Category: Natural History

Catch a bus – it could change your whole perspective on life.

Bath bus station – there are no pretty views!

I’m working up three posts at the moment and hopefully I’ll publish them all by the end of next week One of them is about what I’ve always called “nodes” – which is about places that seem to exude a lot of energy, hopefully without going full leyline over them. Secondly I’m researching a piece on the ways I’m trying to improve my photography to make it more helpful in identifying plants. The third, this one, is about buses and what travelling on then can teach us.

It’s a kind of in-joke among plant hunters that the maps we use to find and record plants are really maps of plant hunters. Cambridge, for instance, has a very high score when it comes to plant records, but it also has a very high score in terms of botanists. Statisticians have had to find some very smart mathematical models for removing the bias. I had a friend, now sadly dead, who was a prolific recorder of wildflowers. I’d describe him as brilliant and difficult, but he was always ready to help me out and taught me a great deal. The thing about him – Rob, his name was – was that he didn’t drive a car and so he travelled mostly by bus or by hitching lifts with other botanists. I’ve been watching a particular group of plants called Fleabanes for several years now. They can be quite tricky to identify and there are three very similar species, two of which grow in Bath and another which seems to be making a slow journey up the river from Avonmouth. So two possible reasons for the slow journey are firstly that the seeds float or blow up the river. Floating is highly unlikely because the Avon flows in the opposite direction. Wind dispersal is more likely because the prevailing wind direction is south westerly and the seeds are like miniature dandelion clocks. But looking at the maps, the records could as easily be explained by their position on bus routes. I’ve seen Rob on his hands and knees searching in the central reservation of a dual carriageway, so it’s entirely possible that the records really reflect bus journeys. I now feel obligated to search for the wandering Fleabane every year to continue his work.

These days I find doing the washing up infinitely more rewarding than listening to the recycled press releases which hide under the banner of journalism in these diminished days. But yesterday I caught several mentions of “the next war” being touted by almost all of them in a brain dissolving teaser for some kind of announcement about building more weapons factories. It reminds me that we all live in a particular cultural context from which we can never really escape. One of my radio producers once told me that she thought my best writing came when I was being lyrical. Well, it’s not a big stretch from being unable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Babylon) to struggling to find the lyrical voice in a context like this, where lying, thieving from the vulnerable, accepting bribes and trading in weapons that dismember children is regarded as good business.

Rob was finding his lyrical on his hands and knees surrounded by the roar and fumes of fast traffic. Several people, Chris Packham for one, have mentioned hyper focus recently as one of the features of neuro divergence. Perhaps that’s it for some of us, although my own experience is that almost no amount of focus can get me past the feeling of despondency and gloom that this government promotes. If it has a vision at all it’s to spread passivity like a virus through the population.

Anyway, to get to the point – which is about travelling by bus – one of the major causes of passivity is isolation, and that isolation is enforced by illness, poverty, going everywhere by car, wearing headphones and creating your own impoverished environment by doomscrolling on the phone and listening only to your own curated soundscape. A bus, on the other hand is a tin box with six wheels and virtually no suspension which forces you into the company of people you’d never normally meet or speak to. At Bristol bus station a couple of days ago, paramedics were treating someone who’d collapsed on the floor. There were local and international travellers, shoppers and people going home from work looking grey; homeless people, students, schoolchildren and pensioners like us, taking advantage of the free bus pass. There were people of diverse colour and nationality, several slightly deranged people all jammed in, thigh to thigh and standing well inside my usual comfort zone. It’s a challenging and immersive environment in which anything could happen – and I love it. The late night bus is even more gripping. You always get one or two people the worse for wear. One one journey back to Bath there was one man who had no idea where he was; just got off the bus and wandered away in the dark. Another fell asleep with his kebab in is hand and it went all over the floor. Yet another man waved contentedly at his own reflection in the window, half recognizing a familiar face.

The point is – the people you meet on the bus aren’t your carefully curated version of reality but the real thing. Poverty and neglect of the elderly isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet, it’s the old man with his zimmer frame sitting in front of you who hasn’t had a bath or a shower in months and smells so bad that only the smell of a Mcdonalds being eaten by an overweight young person nearby manages to cover the crime like a cheap deodorant. These, dear Mr Starmer are the people you are supposed to be thinking about and working for, but you don’t travel on buses so you’ll never know about them. It’s no use blustering on about the deprivations of your own childhood. Your dad was a toolmaker, and many people will think he made tools like shovels and chisels. But that’s not what toolmakers do. They make the tools which are used in factories to manufacture aeroplanes and cars. Their work is immensely skilled and they have all done long apprenticeships – as long as many doctors. They work in tolerances of fractions of a thousandth of an inch on machines that cost more than a mansion and they are paid accordingly. I worked as a labourer in a tool making company in the 1960’s and they were paid more than double the average wage. They were and probably still are the creme de la creme among engineers because they could work for weeks on a press tool that, if it warped when it was sent off for hardening and cost thousands of pounds. Give it a rest, then, Starmer. All that carry-on about gathering around a single smouldering coal and eating stone soup doesn’t pass the Ernest Hemingway test for bullshit. You lived in a comfortable house and had a good education. Go ride buses for a week – I’d happily buy your pass for the good of the country – and meet the electorate. Get off the bus now and again and learn the names of some flowers; learn Welsh, (I slipped that one in – I never have, but I can pronounce Welsh place names properly; who needs vowels anyway? – work a day or two on a trawler; pick orders in an Amazon warehouse.

