Madame and I are definitely no-diggers, but not in a religious sense and so there are some occasions when we resort to the fork because we share a thirty yard border with several untended plots which constantly test our defences with daring raids. Sometimes they’re aerial – dandelions and sow-thistles are regulars, but also underground – particularly bindweed (hiss) and couch grass. Both of them, especially bindweed, spread underground rapidly; I think I read somewhere that they can grow a metre a week. Anyway, every two or three years we have to dig it out and dispose of it. There’s no point in composting it and we’re all much more circumspect about garden bonfires now we know how dangerous the smoke is. In the intervening years when it’s not a problem, it’s usually enough to run a three tined cultivator hoe, or a sharp draw hoe across the beds and slice them off at ground level. What’s particularly irritating is that our then neighbour allowed us to grow potatoes on a part of one of the plots. We could still keep the ground clear and even improve it but the Council wouldn’t hear of it. However often the plots are offered, there are no takers, it seems, and meanwhile we listen to the bindweed growling at the gate!
It’s been a difficult year for growing so far. We were late getting on to the ground with spells of very wet and very cold weather so we decided to go with the flow, sowing and planting whenever we could. Many of our veg will be later than usual, but fellow allotmenteers who stuck to the textbook timetable have been caught out. We lost some old friends during the winter; the Achillea, the Calendula and Salvias all gave up and a quick trip to a garden centre showed a huge increase in prices so we’ll have to do without for the time being. However the always reliable angelica and some second year parsnips are flying the flag for the insects. We also lost two rosemary bushes down at the cold end of the allotment, so we’ll have to replace them with cuttings somewhere out of the frosts.
The polytunnel has given us great fun and tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and a long row of basil are all thriving. This year – purely as an experiment – we’re growing a patch of sweet corn in the tunnel, hopefully out of reach of the badgers. So notwithstanding a fortnight’s camping in Cornwall; between the kindness of neighbours and the lateness of the season the plot came through for us.
A bit of a post-covid tree planting binge has shown its first fruits in the shape of ten victoria plums while the others all flowered for the first time. We bought them just after the lockdown eased and they were pretty poor, but loads of TLC has helped them along. A Tayberry has grown tremendously fast and looks like it will be providing a good crop later on. All in all, our resolution to cut back last autumn has been comprehensively trashed, so maybe next year. We both ache in every muscle after having to water the vulnerable plants so much in this mini-summer. On the other hand, seven years of regular composting and leaf-mould spreading have left the soil in good condition with decent amounts of moisture at about four inches down.
The asparagus bed is under a final warning because it’s not really producing nearly as well as we’d hoped. Our immediate neighbour grows Connover’s Colossal and he gets great crops, so maybe it’s another example of the old saying – “Right plant, right place”. After a rather lonely winter, the site is finally buzzing again. A few of the newcomers who started during Covid have discovered that Liz Leendertz’s book about a “one hour allotment” doesn’t stand up well to the reality of jobs, children and all the other distractions. Hopefully they’ll return to gardening later in life.
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens, And today we have naming of parts.
Henry Reed, “Naming of parts” 1942
I love the way that, when I’m writing, images and ideas surface in my mind. My first thought when I sat down to write this post was that these four Cranesbills would have been exactly the species which inspired William Morris in his designs. Next I pondered for a while (it’s 5.00am after a sleepless night) on the extraordinary fact that in nature these closely related species are so plentiful. Do we really need twelve of them (Harrap’s “Wild Flowers”). Colin French’s “Flora of Cornwall” lists 34 species and subspecies; such an abundance that the only possible conclusion is that abundance, excess and diversity are somehow hardwired into nature. To return to a previous thought, if Nature is structured like a language then this abundance represents the dialects; the regional and environmental inflections of the same idea – like each one of us; all (potentially) beautiful if only we could break out of the prison we create when we each see ourselves as the only show in town.
And then Henry Reed’s poem plopped into my mind and I had the clearest recollection of myself in my early teens, sitting in a hot and airless classroom and gazing longingly out of the window as our teacher struggled to interest us in this poem. Not me, though. The poem sold itself to me in an instant. Here was another human being, feeling exactly like me at that moment and I took it to constitute permission to daydream. I’m quite sure that our teacher had no such aim in mind, but that’s the dangerous and disruptive power of poetry.
Peacock butterfly resting on a Charlock plant.
I’m indebted to Alan Rayner, by the way, for the idea of walking in nature rather than through it. It came up during a long conversation on a Bath Natural History Society field outing when we were overtaken by a runner pounding by us and seeing nothing at all. This last fortnight the experience repeated itself endlessly as we stood and watched a Kestrel hovering, or knelt in the grass delicately uncovering Spring Squills or – in this specific instance paused to photograph no less than four species of Geranium along a quarter of a mile of sunken lane bordered on both sides by Cornish walls as butterflies jazzed around tracing marvellous curlicues in pursuit of rivals, mates or nectar.
