Category: Natural History

Natural Music

Seed head of Jack go to bed at noon aka Goat’s Beard – Tragopogon pratensis

I was pondering the other night concerning our instinct to describe nature in terms of quietness, peacefulness , meditative tranquility – none of which (for me at least) even begin to express its dynamism, ceaseless movement, busyness and fantastic, inexpressible diversity. Not the disconnected series of aesthetic ooh’s and aahs of the kind that so many TV natural history programmes seem to promote, but something more connected. When we got rid of the idea of god creating everything, we somehow lost the matrix that held everything together. In any case the old idea was redundant and too useful to the wrong kind of people but at least there was a coherent story about where we fitted in. Now the prevailing ideology has exploded us into a billion monads. One attempt at a remedy is to reduce nature to an aesthetic experience. I completely understand where nature as art gallery is coming from and I’ve got many thousands of photographs to prove it, but when we’re out walking together searching hedgerows and marshes; muddy tracks and field edges for flowering plants and suchlike, the overwhelming feeling I carry is of rhythm and flow, of complexity, timbre and key; of pace and time signature; of dissonance and assonance and the larger divisions of …….. spit it out! of music.

I don’t want to inflate this metaphor like a party balloon until it bursts; but I want to hold it there while I write about being here in West Wales and about being human – but most of all being human in nature. I want to put aside any thoughts of saving the earth or restoring lost species and any long lists of rarities in favour of that hoary old retreat favourite – of being in nature. Being in the moment is all the rage, but for me that’s like trying to listen to Bach one note at a time.

Small Scabious Scabiosa columbaria
Sheep’s Bit – Jasioni montana
Devil’s Bit Scabious – Succisa pratensis

Do these three look the same? They certainly do if you’re walking too fast; but don’t worry because these three photographs were taken in three different places over a period of seven years, and you’d be vanishingly unlikely to see all three side by side in one place. If you’re curious to know, it’s all in the stamens. Learning the plants takes years and is full of blind alleys and wrong ID’s, but what that teaches us is that being in nature is a process in which no single place is better, cleverer or more virtuous than any other and also that every place is full of possibilities even if you could count the plants you could name on the fingers of one hand. Where I was today at a field edge and finding a Bugloss plant, I was flooded with endorphins, a runners’ high. This was the place – to pinch a line from TS Elliot – that

“You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid”

There are thousands of plants I’ve never seen and probably never will; but we mustn’t differentiate between the rare and the common as if rarity bestowed some kind of patina of significance. I’ve been out botanizing with some folks who fire Latin names at one another like paintballs and boast of their thousands of records. Each to their own, I say. Since we can only attend to the Great Symphony of nature with all our senses; of sound and touch and taste and sight and smell – and here I’d add memory and imagination because nature works so slowly that some of her works are beyond the reach of the conventional senses; then it follows that every part of our mind is engaged. It’s the complete opposite of emptying the mind, it’s allowing it to fill with something other than ourselves. Embracing the Great Symphony is the work of a lifetime; many lifetimes.

Sea Carrot

Take a typical hedgerow, for instance. Those weeds at the front – the ones with heads comprising many small flowers sitting at the ends of umbrella spokes. Unsurprisingly they’re not always the same plant, they’re a procession of cousins from early in the year; each one pushing past its senescent relative in glorious green livery – one of them has the English name Queen Anne’s Lace -flowering and then setting seed, signalling its own disappearance until the next year. Depending where you live you might see Alexanders first, and then Cow Parsley, Hogweed and then (a bit trickier) Rough Chervil or Wild Carrot – there are dozens of them – some exceptionally rare and subtly different but each one challenging the false idea of the a solitary moment in an unchanging natural world. Searching for a musical comparison I came up with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. One aria to begin with – that’s the family, the genus if you prefer – and then the thirty variations each using exactly the same notes but changing the tempo and key whilst maintaining the theme. Listening to the Goldbergs right through is something akin to following the life of a hedgerow through a season. But then there are the grace notes – like the Stitchworts’ little shining highlights; Bluebells, Campions, Dog Roses and Honeysuckle. Later there are berries and some of them are delicious whilst others might kill you. There’s a restlessness and dynamism in nature. Tides and seasons; the length of days and the rising and setting of the moon can never be stilled by putting a pin through them and mounting them in a cabinet, and neither can we step out of that fierce river because

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas

If the aim of meditation is to back out of the flow of life, then I can’t see the point of it. If the initial premise is that we are always prey to living a shadowy half life working all day and satisfying our delinquent desires at night in front of the television, then I completely agree that something urgently needs doing. But the cure isn’t to hide but to embrace the flow, to step out into earth life and add our own bit of the song to the natural music that birthed us and will take us back again when we reach our own senescence. So seeking, identifying but above all enjoying the plants, the birds and insects; the mammals and the fish for themselves and as part of our own nature, is – quite apart from making lists and showing off to your companions – a form of fully engaged meditation which leads us gently away from seeing nature as a business opportunity.

That’s what I mean by Natural Music.

