I’ve written several pieces now about Treloan lane. Unfortunately, due to an ongoing problem with WordPress I haven’t been able to format them and add photos in the normal way. However I’ve been playing with some possible workarounds using a combination of Google Docs on my laptop and the Jetpack phone app and there’s enough to offer more photos in my pieces until I resolve things with WordPress and get some new login credentials.
So below are a few photos spread out over around one and a half miles which encapsulate the lovely variation in habitat as you walk the length; between tarmac lane; metalled private road through the estate; a wide patch of trees edged with some beautiful Jack and Jill style drystone walls; a length of open pasture; another length of muddy path with fifteen foot high hedges and wide verges merging with what must be an ancient sunken track with the polished bedrock showing through in places. At the end a left turn takes you through another footpath to the sea.
It’s a lovely place for a slow stroll. Keeping your eyes open – not so much for the rarities, but for the locals which are so well adapted to the microclimate the path offers – so much so that you can see the transition from inland to cliff edge in the plants themselves. If you walk east along the coastal path at the bottom you can pass through three at least NVC landscape classifications in a mile. Many plants are generalists, they’ll put down roots wherever they find themselves; but others are much more fussy. Then there are plants that cope with being trodden by hikers, plants that live in walls, plants that can withstand drought; plants that have been here since the ice age and others that came in by car tyre; naturalised strays from gardens and others clinging on to the edges of arable fields now drenched with chemicals. The closer you look and the slower you go, the more you see. The longer you just stand still; watch and listen the more birds you’ll hear and see; the more butterflies will flit past. What’s so special for me about Treloan Lane is the sheer variety of habitats plus the fact that we’ve been walking up and down it for maybe 25 years in all seasons and a double plus for the fact that it’s blissfully quiet. There are lanes like it on Mendip and others in various parts of Wales – marvellous oases in which to do some immersive learning. Anyway, here are some photos we took last week; mostly not of plants but of habitats.
Druce Cranesbill, Geranium X oxonianum, probably ssp ‘Lace Time’ in hedge on lane entering Portscatho
This isn’t the first time I’ve written a piece under the title “slow down”. I did a search just now and I last wrote a piece under that title three years ago, but I’ve explored the concepts on many more occasions. It’s really no more complicated an idea than saying that the slower you walk the more you see; blindingly obvious but in a culture where our personal sense of worth is run by the clock, by targets and by personal bests, crippling to our inner lives.
However the antidote to this dilemma isn’t outsourcing our inner lives to TV celebrities on carefully curated road trips across the earth. You don’t need a full film crew, a fleet of SUV’s and a budget of £100,000 to find nature because it’s there, right next to you. Even if you’re sitting at a desk it’s there, growing under your toenails and eating your favourite woolen pullover.
By the way, in an effort to sound more like a proper influencer, dare I suggest that an 18th century Japanese raku bowl (available from me, of course) and filled with keratin rich armpit hair is the cure for clothes moths that everyone is talking about. No? possibly not, then.
Some “bonking beetles” on Hogweed.
Take a tip from a real expert – no not me – from a child. What do we (did we) find ourselves saying to our children most often? Wasn’t it “Oh do come on!” as we, ever anxious to keep to the unwritten itinerary of the day, try to rush them past something we regard as trivial, like a Dandelion, or some beetles on a weed – so we can get home and open a bottle as soon as we’ve got them to bed. I write from experience!
But children don’t see the world in the same way that we do, with our stratified hierarchies of significance. If we were to sit still for five minutes and think about the way we see the world through our overrated adult eyes we’d perhaps realize that we’ve been schooled in not seeing because seeing soaks up a lot of time and energy. We don’t see street beggars and poverty, we don’t see old people (it might be catching), we don’t see what’s happening in the world because it gives us a headache, we don’t see that society has become deeply and dangerously unequal. We especially don’t see the rapid erosion of nature. We don’t notice the starlings no longer fly in murmurations over Redcliffe church, we don’t notice that those lovely Mexican Fleabanes have been weedkilled or scraped off the pavements. In fact we’d rather think that the city would be a better place if we gave it a bit of ruthless tidying. Let’s divide nature into weeds and pests versus window boxes. Children don’t make that mistake so readily unless they’ve been incarcerated in front of the idiot’s lantern (my grandfather’s name for television). We live, mentally, in -left-over from the war – concrete pill boxes and see the earth through a slit just wide enough to poke a rifle through.
But imagine, for a moment, becoming a child again and switching off the filters for an hour or two and seeing the earth as it is, even in its depleted current state, in all its glory. Let’s use the idea of seeing promiscuously. Everything, all at once, in a riot of sound and colour, unedited or curated by our parents, our teachers, our neighbours and by what we call common sense which may be common but it lacks much sense. A child’s world is full of glory. I remember the spiritual director Kenneth Leach once saying in a talk that doxa is the (ancient) Greek word for glory, and so orthodox at its heart means “right glory”. The beginnings of a green spirituality can be found in those revelatory moments when the earth speaks, pins us to the spot to see some tiny thing filled with beauty. Beauty and truth are soulmates.
Today we went down to St Anthony’s Head and sat on a bench situated on a huge and redundant gun emplacement looking across to Falmouth where we once lived for a year, and the Lizard beyond, one of my treasured plant hunting grounds. Something special grows there now and then. It’s an orchid called Autumn Ladies’ Tresses, Spiranthes spiralis. It hasn’t been recorded there for a couple of years and it’s rather late in the year to see it in flower but since we were there I had a hunt around anywhere I could see a possible spot, but nothing. Sometimes glory takes its time and we need to be patient; but patience is easy when you’re engulfed by the sound of the sea and the sight of so many happy memories. Madame said “it’s good that we can see this together”. “Stop it” I thought, “you’ll make me go all emotional!”
Great spotted woodpecker outside the kitchen window.