So how do I find the lyrical; find peace of mind in a culture of lies, failure and violence. Well, there is still beauty; beauty especially in nature. There is still love; there is still compassion that trickles out from the earth like a spring. It just isn’t coming from the Westminster goon show.

“Where’s the plan?” we ask; “What’s the strategy?”. But as anyone who’s done a management course will know. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Our problems aren’t caused by lack of strategy but by a degraded culture.

Oh yes it was!

Sadly my old pal the Hungarian Mullein has passed. You can still see it where it toppled head first into the canal where, it would be nice to think, its progeny will set up home in the coming years. It’s a bit of an unusual find here in Bath and I had to argue my case with the Vice County Recorder, Helena, who very properly demanded we wait until it flowered until it could be recorded. And did it flower! Its whole life story unwound over two years between germinating in 2023 and flowering this summer and Madame and I walked the riverbank to the canal many times to record its progress; always worried that some overzealous strimmer would take it out. But spared the strimmer, the casual act of vandalism or even a careless narrowboat tether rope, this magnificent showoff did its thing and then toppled, senescent, into the canal. It’s the way of things; we are all part of the same cycle, and a successor plant is already growing next to my left foot in the photo. As you can also, the deceased was a good foot taller than me ‘though that’s not much to brag about. Let’s just say it’s over six feet and not dwell on my height.

After our walk to the canal we came back by the usual riverside walk and recorded a lovely Winter Cherry in full blossom, a field Scabious and two Mallow species, plus a Welsh poppy and what’s called (I think) a confused Michaelmas daisy, so called not because it’s confused (I’m not sure if that’s possible for a flower) but those of us who try to name it are. Very confused. All these in flower as well as some Mugwort whose flowers are extremely dull and minimalist but whose leaves when brewed up are said to give you lucid dreams. I can’t vouch for that because my dreams are all too lucid already, and often hang over me all day. I wonder if a brew made from the Michaelmas Daisy might give you confusing dreams – all I’m sure of is that this group of plants is a bit dodgy and can damage your liver – so they all go into the category of temptations resisted (like incest and Morris dancing as Oscar Wilde might have said).

By complete coincidence we passed by the edge of Green Park and came across one of the parents of the difficult Common Lime tree in Dyrham Park. It’s unusual for me to stumble across a parent and its hybrid in a short enough period to remember the size of their respective leaves, but the much larger leaves of the (wait for it) Broad-leaved Lime, Tilia platyphyllos was a dead giveaway.

Trees are fun, and we’re blessed with a large number of champions here in Bath. Interestingly the two parents of the Common Lime are the Broad-leaved and the Small -leaved, both of which are extremely rare in the wild. But their hybrid is vigorous and easy to propagate which is why it became the Common-Lime several centuries ago. Does it matter if it’s a sort of alien invader? I’ve been reading a marvellous book titled “Alien Plants” by Clive Stace and Michael Crawley and if you’re at all bothered by what you might call boat plants you’re going to have a very bare garden indeed.

Here the larger problem of wild seed sowing is raising its head. Several years ago, as the riverside walk was being initiated, a neglected border which had an abundance of genuine native plants was dug up and re-seeded with wildflowers. I’d previously found a plant called Weld growing there in the shadow of what would have been a very smelly dyeworks where it’s likely Weld was used. Sadly the wildflowers grew for one season only and then disappeared. I’ve not seen any of the original plants again. Dyrham Park tried a similar thing but their plot was invaded by creeping thistle and the expensive wildflowers all disappeared. This week, going through my photos, I found Corn Marigolds, Field Marigolds and Cornflowers had all enjoyed a brief moment in the sun before being choked out by the thugs. It would be far better to learn to appreciate the plants that actually thrive here than to import a whole bunch of no-hopers, however beautiful!

Spooky coincidences on our latest trip

A visit to Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire shows the National Trust deeply involved in conservation and wildlife – but with a sense of humour!

Black Nightshade in Dyrham Park formal garden – my 1000th record, cue shark approaching music

Have I been droning on about targets recently? Well tough, because I’ve just met two of my three targets/resolutions by using storm Claudine as cover for a day at the computer – catching up with some plant data entry. And five minutes ago I got over the line and logged 500 species across 1000 records. It’s nothing much to brag about because not long ago I was chatting to the retired recorders for West Gloucestershire and this year they expect to submit their millionth record; but then I console myself with the knowledge that they started long before me – competitive – me??