Without that special kind of relaxed mindfulness none of this diversity would have been visible. I suppose you could go out after a specific quarry – some rare or interesting plant – and cover more ground – eventually dragging your photographic elk back to the cave; but my favourite way of walking in nature is to move slowly, turning up all the senses to ten and let the plants do the talking. I’m not sure what practical use this kind of meditation has, other than cleansing the mind of thoughts about the endless dishonesty and stupidity of some politicians or the grinding anxiety that all this beauty is being threatened by the greed and selfishness of war and oil. Perhaps that’s the link with the poem about sitting in a stuffy room and learning how to assemble and fire a rifle in the context of the Second World War.
A wild Strawberry ripening on the warm top of a wall
Looking, seeing and beholding seem to me to constitute a hierarchy of mindful attention. For all the superficial similarities, each one of the Cranesbills is quite distinct. The shape of the leaves, for instance is crucial; compare the deeply incised lace-like divisions of the Cut-leaved Cranesbill in the larger photograph with the more modest Dove’s-foot Cranesbill in the centre of the strip of three to the left. Notice the fern like leaf of Herb Robert and the unusually pale flowers of the other * Dove’s-foot Cranesbill – each one an expression of the irrepressible creativity of Nature, and each one asking of us to name them because naming something – in a strange but powerful way – brings it into existence for us. The more we can name, the bigger the world becomes and the more intense our relationship with it. Even the word “Cranesbill” tells us something about the history of our language. If you look at the forming seed behind the flower at the top left – the Herb Robert – you might see the resemblance to a bird’s head and beak. But when was the last time that the sight of a Crane (the bird, I mean) was sufficiently commonplace to attach its name to a plant? Some centuries, I guess!
So it was farewell to Cornwall on Wednesday as we woke early and packed the campervan. This time we were on the Roseland peninsula, a very different place from the Lizard and a very different feel to the natural history as well. But we’ve already booked to return in September. Curiously, we were talking to our allotment neighbour when we got back and we discovered that without ever meeting one another we had been staying on the same campsite for over a decade. He was planning to drive down today for the half-term week. It’s a small world – worryingly and vulnerably small!
Back home, though, we turn our full attention to the allotment which – thanks to some good neighbours – survived the very hot weather, but urgently needs weeding and TLC.
*I submitted just one of what I initially thought were four species to the local BSBI Recorder – the marvellously skilled Ian Benallick for verification – and he corrected my identification earlier today, so apologies for any apoplexy caused by my mistake. His kind correction led me to double check all my ID’s in Tim Rich and A C Jermy’s “Plant Crib”. Geraniums, it seems, are a difficult group. Yet another example of the way we learn so much more from our mistakes than we do from our successes.
Having enjoyed every moment of sunshine on holiday, we spent some of today working at 35 C in the polytunnel which is now almost planted up with summer residents and looks lovely.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas – from “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
I could go on, I suppose, but too many quotations (there are more to come) can make you look like a smartass rather than an intellectual – see Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees Mogg for abundant evidence of that! However I remember a piece of advice I received from a lovely retired priest when I was a curate that has all the patina of a much handled relic. “You should,” he said, “preach one very clever sermon a year, but never more, because that way the congregation will know you’re clever but won’t get bored to tears with you”. The second piece of advice was that I should never preach about adultery for fear of inadvertently landing a right hook on an unprepared penitent. I once recounted this as a very ill conceived joke in a sermon and leaned across to focus on the most impeccably virtuous person I could think of, upon which a deep burgundy blush rose from his throat to the top of his head. Months later it all came out. Lesson learned.
Anyway this might turn out to be my annual clever piece – I’ll do my best, anyway but even I don’t yet know how to express this rather complicated notion.
Walking is very good for philosophers; well it’s very good for thinking anyway – and one of the great things about our holidays in Cornwall is that they give abundant opportunity for walking and thinking. On Sunday we were wandering down the usual ecstatic bridle way on which I’d already amused myself by listing all the wildflowers I recognised; so I was enjoying a rather relaxed feeling as Madame tried to photograph an Orange Tip butterfly and I was wondering whether at least some of the Cow Parsley in the high banks was actually Hemlock. And then – apropos of nothing at all – the thought popped into my mind – “is nature structured like a mind?” Now these sudden thoughts often turn out to be a complete waste of time, but it seemed a good idea to write it in my field notebook. So I write it down and then – in a rather Pooh Bear moment added “Gaia”. Just to remind myself that I should be careful not to reinvent the wheel. Then, ten minutes later and a bit of chin scratching I added to – “is nature structured like a mind? …… four more words – “or like a language?”.
Click here if you want to see where these weird European thoughts came from – it’s not that bad I promise.
That was enough to set me off on what turned out to be a rather tortuous reflection on a famous (well a bit famous) quotation by Jacques Lacan whose impenetrable writings almost exceed Martin Heidegger (“That pellucid Teuton”) in obscurity. He wrote that “the unconscious is structured like a language” – an idea which, after several years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I think I have a tentative hold on. Then of course, remembered quotes fluttered around my brain like Hitchcock’s birds, and Wittgenstein “if a lion could speak we wouldn’t understand him”, joined Eliade with “We live in a story shaped universe”.