Whether or not it’s some kind of syndrome I’ve never bothered to find out, but I’m a bit obsessive about lists, catalogues and picture dictionaries. The first book I ever truly loved – I can’t have been more than five or six years old – was a picture dictionary and recently I was shown an almost identical book in Welsh which I found very moving. So my memory is cluttered with a lot of fragmentary information on random subjects from embroidery silks, ships, artists’ materials and above all plants. I collect floras and Herbals these days but I rarely throw a seed catalogue away because I love the names of plants and their varieties. Cider apple trees are a particular favourite. Where else could you find a variety called “Slack ma Girdle“, which shares a group name with a number of cousins known as Woodbine, often but not always associated with Honeysuckle. As you see, the brain rot is advanced. Words are my crack cocaine.
All of which is a long-winded explanation to account for my memory of a Herbalist’s catalogue which I saw in the early 1970’s and which advertised a remedy called “Golden Seal” accompanied by testimonials which, unforgettably, gave a grisly account by a satisfied customer who had “coughed up a tumour” only a week after starting a course of treatment. And so it lingers in my mind among the uncatalogued memories in the folder marked “hell’s teeth!” However the problem with these unpursued thoughts and memories is that they bide their time and – like the devil – wait for an opportune moment. Opportunity knocked for Goldenseal last week after many years of gestation as I was cataloguing some photographs which I took in mid-Wales a couple of years ago of a Goldenrod plant which was abundant around the old gold mine at Dolaucothi. It’s at the top of this piece. Somehow my brain had managed to scramble Goldenrod and Goldenseal and so the plant with its deeply dubious reputation had got itself (virtually) filed in the wrong place – which didn’t matter until I thought about it. But you know what thinking does.
And so I moved from a casual word association to a determined search through the books and the internet to disambiguate the two plants which involved two fascinating diversions into law and history. Both plants were extensively used by First Nation and Native American cultures and both are still in use today around the world albeit for different purposes. They don’t belong to the same family; Goldenrod is as a member of the Asteraceae, Daisy family; and Golden Seal is in the Buttercups, the Ranunculaceae. Goldenrod is used to make a tea and is used as a diuretic and astringent. It was once called Liberty Tea by American settlers in the independence movement and was used among many other things for staunching bleeding or burns. Gerard of Gerard’s Herbal fame writes that it was taken as a medicine for stab wounds and cuts (one of its Somerset names was Woundwort which is a quite different plant) and Geoffrey Grigson – my favourite chronicler of English plants – reports that during early medieval times it was gathered and sold at fabulous prices (half a Crown an ounce) due to the amount of “stabbing and thrusting” going on. It fell out of favour and later on Gerard says you could by a hundredweight of Goldenrod at the same price. Given that it’s a 5 minute bus ride to the Royal United Hospital A&E I think I would give it a miss. Mrs Grieve gives it her approval in the 1930’s and relates a fanciful and alarming report of a boy who, following treatment passed 15 large bladder stones up to one and a half ounces in 1788. I don’t know what to think about the suffering involved were it true. It’s still sold and used for a range of purposes and even appears in the 1983 British Herbal Pharmacopoeia. It appears to meet most of the purposes it’s recommended for without dangerous side effects.
That, however takes me back to the starting point for this piece because Golden Seal (Hydrastis canadensis) has a wholly different history. My first encounter in a herbalist’s catalogue led to my misidentification and the horror stories about coughing up tumours. A very easy Gemini search established that KIngswood, now a suburb of East Bristol but back then still in Gloucestershire near where I was born, was a hotspot for Herbalists warehouses. None of them now exist in their original form, but it may be important to mention that Kingswood was also on the South Gloucestershire Coalfield and had its own mines and miners. It was said that the miners of Cock Road were instrumental in the sacking of Bristol Prison and burning down the Mansion House during the Bristol Riots while supporting the Reform movement. It was all to no avail; the middle classes who’d refused to turn out for the militia got the vote and the miners got pneumoconiosis (the Dust). Consequently herbal remedies for chronic lung disease including Tuberculosis which my paternal granny died from would have found an eager audience for the snake oil salesmen who were ever too happy to make a quick buck out of suffering. I’m not in any way against herbal (phyto) medicine, in fact I’ve found it interesting enough to mix up some basic simple remedies for myself but as any internet enquiry will warn you – it’s not always safe to believe everything you read online.
So back to Golden Seal; it too gets a positive mention in all of my herbals up to and including the 1983 British Herbal Pharmacopoeia, which means it’s been verified, tested and safe for use which, lets be fair, may still not mean its as effective as the treatment the doctor offers. What could never have been acceptable were the outrageous claims for anti-cancer properties made, up until the late twenty sixties, which have since then been regulated and banned in the UK. Golden Seal is normally prescribed for problems with the mucous membranes such as lungs, stomach and bowel disorders and like several other members of the same plant family was once used to progress childbirth – which means it should never be used during pregnancy. Many herbal remedies have been isolated and synthesised and now find a home in regular medicine but there are still people who think that phytomedicine is somehow closer to nature and less dangerous. In some cases that may be true but equally it may be a dangerous risk – which leads me to one final point.
Herbalists and their suppliers are now regulated to control untested use of potentially dangerous medicines -where the therapeutic dose may be milligrams away from the fatal one. But one area which lacks any kind of legal (or self) control is the internet and its battalions of influencers, who are often paid to promote dangerous procedures and products just as did the herbalists of Kingswood. I find it unbelievable that influencers can now promote lethal nonsense that would be illegal in print.
The wild world is a wonderful gift to us, and if and when(ever) cancer cures are found, the chances are they will have begun as an interesting plant compound or even an account in an ancient manuscript that provokes – as it did with me – a little bit of research. I’ve written before about the dangers of foraging and eating plants without adequate background understanding, and the same applies to herbal medicine. In untrained hands it’s as dangerous as connecting your household mains to the lamp-post outside. Come to think of it, that’s illegal too!
