind of conversion experience – hence the Damascus Road of the title. All my spreadsheets and careful labelling of thousands of photographs suddenly feel like butterflies pinned to a board. If plants can sense what’s going on around them, anticipate and initiate an appropriate response, then they’re doing the kind of thing that we do but using a very different set of “plantish” properties which are bafflingly and beautifully complex. The western world’s so-called “tree of life” with diatoms at the bottom and us (and some kind of god) at the top sets us into a colonial earth. But there are some first nation cultures which see the plant world as part of the community. Without plants at least a couple of the drugs that keep me going are plant based or synthesized and that alone seems to make thankfulness appropriate. It doesn’t seem entirely bizarre to say thank-you to the cabbage you’re cutting or the carrot you’re pulling. This afternoon I made fig compote and that (the flavour, not my cooking!) deserves a round of applause. Plants give us so much; nutritionally, aesthetically, and for healing us because many cancer treatments are synthesized from plants. They’re amazingly clever at making the kind of molecules that we can use to our own benefit. The kind of attitudinal change we desperately need if we’re going to avoid being caught up and killed in another extinction event would be to treat our plants – and not just the delicate hybrids that feed us but all our plants with the respect that they deserve. Maybe those roguish and indestructible weeds have the exact secret we need to ensure the survival of the earth.

Foodie business

There’s a mirror in the lift and today I caught sight of myself as we came back from getting a few last bits of shopping before we revisit God’s Own Country (Wales of course) yet again; I just can’t keep away. I’m ashamed to say I looked completely raddled – red eyed, my hair which has turned curly makes me look like Medusa in the dim light, and a million miles from the picture of me that I keep safe in my head – like Dorian Gray without the excesses.

The red eyes are partly down to hay fever which has been shocking this year; but three heatwaves in quick succession have taken their toll on my body clock and I’m irrevocably awake every morning at around 5.00am – the same time as I can hear the allotment screaming for water in my fertile imagination. So today we were on the allotment soon after six – to give it a thorough soaking – and then we picked anything that looked edible to take with us to Wales; dug some early potatoes for lunch and came home by 7.30am. Then we cooked the aubergines we harvested a couple of days ago by roasting them and stuffing them with richly spiced lamb mince giving them a distinctly North African flavour. I cooked some stewed apple, made up two jars of fridge pickled cucumbers with our own cucumbers and dill; some fig compote and then finally sat down at 11.00 for a cup of tea. So perhaps the red-eye was also to do with being knackered.

Going away, for me at least, is extremely stressful because I’m terrified of leaving something behind. I’ve left our beds behind, even the complete set of tent poles on one occasion – so remembering to pack all our plentiful meds, every computer and charger lead we could conceivably use, not to mention two portable routers (you can’t be too careful) various laptops, phones and Madame’s tablet; books, cameras, maps, GPS unit and so on. One of our neighbours asked if we were moving out last time we took the campervan to Cornwall.

But tomorrow we’ll set out on the busiest day of the year on the M4 and M5 to travel by our much practiced secret route, on which – unless we meet a tractor, a school bus or a herd of cows gets us there in rather less time than queuing outside Newport for several hours in the blistering heat. We’ll be tired I’m sure, but nothing is better guaranteed to give me a long night’s sleep than the sound of sheep on the hill. I have a rather higher clock speed than most people which has impacted my life quite a bit. I piss people off – mostly managers and jobsworths – because I can’t keep my mouth shut when one of them says, or does something really stupid. Our sons have inherited this tendency from me and we all need these regular breaks to let ourselves slow down and cool the brains a bit. Naturally this won’t stop me from a bit of plant hunting when I think Madame isn’t looking.

This is an inherently busy time of the year because harvesting and cooking are joined at the hip, and since the harvesting always produces a surplus of something or other (courgettes?) the cooking extends into preserving, freezing and storing so yes, the days can be very long, but home grown and home prepared food is in a league of its own when it comes to nutrition and flavour. It’ll be another early start tomorrow but the other reason we need to go away is because the builders are coming back to repair and re-lay the bathroom floor after its flooding last year, and they’ll be taking out the seat of mercy for two days. Neither of us fancy trudging around Bath looking for a friendly shop or cafe several times a day. The campervan has a very serviceable loo and it’s only eight feet away! Meanwhile some photos taken on the allotment in the early morning coolness today. The sweet corn has thrown out its first silks – it’s self pollinating and the upper male flowers shower the lower female silks with pollen which is in itself a bit of a challenge for me in the confined space of the polytunnel. However it keeps the cobs out of the reach of the badgers which otherwise would eat the lot every year. It’s our own version of that old government slogan – Protect and Survive. Thank goodness ours works very well and theirs is best left untested.