Category: Natural History

It’s difficult to sort out the rogues: a rather abstract question.

28th July 2025

The Monmouth and Brecon canal today

We’re back next to the Monmouth and Brecon canal in the campervan and today, walking towards Brecon we noticed that the canal is a tad shallower than usual; so much so that boats passing in opposite directions need to take especial care not to ground themselves as they move to the side. This is the place where I saw my very first Kingfisher in the 1970’s and since then we’ve camped here, paddled up and down the canal in our kayak and walked the towpath in winter frost and summer heat. Spring is the most exciting time when the banks of the canal are alive with emerging wildflowers. It’s a truly inspiring landscape – rich and still diverse with flora and fauna. Last night, over the hedge, we heard a man exclaiming to his child “look up at the tree, there’s an eagle sitting there!” In all probably it was the Osprey that’s taken up residence nearby. Hearing the man’s excitement was almost as good as seeing it for myself.

There’s a reason for the low water level and it’s a dispute about water abstraction from the river Usk which runs almost alongside the canal, and it’s between four principal parties; Welsh Water, the custodians of the river Usk, and the Canals and Rivers Trust who are now obliged to pay £1 million a year in what you might call ransom money to Natural Resources Wales whose explanation of what they actually do with the money boils down to “because we can – it’s really expensive collecting all these tithes!”.

The other litigants are the multitude of smaller environmental groups who love the river, love the canal, and the businesses which bring millions of pounds from tourism in the area and the farmers who can’t grow our food without either rain or irrigation. It isn’t a surprise that there’s a shortage of water; well not at least if you’ve read a newspaper since the middle of the last century or stepped outside your front door in the last three or four years. Droughts, heatwaves and then fierce storms are the symptoms of global heating and we’ve known for decades that this time was coming. Decades during which we could have prepared for an entirely new kind of climate.

It’s widely thought that much of the Usk water being abstracted from the river Usk is now being diverted to depleted reservoirs in order to maintain the water supply in South Wales. I did a quick Gemini search and came up with this answer about pollution incidents involving Welsh Water and here it is:

Natural Resources Wales (NRW) has recently reported that Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water was responsible for 155 pollution incidents in 2024.

This figure represents a significant increase, being the highest number of sewage pollution incidents in a decade, and a 42% increase in incidents over the last ten years. Of the total, 132 incidents were from sewerage assets and 23 related to water supply. Six of these were classified as serious (category one or two) incidents.

NRW has expressed serious concerns about the deterioration in Welsh Water’s performance since 2020 and is demanding urgent and fundamental changes to their operations. They have also pursued a number of prosecutions against the company for various pollution offences.

So the canal is being held to ransom and the river Usk is still being depleted by Welsh Water which – astonishingly – isn’t run by greedy venture capitalists but as a non-profit distributing community asset which is supposed to apply all of its surpluses to improving the environment and resources. Needless to say Welsh Water hasn’t done very well, not having built any reservoirs or, evidently improved its sewerage processing plants. The great and good appear to be standing around wringing their hands and whining that they’d like to get their hands on the people who did this. If they’d like to email me or any of the millions of fuming customers I think we could point them in the right direction. “We have seen the enemy; it is us!”

So inevitably someone will argue – it’s not the fault of the water companies if demand outstrips supply or if, as in the case of sewage supply exceeds capacity. Let’s be frank, there are a multitude of government agencies whose whole raison d’être is to plan, to supervise, to administer, to anticipate demand and to sanction the organisations under its supervision when they fall short. We, the great British public (I could have said unwashed), pay these agencies to do those jobs that can only be done at all at a large – macro – scale.

Any public body that fails to anticipate that increasing housing will require more schools, more water, more sewerage disposal, more doctors and schools whilst planning for thousands of new houses is a few sheep short in the top paddock. Any government that abolishes environmental regulations and then goes to all expenses paid conferences to boast its green credentials is asking for its collective dismissal.

Meanwhile we saw a large dead fish floating on its side in the canal today. If the water level drops too far the oxygen level will fall to the point where it doesn’t support life; the clay lining will dry out and when it’s wetted again it will break up and allow the water out. We saw it happen on the Sharpness canal several decades ago. The writing isn’t just on the wall like a piece of graffiti; it’s eaten into the mortar and the whole edifice is crumbling before our eyes. Parts of it have already collapsed on innocent victims. We grieve for the earth and feel utterly powerless whilst the politicians are still in the denial phase and we’ll be well into anger while they’re asking us all to go straight to acceptance and, by the way, would be kindly stop using so much toilet paper to save the earth. Some time. One day.

There are no winners, only losers in this sterile dispute. Large organisations cost money to run, but in return they really must do what they’re paid to do. We all need clean, unpolluted water and we all need to share in the solution even if it means making do with less. Our attitude to water is pretty depressing, wasting it without thinking and treating our sinks as somewhere which is directly joined to another world so it doesn’t matter what drug residues and chemicals go down them. We love rivers and canals and want to use them for leisure and renewal, we love wildlife, we like eating locally grown food and we like taking a shower and we can’t achieve any of these goods by setting one charity to bankrupt another.

I started this piece intending to write about some of the lesser known and interesting plants we found today. I’ll write that tomorrow – it’s predicted to be raining! Here’s a taster.

How old is old?

