Category: Natural History

Taking a leek to avoid a mutiny by Madame

I know. Sometimes my enthusiasm for creating long lists can be a bit – or very -trying because listing every plant we pass and then photographing it can make a seaside walk feel like crossing a desert. On Thursday there was a mutinous atmosphere that grew above us like a thundercloud. The secret of a long relationship is to know when to give up; so that’s what I did and we concentrated solely on one plant; a wild leek which is pretty rare but which happens to be a resident of our two favourite places in Cornwall – the Lizard peninsula and the Roseland peninsula. It’s a variety of the “normal” wild leek which is, in itself, rare; but this one is known as Babington’s Leek. The two are very close, and it’s only possible to distinguish them when they’ve developed those natty allium spikes at the end of their season. Wild leeks are full of seeds and Babingtons contain bulbils – tiny little readymade clones of the mother plant which drop off and take root in the soil around her. In the collection of photographs at the top, you can see the plant at various stages shown from two sites and I think the tiny bulbils coiled together in their filmy cover are just a bit sinister. They look like Medusa’s haircut. Ironically, you can buy the bulbils online and try to grow them in your garden so long as it provides exactly the right soil, seasonal weather and temperature and all the other conditions they need. Alternatively you could take your holidays here and enjoy them in their wild state like we do. The colony we photographed here on Roseland was strimmed off some time in the last couple of days in order not to scratch the sides of some grossly polluting SUV on its way to a holiday cottage. Grrrrr.

We’ve been so lucky with the weather; fourteen out of fifteen days of sunshine and I’ve been testing some AI plant identification and recording apps for a talk I’m doing in the autumn. None of them are perfect and some of them come up with some wonderful howlers. One recording app I was testing managed to lose 25 of my 102 identified species which, sadly, I hadn’t committed to paper. None of them except one were at all rare but it was enough to make me resolve to keep parallel paper records for the time being.

I’ve no idea how or why I’ve developed such an attachment to field botany; it kind of crept up on me when I wasn’t paying attention. Forbidden to do any serious surveys over the weekend, I decided to clear up my personal muddles with four closely related white wildflowers. Disambiguating two Stitchworts and two Mouse Ears all with similar – (same Campion family) – flowers sounds like an odd way of finding joy but they all grow close to the campsite and nobody would think it odd if I spent my time doing crosswords. Mission accomplished yesterday we were able to spend our time lazing around and watching our neighbours. Holidays seem to be very stressful and we’ve witnessed a few smouldering rows and a walk out; we watched some young women set out on a club night. They made me feel like Wellington before the Battle of Waterloo, who said of his troops that he didn’t know what they’d do to the enemy but “by God they terrify me!” One of them had an American Bully dog which caught sight of a rabbit, pulled his lead out of the ground and set off at such speed his lead caught around his owner’s leg, dragged her along the ground and damaged the skin on her leg. It was almost like being at home – but without the clouds of weed. Anyway nobody died, and the girls came back quietly at 2.00am.

I’ve delayed taking my medication until after we’ve gone for our long walks in the cool mornings and I feel miles better. Today we covered just under five miles and stopped for a healthy bacon butty at the Thirstea Cafe. On the way around I found three plants to record very quickly and slipped on the wet grass to do a kind of nine step polka down the track, whilst attempting to regain my balance. Thank goodness no-one saw me.

Behold – the new ones (for me) left to right; Wild Clary, Beaked Hawksbeard, Spotted Medick and Spear Thistle. Incidentally I now know the Latin names for all these – I have to, in order to record them; but the English names are much more evocative – see Geoffrey Grigson’s “An Englishman’s Flora” for an encyclopaedic view of all the poetic names.

Is a hedgerow really the site of an endless struggle.

Druce Cranesbill, Geranium X Oxonianum. The markings remind me of Henbane – another (poisonous) stunner.

I don’t really get the idea that nature is an unending struggle for survival – red in tooth and claw – and all that violent guff which gets pressed into service to provide an ideological scaffolding for behaving in greedy and vile ways – as if Tennyson were a fan of the dark satanic mills. This isn’t a sudden insight brought on by a dose of Cornish spring (although life feels a lot better when the sun shines). We’ve had five days wandering the footpaths and hedgerows of the Roseland peninsula; photographing and recording plants as we go, and this time I was paying particular attention to the succession of plants; especially the carrot family, the Apiaceae, as they emerge one by one in the spring.

I remember the first time I tried to get to grips with this family of lookalikes. I’d noticed the plant known as Alexanders – almost always the first to emerge with its shiny celery-like leaves and an umbrella-like flower head of creamy yellow-white. I’d just bought my very first flower book, published by Warnes, and I went about finding my plant in the traditional beginners’ mode; turning the pages one by one until I found an illustration that looked right. So far so good, but fired with enthusiasm I went on to look at the others in the same family and when I came across some fine drawings of the seeds (alarmingly similar) which were the ultimate key to naming them all; I sighed, shut the book and didn’t open those pages again for years.

Six decades later I know a little bit more (not that much!) and it’s all very interesting, because there’s a distinct succession of these plants every year. Alexanders is usually first to appear as a handsome plant, but soon starts to yellow off and look very tatty. Then comes Cow Parsley – an unfortunate name for such a dazzlingly white and beautiful plant with lace-like leaves; shortly followed by Hogweed and all the others, and yes – it’s quite hard to tell some of them apart because they rarely grow side by side simultaneously. They go on mucking me about, popping out for their brief lives one by one until October and then there’s only the seeds to identify, and they are so beautiful when you look at them through a hand lens; ridged and horned as if carved by a miniaturist sculptor. They emerge, flourish, flower and die but I’ve never ever heard a Hogweed beating up a Cow parsley plant in the dead of night while no-one’s supposed to be about. I’ve never seen a Pignut abuse a Wild Carrot or cheat a Sanicle of its inheritance nor a Hemlock Water Dropwort leave its stream to poison some Rock Samphire and spoil a forager’s day. I just can’t see any evidence that there’s a battle for survival going on out there unless it’s to develop some resistance to chemicals.