So Madame and I took advantage of the nice weather yesterday and drove over to Dyrham Park for a walk in the fresh air, having been kept indoors for days with the terrible weather. I knew I needed nine new records and got my first one as we left the car park and I realised that I’d never recorded the lovely avenue of trees that I’ve used as a banner for the last ten years. Of course I knew they were Limes but when I photographed them and turned to the books I discovered that they weren’t going to give up their precise identity without a struggle. Yes, they are Limes but no they’re not what I thought at all and turned out with a bit of forensics to be hybrid Limes, confusingly called “Common Lime” because they are – well – common. If you look again at the banner at the top of all these posts you’ll see our youngest son and our oldest grandson walking down the avenue together hand in hand. You’ll also see that the trees have all been given flat bottoms by the herd of grazing deer which were culled when they contracted TB a few years ago and have now returned with the perimeter of the park fortified with enormous fences to keep out any infected cousins. So that was good news and we await the restoration of the unnatural fringes by the deer when the leaves grow again next spring.

So that was one for the record and we wandered on down through the terraces where the National Trust team have done a great deal of forestry work, thinning and planting Yew, Bird Cherry and numerous other plants. The Rhododendrons, I imagine, are for the chop later when the newcomers have established. Most of the affected Ash trees have now been taken out so the park is going to look very different in a few years time. But everywhere we went, we could feel a real sense of direction and purpose in the plantings, it was very pleasing to see, and well done to all the volunteers who do most of the donkey work.

I guess it’s the time of year but of course the evergreens have the stage at the moment, and I always feel they’re a bit funereal. Yews and Laurels; well that’s churchyards and wreaths as far as I’m concerned! Down in the formal gardens you can see how the vision is working out. To be honest I’m not keen on straight rows and tulips but the head gardener has introduced a very subtle subversive note into the plantings and so we relished the long borders of espalier cider apples with all their local names, although we looked in vain for “slack ma girdle” which was the name we gave our quiz team when Madame worked on apple trees at the research station. Better still we found Soft Shield ferns and Black Nightshade growing on the banks and some of the healthiest looking Harts’ -tongue ferns we’d ever seen. A deft hand with the planting scheme has completely swerved any feeling of the Parks Department and created a garden that we’ll return to many times. The pruning of the apples and pears – under the guidance of the Head Gardener – who did some training at Versaille, (he told us), is unusually tight and looks almost daringly tight to the branches.

Then, for the first time ever, we ventured into the house itself – well, actually the servants’ area – because I’d spotted a very pretty Delftware tulip stand through the window in the old kitchen. It’s only the second one we’d ever seen and with the exception of two genuine antique earthenware pots, the kitchen and dairy have been equipped with some very nice freshly thrown scalding pans. There’s a photo below.

So it’s a red letter today. Two resolutions fulfilled and the third, of which this post is a part, is to complete a million words before New Year; just 34,000 to write which is going to be tough. Next year’s resolutions are going to be about boiling down the ten years of the blog to its essentials, and next week I’ll make a start on logging the fungi. Targets are good!

Before your very eyes – Cheshire cat plants are the lost smiles of nature.

If you’re up to speed with the latin names you won’t need me to tell you what they are. I’m using the common English names because they’re the place most of us start our journey as well as expressing the poetry of nature.

Actually (so far) one of these plants – the one at the top left – hasn’t yet joined the ranks of the disappearing but it’s still early days in the crisis of species extinction that’s barrelling down on us. So on the left, top to bottom there are the Small Scabious, The Sheeps-bit, often called Scabious as well, and the Devil’s Bit; ditto. The one on the right is a Common Restharrow – which was the initial impetus to write this post. I’m writing about these plants, and the reason I think you should be interested too is that seeing them is like looking at the prelude to a slow motion car crash.

I wonder if there was a smidgeon of irony in choosing bonfire night to launch the latest Red List – or to give its full name “A new vascular plant red list for Great Britain”. I can hardly imagine the great British public queueing around the block to get a copy before the ink dries, and it is very technical (but over the years I’ve already put in the hard miles); however it’s a duplicitous ten quid’s worth of ebook masquerading as a scientific survey when it’s really a requiem for a disappearing earth. Every paragraph is damp with tears – it’s the saddest list of names you’ll ever find in a book about plants.

Here’s a Google Gemini summary of the findings:

Increased Threat Level: The proportion of species assessed as threatened (Critically Endangered, Endangered, or Vulnerable) has increased 26% (434 species) are now classified as threatened, up from 20% in the previous 2005 list. A further 140 species are listed as Near Threatened, suggesting their conservation status is of concern.Widespread Declines: Many plants that were once common and widespread in the countryside have continued to decline and are now assessed as threatened.