Madame and New King Street, Bath, 21st July 2025

Madame and me were sitting companionably on a bench in Henrietta Park when I suddenly blurted out “maybe this is what we’re meant to do“. I’m having real trouble adjusting to getting old and I think I must have been doing a bit of subconscious bargaining with the grim reaper – “Look I’ll just sit around staring at the wallpaper and shouting at the telly if you’ll leave me alone and go away!” Madame – not surprisingly – gave me a funny look and the subject was dropped. There is nothing more remote from my ambitions than giving up and staring at the wall, and yet it’s all too easy to accept the general view that old people should shut up, stop moaning and step aside from the industriously youthful as they go about their important business at 100mph. “Oh dear”- I’m inclined to brood – ” I’m getting progressively deaf and without nightly eyedrops I’d probably get irreversible glaucoma, my asthma’s getting worse and the medication maintains its iron grip on my heartrate; oh and there’s the skin cancer and the oesophageal problems waiting like hungry dogs on the threshold and my knees hurt. Actually that’s the core of another argument against assisted euthanasia viewed as a form of equity release by helpful relatives. The next morning, with nothing further said on the subject, we both woke up with the same plan. Let’s renew our gym subscriptions! And so we did.

Good ageing seems to be far more about what we think of ourselves than what other people think about us. I’ve got some big plans, all of which involve getting about and thinking straight. For instance I’ve written almost a million words on this blog without the slightest financial support of my loyal readers who have more sense than that. I’ve built a database approaching 1000 plant records and later this year I’ll have identified 500 species of wildflowers – all of which gives me immense joy. I recently read a newspaper article suggesting that age is just a number and – well – it is a number in one sense, but more importantly it’s a usefully predictive number whose predations can be ameliorated, softened and reduced when you realize they’re not a script. The key to a happy life is having some agency and the nerve to use it when the need arises. Most of the things I can’t do any more are also things that I’ve had the privilege of doing and enjoying in the past.

And so to the photograph and its five subjects which include four plants and a building. Even in a small patch of weeds there’s a question to be pondered and the question with this photo is “how old is old?” , and it turns out that I’m by far and away the youngest participant in this little tableau. Once upon a time I used to think of wildflowers as universally ancient species – like first nation people; pristine examples of the way things were intended – (not sure by whom or what!) – and to be the enduring model for the future and end-point of environmental restoration. But that turns out to be nonsense. Here’s the batting order for our arrival in this country, leaving aside the little brown clump of annual meadow-grass which has died of drought but will be back next year as sure as eggs is eggs, and pretty well anywhere in the world with a temperate climate.

  • Photographer (me) 1946
  • Mexican fleabane 1895
  • New King Street, Bath 1764 – 1770
  • Ivy-leaved toadflax 1617
  • Green bristle grass 1666
  • Sun Spurge pre-1500.

However there’s a huge flaw, a kind of category error in my reasoning here because my six objects are all (including me) both species – types – of plant, building, human – and at the same time instances; unique, one-off and temporary. However much I’d like to imagine that I’m the single permanence in a world of impressions in reality I’m just another fleeting instance . The great fire of London may have ravaged our distant ancestors but neither me or the green bristle grass were there to witness it; nor were we there in the 2nd World War to witness the bombing of the neighbourhood or the drunkenness, the brothels and the stinking dye-works of the Georgian period. All that happened was that we passed one another in a quiet and sunny street and I took a photograph because I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at. My greedy ego wants to erect a monument to perpetuate the big moment, but the street that day was a river of un-noticed instances in full spate and all I took to the party was my temporary existence and my momentary consciousness of an unrecognised plant that isn’t even particularly rare.

So it turns out that firstly I’m not really a spring chicken and secondly the idea of a consistent unchanging natural world is a load of cobblers. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it more elegantly than I could ever manage – “Nature is a Heraclitian fire”; turning, evolving, climbing and coiling and occasionally flashing a blinding glimpse of an ungraspable truth. Even in my senescence I’m still a part of it; still in the dance albeit rather slower these days.

I’d never seen a specimen of Green bristle-grass, and I even thought for a moment it was some kind of meadow foxtail coming in from the cold. I just love the way that plants travel around the world, recognizing no borders and setting up home wherever they find a congenial place- even if that’s just a crack in the pavement. Looking at my little timeline I realize that we’re all boat people when push comes to shove. None of us have any right to puff out our chests and declare that we’re indigenous as if that carried some kind of mysterious moral weight. On my desk in front of me, four tiny (1mm) seeds have fallen out of the plant. I can take them and sprinkle them in the pots outside the door and see if they grow because they’re the plant’s message and investment in the future, although some would argue that would be an unwarranted interference in nature. I’ve had a couple of days of pure fun, photographing, measuring and recording something of a rare event.

The earth will get along with or without me and I’ve always hated self-pity in others, but meanwhile there’s work to be done. Every day’s an adventure if you get your head into the right space and stick to the things you can do rather than those you can’t.

Words really matter

Beautiful Demoiselle on the Monmouth and Brecon canal

I was inspired to write to the Guardian letters page many years ago to take issue with Waldemar Januszczak over a piece he’d written loftily dismissing the worker writer movement (in which I was locally active at the time). He’d dismissed the whole idea of working class writing with a contemptuous wave of his silk scarf. The Guardian is one of those media outlets that has never understood that its constituency largely comprises that group of people who are totally unaware of life outside their bubble, and I return again and again to an idea I’ve carried for decades which says that it’s what you say when you’re not thinking that betrays your true personality. Not thinking led a colleague of Madame to pronounce on the situation in Russia during the Yeltsin era, saying there was no poverty there and cited as evidence that the local Starbucks in Moscow was usually crowded.