This is actually a photograph of some Sow Thistle flowerheads, I took it in June in Cornwall, but if you look carefully enough with the eye of imagination it might pass for an image of the two magpies squabbling over some nesting material that I once saw, squashed flat on the road joined beak to beak by the short length of dry grass they were fighting over. They were so utterly focused on their greedy rage that they failed to notice the oncoming (I like to think) bus. The image has never left me, and if I’d only managed to photograph it in those pre-mobile phone days I could have used it in a dozen ways. Think of the proverb He who goes out for revenge should first dig two graves – incidentally Confucius didn’t actually say it but it’s good advice in any case. Now, a couple of days on from the moment the memory popped uninvited into my mind, I honestly can’t remember the context. So much of what my mind throws up is like an out of context post-it note that’s been sitting on the fridge door for months. But there, a casual popup memory led to an equally casual flip though the photo files and suddenly I’m looking at the sow thistles and thinking about a literary character called Père Ubu, who was invented by Alfred Jarry in 1896, scandalized French theatregoers and launched Dadaism. Ubu is the kind of monstrous human who would casually take a life over a blade of dead grass. He is fat, ugly, stupid and psychopathic, which may remind you of a well known President but I couldn’t possibly comment. I wanted to write my compulsory thesis on Jarry when we were at Art school but the Principal, Clifford Ellis, who was blessed with a very linear imagination, told me that he knew everything there is to know about Jarry and there was nothing I could possibly write that would be of the least interest to him – and refused to let me write it. I went straight to the library and asked the librarian if she knew of any artist about whom there was only a single book and of whom I’d never heard. After a bit of bibliographical research she came up with Eugene Boudin. I had never seen any painting of his and the prospect of very little research combined with a surname that translated as blood pudding I was hooked. Sadly my Dadaist revenge passed unnoticed by the Great Man and even with a staggeringly silly deathbed scene I got an A grade. Some years later I finally saw Boudin’s paintings in the flesh and I loved them. All of which goes to demonstrate what a compost heap my mind is.
But to begin at the beginning (again), these two magpies managed to demonstrate that two does not always equate with joy and to stretch the elastic proverb even further Madame and I had three boys while I don’t recall ever seeing four magpies together. They’re such unpleasant birds – always ragging nests and killing fledglings. Their immaculate morning suits don’t fool me; they’re like right wing assassins dressed as gentlemen. Nature tells more than one story and some of them are very dark. The nursery rhyme who killed cock robin? fingers the sparrow but I reckon it was a hit by an anonymous magpie who fitted the sparrow up in order to start a riot in Cheltenham. It’s worth encouraging children to learn the nursery rhymes because they often love a bit of darkness, and in the process they’d learn the name of fourteen creatures not including one which is murderous but remains a shadowy behind the scenes wraith in my rendering. One for sorrow two for joy is a counting rhyme that might well appeal to a reluctant learner despite being slightly less accurate than Old Moore’s Almanac. Oranges and Lemons can give us a pigeons’ eye view of the parishes of central London – my granny was born near Bow and when I think of the rhyme I think of her, an orphan, and also the mysterious Bungalow Granny who lived in a wooden building behind the Crest, the cottage where my real granny lived. Could the solitary resident have been her adoptive mother or foster parent? There’s a story to be written even in a single name and location. The beechwood in which her shack stood is the mise en scène. Why were my sister and I never taken to meet her?
If my mind is a pinball machine it works in two ways. In flow moments I want the ball to blunder its way past every single coil generating thoughts and words as a tangible reward, but on bad days or in bad dreams I just want it do shimmy around every memory, lighting none and exciting no morbid connections. Consciousness is only suffering on the bad days. The Buddha was wrong. The good days are festival days where sweet apples fall into my hand and consciousness is joy.
I guess the world in which we live is as much made by memories, recollections and, above all, language, as it is by the processes of nature. The two processes, language and nature are indivisible. We can only understand the natural world by exploring it from the inside because we are human and therefore part of it. The disciplines we can use to find our way pay no attention to boundaries and no particular approach, whether scientific or creative, can claim squatters rights or legal tenure.
Isaac Newton was into alchemy, William Blake and JMW Turner seem to have got there through visionary gifts, Tracey Emin has gone deeper than most living artists in exploring what it’s like to be human, and what about Amsel Kiefer who walks the darker path? What is the nature of Nature? RS Thomas wrote memorably of finding a depression in the grass still warm from the body of an unseen hare. Perhaps the illumination always comes from the unexpected, from left-field, from stopping worrying, from putting aside ceaseless questions and waiting in silence. Sometimes it takes years.
So here we are back in the Bannau Brycheiniog, thirteen hundred feet up the side of Mynydd Bychan on a hill farm which is emphatically shouting “history, history” in my ear. There’s an odd feeling that this place is peculiar; not quite right by the culture of the surrounding hills. We were in desperate need of a bit of peace after months of building work on the flat during which we’d had to move out several times and equally tough times on the allotment with the heatwaves and drought which I’ve already written about; not to mention the continuing saga of the campervan engine. That’s a very inelegant sentence but it perfectly shows how stress gets inside our heads and muddles them.
I brought four books with me apart from the usual Potwell Inn clutter of cameras and notebooks, and they are respectively “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold; “The Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwest Europe” by Julian Barker and, “A History of Wales” by John Davies which is a real 750 page clonker; also “Joseph Banks” – the biography by Patrick O’Brian. I grabbed the first one, the Sand County Almanac off the bookshelf as we left the flat to drive here and I’m so glad I did. The Flora was a chance find of the out of print volume which hardly ever comes on to the market second hand so I jumped on the only available copy on the internet. The history of Wales isn’t the most up to date or indeed the most radical; less fun than Jan Morris’ – “The Matter of Wales”, less political than Carwen Graves’ “Tŷr” and less focused on hill farming than David Elias’ “Shaping the Wild”. I’ve left out William Condry’s New Naturalist volume “The Natural History of Wales because I haven’t read it yet but I’d recommend the first five without reservation, and you need to read all of them plus the poems of RS Thomas too even to catch the flavour of the debates that still burn underground like peat fires. The Banks biography is the sole English representative because I wanted to get a feel for the plant hunters of his era.