Dancing in the bog!

Ragged Robin – Silene flos-cuculi

Ragged Robin is one of my favourite wildflowers; it’s so exuberant, so punky and so unnecessarily lacking in any evolutionary credentials for the disorganised petals of its flower that seems to be a message from nature to remind us that plants have never been there to massage our aesthetic sensibilities. Close-up like this, the petals suggest the dancing fingers of a group of witches. I’m reminded of Matisse’s Dancers but perhaps more by Roger Hilton’s famous 1964 painting “Oi Yoi Yoi”; so in-your-face and so Dionysian in its darker sense. This one was growing on the far side of a ditch and I was so keen to get the photo that I had to be rescued by Madame when I lost my balance and feared a muddy, and probably smelly, dive. I’ve fallen in a few rhynes (that’s a Somerset word for a drainage ditch, pronounced reen) in my time and wouldn’t recommend it for the faint hearted.

Anyway that was all a slow intro to the theme of this campervan trip to the far west of Wales overlooking Ramsey Island. I’ve brought a new camera with me – it’s an Olympus TG-7, the latest of six previous iterations, the first of which I took on the Camino. This isn’t a review; I paid for the camera myself and bought it on the back of many other reviews by people who know what they’re doing. It’s shockproof, waterproof to about 30 feet, and fully featured when it comes to aperture, shutter speed and ISO setting so very much a technical step up from the Pixel 6A phone I’ve been using for nearly everything on this blog. In fact it’s only 50g heavier than the phone so it’s supercompact, with built in geotag and GPS unit and for me the most important feature of all, it has inbuilt macro facility and offers in-camera focus stacking. On paper this is a serious piece of kit for a very clumsy person who falls into ditches trying to photograph perfectly common wildflowers and fungi. Of course other cameras are available – I’ve got a Panasonic G2 with a Leica macro lens but it weighs a ton, doesn’t do muddy ditches and takes ages to set up for a shot.

My first discovery on trying out the macro/focus stacking is that it really does need a tripod, but mine – a Manfrotto carbon fibre job with a magnesium ball head looks impressive but is just too heavy and vulnerable to life outside a studio so I’m looking around for something light and bombproof that can get the camera down to 1 cm above the ground facing directly downwards. I took this photograph of the seed head of a Rough Chervil plant in the van with the big tripod and it gives some indication of what macro + focus stacking will bring to the table.

We’re camping at the far end of the peninsula and the weather has been – let’s say – very Welsh; but when the sun shines all day, as it did yesterday and the sky is China blue, as you might see on the best porcelain; and the wind gives a brief respite from the storm the previous night (which pretty much emptied the campsite) then this place is as close to heaven as we’ll ever get. Yesterday we did one of our favourite walks across the fields to Whitesands Bay and dropped in on many of the plants which specialize in this kind of environment because we now know where to find them after many visits. There are numerous bogs and marshes hereabouts and one of the most important botanical lessons I ever learned centred on the importance of understanding the ecology of the place we were searching. We find Ragged Robin and Yellow Bartsia here because of the wet ground. Bogs and dunes – our cup was full! Yesterday we found Dwarf Mallow, thriving on a dry and sandy footpath along with Sand Spurry, both in their happy place. There were Southern Marsh and Pyramidal Orchids – although it was difficult to be sure of the first without entering the marsh; Purple Loosestrife, Kidney Vetch, Lady’s Bedstraw, Sea Carrot, Navelwort and the ever elusive Scarlet Pimpernel which has changed its family name from Anagallis to Lysimachia to avoid detection – but we were ahead of that knavish game.

But perhaps the most exciting find was the Stoat that crossed the patch immediately in front of us. Madame didn’t see it, and just as I was getting excited and pointing to where it disappeared, to my great surprise it came out and crossed the path again; a tiny cigar sized assassin – not about to be deterred from its business by two huge inedible shadows with the sun at their backs.

Is that the reason we love nature so much? Its capacity to redefine beauty? Like a beetle flying past, flashing iridescent green like a flying emerald, or the powder blue abdomen of a Broad Bodied Chaser dragonfly – hunting the shallows of a pond? or a Stoat in pursuit of its prey?

As we waited for the bus home, we watched groups of long limbed teenagers learning to surf and playing football; falling in and out of love thirty times a day and trying to figure out what exactly being a grown-up entails. My heart says “it’s not what you think!” but I’m ill-inclined to march along the beach spoiling their best ever day with my old-man truths. When the bus finally arrived our driver took a minute interest in our various destinations and ignoring such minor inconveniences as bus stops he dropped us all off exactly where we wanted to go, (anyone for the supermarket?) He stopped for a pee in one of the caravan sites – because the council have closed all the public toilets in the town – a major problem for drivers on a ten hour shift – and then made an unscheduled diversion to pick up some passengers at St Non’s Well, whilst passing a free dog sweet to some walkers on the side of the road.

Goodness knows we have our own human parasites, predators and Dionysians; controllers and exploiters – many of them wolves pretending to be grannies – Red Riding Hood is, after all a story about humans not wolves; and the present election has been sheer torture as they strut their stuff – it’s been good to escape for a while.

