Category: Natural History

Seeing and beholding

A rather neglected apple tree on the allotments. I’m thinking of Samuel Palmer.

Hardly anyone was drawing in the 70’s, when we were at art school. A few tutors paid lip service to it but basically it had fallen out of fashion in favour of a rather woolly notion of creativity. Observational drawing; life drawing; were so last year and the now was all about being. Stony ground, then, for those of us who persisted in the archaic study of form and structure. I remember a bit of a row with my Head of Department when I showed him a monochrome painting I’d made of an apple tree and suggested that apple trees had a particular structure that you could see through the distortions of wind, weather and pruning. He said that this was ridiculous and that all the trees were pretty much alike. He, of course, lived in an entirely uniform conceptual world whereas I was drawing the phenomenal. I felt puzzled and deflated by his negative response and yet -decades later – I can see that not only was I in the right, but that an understanding and recognition of these subtle structures would turn out to be absolutely essential when I began to love plants.

*On reading this back to myself the next day it seems I should at least try to explain what I mean about the structure of the apple tree.

All trees, of course, need light and soil and so they have evolved to make the best use of what light there is available which in turn suggests that branches and leaves are always arranged in the most efficient way to catch the sun in order to ripen their fruit/seeds for the continuation of the species. That’s undoubtedly true, but they all seem to do it in different ways and those different ways seem to be remarkably consistent from species to species. The apple, being a domestic fruit, grown for the benefit of humans, gets mucked about a fair bit by pruning for the best possible crop. The one in the photo has been very neglected and in a commercial orchard it would have had the central tangle of overlapping branches pruned out to allow light and air to the tree. But even amidst the mess I can see something of the familiar structure. The apple is a bit of a ballerina. I always think of a dancer on points, arms extended , curving slightly upwards and then downwards towards the lowered fingertips. The fruits, in the autumn, are like fairy lights; golden and streaked with red. They don’t need any notices to suggest “eat me” like Alice’s mushroom although too much cider from those same apples might have something of the same effect – and due to their propensity to cross breed promiscuously, every tree and every fruit – unless it’s been grafted – will be different. Some might be so full of tannin they’ll put your face into a rictus like pucker for the next hour and some so sweet you’ll fetch your penknife back from your pocket and peel another, and then another. While some trees sit solidly on their roots like cathedral pillars, the apple dances for the sun. It’s almost impossible to describe it in words but from winter buds to spring flowers and then ripening fruit it’s pure joy. It’s just a plant, you might say, but we truly know plants through all of our senses. We don’t just see plants we behold them. There’s aesthetic joy in seeing. We smell their perfume; we (when we’re sure of them), listen to them – shake a ripe Cox and you may hear the seeds rattling inside; taste them, dry them for the store and cook them. We can even turn them into alcohol and medicine.

Finding some botanical competency has been a long and pretty arduous journey through small errors and real howlers but just as we once learned to draw the human form by understanding how it articulates and holds together; the process of identifying plants involves genuine and deep contemplation of the tiniest details and the elimination of each false trail one by one until a family and then a species finally emerges. Often I’m defeated and I have to appeal to a higher authority – someone with more experience.

The upside of the experience is that – like the spokes of a wheel – explorations can take you off into all sorts of different disciplines, relationships and histories. Ecology, environment, global heating, folklore, cooking and medicine are just a few of the fields that can help to determine not just the name, but the meaning of a plant within human culture.

Autumn has slammed down the shutters on the prospect of long and warm days and tomorrow is offering a day of driving rain. At this time of year we turn towards the lovely world of fungi but darker nights and shorter days also provide the chance to go back over the hundreds of photographs I’ve taken during the season. This year I’ve been learning to use a new and very lightweight camera which offers in-camera focus stacking and eliminates the biggest bugbear of macro photography – very shallow depth of field. Now, for the first time, I can photograph a leaf and then, later, examine it at around x20 magnification; even down to the tiniest star shaped bunches of hairs. It’s all evidence when it comes to ID.

We’re soon off to Cornwall again in the campervan and so I’ve been hard at it in the kitchen preserving and bottling. Luckily our son has got a half-empty freezer and so some of the work can wait until we’re back. Later on we’re looking forward to a short trip up the canal in a narrow boat. The polytunnel is now clear apart from a couple of lunches worth of sweetcorn. I suppose it’s no surprise that we get so knackered. I’m massively disappointed with the Labour government but I never really expected anything more from them. Deacon Starmer and the Prophets of Gloom would make a great album for a funeral.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuckoo!