A hunch is just just a theory without footnotes
So, to borrow an image from police procedurals on the telly I started a kind of virtual mind-map in my head, as you might pin post-it notes on a screen. In no particular order, we now know that plants and trees really do communicate with one another; sometimes through the mycelial networks of fungi and sometimes through the release of tiny amounts of organic compounds; sharing food, sending warnings about pests. On the allotment we occasionally make use of these properties, for instance by sowing Tagetes (African Marigolds) to warn off eelworms. We know quite a bit about these functions but hardly anything about the finer detail. The point here is that interactions between plants; between the tiniest single cell organisms through and between all of the many Kingdoms up to and including ourselves could be described as languages, and one of the essential properties of language is that it’s structured; there are syntaxes, rules that need to be respected if successful communication is going to happen.
All that this suggests is that as clever humans we’re able to crack some of those codes – we know when the dog is angry or frightened, when the cat is hungry, when the bird is startled or just looking for a mate. Not all of these interpretations are founded in fact. The medieval doctrine of signatures denoted Lungwort as a cure for chest complaints because the spotted leaves looked rather like the nodules on diseased lungs. Some herbal remedies were founded in hypothetical links between appearance and curative properties; but some were well found in experience, which is why Big Pharma is scouring the earth looking for plants able to synthesise organic compounds as yet unknown to science. Just think of the current interest in Cannabis and Psilocybin. Here again, the active ingredients in both, have a powerful and often curative function in human medicine. These tiny organic building blocks in plants and fungi are miraculously able to lock on to molecules in our own bodies and change whole systems. It’s as if we were made of the same stuff.
You may wonder “what about poisons then?” I once worked in a satellite broadcasting studio and over the desk – you know, the thing that looks like an aeroplane flight deck – was a sign that read “In the event of equipment failure RTFM” I asked the engineer what it meant and he simply said “Read the manual”. The business of vegetable molecules locking on to our own is a serious matter, and however much Hemlock Water Dropwort roots look like parsnips they’ll kill you before you’ve had time to look them up in the manual. In the linguistic interactions between humans and other life forms there are melodious moments and grammatical disasters.
All of which suggests that we have a great deal more in common with other life forms than we often think. Those moments of ecstatic connection with nature are much deeper than nice feelings. They’re a recognition that we are made of the same stuff – how could it be otherwise?
Thrift, shale and Sea Beet all evolved into their present forms in a process so remote and complex it’s hard even to imagine. But if all creation evolved in an orderly way even through mutations and adaptation; if the theory that nature is structured like a language should be tenable, then maybe – just maybe – that language may be faintly communicable not through translation into any human language but through interactive imagination and moments of insight. Our unconscious may be a better listener than our rational selves.
I know this might sound like a return to tarot readings and astrology. I’m certain that many “regular” scientists would dismiss it as heretical nonsense. But even in my most recent floras, there’s always genetic information that describes how many sets of DNA the plants possess. The reproduction of plants is generally very rule-bound and when a new generation breaks those rules it is often infertile. Some genera get around that by reproducing without fertilization by another plant. As with Blackberries they’re nature’s little joke to keep naturalists off the streets as they struggle to identify hundreds of sub-species and write monographs about them.
Maybe you didn’t press the uncover button above, and missed Mircea Eliade’s quote that the universe is story shaped, and Wittgenstein’s famous statement about not being able to understand lion speech and finally Lacan’s assertion that the unconscious is structured like a language. Of course there’s a whole universe of natural language that will remain unintelligible to us because we are not trees or hoverflies. But we can know the circumstances under which trees and hoverflies and elephants thrive. The instinctive unity with nature which is gifted to some can be learned and must be learned if we are not to perish as the species that thought it could manage on its own.
Which brings me to the last post-it note. In a largely irreligious culture many people are unaware of the wealth of creation stories that our ancestors told one another to explain how we came to be. If I pick just one Old Testament story it’s because it’s a brilliant insight into the way of things. In that story God created the earth and all its creatures by speaking. There are many other creation stories across the world that reflect the astonishing thought that language is the substance and condition of our existence.
To recap for a moment – if Nature is structured by some form of broadly considered language; and if the unconscious mind is also structured like a language, then mind, language and nature have this in common. We are one with nature not out of some voluntary act on our part but because that is the way of it. We can ignore it but we certainly can’t change it.