That was then!

Our rented cottage around 52 years ago – our home for three years
The same cottage on Thursday

Generally speaking I prefer not to go back – it tends to leave me feeling a bit disarticulated; but this week, at Madame’s suggestion, we took our youngest son for a walk around the district surrounding our old Art School, and even went to see the cottage we lived in over fifty years ago. In a sense nothing had changed and yet everything had changed. We lived then on a 400 acre dairy farm which is now a 400 acre beef farm growing cereals rather than hay. The geography never changes, of course. The farm is still perched at the upper edge of a steep Cotswold valley; the brook still flows along the bottom and new trees, now the elms are all gone, have seized the opportunity to fill the gaps.

But the brook is looking a bit polluted and eutrophic, the cereal crop has been infiltrated by Black Grass which, because of its capacity for carrying ergot, is needing constant attention and spraying – one of the unforeseen side effects of warm and wet winters. A serious infestation can reduce the crop by up to 70%. There were no grazing cattle to be seen anywhere, nor any pigs or hens. The traditional mixed farm is gone; the dairy where we went every day to collect warm raw milk, has been repurposed as holiday rentals and the place where a barn once stood is now a storage area for caravans. The little terrier who once attacked anything that moved is a just memory and the matriarch of the family who we’d often see sitting outside on wooden chair plucking a chicken to the accompaniment of many growls from the dog is a memory too.

As for the Art School, most of the modern buildings we used have been demolished and the traditional 17th century stone ones mainly converted into flats. The lane which we walked down every day is infilled with tastefully modern houses, but the farm is still run by the next generation of the same family, the farmhouse is run as a bed and breakfast. Being there, in the place we spent three years, felt both familiar and yet remote – but more than any built features it was the silence that struck us. There was nothing louder than the rustling of leaves.

After our visit we went down to Corsham Court, which was closed to visitors and then on to look for a pub. The local, once called The Packhorse, has been renamed The Flemish Weaver as a nod to the refugees who brought their 17th century skills to the village and influenced the design of the tall houses in the High Street; but that was one place I didn’t particularly want to go back into. I prefer the memory of the awful rough cider and its drinkers who mostly got the shakes after about six months on the stuff – oh and the dangerous yellow ceiling that dripped liquid nicotine on the floor on the busy nights when heat and human sweat combined. We once took an American visitor there and after a few pints of scrumpy we missed him for a while and found him clinging to the lamp post outside.

But Wiltshire is an exquisitely beautiful county and so then we went off in search of another pub whose location I had misremembered; and we took to some fantastically narrow lanes and found Slaughterford again – who could resist such a name – but then had to drive on to the next village through an even narrower lane with no possibility of passing an oncoming vehicle and driving through deep potholes which threatened to smash the suspension. All very pioneering stuff.

Having finally reached the tiny hamlet we found the pub sitting next to the brook and looking for all the world as if it was auditioning for the part of the Potwell Inn – except for the fact (?) that the Potwell Inn is never that busy in my imagination and the real landlady isn’t nearly as well upholstered as the fat lady in the novel and didn’t seem at all likely to form a warm relationship with a wandering tramp like Alfred Polly. The food was good, though and our son seemed delighted with the two eye-catching young bar staff. I, obviously paid no attention to them all. Really!

The photos here were taken with a new camera with large numbers of options hiding behind the knobs. It’s ultra strong, waterproof and will take excellent macro photographs using focus stacking as soon as I can afford a suitable low level tripod. This was just a practice run but we’re soon off to Pembrokeshire where I’ll be able to give it a proper workout.

It’s felt as if we are snatching our food from under the wheels of the climate deniers

Potatoes, broad beans, tayberries and strawberries

At this time of year it’s hard not to be wide awake at 5.00am, and more particularly this year because the timetable on the allotment has been condensed by about a month. A late, wet spring and a mild winter have challenged our ingenuity, so when to sow and plant have become more of a gamble than ever. The plants, on the other hand, are able to compensate for their straightened circumstances and race to complete their cycle of growth. “Time is short” – they seem to think – “Let’s get on with it!”; and I know that talking to your vegetables is thought to be a sign of madness, but they talk to us all the time and it’s downright churlish not to at least acknowledge what they’re saying. At best we are intelligent companions to our allotment plots. We sow and hoe; feed and water, and try to protect them from beasties and east winds as best we can.

It can feel like endless hard labour; hitched like a trailer to the back of a runaway season. The Potwell Inn may seem like a dream life, furnished with warm evenings and cool wine; perfumed by nectar – but it ain’t nothing of the sort. Tasks pile up and all we can do is take the most urgent from the top of the pile while the bindweed shoulders its way across from the abandoned allotment next door. More like a guerilla war against entropy – made far more difficult by knuckle dragging politicians and their sweet talking lobbyists as they bury their tiny brains in the sand and pretend that nothing is going on. But there is always pleasure to be got from drawing on sixty years of experience. Picking just the right tool from the chaotic shed; the draw hoe that will slice the weeds off at the ground if we keep it sharp, the cultivating tool for working compost and pelleted organic fertilizer into the surface; the indispensable ridging tool which gets used just once a year. Hand tools aren’t just useful, they become companions.