The plants – not just the Carrot family – seem to have evolved a scheme to allow all of them to flourish and complete their life cycle in relative peace apart from the predation of cows, hogs and numerous small bites from insects. They grow to different heights; the later ones being generally taller than the early ones and pop their clogs before they become a burden to their neighbours – and I’ve never heard any moaning about the brevity of life from the depths of a hedge or a ditch. By and large they seem enviably contented, if that’s not a category error. We humans like to whinge about the way our happiness has been stolen (always someone else’s fault) when in fact we’ve hidden it because we don’t want to own it. Before long, the safe place where we concealed it is forgotten and we can relish the tragedy of our lives over a couple of bottles of cheap wine. Plants don’t do that.

I have the great fortune of meeting a teacher who’s thought deeply about this and whose work crosses many borders that are patrolled by legions of gatekeepers – a brave soul. He explains the fruits of his labours as “Natural Inclusion” – as against Natural Selection in its purest and darkest form. You can Google the phrase and you’ll see who he is in much more detail, his name’s Alan and he’s a great teacher. He uses scientific conceptual language, but he also uses poetry and painting to express his ideas.

Basically, and dangerously simplifying, with a little help from Google Gemini here’s a very concise summary of an important antidote to lazy evolutionary thinking that plonks us down in the middle of a merciless battle. If ever we needed to visualize ourselves as a working and living part of nature it’s now. There are many threads that have joined together to create our bondage to greed and exploitation as if it were something natural, and we have a few decades at best to cut through them and set ourselves and the ecosystem free before it’s too late.

Alan Rayner proposes a new concept called natural inclusion which challenges some aspects of traditional evolutionary theory. Here are the key points of his ideas:

  • Natural Inclusion (NI): This is Rayner’s core concept. He argues that nature fundamentally works through inclusion, not separation. Boundaries between things are seen as dynamic interactions, not fixed lines. Imagine the difference between walking through a doorway (inclusion) versus hitting a brick wall (exclusion).
  • Questioning Natural Selection: Rayner believes natural selection isn’t the whole story of evolution. He proposes that the process of change is more about the flow of energy and the dynamic interplay between organisms and their environment.
  • Nature as a Guide: Rayner suggests looking to nature for moral guidance. He proposes honesty, reasonableness, and kindness as core values because they reflect natural processes.

Rayner uses art, alongside writing, to explore these ideas. His paintings serve as a way to connect with people who might not be drawn to scientific explanations.

St Francis talked about the sun, the moon and the stars; the animals and the earth as our brothers and sisters. I found the Geranium in the photo on the footpath leaving Portscatho. It probably escaped from a garden somewhere nearby and I instantly fell in love with it. If our current worldview doesn’t allow us to fall in love with a plant, we need to get another world view!

Common Vetch

What do you mean – what does it mean? Botany as a sensual pursuit.

The narrow road down to Percuil harbour with the hedgerow in in full flower.

I know there’s a process underlying the transformation of a spring walk in the sunshine into a list such as the one in my notebook yesterday. There’s another page for Wednesday with different plants on it and together they total 50 plants identified, recorded and sent off to the national database. The process must look hilarious to passers-by – old bloke on his knees, ferreting through the bottom of a hedge and talking loudly to himself as his partner walks on, oblivious to the one-sided conversation. A bonkers display of eccentricity. “Is he alright there?” I can imagine someone asking. “Is he lost?”

Well, in a manner of speaking I am lost. Ecstatic. Taken out of myself to another level of consciousness. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that I’m a bit of an outlier when it comes to plants. I know plenty of able bodied and perfectly sane (they might say) academics whose interest in plants can only be expressed in the incomprehensible private language of a Magisterium which exists to defend the McGuffin, or at least its McGuffin; plenty of others are available. It’s easier to learn Icelandic than discern the subtleties of polyploidy, or find the exact term to describe the shape of a leaf. I wish them no ill, I just wish they’d drag themselves away from their scanning electron microscopes and get out there amongst the plebs, (the) hoipolloi; the thugs, weeds and escapees; the abandoned pre-industrial feedstocks, the temporary residents doomed to rapid extinction, the ones threatened by foragers, collectors and developers and the ones that can give users visions, paranoia and even end your life in grisly ways.

My grandfather, who was both well educated and self-taught (they’re not mutually exclusive) had a set of encyclopedias; and one photograph has affected my whole life. It’s a photo of a bloke in a brown warehouse coat – ie working class; the properly educated scientist would have had a white lab coat – standing next to a pile of buckets, jars, beakers and test tubes each containing the correct quantity of some element or compound thought at the time to be essential to life. You might call it Frankenstein’s larder. The caption assured us that this was everything necessary to make a human being , except that the great mystery of the animating principle that drew them all together in the form of a living, breathing – let’s say – poet was not even hinted at. Although I never knew it at the time, this is a form of reductionism, which can be helpful if used properly as a metaphor for understanding complex phenomena; but lethal when used as a slam dunk proof that nothing is greater than the refuse from the pathologist’s table.

Yes to DNA if it helps us to understand the mysteries of relatedness in living things; yes to scanning electron microscopy when it helps us to visualise the pollen grain, the fungal spore and the bacterium; but plants embody so much more. Forgive me for mentioning my earlier life but to worship the partial and ignore the ineffable mystery of the whole is the classic definition of idolatry. We need to take that kind of science out into the world, on to the streets of a ne’er do well culture where it can have some sense knocked into it and its sense of wonder restored.