Normally I’d be out there on my hands and knees searching for plants to record; I’ve even printed off lists of possible sightings but I seem to have hit a bit of a parting of the ways – I want to explore not just the names but the science, the habitats, the uses and the whole culture. In fact it increasingly seems to me that I need to focus on the meaning – in the broadest possible sense – the meaning of plants in our culture. Hence the disparate choice of reading for our break: Davies for historical context, Banks for the beginnings of scientific botany; Barker for the many uses of plants and Leopold who – even almost eighty years ago – was asking the most profound philosophical questions about conservation in a world where even back then species were disappearing and humans were becoming increasingly detached from the natural world under the cover of progress.
….. each [professional]n his own way is a hunter. And why does each call himself a conservationist? Because the wild things he hunts for have eluded his grasp, and he hopes by some necromancy of laws, appropriations, regional plans, reorganization of departments, or other forms of mass-wishing to make them stay put.
A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold 1947
So let’s be clear. Without plants we’re all dead. No oxygen to breathe, no food to eat and an empty windswept desert instead of a green and pleasant land. The glossy prospectus of life support under a big tech dome is a fraud; there is no white coated Seventh Cavalry hiding behind the hill, and without nature we would cease to exist; without meaning or purpose.
We were children, my sister and me, walking back along the road to Pucklechurch from the Rose and Crown in Parkfield with our parents. We were replete with red lemonade and crisps. Jenny was picking dandelions and we came across an old man, possibly a farm worker or miner who could have come direct from a casting agency as a typical peasant. He stopped us with a wave and asked her if she knew what the flowers were called and she told him dandelions. He tittered and leaned in conspiratorially -“we calls em piss the beds!” Our parents made conventional end of conversation noises, gathered us up into a safe huddle and we walked on towards the bus stop. I might have been eight years old and that experience felt as if a gap had opened in the evening sky and another world revealed.
Plants and memories have a powerful aggregating force between them; they’re sticky and accumulative. Only yesterday we were walking along a narrow lane towards an area of boggy heath called Rhos Fach which I’d read about and seen on the OS map when I spotted a harebell and some lesser Hawkbit among strangely familiar grasses beneath a bank on which, fifty years ago there could have been a hedge of hawthorn; now just a few elderly horizontal branches surviving from the last laying. Somewhere deep in my brain the neurons made instant connections and I was the same child just a couple of years after Pucklechurch, lying on the same grasses on Rodway Hill, gazing at the sky and feeling, well, ecstatic. The two experiences connected by a powerful force with no name other than memory in which every sense is stored and released – colours, smells sounds; every subtlety every nuance encoded like messenger RNA searching out its target and – once found – springing into life.
We don’t any longer know how to love
Needless to say, back at the cottage I turned to the AI and quickly discovered soil type, bedrock conformation, a series of predicted NVC classifications and a list of plants recorded there; oh and the national grid reference finally to drive the pin through the thorax. I was reminded of the fictional artist Gully Jimson’s priceless comment in Joyce Carey’s “The Horses Mouth” – “It’s like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?”
In the clash between the instrumental and the aesthetic there lies our culture’s dirty secret: we don’t any longer know how to love. It’s too nebulous, too fragile, too open ended, and like apomixis (that’s the way blackberries do it), just too bloody complicated.
This isn’t an attack on botany or botanists, but it is a serious warning about the dangers of idolatry (which should never be consigned to arguments about religion). Idolatry worships the part rather than the whole; in fact you might characterise it as the all too human root of reductive thinking which in turn is the cause of so many human tragedies. A form of ethnobotany could be a way around the mountain.
And so, back to the troubling garden
It seems that there is a real story behind the uneasy feelings that the surrounds of the cottage evoked. Walking around yesterday we found sheds, a couple of abandoned rotavators, a steel shoe tree, a lead model of a horse next to a horseshoe; any number of bird boxes and seats wrapped around out of place trees, a broken beehive, empty bird cages, and an overgrown vegetable garden; walkways mown through the site but with little sign of walkers. There is a strong sense of something abandoned. It didn’t take much research to find that this was once the site of a much loved Edwardian guest house run by a woman called Rita who was also a formidable gardener. She created an arboretum, dug a lake, planted an orchard and made a gathering place for walkers drawn to the Bannau. We are among the tail enders. Everything has a lifespan, even (or perhaps especially) gardens. They’re our attempt to bring nature close and under control on our own terms which is, sadly, both beautiful and fruitless. The circus moves on; the power and beauty of the hills is stronger than our dreams of upstaging them.
For ages I’ve wanted to broaden my approach to plants when thinking and writing about them, and I’d very much like to move a bit closer to Geoffrey Grigson (whose brilliant book “An Englishman’s Flora” is about to be republished as “A British Flora”. I really love this book for its breadth and scope; escaping the stamp collector’s view of field botany (the rarer the better) and wandering in his usual provocative way through the countryside picking up fragments of folklore, old country names, culinary and medicinal properties. You can still pick up a second hand copy very reasonably although the reprint is only £25. I’ve got a worn out paperback and a large format hardback – both treasured possessions. He’s not the only natural history writer who’s spread his wings in this way, Richard Maybe is another and there are more. I should include the early works of Henry Williamson and in the same breath dare to mention my Mother who was brought up in the deepest Chilterns and who once told us about her first encounter with a flush toilet which so scared her she couldn’t use it. I would dearly love which ‘Lady’s Slipper’ she mentioned as her favourite flower – and which could have been a geographically unlikely appearance of the now extinct orchid or one of six other more common wildflowers with similar names. Robin Wall Kimmerer gives a fascinating account of the encounter of western botany with First Nation Canadian ethnobotany. Thanks to Grigson I now know why Latin names are so important. There are such fields, known as ethnobotany, folk taxonomy, phytonomy or ethnoecology which is an academic way of recognising that plants have cultural meanings too. In our laser focused reductive way we might grudgingly accept that plants are useful for giving us clues to molecules which might be useful in medicine but fall way short of recognising herbal medicine as a legitimate pursuit. By the way, I had a text yesterday advertising a T shirt with the slogan “All plants are edible, some of them only once!” .