The compensations are still there to be snatched out of harm’s way. Our new potatoes came on last week, and they are so sweet I’d pay a tenner for a plateful with a big knob of butter. We grow a first early called Red Duke of York and in early season they’re better even than the Arran Pilots that my father and grandfather swore by. Broad (Fava) beans have done well this year and, again, we eat half of them uncooked- straight off the plants – as we do the strawberries and tayberries. We revert to the prehistoric practise of foraging our patch of earth in spring and then freeze and store; make jams and pickles and sauces in the autumn. Our neighbours probably see our plot as a disgracefully unkempt and weedy riot, but the insects, bees and pollinators; the dragonflies and damselflies and hoverflies wouldn’t agree as they work the clumps of catmint and marjoram. On a good day you can hear them even above the continuous noise of the passing traffic and the ambulances ferrying the casualties of modern life to the hospital.

But then, of necessity, there’s much more than just allotmenteering to contend with. There’s cooking and eating; cleaning painting and decorating, shopping and baking before a moment can be found for a bit of botanising, let alone writing. Did I even mention arthritic hands and knees? – the unwanted honours of getting old. The average summer day begins appallingly early as light floods into the bedroom; the hours race by and by five o’clock in the afternoon and against all common sense we break open a bottle of vinous sedative and talk about love, and children (harder than herding cats) and plan campervan trips. In between times there are always new skills to learn, new accomplishments to strive for. There are no mountains to climb and no dull cruises to endure because our bucket lists are full of the mundane and the ordinary which – given a good light and a fair wind – can sparkle like a teenage dream.

So it’s now eight am and I’m off to the kitchen to make strong coffee and wake Madame. The day begins.

Hmmm – fish pie!

Down the AI rabbit hole part 2. Dandelion Days

Dandelion – Taraxacum agg. Harder to identify fully than you’d ever think possible

Late yesterday evening my son emailed with a far more comprehensive list of the wildlife mentioned by Henry Williamson in the novel Dandelion Days – grabbed up with his pro version of Google Gemini which is much better than my basic version when it comes to extracting text from the photographed PDF I found online. Far longer and more comprehensive but still nowhere near complete. It looks like the only reliable way of achieving a good result will be manually, which raises an interesting question. How important are lists anyway?

The point of trying to create a word cloud was to use it as a tool for unpacking Williamson’s relationship with the world of nature. I might think of it as a kind of Venn diagram where the two fields of interest – human and natural – overlap rather than glower at one another across a chasm of difference.

Lists are important to science of course, but plants have a good deal more interest than placing them in abstract and endlessly changing families. Plants can bring us almost to tears with their extravagant beauty; they can feed us, heal or poison us with equanimity. They can calm us or make us hallucinate; they can signal a whole culture (think leek or thistle), and signal the beginnings and ends of seasons, furnish feasts and famine, promote cooperation and strengthen community; signify the beginning and the end of life; bring us clothing dyes and shelter. Plants – and animals too – are among the most complex signifiers we have; from the scent of a madeleine to the smell of boiled cabbage in an evangelical theological college. To return to my imaginary Venn diagram, we humans are so deeply mutually inscribed with nature that the two circles meld into one seamless interdependence. Our history, geography and environment are mutual – The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / drives my green age (Dylan Thomas)

The Plough Monday that’s still celebrated in Elberton – one of my old parishes – is very different from the one below. It takes place in the parish church and the Ransomes plough (which had to be shortened to get it through the door) is carried in to be blessed by the Young Farmers. Some years ago I asked a local farmer if I could have a small quantity of corn to bless on the night, but when it turned up I was advised not to touch the bright blue grains because they were coated in a powerful systemic insecticide. Nonetheless the sense of community was always there – even on a freezing cold January night, as we celebrated the beginning of the farming year – more notional these days since many spring crops are sown in the autumn.

PLOUGH MONDAY was celebrated in the village in the third week of the new year, and Phillip on his last afternoon was able to see the strange procession. This rite had been held in Rookhurst ever since the walls of the first cottage had been raised from a mixture of straw, cowdung, mud and stones.The Ploughing Matches were held in the morning. At the far end of the field away from the spectators, behind the teams with their straw braided manes and tails bound with coloured ribbons, many birds screamed and wheeled; the gulls graceful and soaring, alighting with grey pinions upheld on a glistening furrow suddenly to seize a worm or a beetle-case; the rooks jostling and flapping sable wings, the starlings chittering and running with eagerness. Sweet chirrupings in the wake of the turmoil were made by the dishwashers, some of them winter visitants with slender breasts of daffodil, and all joying in the food turned up in the gleaming furrows. Bill Nye the crowstarver, and Samuel Caw his mate, a still smaller boy, were enjoying themselves during the Ploughing Matches, for repeatedly from the spinney in the Big Wheat-field, where with other boys they had a roaring fire, the clappers sounded with the clang of the rail, and the beating of tins and sometimes the hollow voices floating in the air.