So let’s start with the larger picture at the top of the page, in a way that’s also a defense of English plant names. The name Common Restharrow at least paints a picture. Having driven a little grey Massey Ferguson 35 and towed a chain harrow to aerate and tear out the thatch of dead grass whilst flattening molehills I get the joke. If I’d been doing the same job a century ago and leading a horse-drawn harrow I might have called the plant “rest horse”, because this little plant in a typically tangled mass can stop a harrow in its tracks. I’m thinking of the rain soaked agricultural labourers in Peter Brooks’ film of Ronald Blythe’s book “Akenfield”. Ononis repens defines the plant’s place on the spreadsheet down to ten decimal points, but fails to tell the story. Of course, unlike my Fergie, a giant turbo charged tractor would pass over without noticing – but it wouldn’t need to notice any more because Restharrow is disappearing altogether. It’s been moved up the parade of shame from “least concern” to “vulnerable” under the onslaught of intensive farming. I can still take you to see it, but it’s mostly on the coastal headlands in west Wales and Cornwall at the field edges, beyond the reach of sprays and ploughs.

And that’s where the sadness comes. The loss isn’t just technical – an entry on a spreadsheet – but a loss of memory, of relatedness, of history; it’s personal. Sun, wind and rain; strolling and rolling together with Madame; hours, days and weeks of searching followed by the moment of joy in finding. These are not the simple pleasures of an ice-cream at the end of the day’s plant hunting; they’re the joys of complete focus and engagement; of falling in love. This is a big deal.

In a recent posting I was writing about human grief in a very allusive way (which I hinted at in the title), and in parallel, I can’t stop wondering whether the loss of meaning when we lose someone close to us isn’t just damaging when what’s lost is a part of the physical world in which all our memories are embedded. In Stoke Row on, the edge of the Chilterns, my grandparents had a smallholding. More even than remembering what they looked like I can’t escape from associating them with the Beech trees that surrounded their cottage; from the sight and smell of the paraffin stoves on which granny cooked, and of the rich oily smell of chicken meal. I remember that the first squirrel I saw was a red squirrel, and I remember the line of trees at the back which my Mum would examine and proclaim that there was rain over Granny Perrin’s nest. My Mum’s favourite flower, she would say, was Lady’s Slipper – but which – of about ten alternatives did she mean? The orchid is now extinct so that leaves nine. When she died my sister and I were trying to decide where we could bury her ashes and we did a bit of research to see if we could return her to her childhood home. It was a powerful blow to discover that the Crest smallholding is now covered with an industrial estate. In fact it was even more of a bereavement to discover that I would never see the tarmac road dressed with flint pea-gravel again, nor gather primroses nor help to gather prickly and itchy hay to be stacked in stooks and ricks.

So let’s go back to the three Scabious, only one of which (top right) is really a Scabious. The other two, united by their similar appearance and vibrant pale blue-violet colour, kept me bewildered for several years although, once you know how, they’re worlds apart. I was always dazzled by the name Devil’s-bit. Such a plant must be special, I thought – like Viper’s Bugloss and Deadly Nightshade; it’s the names that draw me in like a moth to a flame. But Devil’s Bit and Sheep’s-bit never seem to grow side by side so the moment of revelation is more likely to happen in front of a decent macro-photograph or, in my case looking at the illustrations in Collins Wild Flower Guide and seeing – actually noticing – for the first time that the stamens on Devil’s-bit are like little mallets and on the sheep’s-bit they’re tiny little trumpets. Oh floods of joy! except what I recall more than anything else is where they grow, and they grow there because they are perfectly suited to their homes; to the weather and climate, to the soil, and to the grazing or cutting regime under which they can thrive. Change any one of those things and they’ll likely dwindle and disappear – not waving you might say – but drowning. One blisteringly hot day in the midst of a drought we shall go back and they won’t be there any more.

Maybe the flowering plants are nature’s way of smiling at us. I used the metaphor of the disappearing Cheshire cat’s smile at the top. Perhaps it’s the canary in the mine; whatever – it’s nature sending us a message that when the flowers go they take the joy with them.

Thrift growing on a clifftop in St David’s Pembrokeshire

Is this a bunch of photos or some kind of electronic reliquary?

Well it’s probably both, but for now I’ll go with the “Caucasian Wingnut” label on the tree. The other photos – in no particular order – are of my lightweight plant recording kit; the view from Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire which I’ve been going to since I was old enough to ride a pushbike and had to climb over a wall to trespass and where I’ve ridden horses, foraged St George’s mushrooms and recorded plants and fungi ever since. It’s also possible, if you walk to the edge of the escarpment, to see nearly all the places I’ve lived in since I was born. There are a pair of “then and now” photos of the cottage we lived in when we were at art school; one picture of our latest allotment; some stored dried and bottled food from it; some pots of tayberry jam and another of Priddy Pool on the Mendip hills and finally a Ragged Robin plant. They’re all extracted from the 20,000 photos I’ve spent 18 months processing down to 1000 botanical records and 500 species – which I’ll finish this week before I start on the fungi.

For the benefit of WordPress and Facebook followers who may be wondering why I’m writing this, I’m trying out a new link to Bluesky since the Facebook algorithm has blocked my posts because their computer has decided that “The Potwell Inn is a business” – no it’s not it’s the title of a comic novel by HG Wells. If the link works properly it should give present and future readers access to the whole nearly 1 million words and associated photos from the past decade. Press that follow button. You know you want to do it!!