Anyway I hope you catch my drift. I was first fascinated by plants because they so beautiful, and the closer I looked the more beautiful they became. Several years ago when I was young (ho ho) there was a company in Kingswood which was quite a big supplier of medicinal herbs. A friend of mine once showed me a printed sheet of testimonials they sent out with their products (which included a specially formulated smoking mixture for asthmatics!) One of their big sellers was evidently a herb called Golden Seal and I mistakenly thought it referred to Goldenrod. One of the testimonial letters described how the patient, after only a couple of days of taking the remedy, claimed to have coughed up a substantial tumour. That’s not an easy to forget image. Today when I was mulling over this piece I had a look in Mrs Grieve’s 1931 “A Modern Herbal” and she, like Grigson, lists the alternative names of Golden Seal and among them she reveals that she’s actually writing about Turmeric root which these days is something of a supposed miracle cure, ‘though falling short of projectile tumour expulsion. Those sneaky scientists while all-along decrying herbal medicine, have been scouring the old herbals for patentable synthetics. Tomorrow I’m expecting a second hand copy of the almost unobtainable Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwestern Europe“. I get almost all my books secondhand these days. We’re soon off on another trip to the Bannau Brycheiniog and I’m hoping to persuade Madame to take a short drive to the village of Myddfai where I can breathe the same air as the famous physicians once breathed – hopefully without the addition of smoke particles from the fire around nearby Llangynidr Reservoir which we can even smell in Bath, fifty miles away. We have friends living just a few miles from there, and their smallholding narrowly escaped a previous very frightening wildfire.
There are a thousand extensions to plant hunting that can bring the plants alive for us. I’ve been recently mugging up on some of the science, having previously known nothing at all about DNA and molecular biology and it’s mind blowing and beautiful in the intellectual sense that scientists and mathematicians use. Reading the more controversial books of Stefano Mancuso, I didn’t know for instance that the animals – that’s all the animals amount to just under half of one percent of the total biomass of the earth, whilst plants amount to around 82% (90% before the industrial revolution), and we humans amount to …….. just 0.01%. We have seen the enemy, it is us!
I’ve been amazed at the lukewarm manner in which governments have brushed aside the statistics of global catastrophe. Now, here in Bath and in the midst of the fifth heatwave of this drought plagued summer we are advised to close our windows because of the health risks associated with PM 2.5 particles travelling in the wind from South Wales. Newspapers of a certain kind continue to write about the lovely summer weather while Madame and me, among thousands of other gardeners and farmers, have struggled to keep our plants alive, and the local media are filled with rage at the local authority whenever they try to reduce and control traffic pollution. I’m reminded of William Cobbett’s quip that “they demand change but without alteration”
God alone knows how many trips I’ve made backwards and forwards to the allotment water troughs with a two gallon watering can in each hand – that’s forty pounds weight – in the face of appeals to restrict our water consumption. The upside is that we’ve been feasting on the sweetest sweetcorn, the shiniest aubergines and the richest tomatoes not to mention all the other unobtainable herbs and vegetables. As the difficulties multiply, my admiration for the adaptability of our plants increases. Some of us have wondered in Sunday Schools what the biblical manna might have been, but the more I learn about it the more I understand that the plants which keep us and every other living thing on earth alive do it all by turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar. That beats Moses and his stick any day!
Our kitchen in August 2018 – nothing changes much except we’ve now got two functioning extractor fans taking the fumes and cooking smells up the built-in flue. Only took 10 years of arguments with the landlord!
It’s early August and apart from being sweated alive by the fifth heatwave of the year there’s another sense in which it feels like Christmas every day. In these repeated heatwaves the only strategy we can follow is to keep as many of the plants alive as possible, and so life pretty well revolves around watering, cooking and preserving – and it’s worked wonderfully. Plants need water, food and sunlight, and the abundance of sunlight, although a curse through forcing us to water so much is marvellous in helping our crops to covert the water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. Just imagine what a miracle that is; but some plants like peas and broad beans will never thrive in these conditions however hard we try to help out because, like Madame, the heat makes them feel exhausted and they give up. But others take to it like ducks to water and each day, after watering, we bring the ripened produce into the kitchen and scratch our heads over what to do with it. Fresh vegetables are an order of magnitude more tasty than the impoverished lookalikes that taste of nothing after their long journeys. Every day is Christmas day.
Today it was the turn of the aubergines and after a test run in our youngest son’s commercial pizza oven I felt sure I could replicate the burn in our kitchen, with no danger of the smoke alarm going off due to the new extractors. And so it turned out to be – the fruits – still hot from the sun – blackened and smoked gently as the insides cooked at 275 C and, as they cooled, virtually peeled themselves leaving the pale, faintly smoky flesh waiting to be united with garlic and tahini. We’ve got more tomatoes, cucumbers, figs and new potatoes than you could shake a stick at, and it’s so exciting that I just put the apron on and relish every moment as the cupboards fill with winter stores.