Beggarticks

Cuckoo – like dog or horse gets pressed into service in quite a number of flower names. I particularly like “Cuckoo Pint” – Arum maculatum – a spectacularly well hung (sorry) allusion to the presence of cuckoos in nests they oughtn’t be in – if you catch my drift. Among other folk names for the same plant we get Parson in his pulpit and also Lords and Ladies. Geoffrey Grigson lists a couple of dozen names – nearly all of them both vulgar and funny. In my innocence I always wondered where pint as in beer came from; but it’s actually a reference to a pintle, a long bolt that holds a boat’s rudder in place – need I go on? So perhaps the plant name should be Cuckoo Pint as in pin rather than in eye except I’ve never once heard it pronounced so. Anyway, there’s an exception to every rule and so the Cuckoo Flower is named after the fact that it appears at the same time as the Cuckoo is laying its eggs in a Reed Warbler’s nest. Sadly the last time I heard a cuckoo was several years ago on our friends smallholding near Brecon.

Much enlarged photo x10

So taking up the theme, I have to say that I’m rather addicted to plants that show up in the wrong place. Once you’ve got your eye in, they stand out like a sore thumb and when I don’t recognise them – that’s to say almost always – I feel obliged to find out what they’re called and even, if they’re a bit rare, record them. Twice this week my eye lit upon an unexpected plant on the canal – one is called Beggarticks which was a little upstream of a new (to me) Mullein which I think will turn out to be Hungarian Mullein, Verbascum speciosum. Both of these are neophytes – newcomers – which have entered the UK during the last century on boats, or at least in ballast or escaping from wool shoddy carried by boats. Most floras don’t even mention these floral boat people, and it has to be said they’re quite hard to identify without a hand lens or a macro photo.

But they’re not all incomers. I also encountered a Fool’s Parsley plant growing through a weed control mat on a length of landscaped riverbank. It’s related to Hemlock and consequently rather poisonous, so I’m sure it wasn’t part of the designer’s plan but then, nature doesn’t read planning regulations – she makes her own rules.

How these plants got to where they’re now growing is a mystery; but it occurs to me that they may have been carried up the canal from Bristol on the shoes of narrowboaters. Most plants will stowaway given half a chance, but some, like Giant Hogweed, Russian Vine and Himalayan Balsam get thrown out of gardens when their owners realize what thugs they really are. Unfortunately, unlike teenagers, they don’t grow out of it and carry on terrorising towpaths and riverbanks the length and breadth of the country. Other strangers have replaced wool shoddy and ballast by commandeering birdseed as a means of transport, and among the upcoming means of getting about some are seeking pastures new by way of wildflower mixes. There’s no let-up for the prospective Cuckoo hunter. Apple of Peru – Nicandra physalodes– regularly pops up on the allotment.

Today was/is Harvest Festival day for the Potwell Inn. We cleared the polytunnel of tomatoes, aubergines and accidentally grown Scotch Bonnet chillies, and feasted on sweetcorn which has escaped the badgers this year by being locked inside the tunnel. Now there’s a mountain of pickling and preserving to climb, and we’ve plenty of Squashes to last the winter. It does seem odd that today is the first day of meteorological autumn when we’ve barely seen the summer, but climate damage is the cause of all this and lying in bed with the windows open at night reveals that more planes are flying over Bath than buses drive up the A4. I should think there’s a plane overhead coming in to land or taking off every ten minutes. The Local Council are doing their best – against some strong and synthetic opposition by people who don’t even live here – but it all seems a bit pointless when the pollution by aeroplanes is deemed too economically important to curb.

Uugh! aargh! get off!!

Bullwort

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

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

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

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

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

I should be more careful

Inside the polytunnel – as seen by Rousseau – the plants on the right are not Cannabis as our neighbour thought, but African Marigolds (Tagetes erecta) to deter whiteflies.
Completely fake AI generated photo of Ghost Orchid on the pavement – made by Google Gemini. That’s why it’s dangerous!

In my last post I was extolling the virtues of exploring the local plants before setting off to search the country after the rarities, and I cracked a poorly judged joke about not going to see even a Ghost Orchid unless it was growing in a crack in the pavement outside the flat. I must have thought I was on safe ground because no-one has seen a Ghost orchid in the UK since 2009. Then, suddenly today, an emailed newsletter from the BSBI announced that it had been seen once more at what will remain an undisclosed location. You’d think that rogue hunters would leave such a rarity alone but sadly not. Back in my home parish of Littleton, someone dug up a whole group of much more common orchids and spirited them away. Just for the record, orchids rely on a highly specific relationship with particular fungal networks and so digging them up is a lost cause. Anyway – lest I sound more pompous than I (hope I) really am, I’m not the trainspotter type and although I’m very happy that the discovery has been made, and even happier for the lucky finder who’s obviously put many search hours in; I’m quite satisfied with a photo.