Recently, a Guardian piece described the people who go out with electronic devices searching for treasure hoards as “Hobbyists”. Had the writer paused even for a moment to consider the inappropriateness of that word “hobbyist”? In the writer’s defence they might argue that they were saying there’s a place for the aforementioned hobbyists to make a (tiny and supervised) contribution to professional archaeology. “Oh gosh – anyone for coffee? mine’s a macchiato Tracey” . Forty years ago I worked as a part-time instructor in a prison. One of my class members was a little and very volatile Welshman who was doing nine years for an affray in which a TV went through a window and one of the protagonists was dangled through the same one. The thing about him was that he was one of the greatest experts on Roman British settlements I ever met. People can be much more complicated than the parodies we invent when we’re not thinking. I remember saying to one particularly nauseating man who’d found more Jesus than me (or could it have been the tea and biscuits?) – “don’t patronise me; I’ve been patronised by much better Christians than you.”

Hobbyist, then, and how about amateur? another word that the insiders use to put the outsiders in their place. Did you instantly recognise the damselfly at the top of this post? Bob Talbot would have known instantly – another man who would never make it to the church Oyster Supper, but who ran a fishing tackle shop in Bedminster, tied flies for pleasure and took me under his wing when I was struggling with my work. I would take the ten o’clock communion in the Lady Chapel wearing my fishing gear and wellies under a long cassock, and dash straight through the house discarding my clericals and out through the back garden gate where Bob would be waiting in his three wheeler to take us out to a river or a lake somewhere. He said to me once “you can keep your god, Dave; this is all I need to be at peace.” On tough days I would go round to the shop and sit with him drinking coffee and setting the world to rights.

And as a beginner field botanist, (my retirement dream) ; although I was fortunate to find a very few highly skilled people who were willing to share their expertise, there were all too many – often retired professional academics – who consistently undervalued the contribution of thousands of unpaid volunteers who had no formal qualifications but were happy to put the hard miles in to record the ordinary and everyday plants without which we’d have no idea what is going on with climate change. You’ll never understand what rare is until you’ve mastered the common to contextualize it.

We’ve become sensitised to personal pronouns, the he and she, his and her bear-traps for careless talkers and that’s a good thing even if it does lead to some hilariously mangled conversations at times. If we must hurt people’s feelings and diminish them as human beings then at least let’s do it deliberately; be proper bastards and own our stupidity. Let’s banish the class-based hierarchies and accept that when the shit hits the fan we need an engineer not a colorectal consultant.

Words can encourage, inspire and move us but they can also belittle and demotivate us. I’m a writer and words, to me, are precious so I get angry with people who use them carelessly, thoughtlessly or untruthfully. A crime against language is a crime against our humanity. So let’s be clear – the only appropriate use of the word “amateur” should be when someone isn’t paid for what they’re doing and regardless of their level of expertise. As for “hobbyist” I can’t see it in any sense except for the purpose of belittling someone. In truth, if it weren’t for unpaid volunteers we’d barely know the extent of environmental damage and species depletion we’re causing. Yes, of course, the number crunching is a bit specialised and the drawing of subsequent conclusions from the data needs keen scientific antennae, but even those more rarified tasks are often being carried out by unpaid volunteers because the government and its ministries know that the best way to solve a problem is never to investigate it – just so that some smarmy politician can say (hand on heart) “there’s no evidence”. “Of course there’s no evidence you clown!“- I might reply – “because you refuse to look for it“.

But we, the great unwashed, will look for the evidence and teach ourselves the skills to do it well because there isn’t any other way.

Even 9mm can be a diagnostic factor.

Just bants mate, no offence intended.

Part of the Lleyn Pilgrim’s Way near Rhiw

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

GK Chesterton “The rolling English road” 1913

I suppose it was just what might be called light hearted banter, but Chesterton’s suggestion that ancient roads and tracks are the result of drunkenness is so way off beam. It’s also evidence of a mindset that’s at least one of the underlying causes of the state we’re in. The truth is, our forerunners and ancestors had an utterly different relationship with the landscape and there’s a far more important reason for winding roads than the suggestion that they were too pissed to make them straight.

We just got back from north Wales where the second half of our stay was in a rather inaccessible cottage on the steeply sloped side of Mynydd Rhiw below the hamlet itself. We were also on the footpath that’s been designated as part of a Pilgrims’ Way. Let’s not get too carried away by that designation because pilgrimage is becoming big business for pubs, cafés and anyone with an empty transit van willing to shuttle pilgrims and their luggage between sections. However Bardsey has been a pilgrim destination for centuries and these miles of track intersect with any number of sacred places. Since Chaucer’s days pilgrims have been a grand mixture of the pious, the curious, the culpable and lost souls looking for some spiritual treasure.

By reason of age, infirmity and knee replacements, the steep path became – for five days – the only way back to the car, and the best available nature reserve. I completely fell in love with 400 metres of stone wall and its associated plants. Breathless and a bit arthritic I had to stop every ten or fifteen paces in any case on the extremely steep slope and so a bit of botanising was inevitable. I even made a list, and I was necessarily directed into a thoughtful appreciation of the people who built the accompanying wall. Five feet high in most of its length and huge boulders- the largest at the base. Some of the stones were so large they would have needed the combined strength of half a dozen strong men. Some were obviously there already.

These walls are quite different from the many other regional styles, and the reason of course is that walls were built with whatever was immediately available and to-hand. In Wiltshire and Gloucestershire there’s a lot of flat brash; and in other parts there are flat slabs of slate. An experienced stonewaller could probably tell you where a particular wall could be found – just from a photo.

But look again more closely, and what you see is the most marvellous habitat for insects and small mammals. One highlight of our time there was to find a couple of bits of scat – poo – that possibly came from a stoat; black, and rich with the blood and bones of its prey and pointed at the ends as we discovered is the sign of a carnivore.