It hasn’t always been that easy. Something of a turning point in my life was the day (just before we had an extremely low-key wedding), when we picked 40 lbs of blackberries on Rodway Hill. There were a couple of outcomes from that day. The first was that we made a huge amount of completely horrible blackberry chutney – so bad we couldn’t even give it away. The second outcome for me was the overpowering feeling of gratitude which (being a fervent convert to extreme atheism) didn’t fit at all well because there seemed to be no-one or nothing I could thank for the generosity of those spiteful bushes. Sixty years later I’m still struggling with that conundrum having tasted some of the off-the-shelf options without being convinced by any of them.
But I can dimly see a way through the desert by repairing and joining up the broken fragments of our polarized and fragmented culture. Let’s take plants as a beginning. We casually divide them into arbitrary categories (food; wildflowers; weeds; rarities; orchids and ragwort etc.) often entirely based on usefulness to humans or potential for monetization. But all plants come from the same tree of life as we do. Some time, millions of years ago, humans, dinosaurs and plants took different paths and we’ve evolved to live very different lives but notwithstanding Darwin’s troubles for suggesting that we share a great deal of our history with the great apes, for instance, and regardless of the religious arguments about it, we all came from the same single celled organism which contained the first few chapters of the library of life which have evolved, adapted and now reside in each of us inside every cell of our body; our six feet of tightly coiled DNA. The library is the same library which mothered (each with its own chapters) the butterfly, the tiger (Tyger?) the earthworm, the edible mushroom, the lichen and last of all, you and me. It’s not necessary for us to strive to unite with nature because we are already one with her. Hugely diverse and adapted; a coat of many colours you might say but a single one and not the atomised billions of homo sapiens who dare to think of ourselves as individuals.
So after years of seeing my passion for field botany, for gardening, for writing and spirituality for anthropology and for ceramics, for science and for cooking as separate “interests” I can see that they’re all more like spokes on a wheel at the centre of which is the big question –“What’s it all for?” – and when I ask myself the big question that way I can answer with another question which, for me, removes the thorn of the first. “Why does it have to have a meaning or a purpose at all?” We could invent a multitude of possible answers to the big question but I can’t see what useful purpose it would offer.
Just out of interest I should say that this far from sudden insight was triggered by my instinctive dislike for any kind of Magisterium which almost always exists to promote its own version of an answer and to persecute in the most cruel and heartless manner anyone who offers an alternative or sometimes even a slight amendment. The lightbulb moment came from binge reading about molecular biology and the latest plant taxonomy research in order better to understand DNA and one or two obscure (to me) statistical methods. Once, however dimly, I began to understand the beauty and complexity of what goes on in both plant and human cells; I began in an almost religious way, to see all of my interests bonded together by their common structure.
The icing on the cake has been to read about the work of Stefano Mancuso who runs a research programme at the University in Florence which he provocatively calls “Plant Neurobiology”. He and his colleagues across the world have come in for a great deal of flak from the old guard because plants don’t have neurons and couldn’t possibly have brains like ours but they are able to sense problems and respond to them; communicate with and “listen” to other plants and synthesise astonishingly complex molecules. All this has brought it home to me that writing about plants as if they were part of a giant but insensitive stamp collection is doomed. Without plants there would be no trace of the human and yet plant life would go on – probably less destructive. Plants are worth so much more than being pressed into herbaria and to even begin to understand what they are, we need poets and visionary science; we need anthropologists, herbalists, first nation men and women, collectors cooks and artists. I fear that we will never find a sustainable space for humanity on the earth unless we accept that we owe it all to the plants.
I guess it’s safe to admit, ten years after I retired, that I would occasionally climb the steps to the pulpit with no script but just a cluster of ideas whirling around my brain and praying that I could somehow thread them together into a sermon. This risky strategy evolved from the Franciscans who understood that the genuinely authentic sermon came out of knowing your stuff and assembling your talk like the pieces of a jigsaw until the last piece, the big reveal, showed how it fitted together all along. Some of my congregation loved the excitement and learned to be patient. I never believed in the spoon feeding of platitudes taken verbatim from a commentary. Others were kind enough to describe it as a waste of time, and insult to their intelligence (what intelligence?), or told me they hadn’t understood a word. Actually I agreed with all of them – but for different reasons.
At this time of year I have similar problems with cooking. There are only two of us permanent residents at the Potwell Inn, so what the hell do I cook with all these aubergines/ courgettes/ figs / tomatoes and beans? What with the drought, the successive heatwaves and the weeds it’s a wonder that we’ve got any crops at all but we decided early on to prioritise the watering and we’ve kept most of our plants alive – hence the surpluses. There’s a deep satisfaction in harvesting just as there is in cooking, although standing in front of the stove sweating and cursing all day when it’s well over 30C is less than fun. Growing, harvesting, cooking and eating are like a genetic sequence; they always belong together and as such they’re a part of ‘the way we do things round here‘; our culture and the meanings of our lives.
Of course it takes a bit of practice to acquire the skills in all four disciplines, but compared with the times we started it’s a doddle. You couldn’t buy garlic, olive oil, any imported foods unless there was a deli nearby (we were lucky because we had two deli’s but we could barely afford to shop in either of them and in one of them they treated you as if you’d been brought in on someone’s shoe. Food and class are another complex that should be more familiar to anthropologists than they are. I was taught to cook by Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and others. Even in the swinging sixties, Penguin books i.e affordable books were still printed on the cheapest paper and were rarely if ever illustrated aside from the wondrously evocative line drawings by John Minton and others which, while failing completely to convey much sense of what a dish was meant to look like, resonated with the culture of which it was a part. You could learn the ingredients of a dish – let’s say an omelette – but never be repulsed by some disturbing image, glistening like like a rabbit’s freshly drawn guts such as feature so widely today in food-porn coffee table books. Then you were lucky if you got more than “get some eggs, break them and whisk them, put a knob of butter in the pan and cook the omelette whilst stirring (?) and shaking it. Turn it out. When you learned to cook French food from ED you absorbed far more of the regional geography and culture of France that you ever learned about cooking an omelette. But you certainly knew what to cook it in. The first part of her books tended to be about “The batterie de cuisine” and in Clifton where we lived there was a shop that sold good pans that we couldn’t often afford anyway. Jane Grigson, another writer of real heft, was the same. No pictures to speak of but cultural wisdom hovered like a graceful miasma around every page. Her daughter, also a cook, recalled that she occasionally might find a dead pig in the bath waiting to be dealt with. That’s my girl! Jane’s partner Geoffrey Grigson was a polymath poet, writer and botanist who wrote one of my favourite books – “The Englishman’s Flora” which I discovered only an hour ago is soon going to be re-published by Doubleday under the more appropriate title “A British Flora”. Geoffey Grigson’s extensive research goes beyond listing plants by adding fascinating material on their uses and local names. Once again a Grigson book comes close to being a cultural anthropology of plants rather than a dry list.