I should also admit that I break my own rules all the time because we spend many weeks camping in Cornwall, West Wales, North and Central Wales as well as here in Bath and on Mendip. We’ve been going to all those places for so long that while we’re there they all feel like home and I’ve got long lists of plants for all of them.

Yesterday, to add even more unwanted texture to a difficult week, one of my teeth dropped out as a kind of tribute to National Health dentistry. I watch the news and read the papers and I detect a kind of Panglossian optimism in the air now we’ve got a Labour government. I’m afraid I don’t buy it.

Finding the Heffalump!

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

*Sadly that one didn’t work out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dundas aqueduct – July 2017

The lowdown on city centre streetlife

A local blogger posted a couple of pictures today rather like the ones above except that the left hand picture showed a pavement lined and ennobled by plants and the right hand saw the same picture with all the plant life taken out by the moaners and scrapers employed to humour tidy minded citizens. These two plants are respectively Knotgrass and Procumbent Yellow Sorrel, both eking out a living barely two centimetres above the pavement and inconspicuous with it – like all successful squatters; and you know how it is when someone passes a deeply upsetting remark without even realizing they’re being annoying. Like one of our neighbours who thought I’d be impressed by his decision to vote Reform in the recent election. I don’t think our blogger – one I follow and who is normally very sensible – thought for a moment that anyone would disagree with his settled opinion that “weeds” make the pavement look bad and upset the tourists. But urban plants are fascinating and I’d venture that they’ll get even more fascinating as the climate heats up and we all start to wonder what will survive global climate change. What lives on air, dust and heat ? What is it in their DNA that makes them such great survivors, and can we borrow a bit of it? Here are some more weeds.

So – left to right, Rue Leaved Saxifrage, Coltsfoot and the old Charles Street Telephone Exchange – all growing together. So tell me which of these three is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen? I’m all for uprooting the building which was built facing the end of a lovely Georgian street under crown privilege and therefore bypassing planning regulations. Our backyard – an old builders yard – featured 47 species of weed last time I counted. Every year a council employee comes along the street scraping them all off – he used to spray with glyphosate; then they tried rocksalt and now it’s down to a sharp hoe. For the sake of setting the record straight, the plants all regrow in roughly the same time whatever the council do. In Oxford a rogue urban botany group started to label the “weeds” so that passers-by could see that they had names and often uses too. Brilliant idea but I daresay by now they’re all banged up in prison for discussing writing plant labels on a zoom call intercepted by GCHQ.

Of course you might find the mean streets of central Bath so upsetting that you can only traverse them by blotting out the noise with headphones and adopting that curious mobile phone walk, head down with the phone held out ahead like the prow of a ship breasting hostile waves. The other day we were in Great Stanhope Street and we saw a Lesser Black Backed gull attempting to swallow a rat whole, shaking it around to try and align it into a suitable position; an operation which caused the rat’s tail to wave around rather upsettingly in the sunshine. On the same morning we saw a pair of pigeon’s feet on the pavement – pretty clearly the remains of the local Peregrine Falcon’s recent meal finished off by a fox or a carrion crow.

Throw away the mobile distraction unit along with the headphones and you too could enjoy nature red in tooth and claw; share the outrageous joy of the carousing teenagers on the green and talk to the flowers whose worldly experience as survivors exceeds all expectations. The countryside isn’t a nature reserve somewhere outside the city boundary, nature is right here and we’re part of it.

Sea Spleenwort – living off Pepsi can, crisp packet, dog ends and McDonalds tray.
NB – no sea!

A hot day in the kitchen

Every year the processing of tomatoes comes around; always surprising, always rewarding but always knackering. The polytunnel is a tremendous asset on the allotment, but the crops inside it seem always to ripen almost simultaneously, leaving us with a challenging glut. Our small flat has limited storage space so the more reduced the crop is, the easier it is for us. This year, fortunately, we need to make tomato ketchup which reduces 2 Kg of tomatoes to three small bottles. The ketchup is intense and – dare I say – much better than the commercial ones and tomatoes are the only crop in which we’re almost completely self-sufficient. I could write volumes on the sheer impossibility of total self-sufficiency which could only ever function well in a close community with a tradition of barter – the kind of community that only a small handful of us now live in. Having lived in a couple of comunes we would say that they’re no kind of primrose path to happiness and contentment. There’s always at least one person who refuses to work!