In a worldwide culture which has lost its way in greed and selfishness and where the consequences selfish and destructive behaviour can be airbrushed away, we need good stories more than ever because, in a sense, Eliade is saying that to tell stories is to shape the universe; so to contest and reverse an ecological disaster we need stories that answer the most terrible question ever asked of a human by a god, when the Hebrew God demanded of Cain – “What have you done?” and Cain, whose hands are wet with his brother’s blood, answers “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
If you’re interested in food – especially in the slow food movement, you may well have read John Barlow’s excellent book “Everything but the squeal” – which is an account of a year in Spain during which he attempted to track down and eat the whole of the animal as expressed in the wide range of Spanish pork cooking. The title says it all; it’s a not for the faint hearted guide to not wasting a single scrap of a living creature after it has been slaughtered for our benefit.
Vegetarians and Vegans may, by this time, have decided to abandon this post but I’d argue that wastefulness afflicts us all. As a meat eater I entirely accept that I bear a moral profound responsibility for my choices and one of the ways I try to live that out is to eat meat less and then usually the cheapest cuts and make sure that they are sourced from farmers with high welfare standards. In fact, that point alone means that we could never afford the kind of daft offer that Waitrose came up with this weekend, inviting us to celebrate Coronation Weekend with a rib of beef joint costing £185.00.
Meat eating is a kind of in your face introduction to the earthiness of food and the biggest problem for our culture is that we are not (generally speaking) cooks and so prefer any engagement with meat to be as fast and painless as possible -which in turn obliges us to eat the leanest and most expensive cuts. Coupled with that is our fear and aesthetic loathing of raw meat because it shouts mortality at us and finally because we have no time left after our neo capitalist culture has eaten up any fragment of it there’s none left either for cooking or – tragically – for eating together.
So let’s take a look at sheep meat. These days we all know about sheep because of the glut of TV programmes in which we can easily see half a dozen lambs born before Sunday supper. Ah …. baby lambs we coo. In the spring we are bidden by the supermarkets to eat Spring lamb for Easter just as we are bidden to eat turkey for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Our culture demands that we eat meat as frequently as possible whilst not counting the cost in suffering and methane production in the industrial fattening units. Boning a piece of pork belly is a meticulous operation that brings us irrevocably to the moral issue of meat eating. We can’t face eating tripe these days, nor chitterlings nor any of the 80% of the animal that we are far too sophisticated and fastidious to eat. “Stuff a heart? – I’d rather starve!”
So the meat industry – and that includes the restaurants as well, needs to find a way around our aversions and we came across a particularly egregious example here in Cornwall this week. To begin at the beginning, sheep meat comes in various forms. Spring lamb is the youngest and possibly the least flavoursome of the trio, but almost anyone can chuck a piece on the BBQ and make something of it. The next stage is the one to two year old lamb which is called hogget and if you can find it, is lovely. The third stage is mutton which is meat from a sheep that has had lambs but is no longer productive. It could be almost any age depending on when successive pregnancies have worn it (or rather its teeth) out. The trouble is, mutton has a bad rep because it’s the quintessential slow food and so – unless the chef or cook knows what they’re doing it can be as tough as old boots and taste like cardboard. So how do we get around this insuperable obstacle? The answer, of course, is to promote mutton for its real strengths and train chefs and cooks to deal with it properly. Naturally that’s never going to happen because it costs money. So the PR poets barge in with a cunning plan. “Let’s” – they say – “call it Cull Yow! – nobody knows wtf it is but it sounds pretty ethnic “
Obviously they’ve been watching too much TV because ‘Yow’ – anywhere in the country except Cumbria which is entirely populated by warrior models who cut hay in miniskirts – means ‘yew’ – everywhere else. So it’s a slam dunk win for the industry. Distancing from the real name of the meat which is really ‘dead old sheep’ we now have the entirely virtuous name “Cull Yow” – local; slow food and entirely life enhancing.
I don’t mind a great mutton revival – for reasons I’ve already explained -but I do loathe the sheer dishonesty of putting mutton on the menu at an up and coming gastro pub as if it were some hitherto undiscovered delicacy. We’re actually booked in for lunch there next week as a holiday treat and I will report back on whether the mutton was any good!
This is going to be a very short post but I think it’s important to think aloud occasionally, if only to begin to set out some kind of a stall. My aim here is to tease out a couple of missing threads in the environmental movement; threads that – if we could fill them with life – might release enough energy to get this heavy stone to the top of the mountain.
The only data I really understand is myself and my feelings which seem constantly to suck the life out of any hope. Despair is utterly destructive. I’ve mentioned before (often) that any kind of earth spirituality needs a structure, a framework in which to function, to act, to think and to conduct our daily lives. This doesn’t seem to me to require the invention of any supernatural entities; there’s more than enough awe in nature to inspire the biggest of thoughts and responses and even to drive to our knees from time to time. That’s the first missing link – a structure or framework which will need to be maintained and expanded by our best thinkers.
This would be the first task of what I’ll call the geologians – the earth philosophers who know how to ask good questions and frame good answers. Theologians do God which is a good deal easier since “because I say so” is a circular argument which I’ll come to with the next missing link. Geologians will help us to think sensibly, coherently and truthfully without waving big sticks like damnation and purgatory.