Anyway, on the stove in the picture at the top – fig compote cooking down slowly until it become a dark, sticky and fragrant mass – (representing the lower strings section in the flavour orchestra) and the lighter woodwinds represented by Marcella Hazan’s marvellous no.1 tomato sauce which is indispensable to the Potwell Inn kitchen. We make pounds of it and bottle it to last through the year. The peapods are going to be part of a vegetable stock to give some hinterland to a french style vegetable soup.
Regarding the climate crisis we went for a wander around Bath a couple of days ago and I photographed this lovely Georgian street running down towards the river from Walcot Street. I’ve mentioned before the fanatical opposition to any move by the council to reduce traffic in Bath. More than fifty years ago when we lived here, the Local Authority when not occupied with demolishing fine houses on Snow Hill and replacing them with Tower blocks, also commissioned the Buchanan report which proposed demolishing much of Walcot and building a tunnel to link the north to the southbound routes. This plan would have involved the demolition of all of the houses you see. When the houses were empty it planned to set fire to one of them so the Fire Brigade could practice putting out fires in Georgian buildings. The sensible citizens of Bath rose up against the whole plan which would have left Bath without one of its finest parishes and the city remained clogged and polluted by ever growing traffic. The traditionalists seemingly grew attached to the noise and the choking fumes and every time a remedy is suggested which involves walking or cycling they rush, screaming like banshees to the high court to defend the ancient right to drive at 40mph in a 20mph zone , to park on the pavement and to treat zebra crossings as suggestions that you might care to stop but if, on the other hand you don’t feel like it you may menace pedestrians without fear of tiresome legal proceedings. Most amusingly the High Priest of rage oftens begins his letters to internet groups by writing “I’m not normally one to complain”. We really don’t deserve him!
Where’s the door? This is our friends Al and Helen’s old caravan. We once followed it from South Gloucestershire to Avignon on a camping trip. I’d know it anywhere.
Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
William Carlos Williams
Following on from the previous post; I have no doubt that we can occasionally understand when someone – usually an artist – has produced a work in a deep way; I’m thinking of this kind of work in terms of beholding or revealing their experience as opposed to just explaining it; It’s ferociously hard to explain how such a thing can happen and yet William Carlos Williams’ poem “This is just to say” takes an utterly banal idea and transforms it into a shared moment. “I have eaten the plums” Is surely a love letter to an unseen lover (the assured “forgive me“) who’s not yet awake; about a liberty taken – stealing their breakfast – and then almost a haiku (delicious, so sweet and so cold) .
William Blake could venture the possibility that we might see “the world in a grain of sand” in what feels like a poetic manifesto. It’s the expression of “The hard question”. How are the sense impressions we all experience every day – cold plums from the fridge; running sand through our fingers and idly watching them fall – how are these turned into “qualia” – or as Thomas Nagel puts it “what they feel like”. The hardest question of all is how can we communicate those feelings to another person – ever? Think of the struggle we have to explain a pain, for instance, to someone else.
I used to take our oldest son, then just a toddler, up Hope Chapel Hill in his pushchair when we lived at the bottom of this tremendously steep road. Often I’d let him walk up and he was always drawn to the cobblestone gutter where he would find treasures. The tops of ring-pull tins, cigarette ends, sweet papers, leaves, pebbles and grains of sand. It could take hours and yet he was completely absorbed by them.
When we were at Art School I became equally absorbed with By Brook which is the little river that runs through Castle Combe and on through Slaughterford until it reaches the River Avon. It runs through a very lovely steep sided valley and there used to be a little pumping station – ruined by the time we found it; sitting in a clearing of boggy ground, and further upstream a disused paper mill. In those days the river ran gin clear and there were small brown trout that, once or twice, we tried (unsuccessfully) to fish for. The whole area was keepered for a pheasant shoot and there was a water bailiff that we made sure never saw. I was having a hard time and this empty spot had a healing effect on me.
I was particularly fascinated by the contorted and interlocking roots of the trees on the sides of By Brook, and made many drawings of them (bottom left above). The top left photo was taken almost sixty years later and you can see that the water is now milky and probably eutrophic from farmland runoff.
I’ve never forgotten the experience of being there but I’ve never found a way of expressing it; the sound of the breeze in the Hazel bushes, the occasional staccato alarm call of a pheasant, the rich smell of the grass and the water and my struggles to make pencils and heavyweight paper speak it all. I’ve returned there in my memory so many times and although for me it’s an effortless transition in time to revisit the memories, the expression of them in whatever form always seems to slip through my fingers. On Tuesday our visit to the Victoria Gallery to see Norman Ackroyd’s exhibition The transience of light was both deeply moving and extremely challenging. How did he pull it off?