The supreme irony of all this is that so many people – insultingly known as ordinary – already get it. They go for walks in the sunshine and pause to look at the plants and flowers and absorb something important, as if there were an invisible energy there, flowing back and forth between the hedgerow and the walker. When I first began to encounter flowers and plants as a child I valued their immediate impact – bright as a Daffodil, blowsy as a Gladiolus, tarty as a Dahlia. The plants our Mum grew in the garden. Wild plants often lack that degree of egotism. These days as I learn more about them, I have come to love their complexity. The humble Buttercup has at least nine closely related forms; the Dandelion approaching 300 and don’t even mention the Blackberry . I don’t understand and can’t unravel a fraction of it, but that cloud of unknowing does nothing to diminish my joyful wonder at finding the most common plant hiding amongst its taller neighbours on the side of the footpath. Madame walks on the moment she hears me say HELLOOO in my best botanical voice, and carries on alone, while I’m chatting to my new friend.

I love the way that the plant world can even finesse a colour. This week the Stitchwort and the Cow Parsley (Queen Anne’s Lace is a much nicer name), are shining out from the hedge with an intense white that reproaches the very slightly creamy Hogweed and the distinctly yellowish Alexanders. As a not very accomplished botanical artist I really struggle to find a way of expressing the dynamic range of the hedgerows and meadows. The intense blue of the Germander Speedwell is not better than the pale blue of the Pale Flax; just another note in the huge overarching colour cloud. The colour, shape and pattern of plants are as much an inspiration to the artist as they are data to the taxonomist – look no further than William Morris, Claude Monet and Ivon Hitchens among hundreds of others. And the colours go beyond what we can see into the ultra violet. The honey bee may be seeing something very different than we do.

Taste and flavour are a whole new botanical delight. Let’s put gin aside for a moment; but even poets get in on the act. Here’s William Carlos Williams poem “This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

It’s a fair bet that the plums in the fridge weren’t just large sloes. Which of us hasn’t tried to convince one of our children that the sloe is as delicious as any plum in order to teach them a memorable lesson in plant identification. There are occasions when the taste of a plant – like the real plums in William’s poem can transport you. As children we used to nibble the young leaves of Hawthorn – we called them bread and cheese. Yesterday I found some Scurvy Grass and I nibbled it. It tasted like fiery horseradish and I was immediately filled with the thought of a barrel of the filthy tasting pickled plant being served to sailors as a preventative for scurvy. With care, and above dog pissing height I often take a bite but never forage except for field mushrooms, oh and sloes which transform gin into something lovely if you’ve got the patience to wait – or sloe vodka which is just as nice but does it a bit .quicker

Smell and taste being closely related, the obvious candidate for this category would be Ramsons (wild Garlic) or Three Cornered Garlic but yesterday offered an altogether quieter but deeper pleasure. As we emerged from the footpath through the woods where we’d feasted our senses on Early Purple Orchids and bluebells, we stepped into a field beside the Percuil river that was full of Sweet Vernal Grass in flower. The books will tell you that the scent of Sweet Vernal Grass is “new mown hay” – and it is; except for the fact that 97% of the wildflower meadows that would once have been cut for hay have now disappeared in favour of Ryegrass and Clover leys. Hardly anyone makes hay in any case so to most young people the “new mown hay” smell is about as meaningful as the smell of moon dust. I’m lucky not to be in that unfortunate group because putting up with knackered knees and all the other indignities of age is the price of knowing that intoxicating perfume, described by the reductivists as Coumarin, because as a child my sister and me onced helped our grandfather make proper hay on his smallholding in the Chilterns. You could spray Coumarin on silage, haylage or concentrated cattle feed and it would still smell horrible. Sweet Vernal grass is the intoxicating perfume of Spring and on Wednesday it swept across us in sweet waves, evoking haunting memories of the lost sensuality of the historic countryside.

Perfumed field near Percuil

All of which brings me to sounds. When I was a teenager I used to cycle over to Dyrham Park, climb over the wall and just lie in the long grass of what’s still called Whitefield. If you want to know what a real wildflower meadow looks like you won’t find a better example this close to Bath. The sound of the wind in the grass and trees is one of the great pleasures of solitude.

So here’s to the benighted idiots of the past. The ploughmen and apothecaries, the wise women, the monks in the infirmaries and the witches; the alchemists, dyers and weavers, the poets and artists who loved plants and flowers but allowed them to be so much more than the sum of their parts. I’ve been filling in the records for all these plants, but apart from the obvious questions like what’s your name? how dare you record this plant you peasant? what’s it called? where was it? was it in flower? ……. I can’t find anywhere the most important question of all – what does it mean? – to you? to the earth?

Early Purple Orchid – smells of Lily of the Valley when young but then of blackcurrant (cats’ pee!) later on.

A catch up on the allotment and a warning to be careful what you wish for – just in case you get it!

So here, at the end of a heavy duty week on the allotment are some of the fruits of our labours after a long and difficult winter. Crops are growing; even broad beans in the polytunnel are in pod and fattening up – which was especially nice when we saw that they were selling at £7 a kilo in the supermarket yesterday. Spuds are pushing through and the tunnel strawberries are about to begin their ripening. Spared any early frosts this year the trees have had a good fruit set. The bottom right photo is of a hybrid blackberry that languished in the fruit cage for three seasons so we took a chance on moving it to a better position with more light and air. Eight years after taking over an overgrown field, the plot is finally looking established. There’s a settled feel to it that; after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing; suggests that the allotment has accepted our guardianship. There’s a profound difference in the progress of happy plants over unhappy ones and any successes we have are down to noticing what the plants like best and making sure they get it. The strawberries, for instance, have runnered all over the place and made their way to a narrow bed beside the polytunnel where they are protected from winds in any quarter, and bask in its radiated warmth. It would be the last place I’d have chosen to put them! – but the earth is kept moist from rain runoff, the sun passes happily through the polythene cover and it’s one of the few low-traffic areas on the plot.

Gardening takes up a lot of time and energy, but I’m a great believer in texture and so we’ve tried hard to keep going on other things – like botanising and taking trips in the campervan. I’ve written before about the degree of planning that I do before a trip and I’ve made great use of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s magnificent databases and distribution maps. But one thing that’s always frustrated me in the past was the fact that ordinary members of the public (like me) only got limited access to the detailed information contained in 40 million records. This meant that if I wanted to check the location of a plant I was interested in I could only get an approximate 2X2 kilometer square on the map. Trust me, scouring 4 square kilometers of bare countryside for a tiny clump of flowers doesn’t half slow you down. There is one particular plant that I’ve been looking for for three years.