In the lee of the wall a pilgrim might have sheltered from the storms that regularly blow in from Hell’s Mouth bay below, and of course a large number of plant species were enjoying the comfort and warmth that a wall brings. But more important to my argument here was the sinuous course of the wall as it descended the hill. The reason wasn’t hard to imagine. The builders obviously took their stones from next to the proposed course of the wall, thereby creating a pronounced hollow, the grass punctuated by protruding clints waiting to turn an unprepared ankle. These builders must have had the strength of oxen. It’s all well and good to lift 200 lbs a couple of times in the gym, but to lift similarly heavy, muddy and irregular stones all day; time after time must have shown awesome stamina. However now and again they must have encountered rocks weighing far beyond their capacity. I’ve seen it suggested that they could have shattered stones using fires and water but here on the side of a mountain there were none of the makings for such technology, and so they just went around them. They read the landscape and bowed to the facts on the ground.

There’s a whole spirituality in that obedience to the landscape; a kind of Tai Chi approach to building a wall; bending and turning to the superior force of nature. When the Romans came they used their technology to dominate the landscape, building straight roads across the country. It’s a habit we’ve never shaken off in spite of it being so wasteful of human energy. We waste our strength and precious resources by demanding that the earth bends to our will, when the ancients accepted that as a part of the whole of nature we’re limited in what we can demand. So here are some of the perfectly ordinary plants that lived under the shelter of the wall, only occasionally observed by pilgrims in search of the meanings that have always just slipped away. As RS Thomas described it in one of his poems, it was like putting your hand into a hare’s form and feeling the warmth although the hare has always just fled.

After Fern Hill

Is poetry – or maybe drawing, painting: is any manifestation of creativity catching; is it contagious in the sense that being close to one of the inspirational places or people could arouse a sleeping talent within you and bring it to birth? This morning I was making tea in the kitchen here on Lleyn and wondered for a (very) brief moment if – after so many years of scepticism – such an idea might have a sliver of truth in it; because thousands of people believe something similar. How many visitors to Bath secretly buy an extremely expensive notebook or a new and hideously expensive fountain pen for the beginning (inspired by Jane Austin of course) of a new novel? How many visitors to St Ives seal their resolution to learn to paint with the purchase of a watercolour sketchbook at an eye watering price? I share the temptation of course but never believed in the magic until this morning, while making the tea and my mind filled with Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas’s famous poem.

Here’s me, blathering on in full romantic flow about RS Thomas whilst staying in his North Wales parish, putting the teabags into the pot and thinking about a poem by a South Wales poet. For a brief orgasmic (i.e. it didn’t last long) moment I thought I’d contracted poetry by contagion. Later I looked out of the window and counted four ferns – Male fern, Hart’s-tongue fern, Maidenhair spleenwort and of course Bracken all close to the back door. The winner, naturally, was the bracken which drives out all other competitors.

Competition plays a big part in plant life. I also spotted one of the smallest Dove’s-foot cranesbill I’ve ever noticed, growing close-cropped on the well maintained lawn. Another struggling plant caught my eye at the same time, this one a Navelwort barely two inches tall, subsisting on a bed of moss. To grow a fine plant we need to provide sufficient food and light and a suitable environment. But we tend not to think that the same criteria apply to poets and painters. You can read a dozen biographies of successful artists and writers without once being told about the family money that kept them afloat. The persistent and useful myth of artists starving in garrets fills in the many gaps in the ledgers of the famous. The upshot is that many self-effacing little gems are passed over in favour of the big, the tarty and the obvious; the Dahlias and Gladioli of the creative arts.

Navelwort, the leaves shrivelled by drought

So do I think the gift – whatever it is – can rub off on another person? Well yes I do, but not by visiting their haunts, drinking their favourite beer or buying a printed coaster in the local gift shop. Not will the gift embrace you when you arm yourself with pen and ink or laptop and sit there gazing into space waiting for some inspiration somehow to descend on you. But reading and studying their work with real emotional intensity does at least help you to discern something of the vision that drove them. Out there, in the world of the ten thousand things – as the Taoists say – are all the pieces of the puzzle. We just have to be patient until we’ve found them.

Dove’s-foot cranesbill, constantly shorn by the mower.

The long view

The Snowdon range from Rhiw

We’ve moved just over ten miles to a very small cottage on the side of the hill above Porth Neigwl which, in English is rendered as Hell’s Mouth on account of the number of ships wrecked there in South Westerly storms. We’ve been down to the long dune fringed beach in severe storms, and seen how the sea can be almost overwhelmingly dangerous. The Welsh name might also be translated into gateway for the clouds – a name we can also vouch for. This part of the peninsula, with Mynydd Rhiw on one side and Mynydd (mountain) Cilan on the other, seems to attract and embrace banks of low cloud and sea mist in its long arms, mist that, with luck, will burn off during the day. There’s an irony in the photo because we struggled without success to make the telly work last night and it wasn’t until we looked at the photo that we realized there was a satellite dish on the wall. Wrong socket error!