@davepole.bsky.social

Somewhere between the recycling depot and the destructor bridge there’s a spirituality of hope – but I can’t find it.

The new Destructor Bridge

Bath is a city divided by the river. Walking west to east along the towpath between Windsor Bridge and Churchill Bridge you follow the northern half of the city which bears the postcode BA1. BA1 is posher than BA2 because it’s got most of the expensive and Georgian parts. Then, at Churchill Bridge – (I’m sensing a bit of a pattern here because you will already have passed beneath Victoria Bridge) – it all takes a bit of a dive on the northern side as you pass the bus station, the railway station and the Southgate shopping Mall and then Royal Mail sorting office before you approach the end of Pulteney bridge where (if you dare) you can pop into the public loos over Waitrose and change back into your Jane Austen inspired Emma costume or pretend you’re Knightly according to taste and preference.

In many cities they demolish the old and build the new on top but in Bath, given that the tourist money has come from the old, for several centuries, they built the heavy industry and the ugly/smelly bits across the river out of sight. The Destructor bridge linked the upper Bristol Road to a giant incinerator which was next door to the gasworks and just along from Stothert and Pitts where they specialized in heavy engineering; cranes; bridges and transport across the British Empire. As industry died, plans were hatched by friends of the developers to “improve” the city by demolishing older buildings in favour of concrete tower blocks. You can read about this in the excellent and angry book “The Sack of Bath” by Adam Fergusson. We bumped into his daughter once in a pub in Hay on Wye and immediately recognised one another as kindred spirits.

Sorghum? where the hell did that come from?

It just so happens that we live near the towpath – just far enough away to avoid the smell of sewage as long as you hurry past a couple of the outflows in the summer. The towpath is my plant hunting ground; the place which never fails to reward me with something new; often a squatter or a vagabond. I reckon I could easily account for 50 species in my records, probably more. On Friday I went for a walk along the path to clear my head. On the opposite bank they’re clearing the old gasworks site in order to build hundreds of new flats – the river view would increase the value of an old air-raid shelter into six figures. The noise was horrendous, with drilling, piling and lorries everywhere. The spirit of the old destructor bridge lives on with a twenty first century sound-track. On my side of the river I passed the recycling centre which is joined by the relatively new version of the destructor bridge which clung to its name but lived up to its reputation when they discovered it was a bit too long or maybe too short when they came to lift it into place and retreated bloody but unbowed for months as the designers licked their pencils and tried to find someone to blame. Fortunately it wasn’t called the Prince Andrew bridge because that would have taken nominative determinism to the level of farce.

But I was there clearing my head because the previous week we had attended the funeral of a young friend, just 40 years old from bowel cancer and I needed to find that kind of safety in numbers that lets me escape into a spreadsheet for a couple of hours. Walking past the destructor bridge and the recycling centre seemed to be hauntingly significant as I recorded and photographed the ordinary, everyday plants that most of us ignore as if they were strangers in the street. Ivy leaved toadflax, cocksfoot grass, alkanet, broad leaved dock, ribwort plantain, blackberry, ivy, herb robert, false oat grass, buddleia, marsh figwort, common ragwort; red valerian, groundsel, bilbao fleabane, gallant soldier, pellitory of the wall, mugwort, tansy, several kinds of dog rose and annual mercury. I fear I’m writing a book of remembrance for the weeds I pass in the street as the climate catastrophe intensifies.

We tend carelessly to describe grief as a kind of temporary and solvable disturbance of the mind. Time, we say, is the great healer. But it’s not, I want to scream. Bereavement. and the grief that explodes in us when it happens, more closely resembles a stroke. It destroys memory, reshapes the world in unfamiliar ways so we can’t recognise the places we once knew. The loss of a limb just as the loss of someone we love, can’t be mitigated by positive thinking and we don’t get over it – ever.

And I feel as if I’m suspended between the grim spirituality of destruction and the optimistic recycling of fading memories. The river becomes the Styx in this uninvited metaphor. The noise, the roar and pollution of the bulldozers and lorries on one bank and on the other the recycling centre where we take the things we no longer want – to be reprocessed into something else. On the one bank letting go completely and on the other, clinging to the hope that something may be retrieved while we rather desperately make records and take photographs, out of which – one day – it might be possible to build a spirituality of hope in a world where God – like Elvis seems to have left the building.

Creeping Thistle – Cirsium arvense

Just give it to me straight, Doc!

Volvopluteus gloiocephalus – the Stubble Rosegill.

I once went to see our GP with a very painful toe joint. He examined my foot thoughtfully and eventually said “you’ve got Hallux rigidus” “Yes, I said, “it’s a stiff toe, but can you do anything?” There are two schools of thought on Latin; one suggests that it’s the way that some professionals want to sound as if they know something that we don’t. The other school takes a more pragmatic view of things and accepts that our native languages are so different – each with its own names for illnesses, plants, fungi and so forth – so the only way to avoid confusion is to use an agreed common language like Latin. The two dispensations only collide when the teaching of Latin is withheld from large numbers of people and then the whole thing becomes a grisly class issue. I never learned Latin at school and so the pronunciation of these unfamiliar words often feels like walking across a minefield.