Rookhurst rejoiced in the afternoon. It was a half holiday, and all made merry. The crowstarvers left their fire and turfed hut and clappers, and joined the revellers. Dressed in the skins of donkeys, and harnessed to an old plough with an applewood-share, they started off for the annual round of the cottage thresholds. Big Will’um, the bailiff, tall and gaunt and heavy- booted, guided the barefooted pair. He himself took long, loose strides; a boyhood in the heavy winter fields, dragging feet from the sticky clods, had given him a slouch. Every aged cottager, clad in best clothes, hobbled to his doorway. ‘Whoa, now, growled Big Will’um. The pair pattered to a then wheeled several times before the cottage, drawing the plough after them. The old people beamed, and nodded, and their gratitude when the corn-spirit had given its blessing. Now the garden would be in good heart for the year’s potatoes, beans, onions, cabbages, lettuces, the roots of rhubarb in the sun-warmed corner. The long black pig not get fever, but fatten well and perhaps reach a weight of twenty score. [400 lbs]

From cottage to cottage they passed, making as to furrow the ground before each one. George Davidson carried a blown-up pig’s bladder on the end of a stick, with which he belaboured grinning labourers and the padding donkeys alike. Ribbons were wound round his body, and a red paper cap was on his head. About a hundred children, men and women, many with cameras, followed the procession, accompanied by dogs of all sizes and breeds. Everyone was happy. Bill Nye had never grinned so much before, enwrapped as he was in the ass’s skin. He knew that a big good meal was at the end of it, and, with luck, a packet of fags and a pair of boots.

Willie felt proud that this was his village, so impressed was Phillip, who declared that he had never heard of such a glorious idea before. Neither Jack nor his cousin was able to tell him why the asses’ skins were always used by the boys who drew the plough. ‘It’s only done in this village, having died out elsewhere,’ said Jack.

‘It’s a jolly old custom too,’ remarked Willie. ‘At least as old as Doomsday Book.’

It was a survival of the rites of the corn-spirit practised since the first thought of man was to put the idea of a god into stone and food. Likewise at the harvest to eat the first-fruits was to have within the body the power of the corn; a survival, possibly, of instinct combined with early human reasoning: the practice of eating the conquered and, therefore, possessing his strength and cunning. 

From Chapter 20 of Dandelion Days by Henry Williamson, first published in 1930

April 2019 at the Lost Gardens of Heligan

Down the AI rabbit hole

asparagus autumn Camino campervan repairs climate change climate emergency composting covid 19 deep ecology economic collapse environment environmental catastrophe environmental crisis field botany foraging Fungi garden pests global climate crisis global heating green spirituality herbal medicine intensive farming locally sourcing lockdown macro photography meditation no-dig pickling and preserving pilgrimage polytunnels preserving raised beds rats regenerative farming rewilding Sourdough species extinctions spring technology urban ecology urban wildlife walking water storage weeds wildflower meadows

What I really wanted to do here was to produce a word cloud, similar to the tag cloud above; but using the names of all the wildflowers mentioned in “Dandelion Days”, the first of four novels comprising Henry Williamson’s sequence “The Flax of Dream” first published in 1930; rapidly approaching 100 years ago.

Now I know that some readers will be aware that Williamson’s reputation has been tarnished by his (brief) association with fascist ideology, but the four volumes of “The Flax of Dream” and the huge sequence of seventeen novels comprising “The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight” were an inspiration to me when I first read them 50 years ago; especially for their uncanny connection with nature. The writer of “Tarka the Otter” and all those other wildlife books seemed to understand -like a man outside his own time – that he was a part of nature rather than the evolutionary telos and heroic conqueror of it all. And, after all, Williamson wasn’t the only writer or artist to disappear into the dark rabbit hole of fascism. Ezra Pound; Wyndham Lewis; even the saintly TS Eliot and numerous members of the Royal Family and the nobility flirted with it too. Oswald Moseley spent time in prison for it and his wife, Diana, one of the Mitford sisters was an enthusiastic fascist.

I was once standing on the old bridge below Damery Lake in Gloucestershire when I had an extraordinary daytime vision. I was suddenly possessed by the spirit of a young army officer who, in the midst of some terrible First World War battle, had imagined himself standing in exactly the place I was, and longing for home. The stone bridge – which could once have been a narrower pack bridge over the Little Avon, flows north west without much enthusiasm towards Berkeley Pill where my old friend Dick England milled flour. Along its course are several reedy and tree lined ponds and lakes containing – they say – brown trout. A paradise of hunting, shooting and fishing for an Edwardian gentleman. That soldier could, in my imagination, have been the young Henry Williamson whose WW1 role was to drive teams of horses back and forth towards the lines with supplies of food and weapons; perhaps returning with the casualties. His whole subsequent life was troubled by those fond memories of childhood wrestling with the destructive madness of war.