A third quarter moon above Aberdaron last night

We’re looking down from the garden towards Sarn y Plas below us; the cottage owned by the Keating sisters who allowed R S Thomas, priest and poet to live there after his retirement from Aberdaron. The church authorities refused to allow him to remain in the vicarage next door in spite of their having no use for it. Madame noticed some days ago that it was in disrepair, and a drive around it today confirmed the very poor state of the roof. I find it very hard to believe that the church had so little understanding of how celebrated he was as a poet, even though they must have known that his eccentricities led many village people to dismiss him as a “miserable bugger” . The church on the beach in Aberdaron does its best to give pilgrims somewhere to see and hear the reality of his poem “The Moon in Lleyn” , and there’s a small upper room in Llanfaelrhys church with a peaceful feeling and a fine view of Bardsey. In the churchyard his wife Elsi, his son Gwydion, the Keating sisters and the poet and acquaintance, Jim Cotter are all buried. It’s a windy and often cold place for visitors to meditate. Even Sarn y Plas, his old retirement home is under plans to open it to the public, but there is no sense that the church authorities or the village itself is prepared to treat him and his work as much more than a side-hustle. The old vicarage could be redeemed with some restoration and a permanent exhibition. The Keating sisters, who lived almost next door at Plas yn Rhiw, on the remote estate where we’re staying, were equally disliked by many for their opposition to potential caravan sites in the area and even bought up land and gifted it to the National Trust to prevent any further development of tourism. They united in opposition with RS and many others to a nuclear power station being built in Edern up the road, and to military development down on the dunes where bombing practice took place during the war. RS was rumoured to have supported the arson of second homes in the area but no evidence was ever presented. He was a fierce Welsh Nationalist without doubt, leaving ample evidence, sadly, for the the fact that those with most to gain from the destruction of this beautiful place wanted him and his campaigns gone for good. The church, as chaplains to the status quo, wrung its hands and hid the bibles in case anyone ever read them properly.

So, inspired as I’ve been by his brutally honest poetry, it’s pretty cool to be here in the midst of it. I’ve already mentioned his poem “The Moon in Lleyn” which shares a kind of melancholy tempered by hope with Matthew Arnold’s poem “On Dover Beach” which could as easily have referred to Porth Neigwl. But before we get too carried away by the melancholic solitude of this extreme Westerly point, it’s sensible to remember that beneath the hillside where I’m typing this, lies a lode of manganese ore that led to one of the biggest manganese mines in Europe for a while. For all I know this cottage could have been built for a quarryman and his family who would have lived here many decades before RS came to minister here. I could walk across the top of the mountain, which isn’t very high at all, and in ten minutes drop down into the valley beyond, where there are abundant signs of the old industry. I suspect RS would have hated the clanking of the overhead cable lift down to the waiting ships below; the pollution and the whole bleak rust-belt atmosphere of it. However passionate a priest he was, he would never have regarded himself as a missionary; more of a Jeremiah perhaps!

And today, sitting in the pub opposite the church with the smell of hot cooking oil drifting past and hundreds of tourists looking for something to do, I know he would have hated it just as much. The environment has recovered from the mining and could recover perhaps from mass tourism and caravan sites, although there’s talk of another nuclear power station on Anglesey. Despite the best efforts of RS, the Keating sisters, the National Trust and thousands of Welsh Nationalists, his world was a temporary one. The other night we were driving down to Porth Oer for a walk and we even surprised a hare which ran down the road in front of us and bolted into a field. Another poem brought to life. The soil here is slightly acidic and I’ve been finding Heath Bedstraw and Harebells, not to mention orchids on one of the dune lined beaches. It’s still awesome but overhead the bombers still make training flights

It would be easy to put on a pessimistic air and claim that – therefore there’s no point in resisting change – and our local (but thankfully no longer) MP Jacob Rees Mogg was dubbed minister for the 18th century by one journalist for wanting to reintroduce imperial weights and measures. But battles such as engaged RS can last for a generation or even a century, outliving our own disappointments but ultimately vindicating our campaigns. There’s no need to accept the judgements of our contemporaries who will, soon enough join Dante’s bishops in the circle of hell especially reserved for those who didn’t give a shit. All we can do is hold on to the good we can still find and keep the hope alive for the turn of the soft withdrawing roar of the sea.

Oh and this – one farmer’s investment in the future:

You in your small corner and I in mine

The Mud Cliffs of Aberdaron

This is one of my favourite beaches and it’s also one of the most complicated in geological terms. I looked it up on the British Geological Society website which I often find very useful, but this one had my eyes glazing over in a paragraph. It’s very much like looking at the side of a closed book and knowing that the hundreds of pages all contain important writing, but being unable to open it. You can see the stratified pages and even work out that some are made of different paper but other than that it remains as comprehensible as the Dead Sea Scrolls (unless you’re an expert, you’re delusional or you’re in some kind of counselling. All I know is that it’s eroding at a rate of knots and that it appears to be mainly mud with boulders which range from car crushing to the things so pretty you put them into your pocket and then wonder later why you ever picked them up. Here there are topaz and serpentine and bits of manganese ore, but mostly mud. When I saw the bright yellow flowers growing there I just had to go and look, but I also had to pick my way through great heavy lumps of the stuff. It’s a hard-hat area for sure!

I ask myself what kind of plant would pick a completely unstable seawashed near-vertical cliff to set up a family home? The answer, of course is in two parts. Firstly the plant didn’t actually choose to live there, the clifftop where it was previously growing happily just collapsed on to the beach. Part two suggests that possibly dozens of species fell over and most of them died. The survivors – so far as I can work out – are all perennials, and they are all able to spread vegetatively – so they take a packed lunch with them if a lump of cliff soil comes down with them: and here’s the rogue’s gallery:

Clockwise from top left, kidney vetch, field sow thistle, sea mayweed,sea plantain and coltsfoot.

You may think this is a pretty pathetic way to spend an afternoon on the beach and, in the light of a brilliant book I’m reading at the moment, at least I’m not straining medieval latrine waste through a sieve to see what grains the deceased were eating. Each to his own, I say. I’ll be writing about all this again no doubt. but for the moment I’ll just say that plant hunting is much more than ticking species records like so many steam engines. The plants on the cliff are perfect examples of what I mean because I (maybe you too) just have to ask myself- how did you get here? There’s always a story and I’m a storyteller so I always want to know why? and how?