Anyway this last week the database was opened up to all BSBI members, with some provisions for protecting especially rare and endangered plants and this gave far more detailed locational information. I’m much more interested in the kind of unthreatened plants which are especially fussy about their environment whether that be pavements or lead mining slag heaps. I had to apply for access and rather to my surprise it was granted. I fell on the database like a hungry wolf and quickly discovered how close I’d been to finding my three year quarry – that’s a trip for the next couple of weeks. But then we’d also been to a lecture on ferns a few weeks ago and one difficult to find plant had cropped up in the midst of one of my favourite places on earth; not pretty but, let’s say, post-industrial. So a quick search online and within seconds I’d got a reasonably precise location. But instead of the adrenaline rush I’d expected I felt a bit ashamed of myself – as if it was cheating. That’s one to resolve later but it feels as if I enjoy hunting more than finding.

My research into AI wildlife recording applications took another step forward when the BSBI released a phone recording app at the same time. Good for them! Of course we shot out for a walk as soon as it stopped raining and I entered a record on the hoof, as it were, with a minimum of fuss. Coincidentally I’d been tasked to produce a precis of several longish reports on the work of the Natural History Society that we’re members of. I always swore that I’d never go to another meeting after I retired but I relented in a moment of weakness. So – and here’s a major confession – I fed all three long reports into Gemini, the Google AI machine and analysed them one at a time and then it took less than half a minute to produce a brilliant summary of all three, of a quality it would have taken me days to produce. My personal prejudices, likes and dislikes played absolutely no part in it because it was produced by a deep text machine with no knowledge of which ideas I liked and which I hated. All my work was focused on asking the best possible question and setting the task in logical and unambiguous terms. You might call it a scientific approach.

I presented the report to the committee and one member kicked off about the absence of the term “research” that wasn’t in any of the contributory papers. I could see that the discussion wasn’t going anywhere and backed off, but I left the meeting feeling that I’d been the victim of gaslighting. My hard work was being dismissed because -well because what? Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political theorist distinguished between organic and traditional intellectuals; the first group theorizing from a world of lived experience and the second (such as philosophers and clergy) giving history and tradition the whip hand. Give me the wisdom that comes from lived experience any day!

Back in the real world, I read two articles that seemed to treat plant recording as a kind of Ian Allan trainspotter discipline – more was clearly better. I get very fed up about this kind of thing, because it puts the amateur naturalist at a tremendous disadvantage. In one instance a recorder had submitted 135 thousand records to the big database. A little bit of basic maths suggests that with 3,500 plant species in the UK you’d have to find every one of them almost 40 times to amass such a score. The real scientific impact of such a magnificent effort is not in the gross total, but in building our knowledge concerning the distribution of plants across the country, their seasonality and preferred environments, the variations in their appearance and whether they are increasing or decreasing in number or in danger of disappearing altogether. Ten thousand records of a single plant – let’s say, bluebell hybrids made right across the length and breadth of the country could be tremendously useful. Amateur naturalists can be a vast army of potential volunteer recorders who, with targeted and appropriate help from the professionals, would get better and better at identifying plants and therefore contribute to the data that scientific research depends upon. There’s no hierarchy needed here; no need for anyone to feel intimidated or inhibited from having a try by the thought that they might get laughed at or patronized. The academic gatekeepers, far from preserving the integrity of the discipline are holding it back; squeezing the life out of it.

But hey! we’re off down to beloved Cornwall in the campervan and I’ll be testing the apps, looking for plants, doing a bit of recording and hopefully some sunbathing too, alongside a few trips to the pub. Here at the Potwell Inn, we celebrate the life ordinary. This weekend an old friend died of Motor Neurone disease. I have no idea how to process that.

An evening in the campervan with an excellent documentary series on Frida Kahlo. I really didn’t notice she wasn’t wearing much when I took it. Madame was consulted and she approved before I included this photo!

Who could resist it? – meet the Hairy-footed flower bee (Anthophora plumipes)

This little fella – I know he’s a ‘he’ because the females are all black has taken to spending his nights in the keyhole of our allotment shed and I’ve had to chuck him out two or three times in order to get the key in to open up. We were talking about planting more bee attractors on the plot, and now we’ve made up our minds to plant some Lungwort – Pulmonaria, and more Comfrey because the old plants have expired. This bee isn’t a communal bee but a solitary one; however apparently he occasionally gets into a gathering rather like Ivy bees do. I owe this ID to Alvan, a fellow musketeer, but I’m desperately trying to avoid getting into bees because at least flowers stay still while I photograph them, and I find that entomologists and lepidopterists can go into a faraway place where their eyes swivel independently in order not to miss anything.

Anyway, any interesting botanical expeditions have been delayed while we get the allotment up to speed. You’ll notice that the tomatoes in our polytunnel are all carrying commercial labels, but before you toss your head scornfully, we moved over to commercial grafted plants a couple of years ago because they are completely blight resistant and much higher yielding. The grafted aubergines which we also buy are sitting atop a rootstock as thick as a pencil already. We are already looking forward to the summer crops. The potatoes are peeping above their ridges; the Chard leaves are enormous but delicious and the fruit trees and bushes are almost finished flowering. Our two resident robins are so fat from following us around as we work that they can barely take off and fly back to their nestlings. Despite the awful weather of the past months, nature has her hand on the tiller once more, it seems.

Last Saturday we had a local field trip around Victoria Park and the Botanical Gardens and we spotted these Three Cornered Garlic plants which thrive around here having evaded border control whilst migrating from the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in the UK they’re harder to find – but I think they’re absolutely beautiful and deserve to be spared by foragers. In Cornwall whole hedgerows have been stripped of Ramsons – Wild Garlic – by commercial foragers. Which reminds me – as it’s peak St George’s Mushroom season – that although they’re generally promoted as safe I’ve met two people, both highly experienced mycologists, who developed symptoms of poisoning after twenty or thirty years of eating them safely. Some plants and fungi contain some pretty nasty accumulative toxins so please do be careful. If there’s a scintilla of doubt in your mind, don’t eat it!