And so, with that bit of background, off to the AI rabbit hole. My memories of the book were of it being packed with the names of plants, birds, insects and small mammals, and so it occurred to me that I could recover those names in some kind of list by using the awesome power of AI. With a lot of help from my son I worked out how, theoretically to do it and set to locating and downloading a PDF file of the whole book into my laptop. So far so simple. Next came the tricky matter of the question. How exactly should I phrase my end to what Gemini likes to call a conversation. The opener as it were.

  • Q. List the plants in “Dandelion Days ……” etc
  • A. “Dandelion”
  • Q. List the plants in the whole text of the novel in my file ###. pdf
  • A. There are no plants mentioned in ####.pdf
  • Q. Make a list of plants in Devon in the early 20th century
  • A. 3 trees and 4 plants and the enthusiastic claim that there were lots more of them.

It was becoming clear that AI couldn’t distinguish a plant from all the other strings of letters that comprise the novel and so I took myself and the original knackered paperback Faber book back to a quiet corner and discovered what I’d known all along ; that Dandelion Days is a botanical handbook of early 20th century wildlife as well as being an affecting account of a middle class childhood lived at one with the natural world.

So there will be no word cloud – not even a long list, unless I do it manually; but my memory is vindicated and I’ve found once again one of the wellsprings of my own imagination. In the near-century since publication the natural world has been irreparably scarred and impoverished and would have become unrecognisable by Williamson himself, by G M Hopkins, George Ewart Evans, Richard Jefferies and all the others; poets and painters of the old landscape that now lingers in the background of our imagination in the etiolated form of a vague love of nature.

Whether or not some kind of spirituality could be woven out of the dry remains of books like the Flax of Dream; a nest into which new life could be born, depends on whether we could reset our understanding of our place on the earth. Whether some understanding of natural grace could drive out the squat gods of greed with their fundamentalist credo, remains an open challenge to us.

But three things at least are clear – we won’t find it through politicians but by poets, musicians and artists; we won’t need a high priesthood of retired oil executives to keep us in our place and finally we sure as hell won’t get any help from AI!

Hemlock Water Dropwort – Oenanthe crocata. Step away from the poison!

Hmm

Whitefield in full flower

It’s been a sad roller coaster of a week with all the highs cancelled by some awful lows. Last weekend we were in the Bannau Brycheiniog – Brecon Beacons, staying with friends. I’d been in conversation with the doctor about my AF medication and she had contacted the consultant cardiologist for advice. Out of the blue I received a text message from her with a suggestion of a new drug whose side effects were even more severe (and dangerous) than the previous lot. The message said that this was the “drug of last resort” – well thanks! I’ve always wondered if doctors make you ill, but this felt like the threat of some serious iatrogenic harm. The Wednesday high was a field trip to Woodchester Mansion; a lovely but enigmatic unfinished building set in a magnificent Cotswold valley. I was leading (or supposed to be), but the group instantly split into birders, entomologists, trippers and botanists who all wanted to go their separate ways – notwithstanding my hard work on risk assessment maps and species lists – and so we threw in our lot with with the botanists and thrashed our way up and down 600 feet of steep Cotswold valley. The upside was a personal guided tour/tutorial where we found half a dozen rarities that we’d never have noticed in a hundred years and I discovered a whole pile of ideas about plant recording.

Friday was never going to be a fun day because we were going to an anaesthetist friend’s funeral. He died in the appalling way that only Motor Neurone Disease can offer. The church was full of consultants who radiated the kind of smooth skinned self confidence that my old friend never displayed; the vicar barked at us like a performing seal and I felt the meaning of life and death draining away between the medieval floor tiles. The consolation of old village friends just about kept me going but there were no tears accessible to me in the etiolated atmosphere. It seemed as if his widow and children had their grief airbrushed out as the torrent of worldly achievements, words and music shuttered the darkness away. As we left down the lane I found relief at last in a woundwort plant and crushed its leaves, releasing its powerfully unpleasant smell. Real; real! On Saturday an email announced the death of another college friend; news came of Michael Mosley’s disappearance and the brutal slaughter of hundreds more Palestinians in Gaza. Even the thought of an imminent election brought no hope . “Homini lupus est” – man is a wolf to man. Then from the sublime to the gorblimey I managed to lose my hearing aids and I was plunged into an underwater world of deafness.

By Monday Madame had helped me find the hearing aids in the communal dumpster in the basement and I cooked a curry. Those two clauses were not in any sense connected. We decided a trip to Whitefield would cheer us both up, and so we drove over to Dyrham Park and found three species of orchid within a riot of unimproved meadow plants. Pyramidal, Purple Spotted and Bee orchids – all of them very small this year. The field will soon be cut for hay, but today it was thrillingly lovely. Among the pictures, the Buff Tailed bumble bee is feeding on Rough Hawkweed; a flowering head of Crested Dog’s Tail grass; the field white and gold like the Milky Way, with Oxeye Daisies and the same Rough Hawkweed; and the three orchids

Thanks for the memory – it’s pretty wild out there!