Last week, walking down past the site of the old riverbank gasworks I started to record the plants I was seeing. I won’t bore you with another list, although you might be interested to know that Figwort is so-called because its fruit looks rather like a small haemorrhoid and fig was one of its folk names for reasons you won’t want to think about. Anyway the riverbank was lined with plants and among them were a very pretty hybrid dog-rose and some lemon balm – oh and tansy as well as weld. I can see how the weld got there because Kingsmead had a dyeworks and weld provides a yellow dye – a very smelly process I read. Tansy was used in folk medicine, lemon balm is reputed to keep flies away and lady’s bedstraw smells lovely and was apparently used to stuff mattresses back in the day; possibly with an addition of fleabane. All seemed to have a history but I was puzzled by the lemon balm and the rose, so I got going on Google Gemini because I had a story in my head about a young couple scratching together the money to buy a tiny cottage between the river which flooded regularly and the gasworks which must have smelt horrible and produced foul air twenty four hours a day. My couple were making the best of a bad job by cultivating a little garden on the riverside. Sadly my fantasy collapsed at the first hurdle because there never were any houses on that stretch of the riverbank. So my next narrative is of fly tipping bargemen either chucking their waste over the side on to the riverbank or growing their medicines wherever they could find a suitable spot to plant them. Naturally there’s no way of telling what the real back-story is but there is a more prosaic explanation because the site is now very close to the council recycling depot. Who knows??

But there’s another aspect to this that we need to pay attention to, which is that the whole issue of how plants wind up where we find them is fascinating and complicated. A few weeks ago I finally recorded a Hungarian mullein flowering on the canal miles and miles from any other similar plant. It’s not a bit of use telling it that it shouldn’t be there because it’s an event comparable to spotting a white tailed eagle over Bristol. These things shouldn’t happen but they do – very occasionally.

The title of this piece is “You in your small corner and I in mine” and it comes from a children’s’ hymn I was obliged to sing many times in Sunday school. I quote it because looking back it seems that one of the more sinister purposes of the whole cultural apparatus of church and sunday school is to ensure that we each stay in our own small corner. You don’t want to be too big for your boots, a smartass, all fur coat and no knickers, or jumped up. Best stay where you are; no past and no future because there’s nowhere better than home sweet home, nowhere more comfortable than your own small corner. Fortunately they didn’t send the plants to Sunday school and when things got tough they moved on somewhere else – with nothing more than the mud in their roots. “Weeds, we call them”, says the Telegraph in thundering denunciation. I beg to disagree!

Sunset over the Monet and Brecon canal

Madame and I have exchanged words about whose idea it was to take this picture, but it was me that pressed the button. The resemblance to a Monet painting only occurred to us over breakfast this morning. The impressionist blobs of Hogweed and Nettles; the solitary clump of Reed canary grass and – if this were an ultra high definition photo – the little cloud of mating Mayflies; balanced by the streaks of cloud and the bright gaps between the leaves; even the composition leading your eye towards the horizon and the hills around Brecon.

If you look very carefully you might be able to see a low wall alongside the small road leading west towards Llanfrynach, and if you had walked up there last night you would certainly seen a farmer and tractor carrying large bales of hay back across the canal to his barn; he with a broad smile on his face as he sang (inwardly) a hymn of thanksgiving in Welsh for the harvest snatched from the jaws of global weather disruption. I gathered my watery eyes and snot soaked features into a smile as he passed, trailing clouds of pollen behind him. It’s been a tough week for plant hunting – hot, sweaty and malignantly pollen-rich, and necessitating my taking industrial quantities of asthma inhaler and paracetamol. This is the second time we’ve camped in Wales during haymaking, and the other one didn’t end well either!

Anyway, enough wheezing for now. I was particularly interested in the canalside wall because I’ve been reading the most marvellous book called “Urban Plants” by Trevor Dines, only published last week and I’m not on any kind of commission here! In it, there’s a chapter on walls and so my eye was drawn immediately to the one on the canal where to my great delight I found three more plants I’d not recorded before – by no means rare, but new to me – I’m not a twitcher. In addition to the grass I’ve already mentioned, there was a vetch and a couple of new stonecrops. Being a good (non-practising, lapsed) Protestant I still need to balance every moment of pleasure with a good deal of hard work which, yesterday, included several email conversations with other botanical friends who know a lot more about plants than I do. So welcome to my spreadsheet numbers 727-729, we all hope you’ll be very happy.

Anyway it was an idyllic and peaceful end to the day and a decent night’s sleep on top of the duvet. But this morning I celebrated the new day with the thickest, blackest, sweetest and bitterest cup of coffee ever made.

I’d forgotten, but we’ve been carrying this little mocha coffee maker in the campervan for so long that I only found it accidentally while I was clearing out the cupboard last week. Madame has always made fun of me because on one of our first ever camping trips to the Lizard, we struggled across the fields with a cafetiera and my portable typewriter. by now, sixty odd years later I can understand why the typewriter, but the coffee apparatus is some kind of transitional object. For goodness sake I don’t even like the life-threateningly sweet tar of its gurgling infusion, just the smell gives me palpitations – but that cup of coffee in the morning with its big spoonful of sugar somehow girds my loins (if you’ll forgive the imagery). A slice of toast and home-made bramble jelly, a very small cup of the distillate of hell and I’m ready to write. I feel like a writer.