Aaaargh! Spring – please slow down, just a bit!

Clockwise from top left- the canalside view with Pen y Fan in the background; then Common Dog Violet, Wood Sorrel, Maidenhair Spleenwort, Ramsons, Greater Stitchwort, Reflexed Stonecrop and what I think must be bracken growing very close to the water. There were many more – too many to list without annoying Madame!

The rewards of Spring are everywhere at the moment, notwithstanding the cold nights which are keeping our tender plants blocking the hallway as they harden off. There’s so much going on I hardly know where to begin. On the allotment – after the usual despairing survey of the weeds, the waterlogged ground and the mounting sense that nothing good will ever come of it; we got our heads down two or three weeks ago and felt instantly better. I’m a bit suspicious of the received wisdom that gardening is good for the soul. Couch grass and Bindweed could test the patience of a saint and I’m certainly not one of them. At the weekend while Madame sowed, I finally cleared the asparagus bed which had been on probation for ages and we knew it had to go because it was too far down in the frost pocket on our sloping site plus the asparagus had been weakened by repeated invasions of Asparagus beetle and couch grass from the unattended plot next door. Four barrow loads of weeds and feeble/floppy/extinct roots later I had a backache worthy of a third rate wrestler but a decent empty raised bed much enriched by previous additions of seaweed, compost and sand and with around 18″ depth of topsoil. We’ll grow carrots there this season. We’ve thrown so much money at the asparagus bed over the years, we could probably afford to buy fifty bundles of Chinn’s finest English and still be in pocket.

I was greatly assisted by two almost hand tame Robins who were obviously feeding chicks. Between them they took away many dozens of larvae, centipedes and other insects. Interestingly they weren’t very interested in worms; certainly not as keen as a blackbird would be. I was dazzled by their capacity to hold two wriggling bugs in their beaks and still pick up a third without dropping the first two; they were far better pest controllers than any chemical insecticide.

Inside the polytunnel the experimental crop of broad beans is thriving in the absence of any really hot weather, and the strawberries, all taken from runners in late summer, are flowering and setting fruit. Of course this means we’re already watering inside the tunnel; but the 12V water pump we bought last summer has already showed its worth and helped us avoid carrying heavy watering cans back and forth.

The photos above were all taken on a short trip to the Monmouth and Brecon canal near Brecon during the week. It was here, many years ago, that I saw my first Kingfisher – so beautiful in the sunshine that I thought I was hallucinating. We had hoped to go for a pub lunch with our friends who keep a smallholding almost 100o feet up on the hill, but they were in the middle of lambing so we had a picnic lunch there while they went outside every twenty minutes or so to keep an eye on a ewe in the midst of a long and difficult lambing. Fortunately the ewe and her twin lambs all made it through, although I think that will be her last time. Farming can be heartbreaking as well as hard work.

“A difficulty is a light, an insurmountable difficulty is a sun” – Paul Valéry

Is it too perverse to say that I love naming plants? and the harder they are the greater the reward when I finally get there. I’m exhilarated by the explosion of plants in the spring and early summer, and it’s agony having go forego plant hunting for allotment duties, but there’s no alternative so we just get on with it. I was pondering where this love of plants came from, and during one of my regular 2.00am wakeful sessions – it happens a lot – it occurred to me that I owe a huge amount to Henry Williamson (I’ll come to the reservations in a moment). Of course I read Tarka the Otter and the other nature books, but I also ploughed my way through four volumes of “The Flax of Dream” and fifteen volumes of “The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”. I was probably the only person who ever ordered them all up from Bristol Central Library in many years. Above all, I loved Williamson’s ability to describe wild plants in their landscapes; their names – English names – embedded themselves in my imagination and make the discovery of a plant in a hedgerow into a celebratory event, even fifty years later. Latin names and taxonomical exactitude; whilst essential for research, are feeble by comparison with the poetry of use and history.

But one of the greatest sadnesses of my life has been the discovery that so many of my literary and artistic heroes dabbled with and even collaborated in extreme right politics during the nineteen thirties and forties. TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis were all seduced by the big lie. Discovering that Williamson was an admirer of Adolph Hitler irrevocably shut down my relationship with him, and I’ve never read a page written by him since; but the influence of his natural history writing still remains – it’s just forever tainted by the association.

Anyway, turning with relief to spring again, some flowers that you’d think were easy to identify – are more than a bit fiendish; not least the violet which comes with seven close cousins six of which you could easily bump into in the South West. No alternative, then, but to turn to the books or the apps. But when it comes to fiendishness, nothing comes close to ferns and for me, at the very beginning of this love affair, a chance encounter across a crowded room can lead to hours of agonising – just like the real thing (I’m told!).

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, I’m exploring the dizzy world of Artificial Intelligence in wildlife apps, and particularly in identifying plants. If you’re fortunate enough to know what a data point is – I wasn’t – it’s a single unit/dollop of data. If you’re still attached to pencils and paper, your notebook might contain a few hundred data points. A field guide could hold tens of thousands, but AI robots, though are voracious readers and can consume and store billions of them. Not only that, they can index and arrange them in pretty much any way you like.

So before we all get carried away by the idea of wildlife AI apps remember that the whole industry is based on text. I’ve been playing with Google Gemini but other flavours are available. These text engines can be based on anything up to (I believe) 8 billion data points – that’s a lot of text and a huge fund of examples to work from. The existing wildlife apps are still wallowing in the relative shallows and so they can be unreliable at the moment. I had three obviously wrong fern identifications (back to the books) while we were up on the Mon and Brec. They’ll get better very soon I’m sure. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland have access to over 50 million full records, and Kew Gardens are digitizing their entire herbarium records. iNaturalist also has something huge like 50 million although not all of them are verified, but even if all these records are verified and scanned in – which would be a huge volunteer operation – they would still be far fewer in number than the mighty text warehouses. Machine learning can achieve seemingly miraculous results but I don’t think we’ll be making human identification redundant any time soon, so don’t throw those field guides away!