This rather lovely fungus perfectly displays both sides of the argument. After a bit of toing and froing on the British Mycological Society Facebook page, which I thoroughly recommend, someone came up with a name that fitted the description in the books. I now think it’s Volvopluteus gloiocephalus – the Stubble Rosegill. The English name perfectly describes where it most often grows, and the fact that as it ages the gills turn pink. Unfortunately it’s also known as the big sheath mushroom and the rose-gilled grisette none of which vernacular descriptions fit very well the one that I found in a forest ride which is in the photo. This one was very fresh and the gills were still white. The key feature in mine was the sticky, shiny brown cap.

The AI apps all gave up at first post and so I was stuck with “some kind of Amanita”. My helpful respondent gave me a Latin name which describes a member of the Pluteaceae (family) that has a notable volva (the kind of socket in the ground that it grows from) and a sticky cap. Frankly I think that in this instance the Latin name is a lot more useful and it would still mean the same across the world because this one isn’t rare, it grows pretty well everywhere.

I’d thoroughly recommend getting into something you’ve never done before because every day brings something new and exciting. The experts who’ve spent years studying fungi, for instance, have to go on for more years of Norman normals before finding something new and exciting. But when you’re a beginner you’ve got all those champagne years still to come, and the ordinary, once you’ve started searching, are just as exciting and rewarding as the rarities. Not only that but you’ll never look at the vaulted roof of a gothic cathedral in the same light again once you look closely at some fungi. But quite apart from all that, these life-forms are just so beautiful and strange they fill a gloomy time of the year with ghostly luminosity.

You won’t find me saying my prayers very often!

And notwithstanding appearances I’m not saying them here either. What I am doing is attempting to photograph a very small fungus while holding a six inch ruler behind it. In plants and fungus spotting size really does matter. Here’s what I was trying to get a picture of – it’s a tiny clump of candlesnuff fungus on some dead wood up on the Mendip hills.

Two things coincided which I wanted to write something about; the first was a random comment by a young man a couple of weeks ago which rang some serious warning bells in my mind. The second reason was our first fungus hunting visit to Priddy this late autumn. As to the first challenge I should say at the start that although I’ve never consumed any kind of hallucinogenic substance I am very interested in such properties and I’m filled with wonder at the way plants and fungi can synthesize unimaginably complex molecules which have the effect of reversibly changing our brains. Anyway I was having a conversation about Psilocybin with this young man and he mentioned that Velvet Bottom was a good place to gather them. Now I know Velvet Bottom well; it’s one of my favourite places on Mendip – however I wouldn’t eat anything foraged from there because the whole site is heavily polluted with lead, zinc and even cadmium to the extent that in some patches of ground nothing will grow except a few heavy metal tolerant plant specialists. Grazing by sheep is only allowed for very short periods to maintain the habitat, and downstream in Shipham gardening has, at times, become severely restricted due to fears of cadmium poisoning. I’m sure that readers of the Potwell Inn would never dream of boiling up magic mushrooms or, for that matter Fly agarics to make tea but just in case any readers were planning post retirement breakouts, I’d advise that there are safer places than Velvet Bottom to begin a life of crime.

But I also wanted to write about the metaphorically fatal attractions of fungi which can get very obsessive. I’m just grateful it’s a relatively short season. Fungi are beautiful, strange, mysterious and fleeting visitors which spend most of their time invisible and underground. What we see are the fruiting bodies; the spore carrying parts which can carry their offspring many miles. To be fair, fungi can be very hard to identify and although there are now one or two phone apps that will have a go, they’re still nowhere near safe enough to pronounce any fungus edible. I was testing one new app while we were out and although it easily managed some simple tasks, it failed completely on quite a number. I got many warnings that such-and-so was potentially dangerous. I don’t forage theses days in any case but I have poisoned our cat – which luckily recovered, and come within a whisker of poisoning Madame and me. Even easily recognised and safe fungi – St George’s mushroom for instance has built up intolerance over any years with some real experts, and suddenly made them ill.

But there’s more than enough aesthetic and scientific interest in fungi to compensate for leaving them in the ground. I’ll just put a few pictures up below to show the huge variety of form, texture and colour that they can display – not to mention odour which can range across the whole spectrum from apricot to dead sheep. I love them, and look forward to meeting them again every autumn and then there are always lichens, mosses and liverworts to fill the dark days of winter with fascination. My suggestion would be to photograph anything you encounter that interests you and make a note of the location – you can usually do this on your phone. Then perhaps one day you’ll feel inclined to identify and organise them in a spreadsheet and make a contribution to proper science in this time of global species extinction and climate change. All these below were photographed in a short walk last Thursday.

On Saturday I mended the allotment shed window which had been smashed months ago by vandals. I thing by comparison with the fungi my handiwork lacks a certain architectural je ne sais quois !

Autumn continues to come good.