That said, before we could get going in the kitchen there was heavy work to be done on the allotment because we have decided to remove the fruit cage which has become a climbing frame for bindweed and serves no useful purpose except choking and shading our soft fruit. The forecast had the temperature rising to the low 20’s by mid day, so we went out early to break the back of the job. Two hours later we’d removed the roof and three of the four mesh walls and rolled them into giant builder’s bags to take down to the tip. This should open up the space and make watering, picking and pruning much easier. We were pleased to find, once we’d fought through the jungle, that our mulch of sheeps’ fleece and wood chip has completely suppressed the weeds around the plants, but of course bindweed travels aloft and laughs at mulches.

Back at the Potwell Inn; hot and sweaty, I popped shallots, chopped garlic and sliced tomatoes, sprinkled them with herbs from our little pot garden on the pavement, drizzled olive oil and shoved them in the oven to roast. As I’m writing they’re cooling down and later I’ll put them through the passasta machine – which is the most useful piece of kit for anyone who needs to process a lot of tomatoes. Honestly I’ve spent so many hours trying to push tomatoes through a sieve doing a job that now takes minutes. Later again I’ll unite the passata with some cider vinegar, sugar and all the spices, reduce it down and bottle it.

With later harvestings we’ll make straight passata and two kinds of readymade pasta sauce which we use as a base for anything else that needs a shot of tomato umami. It looks likely to be a punishingly hot week so we’ll have our work cut out with watering and finishing the fruit cage. Early starts are the only way to get it all done before the energy sapping city heat takes charge.

Next on the tomato agenda is one of our favourite Italian recipes panzanella made to the recipe in Anna Del Conte’s wonderful “Gastronomy of Italy”. I’ve never been fond of raw onion, but her suggestion of steeping thinly sliced red onion in iced brine for an hour in the fridge transforms the sulphurous heat into something altogether more lovely.

While all that cooking was going on, I’d brought home a small piece of the (inedible) Stone Parsley I found next to the shed door so I could take some macro photos of it using the focus stacking facility on the new camera and the big tripod arranged over the dining table (my desk). The tiny compact camera, only 50g heavier than my phone looks a bit ridiculous on top of the full sized tripod, but camera shake would ruin the macro focus stacking. I was really pleased with the results – especially when I used some sharpening to clean them up. The photo is below and, for reference, the flowers are only about 2 mm diameter – so we’re almost in microscope territory. Not necessary for identifying this plant because one of the diagnostics is a strong – some say unpleasant – smell of petrol when you bruise the stem. I can certainly vouch for that.

Last night I slept for nine hours and woke up dreaming I was paddling the kayak down a small river. What a glorious start to the day!

Stone Parsley, Sison amomum photographed with an Olympus TG-7 using in-camera focus stacking and a bit of sharpening applied later.

Anyone can do this!

Stone Parsley leaves

As I was closing the lid on the laptop after writing about a bit of botanising in White Field yesterday I thought something along the lines of – “is it discouraging to someone interested in nature for me to write in a way that makes me sound much cleverer than I really am?”

The thing is, I’m a relative beginner and when I go out on field trips with very knowledgeable guides, I sometimes come home feeling a bit stupid. I was leading a field trip myself a few weeks ago and before we set out I read aloud half a page from a book I was reading which expressed exactly that sentiment in the hope that in such a mixed ability group we could look out for one another and try not to be patronising towards less skilled newcomers. I was, of course, thinking about my own experiences. However it was not to be and the propeller heads in the group all shot off trailing latin names behind them like condensation trails in the sky. You could see the hope die in the eyes of some of the others.

There’s no shame in not knowing a Latin name, or what tetraploidy means – they’re just steps on a road that leads to deeper understanding and far more fun. Some leaders are good teachers and some aren’t and if you think back to your biggest and most important learning experiences they usually began with someone taking your puzzled question seriously and helping you – as it were – through the hedge. On our very first field trip the leader took me in hand and began naming some very ordinary and common plants, knowing – as good teachers always do – that a willing learner will store that knowledge joyfully and never need to ask again. One of those plants was Nipplewort – and I was struck by the fact that the flower wasn’t as much like a human nipple but a grease nipple of the kind that used to lubricate old steam engines. In that short conversation I absorbed something of what birders call the jizz of the plant and now when I pass it on a walk I name it silently in my head and think to myself “Nipplewort; Lapsana communis” – in a form of greeting to an old friend. If I should be out walking with our grandchildren I’d do the same thing out loud. It could be the first step in a consuming interest. When, last autumn, we were out with them in Dyrham Park we passed some Spindle Trees I talked about the use of the wood in making spindles. What I didn’t know until very recently was that spindles were more likely to be pegs or skewers or – in Gloucestershire – skivers! Being more of a wordsmith than a taxonomist it’s often the local names that excite me as much as the strict accuracy of the scientist.