Just to finish, though, I thought I’d wile away an hour asking Google Gemini to do some silly things for me. Question one – what are the distinguishing features of Dryopteris ferns? after ten seconds a very sensible answer. Then I asked it to write a sonnet on the subject of dust and once again a technically perfect but aesthetically clunky, sub Tennysonian sonnet emerged. Then finally I asked if it would re-write one of these posts in the style of Phillip Marlowe. The result was hilariously funny but quite unprintable here, being vulgar, deeply sexist and full of bad language.

Thank your lucky stars it’s just me writing this one!

The spuds are in at last

Madame wielding the rake with the Couch grass growling just outside.

I see from the newspapers that the national potato crop is in trouble again. On our way back up from Mendip last week we took the motorway and passed two heavy tractors attempting to plough a couple of sodden, clay rich fields on the Somerset Levels. The resulting mess was disturbing as it combined the pointless destruction of the soil with the consumption of a lot of diesel fuel. The grass pasture on either side of the hedges was looking green and fine. A bit wet for grazing, maybe, due to the probability of poaching the ground, but nonetheless recoverable. How anyone can claim that this terrible unseasonable weather is not connected to climate breakdown angers me. The Guardian reported that this is potentially the smallest potato crop since the last crisis in – wait for it – 2020. Separating out two events four years apart as if they were random acts of god, and seen in the light of record breaking temperatures with crazy winds and rainfall. In my book that’s not two short crises but one long one. Figures of speech like ploughing on make themselves ridiculous first and then redundant soon afterwards.

So I was almost pleased to see that George Monbiot had written a piece in the Guardian on beef farming. I say “almost” because almost every time I read his pieces I find they make me crosser and crosser. Here’s a writer who – on the face of it – should be a firm supporter of campaigns to de-intensify farming but instead completely loses the plot and shrieks at potential allies like a fundamentalist preacher. He starts badly enough by insisting that anyone who fails to agree with him must be the victim of some kind of sinister neuro linguistic programming conspiracy. Not, you see, someone who has also done their best to examine the facts and come to a different conclusion. Having sawn any possible objections off at the knees (a non vegan metaphor I’m afraid but I can’t find a comprehensible alternative); he then goes on to attack regenerative farming by claiming there is no acceptable (that’s a key qualification) scientific evidence to back any of its claims. Here’s a little bit of incontestable evidence that should encourage Monbiot to decide whose side he’s on.

Jeremy Padfield and his business partner Rob Addicott, farm about 1000 acres of the land under Higher Level Stewardship Agreements of which 80 acres are specifically conservation managed for wildlife.  Their combined Duchy farms became LEAF demonstration farms in 2006. Over subsequent years soil organic matter averages out at around 5%; no insecticides have been used within the last 5 years; weed killing is targeted only reactively; antibiotic use has been reduced by 58% and  plastic use is down by 60%. Minimum tillage leads to a 68% drop in fuel consumption; water is intensively managed and stored, and solar energy meets much of the needs of the farm buildings. As well as wider wildlife field margins, Stratton Farms have been experimenting with skylark plots and wide strips of wildflowers and companion plants sown through the crops. Additionally, 20 acres of trees and 2000 metres of hedgerow have been planted. 

Notes on an indoor meeting of the Bath Natural History Society, written by me.

This isn’t, by the way, a kind of bucolic lament for the blue remembered hills. They achieve this by using extremely high tech equipment and it’s that convergence of scientific know-how with boots on the ground that makes these farms profitable. Monbiot, on the other hand takes up what I like to think of as the Amos Starkadder position. I sometimes think he’s got a bit of an Old Testament prophet in him; possibly a new Jeremiah – I suspect he’d like to think of himself as a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness; but in the end he’s always going to be Amos Starkadder – the fundamentalist preacher to the Quivering Brethren in Stella Gibbons’ lovely 1930’s novel Cold Comfort Farm. Amos Starkadder was unable to distinguish between the sins a bunch of small-time village dwellers and the inhabitants of Dante’s inferno. I’m always delighted, by the way, that Dante enlisted the first circle of hell for the eternal punishment of those people whose sin was not to give a shit!

Anyway the price of separating Amos from his flock was a small Ford van to travel the country and trouble thousands of moderately innocent souls who might once have cast a lustful glance in the direction of the squire’s son. or daughter (oh go on then, wife)! and then worried too much about it. George Monbiot makes the sixth form debating society’s error of allowing the perfect to drive out the good. Far from encouraging small and achievable gains to fight climate destruction, he treats a 30 acre mixed smallholding as identical to 50,000 head of cattle in a gigantic American feedlot, and then denounces the both of them with his shrill rhetoric. The thought of going after the biggest threat first seems not to cross his mind, which suggests to me that his views on farming are -to misuse an old Marxist term – overdetermined by a prior commitment to veganism and the memory of an unsuccessful attempt to live the rural life in Wales. He implied that the farmers didn’t take to him and the locals treated him rather dismissively in Welsh! How very dare they! They’re all dammed!

The haunting premonition of a vegan future leaves me shivering amidst 100.000,000 lonely wind lashed trees surrounded by huge industrialised vegetable farms and stainless gloop tanks all operated by (who else?) Monsanto and Cargill. I’m not badly disposed towards veganism, but I’m in no sense attracted by it. We’re walking up in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) this week and the local pub does excellent faggots at half the price of the cheapest steaks. The slaughterhouse is a ten minute drive away. There’s a lesson in sustainable living, somewhere in there.