The second missing link after the framework begins to take shape will be to form a canon – a collection of writings that can command general acceptance. This wouldn’t be too hard, there are loads of books on my shelves that call themselves “readers”- selections of writings that seem to demand our attention because they help us to think more clearly. I’m certainly not proposing we turn our geologians into a high priesthood. A canon is a collection of trustworthy writings that come with the assurance that they won’t lead us into the wilderness – and I’m sorry for the occasional reference to more biblical notions but they’re handy shortcuts sometimes. However, as I hinted before, even canonical literature needs to be constantly examined and revised if it’s not going to die and become putrid. That’s why “because I say so” ican never be on the agenda.
The third, and possibly the trickiest component will be what we have to describe as the cultus – without for a moment implying a derived cult. The cultus might involve – for instance – thanking a plant for meeting some of our needs before we dig it up; community harvest or planting festivals and so forth.
These three threads already exist extensively within native, first nation and ancient cultures. They have elders and wise people who maintain the culture and guide actions, they have highly refined structures of belief and they abound in ceremonies and rituals which enfold communities and hold them together. However this can’t mean that we could just take a system off the shelf and apply it to ourselves. Many of the existing systems are highly localized – to plains communities; herding communities or forest communities. We in the overdeveloped and greedy west have obliterated the concepts of theology, cultus and canon in order to remove any opposition to neoliberal capitalism. The vision I’m talking about refers more to a possible post apocalyptic future. The driving force is the hope that the most thoughtful and creative minds of our generation; artists, poets, scientists engineers and philosophers (well not my generation perhaps; I’m pretty ancient!) – may forge a new vision that can act as a bridge towards a new sustainable future.
Most revolutions are fought without much of a vision of what happens afterwards and this is what leads to populism and dictatorship; easy to fall into and hard to dispense with. Lashing out might feel good for a moment but the bad actors have all the power and they won’t hesitate to use it. What they don’t have is the power to eradicate a contagious vision. Faith – as the evangelists often say – is caught and not taught. Belonging is far more powerful than believing. We’ve got local elections in the UK in a few days time and I’m immensely disheartened by the fact that the Greens have the right policies expressed in the style of a university seminar reading. To borrow and adapt an idea from Monica Furlong; feminist theologian “anger is hope overwhelmed by despair”. Only visions can express theories with sufficient power to change “the way we do things round here”.
That’s true alright. On our walk last Saturday we saw several swallows in the valley below South Stoke as we followed the lower part of the Somerset Coal Canal. Sadly the sunshine didn’t last and we’ve had grey skies, cold winds and rain every day since, except for a wonderful (temporary ) reprise yesterday. I’m sad to say that I forgot to mention the Swallows or the abundant Brimstone butterflies which seem to be having a good year. But it was the single plant in the top photo that arrested my attention when we perched on the edge of the abandoned railway line that followed the canal, for a rest. The photos below were taken in July 2019 after the Bath Quays site was cleared and the archaeologists had gone home.
I’d gone to South Stoke with my imagination filled with narrow boats and the railways that put them out of business, but when we got home it was the single Weld plant – Reseda luteola, or Dyer’s Weed that seized my imagination. Of the long abandoned canal there was very little trace, but the plant was a reminder of a much earlier industrial revolution – of wool and cloth that brought great wealth to the Cotswolds and these lovely villages surrounding the town of Bath; smaller and more modest stone buildings, from cottages to tithe barns and grand manor houses that preceded the famous Georgian architecture of the city that was mostly funded by slavery and imperial wealth.
Wealth and squalour have always existed side by side in Bath; we just don’t like to brag about it. Occasionally I’ve written about drug addiction and homelessness in the area in which we live. Sometimes it boils over into county lines battles but most of the time it’s a faintly simmering sense of antisocial behaviour mixed – as in all the best places to live in cities – with a crowd of creative and musical types retired professors, ne’er do wells and radicals of most persuasions. When they cleared the Bath Quays site for a tree lined flood prevention scheme, they found the remains of the old Kingsmead with its brothels and pubs – lots of pubs. The best of the drainage arrangements sent the sewage straight into the river and at the worst just let it find its own way. Not much has changed there then!
I’ve always been interested in the uses to which plants have been put; herbal medicine, foodstuffs and of course dyeing and cloth production. In medieval times three plants reigned supreme for the dyers. Chaucer knew them all and mentioned them some time around 1387 ( he wasn’t keen). They were Weld, Madder and Woad. Weld gave yellow, Woad, blue and Madder gave a red dye. The process of extracting dyes from plants was as filthy, smelly and disgusting as anyone could imagine. If you’ve ever made a liquid compost from Comfrey you’ll know what I mean. Brilliant it may be as a low cost organic fertilizer, but the smell is so nauseating it’s like accidentally stepping on a dead sheep in a ditch – don’t ask! The process usually begins with fermentation and then the dyeing itself requires a mordant solution to fix the colour in the fabric. These days nearly all dyes are synthetic but even they still need to be fixed – usually with a chemical mordant. In the old days they used a lot of urine; the older and more stale the better – all this done at moderately high temperature.