Nine tenths of writing isn’t the perspiration bit, it seems to me, but in noticing. It’s an almost pathological interest in the tiniest things that cross your path – for instance …… what are those nettles and that hogweed doing there looking pretty in the photo? They’re both of them opportunist, thuggish colonisers of disturbed ground. At least half of the peaceful and lovely rural idyll probably looked like a mud-bath a year ago. Someone’s been doing some earth moving. Why does that plant on the wall look so like the rare one I found on a supermarket wall in St David’s several years ago? Because they’re closely related but not the same. What about this one with similar leaves but loads of dead stalks standing up? – same family, again different cousin. You have to be careful with cousins and families.

Anyway, we’ll be back home soon and then off to North Wales. Right now I’ll be putting on the kettle, filling the water tank and emptying the cludger – oh joy!

Only the yew trees know the whole story

St Meugan’s Church Pencelli

I suppose some might find churchyards rather melancholic places. but not me. We were walking alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal when we saw the road sign which indicated a church half a mile up the hill. It was more of a Welsh mile and a steady climb of 200 metres, passing an adventure centre and a lot of sheep before we came upon the church which is so large as to hold a population much larger than the little collection of houses around and about which wouldn’t even amount to a hamlet’s worth. It was a blistering hot june morning and we passed a group of walkers descending who said there was a good bench up at the churchyard and that sealed the deal.

I’ve spent a lot of time in and around churches and the first thing that caught my attention was the broadly circular wall to the churchyard. This is an often seen feature of Saxon churches which stood on repurposed pagan sites. Churches dedicated to St Helen (Emperor Constantine’s mother who once revivified a corpse with a piece of the true cross that she’d bought from the local relic market) , for example, were almost all situated on springs and one of our neighbours hired a dowser who managed to locate the spring at what would have been my local parish church before the congregation all moved away to work in the quarries.

The walk up a narrow lane to the church was a botanist’s dream, notwithstanding the worst hay fever I’ve ever suffered from. I dripped, sneezed and coughed my way up the long hill taking photos while Madame walked on ahead. By the time we reached the church gate I’d found five species of wildflower I’d never seen before. The circular churchyard and the yews reputed to be more than 2000 years old suggested that this squarely built church sitting silently in the hillside has a history reaching back through beyond the Roman period. Holy places are like that. We find ourselves being drawn to them, never quite knowing why. I’ve always thought that they function as lost property offices frequented by people like me who can’t even fully describe what it is that we’ve lost.

The guidebook came up with some facts and recalled some of the tragedies that the church has seen, including the deaths of family wedding-party who, in 1753, drowned while attempting to cross the river Usk. Outside the church a patch of grass was reserved for the playing of handball, and a pit for cockfighting – forerunners of the creche and free coffee with damp biscuits after the service, favoured by modern clergy.

Outside, a fallen yew tree has been turned into a noticeboard worthy of Antoni Gaudi.

But as I wandered around the churchyard I chanced upon some plants, presumably garden escapes or maybe sown on purpose. I knew that if they were truly naturalised and “wild” they would have been exceptionally rare, but after a few moments the more likely thought came to me that they’d been deliberately put there; safe behind the railings of a pair of listed chest tombs and as symbols of the resurrection just beyond the reach of strimmers and zealous gardeners. The plants – Jacob’s Ladder – were there in three colours, blue, purple and white; a kind of living bible class for those who care to stand and stare. Jacob’s ladder on which, in his dream, Jacob saw the angels ascending and descending to earth. It’s a potent symbol in a churchyard even now – subtle and creative, even a bit subversive.

Delight in the ordinary

In my theological college, at the head of the main staircase, was a door marked “Ordinary”. The plaque was made in varnished wood with gold lacquer lettering – in other words not a practical joke knocked up by a few students – and neither was it a comment on the person on the far side of the door who was far from ordinary. It took a while to find out that the Ordinary – the capital letter isn’t a mistake – plays an important role in any church organisation. It seems obvious, but it’s the Ordinary’s job to keep things running smoothly. In particular he (it was a ‘he’ back in the day) didn’t order the biscuits for brake-pad pudding, always a favourite in the refectory – I’m joking! – or the cabbage (someone once said to me that they knew it was an evangelical college the moment they walked through the door and smelled the boiling cabbage!). It was the job of the Ordinary to organise and supervise the worship, the liturgy and also to make sure that there were no unusual or possibly heretical interruptions to the daily flow of prayer and worship, although I remember one occasion when I was reading from St John’s Gospel and without warning a portly young lady came galumphing on to the platform wearing green tights and performed a liturgical dance around me. It was up there with the moment when I was reading the same passage from St John at a huge carol service in St Mary Redcliffe when I noticed the line at the bottom of the order of service “This page is sponsored by Pascoes Complete Dog Food”.

The Ordinary, then, supervises the day-to-day inner life of the church and keeps it on track, which turns out to be a vitally important role. Until this morning I had never thought of the ecosystem within which we live as a form of liturgy. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, the phases of the moon, the tides and the procession of solstice and equinox all seem to be written into the physical warp and weft of the universe as eternal truths, inviolable to human meddling. But if we take the seasons as an instance we can see immediately that whatever the astronomers and meteorologists define as the seasons, these entities are no more than marks in a calendar; because what we call spring is not an abstract concept but a complex human experience.

Madame is recovering from a knee replacement operation and so we have been pretty much confined to local walks. My regular walks to the supermarket have obliged me to stop and look at the kind of plants that are too lowly (weeds) normally to attract much interest. I stopped today to photograph a particularly fine example of hedge mustard, a plant which is often accompanied by a dried dog’s turd at its base, when the thought exploded in my head that the seasons could be considered to be a form of extraordinary liturgy; a kind of music which unfolds within simple rules but which is capable of great variation. Just to give a rather churchy example (last time, honestly) Ralph Vaughan Williams inserted a single extra note into the seventh line of the tune of “Abide with me”. I always find it almost unbearably poignant to hear that musical phrase played – usually at funerals it should be said.