But finally I want to draw your attention to the quality of the allotment earth. It’s been mollycoddled, sheeted , hoed and fed for nearly 8 years now, during which time it’s changed from intractable and shallow alluvial clay and stones to deep, black, friable soil. The 10X4 beds that took a week to clear of couch grass and nettles when we took the plot on can now be shallow tilled in a few minutes. Of course it’s not going to save the earth, but there are probably 300 allotments on the whole site and half a dozen sites in Bath. Every day we see bicycles delivering organic veg to cafes and restaurants around the town and regenerative farms getting going everywhere. So I’ll end with a question. Hi George do you really believe that all this is a waste of time and a greenwashing campaign by shadowy industrial finance? Is it all a distraction? or have you been out eating too much rich spring grass and got blown.

Immersive plant hunting

Two of our grandchildren playing in Dyrham Park

There was a moment on Tuesday’s fern hunt when a troubling thought occurred to me. “Why” – I wondered – “do I get so emotional about finding plants?” I think it’s a good question and a useful one. I remember we were once walking on Black Down (Burrington Combe) up at the top where the carboniferous limestone has been eroded away exposing the Old Red Sandstone underneath which is more acidic than the limestone everywhere else, and has an altogether different mix of plants. I was confused about this eccentric outcrop in the Mendips for years until it was explained to me how different the geology of that little area is. So there we were wandering along one of the tracks when suddenly a tiny flower caught my attention and I saw at once that it was an Eyebright, Euphrasia. As usual for me it’s not tremendously rare although it’s difficult to identify fully because it hybridises so readily. But what ran through my mind wasn’t the rational sequence of questions such as a professional field botanist might ask, as much as an explosion of joy; an anschauung, the intuitive understanding that comes with something discovered or revealed. No-one loves a list more than me, but that encounter involved a beholding such as might inspire a poet or artist; but when it comes to describing it, it’s just like trying to hold a writhing eel – trust me on that one, I’ve done it and failed on both counts!

The troubling moment on Tuesday came when I wondered if this emotional response might be no more than a form of sentimentality.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’
    ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
    ‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’

Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

Obviously you can take a fact and wrap it in sentimental drivel but it will always lie dead and cold on the page. On Tuesday the first fern we found was an almost perfect Rustyback; a textbook example if you really must but I’d prefer to think of it as an expression, an outpouring of natural energy which, when you give it its name, connects itself to you. The plants become my sisters and brothers – hence all the emotion – love, gratitude, respect not to mention aesthetic pleasure. The naming doesn’t create the plant; but it gives it an address, a point of reference to which I can return – named, and therefore capable of being found and greeted again in a way that makes the earth a bigger, more relatable place.

The Rustyback fern

What is undoubtedly the case is that my childhood was full of such moments because – especially during the long holidays – I wandered (unsupervised) for miles through the countryside with my friend Eddie; laid in the grass on Rodway hill and watched the wind as it swayed the harebells, swung on the trees in the big woods, fished for Sticklebacks in the Oldbury Court ponds and picked bunches of wildflowers for my Mum who always placed them reverentially in jam jars. I suppose we all have that sense of a lost Arcadia. If there were any clouds in the sky we would rarely notice. My Mum was a country girl and she knew the names of plants and taught me and my sister how to love them too as we learned their names.

So yes of course plant hunting takes me back into my happy place, not because I want to be ten years old again, but because it was my ten year old mind in which I first experienced what I came to know later as the “oceanic feeling” and which seems to occur more and more as we search for the ferns, plants and fungi out in what’s left of nature after Thomas Gradgrind has had his filthy way with it.

In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to “a sensation of ‘eternity'”, a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole”, inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics.

Romain Rolland (From Wikipedia)

The kind of earth we need to aspire to rediscover is not just a rewinding of the calendar to the nasty 1930’s; of Janet and John books, Ladybird and iSpy. More than anything else I’d just like to create the opportunities for our grandchildren to walk in the woods at night; count the stars and name the constellations; find and name plants and know some of their uses and qualities; feed the hens as my sister and me used to do in Stoke Row, and understand and practice the art of growing and harvesting. We need to rediscover and celebrate our relatedness to the earth, not in empty, sentimental, bound-to-fail aspirations but fully and deeply; surrendering any thoughts of domination. It is religion, you might say – but not as we know it!

Pteridomania strikes the Potwell Inn

Priddy Pool
  • Priddy Fern List ST55F ( a quick way to describe part of an OS Grid square)
  • Apologies for the Latin – English names are second
  • Asplenium adiantum-nigrum – Black Spleenwort
  • * Asplenium ceterach – Rustyback
  • Asplenium ruta-muraria – Wall Rue
  • * Asplenium scolopendrium – Hart’s Tongue
  • * Asplenium trichomanes – Maidenhair Spleenwort
  • Blechnum spicant – Hard Fern
  • Dryopteris affinis – Golden Scaled Male Fern
  • Dryopteris carthusiana – Narrow Buckler Fern
  • Dryopteris dilatata – Broad Buckler Fern
  • Dryopteris filix-mas – Male Fern
  • Polypodium interjectum – Intermediate Polypody
  • Polypodium vulgare s.s – Polypody sensus stricta
  • * Polypodium s.l – Polypodies
  • * Polystichum setiferum – Soft Shield fern
  • Pteridium aquilinum – Bracken

Plant hunting is helped immeasurably by a bit of homework before you set out and equally with more homework even after you think you know what you’ve found. So this rather grand list was easily got by searching the accessible-to-the-public list and ticking off the ferns (Pteridophytes! As my mother used to say “the P is silent as in bathing” . So it turns out that in the little corner of High Mendip where we’re camping, there are 13 fern species (3 are hybrids – only separable by experts with microscopes) and yesterday in our short walk we found five of them – the starred names which are in the photographs clockwise from top left. None of them rare but some, much more common on the limestone rocks hereabouts – environment is a huge thing for plants. Whilst you might think that finding 38% of the available species isn’t bad for a half mile walk down a bridleway, they’re just the ordinary common species. The rarest fern that could conceivably be found near here is the Limestone Fern, but collectors are still capable of uprooting and stealing rare plants so their exact locations are withheld from general access.