So both ends of the cloth industry depended on water and fuel and both relied upon and produced lots of effluent. South of Bath there is an abundance of brooks and streams flowing down from the hills, a river for transporting the goods, and later on, canals and railways. One further process in the production of woolen cloth was known as fulling in which the woven fibres were pounded with a special form of clay known by geologists as Bentonite and by everyone else as Fullers’ Earth. The power of nature had thoughtfully provided a Fullers’ Earth deposit above South Stoke.
As I said at the top, two Swallows don’t make a summer and a single plant rosette at the side of an abandoned railway line, or second group in flower on a building site don’t constitute a plant record of a whole industry. But they might remind us of the fact that even a beautiful Georgian city like Bath had its filthy industry, its poverty and squalour. Looking back towards an arcadian past of green fields and gambolling lambs is a dangerous kind of self-deception. The river is still filthy and polluted but it’s possibly been like that since the middle ages. In Bristol the dyeing trade was carried out in Redcliffe which is why the wealthy merchants moved up the hill to Clifton to escape the pollution and stink. That’s exactly what they did in Bath too. The weaving and fulling were probably mostly done in the surrounding town and villages with streams and watermills and the dyeing being done in the towns and cities where there was more available mordant – the collection of which known at the time as a separate occupation called taking the piss. The question I haven’t answered – because I can’t – is where the original dye plants were grown at crop scale. A quick check on the BSBI Atlas shows that Weld is still common but Woad and Madder have declined dramatically. I can imagine that the stinking balls of fermented Woad used in producing blue colours would have been transported, like Madder all around the country.
I’ve got a greatly treasured copy of J W White’s “The Bristol Flora” first published in 1912. Madder shows up briefly as an native plant but not in any quantity. Woad was grown in Wickwar; Keynsham and near Frome and White gets quite lyrical about dyeing in Glastonbury. As for Weld, White writes of its greater abundance in this district than in many others and he found it in exactly the spots where you might find industrial remains today. There’s a great deal more work to be done on this thread, but it’s been lovely to speculate on the role of these plants in another revolutionary age.
Part two of yesterday’s post about the Somerset Coal Canal
I’ve already written about Saturday’s walk along the remains of the SCC which enters the Kennet and Avon via a large pound next to John Rennie’s marvellous Dundas Aqueduct, pictured in the photo. Having got stupidly lyrical about a few rusty nails and some collapsing masonry yesterday I wanted to write something about the Cam Brook, and indeed the several large streams, brooks and rivers that have created a landscape so lovely it puts me in mind of Samuel Palmer’s visionary paintings. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the end of a rainbow wasn’t permanently held there by a flock of Turtle Doves holding it still with golden threads.
Anyway, even a less ecstatic walker would have to agree that it’s a rather magical place notwithstanding the crooks who extracted the wealth of the North Somerset coalfield with levels of neglect and cruelty that this extractive age is only just reinventing.
My father occasionally talked about a motorcycle journey he made to visit a couple of old unmarried great aunts who made cider “somewhere near Wells” – he was never specific apart from the fact that the huge fermenting barrels sounded ‘like a swarm of bees’ – and also that he’d drunk too much of the cider which resulted in his legs becoming paralysed, and left him no alternative but to drive into a hedge bank and wait until he sobered up.
I never knew very much about my dad’s side of the family because he’d had a falling out with his own father and moved into lodgings at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Any contact with his brothers and the older sisters who’d cared for him as a child during the years his father was fighting in Afghanistan (really!) was spasmodic to say the least. So nothing more than hints of a Somerset branch of the family existed in my mind.
I had of course heard of a Pole line in Tudor times when Margaret Pole became a powerful force until she chose the wrong side but apart from the humorous thought that I might be distantly related, I never joined those two bits of information together. Then, one day when I was doing a funeral visit to an elderly lady in my parish she said to me “I think we’re probably related”. She too was a Somerset woman and during a long conversation it became clear that the story about my old cider making relatives rang a bell with her and for a short while we forged a connection which was soon broken by her dementia.
But earlier in my career I’d been asked a strange question which I misunderstood, thinking instantly about the hypothetical Tudor ancestors. “Are you one of the Somerset Poles?” was something I’d never been asked before so I was a bit taken aback when a very smart middle aged woman who looked and sounded as if she might have ridden a horse to church and left it with a groom, approached from out of a large crowd of local dignitaries after a carol service. Of course I had heard of the wealthy and powerful Poles but in the absence of any knowledge of a less lofty branch of the family I think I rather rudely dismissed her with a quip about being one of the Staple Hill Poles.
So our walk on Saturday began in the village of South Stoke and went sharply downhill by a series of footpaths towards the remains of the Somerset Coal Canal and we were completely entranced by the landscape – as I’ve already said. By Sunday we were already planning a return visit and so we were busy researching the area and some of its grand (like £8 million) houses, and went to Toppings Bookshops to buy two of the excellent local guides written by Andrew Swift. But during our mammoth Googlefest Madame stumbled on the PDF of a typewritten manuscript published by the local South Stoke history group. As she read this paragraph out to me it made the hairs on the back of my head stand up.