Well the last ten days were a bit of a challenge but at last the polyps (six more of them, including a real biggie) have been removed from my colon and my system is almost recovered from fasting followed by 24 hours drinking drain cleaner and a morning under sedation at the local hospital watching the job being done on a big screen. I found out later that they’d given me a combination of pethidine and midazolam which were the reason I was able to not wriggle/scream/ or change my mind. As is the nature of these drugs I can barely remember what went on and as for the bus ride home it’s blank. I can remember the exact moment they wore off, though, as if a curtain was lifted and when I read the consultant’s notes I had the usual post-operative WTF? moment. On the plus side the (award winning) team were lovely and kindness itself.

So …. the campervan was fixed on tuesday after being recovered for the second time with a non functioning clutch. On Sunday we checked out Morrison’s garage at the Mall and they still sell LPG, so we’ll be ready for the next adventure as soon as they re-open the road through Pilning, and today we had our flu and covid top-ups and pressed a big bag of apples for juice during the afternoon.

Having decided to carry on with the allotment we’ve been working hard every day getting beds cleared and prepped ready for planting up. There are over a hundred broad bean plants of different varieties growing steadily in the greenhouse in their root trainers and very gradually we’re getting back on track. It’s been a magnificent year for the apples, and all of the trees planted in 2021 have fruited this year, which has created a new challenge for us because in spite of my careful records, it looks as if the nursery had mislabeled some of the trees, and in one row of five the first and last had been wrongly labeled – so Winter Gem and Grenadier had been transposed. This was the first time we’d been able to see the problem. The red- skinned apple on the left was one we inherited and we’ve never known for sure what it is but have gone (provisionally) for Ribstone Pippin and the green one on the right is Winter Gem which, ‘though it doesn’t look all that nice is actually delicious and very fragrant. The red spots on the skin are caused by a reaction between oxygen and the skin as the apple ripens off the tree.

Apple identification is a difficult skill to learn because it includes consideration of the horizontal and vertical section of the fruit; its shape, whether conical or round; exact description of skin colour; streaking; degree of greasiness; flowering and ripening times, the colour of the exposed fruit and the degree of russeting and you have to do a lot of it before you can be proficient. We spend a lot of time on the National Fruit Collection website – it’s extremely thorough and well worth bookmarking.

Anyway, while I was feeling sorry for myself a very divisive philosophical issue came up on the allotments when a member wrote a rather cross Facebook message about “rubbish” being “dumped” along the fence line at the bottom of the site. Madame absolutely forbade me to respond, but I feel safe here to write that there has been a growing problem, and distance, between those allotmenteers who believe you are only closer to God in a garden as long as you’ve slaughtered every blade and leaf of plants which you didn’t grow for food or aesthetic pleasure. Wild animals too, but especially badgers rats and foxes, oh and squirrels and mice – oh alright then – cats too are not permitted either. As for insects and above all caterpillars, need I say more?! At the greener end are those who, like us, keep a trail cam to enjoy the nocturnal visitors (which also include deer); we control the rats by never chucking the remains of Friday night’s takeaway on the compost heap because we know that rats originally came from India and love a curry. We have a scuzzy looking pond in which rat-tailed maggots can grow into hoverflies, and we allow lots of weeds to stay – especially nettles – because some rarish butterflies love them, and some lovely seed-setting grasses for the birds to chomp on. We obviously don’t want the Whites to eat our brassicas and so we net them carefully. Sweetcorn needs fortifications to keep the badgers out and so it goes on. Our allotment is, by the standards of the evangelicals and fundamentalists of tidyness, messy; but here’s the point. Nature just loves messy, and over ten years we’ve been visited by a dozen relatively rare plants which stay for a year or two and then move on. There was Peruvian apple, Stone-parsley, Bullwort, A rarish form of Fumitory, and others too. All-comers are welcome to come and raise a family over a couple of seasons and if some people think they’re just weeds it’s their loss.

Our relationship with nature is a conversation in which (for instance – like the apple trees) no-one speaks for four years and then something important happens. We accept that the plot we rent is not ours, but belongs to two of us (two legged creatures) and all of the other creatures from deer down in size but not importance to amoeba and thence to pollens and yeasts. We cannot compel but, as the astrologers say of the stars, we can only dispose, and if you don’t talk to the plants how will you know what they need?

So if we empty our buckets of trimmings, prunings and nuisance weeds like couch and bindweed along the fence we’re not dumping them (with all the negative connotations of that word, we’re putting them there because as they rot down to return their nutrients to the earth they provide a place of safety for dozens of species like woodlice, spiders, ladybirds, all kinds of pupae, field mice, hedgehogs and slow worms whose contributions to pollination, clearing up infestations of blackfly and suchlike, eating rotting leaves and aerating the soil – we rely on. We are part of a vast interdependent food chain. We do not dump plastic waste, old pushchairs and mattresses crisp packets or discarded drinks bottles and cans.