If the seasons are some kind of liturgy, who – or where – is the Ordinary?

So here’s the takeaway point. The task of the Ordinary is to patrol the everyday worship of a community – think monastery or convent – and keep it within the agreed bounds – just as an umpire might oversee a game of cricket and determine what is and what isn’t within the boundary. The question I’m asking myself is who, or where is the Ordinary who oversees and patrols to keep the Earth from harm? The question arises because it becomes clearer every month that the earth is being harmed; not by any sort of malevolent supernatural force but by us. The great processional song of the plants, the insects, the birds and mammals is falling inexorably silent. The liturgy, the song of the earth, is being broken.

Every year we look eagerly for the signs of spring along the canal. Probably the earliest arrival is the Winter Heliotrope which spreads its faint almond perfume along the towpath. Then come Lesser Celandines, Lenten Roses in the park, Snowdrops, and then the pace quickens and we can barely keep up. The canal banks are surprisingly orderly – Cow Parsley, Hogweed, Bluebells all seem to know their times and places and emerge to use a few weeks of sunshine to complete their cycles before another more vigorous neighbour shoulders its way through. It’s anything but chaotic. This procession – in all its diversity – allows a space for every imaginable life form. This is not just a canalside bank, it’s a symphony if only we would but stand there for a whole season without moving and listen to the three dimensional unfolding – four if you include time. You may not be any kind of believer but I defy anyone who claims not to be moved to profound and deep gratitude for the experience.

We have met the enemy -it is us

Nature as liturgy is a new experience for me but above is the old expression repurposed on an Earth Day poster by Walt Kelly in 1970 five decades ago and paraphrasing a saying coined by an American naval commander in 1813, and it is still as important as it was 55 years ago. The disease of our failing civilization didn’t appear the year before last, it’s been lurking in the shadows ever since the industrial revolution. If I dare to use another religious concept (which does at least stand the test of time) the disease gnawing at our inner lives is the ancient granddaddy of all sins – idolatry: the sin of worshipping the partial, the fabricated and trivial gods we invent for ourselves instead of the whole which escapes us always because we are too fearful of the silence.

The ordinary, the everyday life of the planet is slowly dying from a kind of spiritual and intellectual heart failure after many lifetimes of abuse by us. The liturgy, that procession of music and words expressed in nature, is being broken on the one hand by bad actors who know perfectly well that they are doing wrong but persist in any case because they’re getting rich on the back of it, and on the other hand those of us whose silence is culpable because it is a form of complicity.

Madame and I have a couple of small allotments and we can vouch for the fact that this has been one of the most difficult growing seasons we have ever known. The seasons no longer seem reliable so even sowing and harvesting feel risky. Supermarket shelves are regularly patchily stocked and we read of many instances of sickness caused by the agricultural use of pesticides and polluted water. Even the seeds we have propagated ourselves in the kitchen are not thriving as they should when we get them into the ground. An old saying that – “the farmer’s boot is the best fertilizer” alludes to a remoteness from the earth that could as easily apply to working the soil from aloft the vast behemoth of a tractor as it does to urban life with its desert-like pavements. When we first lived in Wiltshire we would often pass a farm known as “Star Fall farm” which sounds at least a bit lucky for its owners. On the other hand when near Malvern we used to pass another farm – its homophone cousin – called “Starve all” – which doesn’t sound nearly so much fun. Where we live there is a great deal of social housing which shelters some very vulnerable people. One young man regularly seems to forget his medication and will stand out on the green howling “the earth is burning” at the top of his voice for a full hour at a time. He’s not wrong. I’m sad that people hurl abuse at him when his anxieties seem to have driven him mad. Star-fall becomes starve – all and brings us all to our wits’ end.

So driven by necessity and post operative recovery, we’ve been doing our botanising very close to home and guess what? the plants we find are vigorous survivors; bullies, thugs and supremely patient life-forms which can bide their time for an age and then seize any opportunity to grow. They are also just as numerous as their more glamorous country cousins. I counted up to forty species within the putting-out-the-bins range of the flat and a wider search could easily yield fifty. We can all stand and gawp at a Bee Orchid, but I understand how it’s harder to get that enthusiastic about a little Thale cress plant that seems to grow, set seed and die back in a couple of weeks in a crack between the wall and the pavement. However these little inconspicuous plants are just as much a part of the web of life, the processional symphony of nature as the wonderful and rather rare Hungarian Mullein at the top of this piece. While the sopranos and basses capture the most attention, the inner lines of the altos and tenors are the scaffolding for the texture and richness of the chord; the thankless punctuation of the liturgy without whom it would become incomprehensible.

I’ve spent years pondering on the much repeated idea that nature is somehow good for us; a sure remedy for depression and every other known disturbance of mind, body or even spirit. I’ve always concluded that a passive engagement with it is pointless and can bring no rewards. The Greek roots of the word liturgy mean a kind of voluntary work for the benefit of the people. It referred to the practice of rich Athenians doing a bit of volunteering. I’ve come to believe that only active engagement with the earth constitutes genuine liturgy – a communal and cultural response of thanksgiving. Is it any surprise that in these dying days of the Church of England a decent harvest festival will have a bigger attendance than an Easter communion.

I very much hope I’ll be able to enter and embrace my own period of senescence in a world that’s turned its back on all the madness and selfishness, and learned to listen and respond once again to the song of the earth. A tribute to the Ordinary we can’t name or even describe because the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao

A rare Hungarian mullein – Verbascum speciosum whose growth I’ve been following since last August. At 174 cm it’s a bit taller than me! A true cadenza (the flower not me!).