1794 October 16th Bath Chronicle: Richard Pole at Southstoke has ten hogsheads of last year’s cider for sale at 92 per hogshead.’ (This is an old local name. There were Poles at Monkton Combe and Southstoke before the Reformation).
John Canvin, local historian.
I traced my Mothers side of the family back to the mid eighteenth century without much difficulty – the male line were all carpenters as was my grandfather. But my Dad’s side was much harder partly due to the fact that a Jewish connection had been concealed at some time in the past – I’ve no evidence to suggest why. But this Somerset connection looks and feels absolutely right. I do just remember being taken as a child to a very scary institutional place with green iron railings to see what could have been a great grandmother and I discovered that one of my Dad’s more recent ancestors had died in the Workhouse in Stapleton but details are few and far between.
So there it is; walking can be a perilous activity but – just maybe I might soon be able to establish my credentials as a genuine peasant. More than a few people I know probably came to that conclusion many years ago!
We know you can buy asparagus at almost any time of the year, but our own asparagus bed is only just beginning to throw up a few spears and we don’t – on principle – buy it from other parts of the world with all its attached air miles. So today our eyes lit up when we saw some bunches of Hereford grown (Chinns – praise where it’s due) and although it was expensive it’s as iconic a sign of spring as Easter, or Oestre which gives a better clue as to what it’s all about.
You can look up the recipe (which comes from Simon Hopkinson – one of our finest cookery writers) – it’s freely available if you Google it. From my point of view it combines four of my favourite elements; pancakes, asparagus, air dried ham and hollandaise sauce. All in all our special treat supper cost just over £10 which compares favourably with any takeaway and tastes ten times better. I know this because we always eat them in silence -like Montalbano on the television.
Years ago, hollandaise took me several tries to make at first – mainly because I didn’t read the precise instructions closely enough. Our son Jo used to make it by the gallon in one of the restaurants he worked in – he said it was easier in bulk. It’s like mayonnaise and all those other emulsion sauces; a bit of practice makes perfect.
Spring is sprung, the grass is riz …
So today we completed the last of the infrastructure work on the allotment and soaked the polytunnel with 250 litres of our stored rainwater. The paths are all topped up with wood chip; every bed is now ready or already planted up and this morning I unscrewed the retaining boards to give us easier access to about 1.5 cubic metres of leaf mould and the same of compost. At last the compost production line is beginning to deliver as we planned.
October 2022. An absolute whopper from the Marcher Apple Network orchard in Cwmdu – no idea what it’s called.
I should open my Severnsider mailbox more often, I know, but mostly it’s full of technical stuff that I don’t understand – which is why I only found a polite note concerning the proper Welsh spelling of an author I’d written about – it ran – “Not a massive typo – you have Carwyn down as ‘Carwen’ on this post which is the female rendition of the name.” The post, from many months ago was titled “This is beginning to look like my mother’s siege larder” – and I’ve just amended the spelling by placing Carwyn in the correct gender.
Blog posts are ephemeral of course, but books last forever so I thought I’d give Carwyn Graves another plug for his two books; the first was (I think) published in both Welsh and English and it was called “The Apples of Wales”. If you’re at all interested in the innumerable local varieties of apple which result from its promiscuous cross pollinations, then this is a really interesting book offering marvellous insights into the local histories of some of these varieties. And if you’re really interested there’s a whole orchard of Welsh apple varieties behind Plan yn Rhiw on the Lleyn peninsula, and we were also able to visit an orchard at Cwmdu in the Brecon Beacons which was planted by the Marcher Apple Network – a society for reviving old varieties of apples and pears. We’ve planted a number of traditional varieties on the allotment, and our friends in the Beacons have planted many more.
Carwyn Graves’ excellent new book “Welsh Food Stories” is equally engaging and informative, so much so that I was tempted into following up on some of the books he mentions and I’ve managed to buy two or three of them secondhand. So I hope this mention makes up for my inadequate knowledge of the Welsh language; long may it prosper!
Anyway, while I’m in the mood I’ll also mention a piece I stumbled on yesterday called “Failing nature on Dartmoor – why its protected areas are in such poor condition and what needs to be done” by Tony Whitehead, analysing the heated debate on successes and failures in preserving Sites of Special Scientific Interest on farmed land on Dartmoor. It’s a subject that I’ve written about before and it’s been much clouded by misreporting and exaggerated accusations. I won’t attempt to paraphrase it but if you’re interested in getting a better grasp of what’s at stake it’s a really useful summary.