But we do process and store all sorts of delicious food that would otherwise be wasted. These tomatoes were picked green from dying vines after the drought, and ripened in the dark so they could be reduced to a roasted passata which keeps for at least a couple of years and is as good as pixie dust for bringing a pasta dish to life.

Walk on by!

Dandelion – obviously! but more complicated than you might think.

Everybody knows what a dandelion looks like, I imagine, but there’s no shame in not knowing that there are around 250 species of dandelion in the UK and – if you’ve got time and a good psychotherapist you could learn to tell them all apart. The beloved blackberry is a similar case but even more complicated, with around 330 species. They’ve evolved an interesting method of reproduction -known by the academics as apomixis which roughly translates as having sex with yourself; don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it – or as Woody Allen said – if you’re going to have sex you might as well have it with someone you love.

Anyway, and moving on rapidly, the dandelion is a handy reference point for what you might call the “walk on by” plant which draws together two threads of the WOB phenomenon. The dandelion in the photo, for instance, has been there along with its definitely not cousins for all of the ten years we’ve lived here. Until today I’ve never photographed or recorded it because it’s too common and therefore not worth the bother. However fate has confined us to short walks near home for most of the summer and the local rogues and vagabonds of the pavements and towpath have been the only available source of botanical interest; which disposes me more kindly to the dandelion. I’m sorry for my casual disregard in the past but now I just have to walk on by not because they’re common and vulgar but because I haven’t got the time or the confidence to sort them out; although I did shell out for the standard handbook which has been sitting unopened on the shelf like a bishop’s bible for months.

After months of tests and investigations we’re near the end of the tunnel (you’ll see why that’s a highly inappropriate joke in just a moment), and all I’m waiting for is to have a 35mm polyp removed from my colon so I can stop being anaemic and feeling knackered. I’m relying on the expertise of the multitude of consultants, nurses, interns and doctors who’ve peered up my rear end, when they tell me that this thing – about half as big again and the same shape as a champagne cork- isn’t malignant. Like birdwatchers they know the jizz of a nasty one when they see it. I have great confidence in them.

But spending every moment checking the phone for the next appointment doesn’t just cost you time, it drains the creative springs and makes life a bit grey and dull. We’ve cancelled several campervan trips so we could both be available for appointments at the drop of a hat and so necessarily I’ve been focusing on the local weeds. It’s bad enough trying to take macro photos out in the wilds; passers-by tend to stop and ask if you’re OK. Do the same thing on a pavement or on the towpath and they’re likely to call the police. But don’t for a moment suppose that all you’ll ever find outside your city centre front door is dog poo and beer cans. I’ve been amazed at how many relative rarities make even a temporary home for themselves in the mean streets of Bath, and recording the ordinaries balances the books against the statistical over-representation of exotica in the field guides. If we’re going to keep tabs on the unfolding runaway climate disaster we’ll need to record the sparrows, silverfish and brambles of the earth.

Here’s another one I’ve never recorded except in some remote and rather glamorous wild place. There was member of the same family, the Sea-spleenwort for which I persuaded Madame to walk miles in freezing wind and sheeting rain in January to find it on the sea-cliffs where it belonged, only to have it shown to me on the basement wall of the Guildhall in Bath. Sadly it seems to have gone now and I thought its near relative, the wall-rue, which has always grown unrecorded by me on the wall below our flat might have died from drought this summer. But this morning I dodged the rain to photograph the dandelion and came back with Hemp-agrimony; wall-rue and field-speedwell – all within ten yards of the front door. I shall have to make a list of plants that grow with 100 yards of the flat and I’ll guarantee it will exceed fifty species.

There’s a bit of a knack to naming plants from their leaves alone and today AI threw me completely off track with the speedwell which it identified as ground-ivy. A most enjoyable trip to the books settled the matter in favour of the speedwell but the two plants are alarmingly similar until you see the flowers. The purple flowers scattered near the speedwell had me scratching my head until I remembered there’s an Argentinian Vervain in full flower growing in a pot next to it. You see, even boring plants turn out to be better than the Times crossword for getting your brain in gear.

Back in August 2024 I set myself the target of organising my utterly random collection of photographs, and identifying the names and locations of all of them with a supporting photo. It took me a whole year to get them on to a spreadsheet and now there are 898 records sitting there waiting to land on several unfortunate referee’s desks. My species total is up to 472, just 28 short of the 500 target. I also set myself the target of completing 1000,000 words on this blog and so far I’m up to 951,500 which leaves me around 49 more posts to write. As my old friend Joan Williams used to say – God willing and a fair wind I’ll get there. But I’m not a trainspotter by temperament and so if it takes until next february it won’t keep me awake at night.

Aren’t statistics a slippery thing to deal with? I read yesterday that this polyp that I’m entertaining at the moment increases my risk of colon cancer by something like 75%. Reading that statement carefully suggests that my real risk depends upon what percentage of any polyps of any size are malignant. The answer to that is 5-7%. So my real risk is more like 75% 0f 10% ie 7.5%. It’s possibly less significant than crossing the A4 on a zebra crossing with a Range Rover approaching.