So after a great deal of huffing and puffing and moody introspection we went up to the allotment to tend our thirsty plants today and I came upon a whole collection of squashes and pumpkins which had been fattening up relentlessly, hidden by leaves and just out of sight the whole time, and then a kind of resolution to my challenge was staring me in the face. The poems and the photos seemed to arrange themselves and the whole argument is there in cryptic form at the top of the page. It says ‘stop trying so hard!’
It all reminds me of a time when against all odds I threw a large raku pot – nearly a foot high, using crank mixture – a clay that’s so full of grog (fired clay sand) that it takes the tips off your fingers. I can remember every moment of that experience, and what seemed most miraculous to me was that I just instinctively stepped aside from it and let it form itself. These were still my own fingers but they were not moving at my behest but that of the clay itself. I can remember the sense of wonder as it grew taller and thinner. It seemed to me on reflection that the harder I tried the less likely it was that I would succeed and so I discovered how stepping aside could be the final flowering of technique.
The idea of never ceasing to try but never trying seems more like a Zen koan than a piece of serious advice and yet there’s much wisdom in it. It’s like St Augustine’s much misunderstood saying “love, and do what you will” which, when it’s properly unpacked actually means that if you love – I mean really love – then you will always want to do the right thing. What it categorically doesn’t mean is do whatever you want in pursuit of love. Whether it’s eating a cold plum, throwing a pot, growing a pumpkin or drawing a river sometimes – no, almost always – it’s best to get over yourself and let the experience speak for itself without you feeling you need to explain it or help it along. Maybe, and this is just a wild thought, what sometimes happens is that “what it feels like” can pass between us through the work of ghostly resonances where we are more often content with mouthfuls of dust.
However long we garden, every year takes us by surprise when the crops seem almost to overwhelm us. This isn’t bragging as much as an admission of poor planning. In early spring when we’re working out what to grow we always seem to forget that the seeds and vegetables we plant out will need more space than we expect, and that to grow all that we’d like to grow when we’re looking at the seed catalogues in the winter we’d need to take on half a dozen volunteers and several acres of land. For instance the polytunnel cucumbers planted next to the fennel looked absolutely fine when we put them in but now the rowdy cucumbers are overwhelming the smaller plants so Madame had to spend an hour this morning pruning some of the exuberant growth back and whilst doing so she discovered a large cache of fruit which had hidden itself among the leaves. Sadly our peas couldn’t cope with the heatwave and, like the broad beans have lost their flowers. The broad beans were so stressed they were attacked by some kind of fungal infection. We’ve known for years that this was coming, but it’s now serious enough for us to abandon some old favourites and hope that the plant breeders are ahead of the game when it comes to drought resistance in plants. A quick look online today suggests that we shall be trying out entirely new varieties of peas next season. In fact all our cool weather plants are going to fail very soon and plant scientists are already looking closely at the DNA of likely plants . This is a subject I know nothing at all about but I’m very curious to know more.
The other problem is when the produce comes in fast, we have to cook and eat it all, and with only two mouths to feed we really don’t need ten cucumbers or five large aubergines at once. I banged hopefully on Charlie, our neighbour’s, door this morning but I discovered he’s allergic to cucumbers, and so the only answer will be to pickle as many as we can. Fortunately the dill is in full flower and those of our neighbours who were silly enough to plant horseradish are glad enough to get rid of some – “take more!” they often plead. This doesn’t really solve the problem because we have cupboards full of five year old pickles, chutneys and relishes not all of which age well. The good news is that our youngest son will cheerfully munch his way through a jar of pickle and a pound of cheese in a single late night sitting.
The heatwave continues and we’re still getting up extremely early and putting a couple of hours in before it’s too hot to work any more, but the knock on effect of that is that we need to go to bed at 9.00pm. However we don’t complain about it because early morning gardening means we get entertained by a resident song thrush who will work through his entire repertoire of phrases dozens of times without ever stopping. The battle with the weeds never eases up, but I’ve discovered that three pronged cultivators loosen their roots quickly and then I can rake most of them out or leave them in the sun to crisp up and die. Watering takes up a lot of time and although a hose would be quicker, watering by hand gets you up close and personal with the plants, and it’s always lovely to see a large pumpkin lurking in the shadows, or scrump a few strawberries, tayberries or an apple, or pull a few weeds on the way round.
Tomorrow we’re expecting the last of the builders to lay new vinyl in the bathroom and that will end an unbelievable ten year battle with our landlord to deal with our serious issues with black mould. They’ve finally connected the bathroom and kitchen extractors to the outside world and cleaned down and sealed the affected walls and repainted them. They even replaced the asbestos cupboard door in the hall which we were told not to use soon after we moved in.
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours looking for a second hand book I need to use. It’s a rather academic 600 page tome which I discovered would cost over £300 to buy new or just under £100 second hand. I made some enquiries about the astonishing cost and it seems that the academic book trade is surviving but only just. A typical print run has gone from several thousand to several hundred because universities and their libraries are so financially overstretched they can’t afford to buy them. It’s a bit of a death spiral. The solution seems to be renting, and so I’ve rented the ebook for a year for thirty quid and I’m bound to say it’s a great way to read because you can search and mark-up with all the power of the computer and enlarge the size of the type to suit your own eyesight and it’s even accessible on my phone. I guess an eagle could read it but not me. I’m hoping that very soon I’ll have a better – if still underwhelming – grasp of DNA and all that stuff. I went to the doctor once with a very painful big toe. “Oh” he said breezily, “you’ve got Hallux rigidus”. No-one in my family was brought up in ancient Rome so I’m a bit rusty on the latin, but even I knew that it meant “stiff toe”. I remonstrated with him that I knew that before I walked through the door. He never tried it again. I often read appeals to get more people involved in botany, but (I speak from experience here) all too often a beginner runs into a brick wall of scientific language which – when used out of context or an appropriate setting – feels like you’re being pushed back. All the research suggests that if you can’t explain a difficult idea simply you shouldn’t be trying to teach it.