Back on the allotment an instinctive starting pistol was fired over the Easter holiday and the site was swarming with allotmenteers. For once it seemed sensible to be planting the potatoes on Good Friday, and the intoxicating smell of the wet but warming earth – known as petrichor – carried the subliminal message of the season. Is there some kind of spirituality here? – something to do with being held by an embracing framework? Nonetheless, not everyone is as engaged with nature as we are. We were expecting a delivery of plants which eventually turned up yesterday, three parts dead, after sitting in a courier’s warehouse for six days. The boxes were festooned with notices that warned they contained live material.
Now we’re sitting indoors waiting for Storm Noa to pass over while Madame sorts the wheat from the chaff in the seed box. This is such typical spring weather. Southwesterlies laden with moist air bring pulse after pulse of rain and sunshine to us in the west country, gifted by the Atlantic. The warmer the sea gets the more extreme the weather gets.
I picked the photograph carefully by typing “river” into my photos database and going through them carefully, waiting for the spark to happen. This was it; the Potwell Inn expressed in a single image. Incidentally my sister once told me off because, (she said), every time I wrote a lyrical piece I would throw a spanner in the works at the last moment, as if I couldn’t bear the thought of a happy ending. It was a reasonable criticism because, on reflection, that’s something I often do. Yesterday I read a single page of an essay concerning grass written by John Ruskin. I thought it was so gushing and overheated that I counted the adjectives on a single paperback sized page and there were 25. As I wrote a couple of days ago, my inner eye could scan the grasses on Mendip or – let’s say on the Lizard with interest, but alight with joy on a heap of mine spoil or bare serpentine rock. My defence would be that I’m far from being pessimistic by temperament; it’s experience!
The Potwell Inn is, and always was, my safe place. Since I read it as a set text at fourteen years old I’ve never lost the liberating sense of delight when Alfred Polly, the hero of HG Wells comic novel stumbled upon this idyllic pub with its own ferry after running away from his own bungled suicide which (long story) resulted in inadvertently burning his hated shop down and heroically rescuing an elderly woman from the blaze. From that moment all my ambitions centred upon finding my own Potwell Inn and my very own landlady. Someone – was it William Goldman? – once wrote that the structure of all great adventures is the Grail legend; the search for an answer to the question “what ails you?” – the one question in life that can never be answered through introspection.
The fact that sixty years later I chose the Potwell Inn as the name for my imaginary happy place, should be an awful warning to parents, teachers and economists about the power of stories. But there’s another thread that animates all great stories and that’s threat and release. Love is only truly love because it always ends in loss. Bereavement is the price we pay for flying, like Icarus, too close to the sun. If you look carefully at the sidebar you may notice the odd category “Uncle Jim” which I hardly ever use, but refers to the threat of annihilation by the large woman’s drunken brother. His threats are comical, but the menace is very real, and occasional confrontations (and dunkings in the river) only end with Uncle Jim’s accidental death wearing Polly’s jacket; relieving the unhappy Polly of his identity and allowing the new beginning he’d dreamed of.
So in one sense, the idea of the Potwell Inn as a safe place is only partially true. Which brings me back to the photograph. The canoeist in question is not paddling – as you might imagine – towards a magnificent sunset. The light floods across from the huge and mythically unlovely blocks of flats that were built on the old gasworks site across the river from us. Grossly overpriced, jerrybuilt monstrosities that resemble Russian bonded warehouses. The old gasworks site on what’s been named by an overheated copywriter as “The Western Riverside” was an ecological hotspot as well as providing a wide wildlife corridor towards a brief strip of countryside – awaiting ‘improvement’ from an ambitious architect with a couple of prisons under their belt. In my view that’s a crime that unites Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Binsey Poplars” with John Masefield’s “cheap tin trays”. [sorry – this is a rant so no prisoners!]
But the threat element of my story goes further because the Potwell Inn of my imagination is also bordered by the river on which my canoeist paddles; but this real river is carrying more than its share of human effluent – the telltale signs are the ice floes of detergent foam that signify that someone – in a treatment plant somewhere close – has dumped another load of shit into the vicinity of my safe place.
I worry that my frequently elegiac rendering of the Potwell Inn distracts from the reality that Uncle Jim, who regenerates more often than Doctor Who, currently wears an expensive suit and loves to entertain Councillors and Planning officials at party conferences : – ( it’s all in the declarations of interest so no-one need bother denying it).
It’s too much – sometimes – this sense of threat. One of my producers once said that my best writing was in the lyrical style. Well yes – but the lyricism of mine and much current nature writing is in danger of becoming politically useful greenwashing. When was the last time I heard a cuckoo? In North Wales last week we were both startled with joy at the sound of a cuckoo which turned out to be no more lyrical than the dishwasher doing its rhythmic thing. The last real cuckoo was probably five years ago on our friends smallholding on the Brecon Beacons. How long will it be before we forget altogether?
On the other hand I’m having a bit of a fern binge at the moment and we found loads of Wall Rue on the wall outside the flat. How ironic that in my previous post I wrote about the way the plants and insects will outlive us when the catastrophe finally happens. Today I’m thinking how unutterably sad it will be if the only witnesses of the unfolding tragedy are dead?