The neglected pavement level view outside our flat

It was the Biting Stonecrop – Sedum acre – in flower, that caught my eye first; that’s the very bright green plant with thickened drought proof leaves and yellow flowers in the centre of the picture. We haven’t seen it there before. But when I looked at it on the larger screen at home I saw the Mexican Fleabane; some Canadian Fleabane gathering strength in the background; some unidentifiable out of focus moss at the bottom and above it the most lovely slime mould – which rarely gets this big on an urban pavement and has the gift of moving very very slowly from place to place. We had some on the fire escape once that took a leisurely six months to descend the steps and set up home on a road less trampled by human feet.

On the wall below the raised pavement we’ve got Wall Rue, a fern; Herb Robert, a geranium; then in a narrow crack at the base there’s Sowthistle, Nipplewort, Dandelion (of course) and half a dozen others, surviving historic dowsings with Glyphosate which was replaced by salt crystals and then the road sweeper’s scraper. Around and about the car park (ex builders’ yard), there are over forty species of wildflower – many of them tiny versions of their grander selves which live in less inhospitable environments. It’s often hands and knees botany in these urban settings.

When we talk about nature and wildflowers, insects and mammals our default setting is somewhere green and pleasant; somewhere we usually have to drive miles to get to, armed with expensive kit; GPS units, field guides and binoculars. However, if you were to ask me where you could see otters in Bath, I’d have to say under Sainsbury’s bridge. Red Kite? south of the river. Buzzards – anywhere if you keep your eyes peeled. Peregrine falcons? nesting on the spire of St John’s Church.

The shocking truth is that if you love the wild – and by that I mean the natural world that’s rather the bit neglected by humans than the exhausted and overmanaged bit that we call countryside, then aside from National Trust land, nature reserves and SSSI’s you’re more likely to be able to feast on it in the city these days.

Yesterday we walked over to Widcombe to buy some decent sausages. Our practice is to eat less meat but of better welfare standards and quality. We took the riverside path as usual, and in the process we passed the Bath Quays site which is very slowly taking shape. In the first year either the architects or the local council had specified wildflower borders in the flood control areas. They lasted for a single year, but because they were probably an imported seed mixture an incongruous jumble of flowers that would never normally be seen together in the wild; they died back and were replaced by the usual thugs and vagabonds which just loved the rich imported soil brought in from elsewhere. Ironically, behind the now unimpressive borders was the blighted site of phase two, a demolished car park. This thin, impoverished and fenced off building site is now blessed by a magnificent display of the genuinely wild. My favourite, the Vipers Bugloss has been shuffling from patch to patch as the park area has been “improved” and has now colonized and spread across quite a large area, but as we walked along the 200 metre boundary I gave up counting after I reached 20 species. There was Mugwort; two kinds of Sow thistle, creeping buttercup, Black Medick, Hedge Mustard, Wall Barley, Poppy, Rye grass, False Oat grass, Ragwort, Mallow and Oxeye daisy; and two or three Geranium species, Docks and Sorrels. There were Spear thistles and Creeping thistles and It was all quite overwhelming and I was prompted to wonder whether I should be using a voice recorder and transcription app on my phone to record the sheer variety. The heartbreaking truth is that these will all disappear under a blanket of flats, offices and retail units, leaving a perfect, manicured and expensive view of our grossly polluted river .

So here are some photos of the treasures that live in the most impoverished and sometimes squalid places beneath our feet. We should really value them much more than we do.

Vipers Bugloss.

The hungry gap slowly closes

Most non – gardeners would probably imagine that a hungry gap in the allotment year would come some time in the darkest part of winter; but it doesn’t. It comes around now -late spring and early summer when seeds are sown, plants raised and pricked out, but when there’s nothing much to eat. The potatoes were planted a month ago and are growing well; the tomatoes, aubergines and peppers in the polytunnel are all growing strongly but it’ll be some time before we can taste the fruits of our labours. Apart from overwintered Swiss Chard and a bit of spinach which are both looking a bit knackered by now but still taste good; and a few stored Crown Prince squashes, the first signs of the food year where we live is an early picking of strawberries and some broad beans from the polytunnel.

I wrote about growing broad beans in the tunnel a few years ago, and was a bit put off by a friend’s letter saying that if the flowering plants get too hot they would not set pods. That’s a good point, particularly after a succession of very hot early spring weather in previous years; but on the other hand, there’s a large element of gambling in gardening and this year we decided to risk a couple of dozen plants to the global climate emergency, and it looks as if our gamble has paid off, after a cool and wet spring. To be sure we planted successional broad beans outside, beginning with a November sowing, and they are all thriving obligingly and at different stages of growth but we had our first picking of tunnel grown beans today.

Our polytunnel container strawberries were doing well when we left to go to Cornwall for two weeks, but the watering arrangements seem to have broken down and we lost a few plants to drought; so we’ve been busy weeding and watering to try to rescue as many as we can.