Anyway, the allotment takes up most of our time in the summer – here’s another photo I took today and I hope you’ll agree that it’s a very pretty mess.

Our wild Fennel plants. Madame wishes they were Dill but they love where they are and all our attempts at growing Dill seem to fail.

We went messy a couple of years ago in the hope of increasing our insect population. We dug a pond, stopped obsessively clearing the ground and continued never using any chemicals. The weeds said thank you very much and duly populated any square inches of bare soil – just the way nature intended it to be. About four years ago I found a rather bothersome weed with very pretty purple and white flowers colonising one of our beds. After a struggle and with the help of the national referee we finally found the name and it turned out to be rather rare in our district in spite of its name “Tall Ramping Fumitory” but a rare subspecies in this country – Fumaria bastardii ssp. hibernica – better known in Ireland. How lovely to have a rare plant growing wild on the allotment.

Then today, I was locking up the shed and I spotted something else – although this time I knew its name because I’d been shown it before by a competent botanist, growing close by..

So this is Stone Parsley – Sison amomum – another unusual plant taking advantage of our relaxed, not to say libertarian regime. I took some photos and when we got home I hit the databases and field guides and confirmed the identification – at least to my own satisfaction – it’ll have to be approved by a referee before it gets into the big database.

So to get back to where I kicked off, absolutely none of this demanded a degree level qualification or anything like it. Just a curious mind, a bit of tenacity and a willingness to ignore any snotty remarks from fellow allotmenteers about how untidy we are. I do this purely for pleasure and I have no interest in impressing anyone. When I was regularly on BBC Radio 2, I was in the supermarket chatting to a friend and a woman came around the corner and said to me “are you Dave Pole?”. “Yes I am”, I replied. She looked at me quizzically and then said “Oh. I thought you were tall”.

An oasis of peace behind the car park.

Marbled White butterfly sipping nectar from Red Clover in White Field today

Dyrham Park can get very busy – especially in the school holidays – I took a picture of the car park before lunchtime today just to give some idea of how crowded it can be with hundreds of visitors walking down the steep approach towards the house. But there’s one part of the grounds where you can pretty well guarantee a bit of peace and quiet. Today we spent over an hour there plant hunting and we didn’t see a soul.

White Field is a wildflower meadow where, in the late spring and early summer, you can find three species of orchid growing without leaving the mown paths. To be fair, it’s not particularly easy to find, tucked away behind the car park and technically outside the grounds behind a high deer fence, but it’s a lovely spot in which to learn to identify many of our most attractive wildflowers. But don’t leave your visit much beyond mid July because it’s mown off and the hay baled and taken away as part of a management programme. These wildflowers actually prefer poor soil and a single dose of artificial fertilizer could cause irreparable harm allowing rank weeds and grasses to choke out their more delicate cousins.

This was the first place we saw Marbled White butterflies and they really are very beautiful; but why here and not, for example on any old grass verge? The food plant – the one which the caterpillars feed on – is a group of grass species collectively called Red Fescue – which is common across the whole country but there are several other food plants as well. So it’s not the food plant alone but some other factor too. The butterflies display a preference for purple flowers and the distribution maps suggest that unimproved grassland is one important factor. So White Field fits the bill perfectly; unimproved grassland on Cotswold limestone with masses of purple flowers; not least Knapweed, Clover, Meadow Cranesbill, Selfheal and lots of orchids. The sad truth is that the butterfly is as rare as unimproved grassland and we’ve ploughed up and poisoned over 90% of our wildflower meadows in the last fifty years. Anyway, they were there on White Field in abundance today and they were a joy to find.

The field which on our last visit was golden and white with Rough Hawksbeard and Oxeye Daisies looked more brown and shriveled today, but if you looked between the straw coloured mature grasses there were hundreds of Pyramidal Orchids, Oxeye daisies, a few Rough Hawksbeard clinging on, Knapweed, Selfheal and Meadow Cranesbill plants at the edges as well as Birdsfoot, Clovers, Hogweed and Ragwort. Lots to look at and enjoy including Ribwort Plantain, Red Fescues, Timothy grass, Cocksfoot and loads of other grasses I’ve never got to grips with. Altogether a rewarding end of season walk with fabulous views out towards the River Severn and down as far as the Mendip hills.