The walk was exactly as planned on Monday. Cross the road and walk 250 yards to the entrance of a bridleway; walk very slowly down it as far as Priddy Pool, photographing any interesting plants, and then – depending on the weather, walk on to the churchyard and the limestone walls near Swildons Hole and then across the village green to the pub. The weather, though, was ferocious. The little spring expedition in our imagination actually brought with it 50 mph gusts of freezing wind and occasional pellets of sleet that felt as if they were lacerating our faces. 1000 feet of altitude makes a huge difference.

Down in the bridleway we were pretty much sheltered from the worst of it, and I got some good photographs of the crozier stage of some ferns as they emerge. They are wonderfully sculptural. We also found two very common flowering plants which were quite hard to identify. Yellow Archangel ought to be easy enough, but this one had silvery white spots on the leaves and so I used a bit of internet AI and chased it down to subspecies – probably a garden escape but it seemed fully naturalised.

Priddy Pool – and I mean the pool that adjoins Nine Barrows Lane is a truly magical place. There’s a certain ambiguity about the name because the plural – Priddy Pools refers to a couple of larger ponds in the Mineries nearby, now a nature reserve but once a lead mining area. My Priddy Pool – the only one named on the OS map – holds the water which subsequently runs underground at Swildons Hole. On July 10th 1968 we’d had two months worth of rain in two days, three thousand houses were flooded, eight people died and 24 buses were abandoned on the streets; and Swildon’s Hole took so much floodwater that the entire upper series was rearranged and the old 40 foot pitch (shaft) disappeared. Cavers who entered after the flood found an altogether different cave. It occurs to me that Priddy Pool, far from being an ancient natural formation may have been altered by 20th Century cavers to assist rescues when the cave was flooded. There’s certainly some stonework on the boundary with Nine Barrows Lane that was built there by someone. But now it’s just a lovely place to watch and listen to birds. Of course it could be a buddle pit or a sheepwash – someone must know.

Then as we came out on to Townsend we spotted a Forget me Not. Exactly as I had done with the Yellow Archangel I rather dismissed it as a garden escape with a toss of the head and curl of the lip – but I photographed it anyway because it was growing wild in a shady verge. Back in the campervan I looked up the Myosotis family in the Book of Stace and discovered that there are loads of them and that my suspicion of nursery bred plants was a bit over egged because there are ten legitimate wildies; three of them rare but the others, although they get grown in gardens often escape back into the wild. Another handy ID shortcut was to go back into the Distribution database and see how many of Forget me Nots have ever been seen in my grid square. That reduced the number from ten, to seven and then to an easily manageable two which were so different it was easy to choose the right one. By the time we reached Townsend our fingers were white and we were shivering, so we wandered back to the campervan and turned the heating up to tropical so we could properly enjoy a bottle of Provençal rosé with our sandwiches.

On the left the Wood Forget me Not – Myosotis sylvatica, and on the right Yellow Archangel – Lamiastrum galeobdolon ssp. argenatum

Anyway; notwithstanding the weather – which has been awful – wandering the bosky dells wasn’t the only reason for coming here. We needed to test out all the systems in the campervan to make sure it’s ready for the summer and happily – aside from a lousy WiFi signal which is only just about workable, the van is good. We, on the other hand, are sitting in it in the midst of a cloud with visibility down to 100 yards.

850 feet up a hill, spring comes later

Cuckoo flower on the campsite

It wasn’t meant to be like this – the first proper campervan trip of the year with everything working properly; batteries charging, the gleaming new sink a stranger to leaks and the fridge roaring away on gas. However we hadn’t factored in the altitude difference or the gloomy weather forecast before we set off to High Mendip for a couple of days and last night we were freezing cold on account of forgetting to bring the duvet. On the plus side we had a surfeit of pillows that looked exactly like a duvet until we took them out of the bag. Back down in Bath the trees were leafing up nicely but up here with a scything WNW wind barrelling up the Bristol Channel they’re still stuck in November. Spring comes later when you’re almost 1000 ft up. As ever the dandelions and daisies were risking the weather and covering the grass, but all the same a solitary Cuckoo flower greeted us when we pulled on to our pitch. If ever you needed an example of the importance of environment, this was it. A lover of marshy ground setting up shop under the water tap.

After a week of pretty perfect camping weather with the high temperatures setting records- and during which we were sweating it out on the allotment – winter has regained the initiative and up here, the wind batters the van in gusts of almost 50 mph, howling in every less than perfect window seal. As the temperature falls to 3C. the buds are clenched tight on the trees, like coldwater swimmers’ naughty bits and we’re sitting in bed planning the best time to walk down to the village where the Queen Victoria pub does a life threateningly good old-style lunch; pies and chips and stuff like that. The route we take will depend on how much mud there is down the lane to Priddy Pool where there are some ferns I failed to identify last year. This time I’ve brought a list of possibilities – fifteen of them, because this is a place they love. No news yet on any improved access to the more detailed locations on the database – I hope I haven’t panicked them by asking!

Before we left we had a discussion about whether to bring my super heavy Welsh Black raw sheep’s wool jumper which weighs about 2 Kg and even smells like a sheep. At that moment it seemed ridiculous but today I’m sitting in bed wearing it, along with its hideously itchy companion beanie and listening to the other van dwellers abandoning their holidays, mainly due to disgruntled teenage children. The wifi signal dropped to 0.50 megabits last night as family resentments boiled over, mobile phones went silent and televisions spurted out their entertainment in ten second packets. How we treasure our little Tardis of a campervan.

I first started coming up here when I was a teenager and spent a lot of time exploring the multitude of caves in the area with the help and guidance of the Bristol Exploration Club. I was never going to be an intrepid or even particularly courageous caver, but I loved the sensual and hard natural beauty of the underground, and the smell of the surrounding fields as we emerged from the dark and wetness has imprinted itself in my imagination. Today we will walk the fields above the underground passages, rough tracing their torturous progress from 400 feet above. Swildon’s stream will be roaring after the night of rain and we will be pausing to find early risers among the plants. Slow is also beautiful.