Two weeks away has also given the bindweed a good start in the annual battle, but we’re as stubborn as hell, and although we never beat it, we certainly give it a headache. We’ve a half decent fruit set; the transplanted Blackberry is slowly recovering and the Tayberry is a mass of green fruit. Tayberry jelly is even more fragrant and beautiful than bramble jelly, but I didn’t boil last year’s batch quite long enough to set it well. Possibly it needs a bit of pectin. I think it would make a splendid ice cream – just as damson does.

Yesterday we took ourselves off to Bradford on Avon to meet some old friends for lunch. We always catch the train to our lunches so we can have a glass (or two) of wine. They took us to see a beautifully restored Saxon church dedicated to St Laurence. I suspect if you look at the photo below you’ll notice that there may have been a much bigger church there at some point – you can still see an old roof line and the imprint of what may once have been a clerestory. It’s a glorious jumble of original, later and restored stonework that offered the traditional steel offertory box set into the wall as well as a bank card reader for 21st century visitors. In places the stone floor and steps were polished by centuries of pilgrim feet. There was also what looked like an original Saxon font and possibly the faint remains of medieval painting. As we crossed back over the old bridge, now being hammered by continuous traffic, we were looking to see if the otters which had been spotted recently by our friends would put in an appearance, but I should think they are largely nocturnal. I absolutely love trains. My dad was a railwayman and we lived next to the railway line which once ran almost past our current front door. The river Avon which runs past our flat and also through the middle of Bradford on Avon flows through Melksham and then mysteriously turns north in the direction of Malmesbury. See how nature makes its own mind up about where rivers should flow.

Lunch was good, and the twelve minute train journey back home flew past twice as quickly as a boring and congested car journey.

St Laurence church in Bradford on Avon.

This is what a wild garden is capable of!

If you look carefully you’ll see the harbour rocks quite far below

I took five photos of this little garden overlooking the harbour and the village of Portscatho today and I just had to show one of them full size. We’ve been passing it for years ; we’ve even sat in it and rested on our way back to the campsite but – unbelievably – never stopped to examine the plants more carefully. The garden is, or may be, a little garden of remembrance. There’s certainly a monument to the soldiers who died in the Burma Campaign during the Second World War and there’s also a disarmed sea mine with a coin slot for donations to charity.

We’ve been here for two weeks of almost continuous fine sunshine apart from the mother of all storms the day after we arrived, and there isn’t a shadow of doubt that here on Roseland and across on the Lizard, when the sun shines the landscape is dressed like a bride; no expense of nature spared.

So we were there, sitting there eating chocolate and Madame said to me – “if we had a garden it would have to be like this”. Of course, we have the allotment but that’s somehow quite different; productive, perhaps even utilitarian. We sow a few wild seeds and encourage the less thuggish weeds to join the party but that kind of wild takes an enormous amount of time and hard work, and of course it’s about as far from any idea of natural as you could imagine.

Wild gardening is self-effacing. We watch the local plants and see where they grow and when they do best but they’re very much urban, city bound plants; miniaturised and tough as old boots. They flower and grow old fast to avoid the droughts of pavement life. Tiny, resourceful living plants eking out an existence on pavements and cracks in the wall. I’m not knocking them, but a garden is essentially an assembly, a gathering. A truly wild garden is only truly wild when it’s self-replicating.

Ignoring the tidy it up brigade is hard work. Those who deprecate the absence of straight lines of Primroses and Pansies can always nail their grids to their own gardens. It’s not anarchy, it’s a choreographed display of sheer self- organized plant cooperation. It wouldn’t be a silly idea to run a half-day introduction to field botany in that one small space – there’s so much to learn and I wondered if there might be a skilled botanist somewhere in the background.

I didn’t count or list the plants, but they all exist harmoniously in that happy invention, the Cornish wall; a loose assemblage of stone and earth, slightly less than shoulder high and populated so perfectly it would make a Chelsea Flower Show garden look strained and artificial. Just from memory there were Hogweed, Cow Parsley and Hemlock Water Dropwort; Lilies; young self-seeded Echium pinana – the most spectacular members of the Borage family, ten or twelve feet tall like a giant Viper’s Bugloss and, in summer, alive with ants and bees; two species of Medick; Foxgloves; Red Campions; loads of Babington’s Leeks and more. All unadorned by seedsmen’s gaudy favourites and all perfectly adapted to their situation. Born neighbours. The lawn was a mass of daisies, the seats were warm and facing the morning sun and we, for ten the minutes or so that we rested there, were in some sort of paradise.

And, of course the whole garden was alive with insects. Later as we walked back we passed a couple of fields where hay was being turned and baled. Above us a group of four opportunistic Buzzards, attended by a mob of smaller birds trying to drive them away, were circling above the mown field looking for escaping mice. Once or twice they dropped behind the hedge in pursuit of some small victim and then, bored by the persistence of the smaller birds, flew off, mewing to one another.

I don’t know who’s responsible for the upkeep of that little paradisiacal space but they deserve a huge thank-you and a Chelsea Gold medal for standing back and letting it sing its uniquely Cornish song.