And after much huffing and puffing I’m posting this via my phone and at the cost of heaven knows how much of my data allowance – but hey …..
The Potwell Inn does not have many overnight guests. This may be due to the fact that our inflatable spare bed has the unfortunate habit of deflating very slowly during the night – which, combined with the lingering effects of a lock-in, sometimes leaves us sleep deprived and hungover at the same time. Our most recent guests escaped that fate by virtue of an improvised puncture patch and an early(ish) night which contributed to an early breakfast and a civilised conversation. Later, during a guided tour of the allotment, an intriguing insight into the parallel universes that we occupied.
Here’s an instance of something close. In the 1970’s I was very involved in pottery and during those years I acquired the habit, whenever I looked at a pot, of turning it over to look at the base. It’s surprising what you can learn from the bottom of a pot – what it’s made from, who made it, whether it was hand made, machine made or cast, when it was made. I’ll even touch the base of a pot with my tongue to see how hard it was fired.
Yesterday I saw some similarly interesting behaviour in our friend who is a great enthusiast for butterflies and moths. And so when we were taking a walk around the next-door community garden she almost ignored the impressive efforts of the volunteers but spent some time examining the leaves of an unruly patch of nettles. “Where you see a weed, I see a foodplant”, she said. I realised instantly that there are probably hordes of things that we know but don’t know and, of course, I knew that butterflies have their preferred food plants – but I hadn’t made the connection in the part of my brain where it really matters. The large and small white butterflies will lay their eggs on our cabbages, but they would also love to lay them on nasturtiums if they could be found. This is one of the foundational ideas of companion planting. Butterflies, and therefore their caterpillars, are fussy eaters. Just like our children, they would eat their greens if you stood over them or bribed them, but they would always go for a burger if there was one available. She also put me right on my ‘from-memory’ list of butterflies on the allotment so far this year and so I learned that my ‘small blue’ was almost certainly a holly blue. This was enough to send me back to my butterfly books where I was able to read much more. The Collins Wild Guide by Newland and Still, lists habitats and food plants separately in an index which makes it incredibly useful both for searching out species and growing the right food plants, and it’s small enough to carry in your pocket.
I’ve written before about plugging in my field botanist frame of mind (if there’s time) when we’re out for a walk, and there are plenty of other ways of framing the natural world. You’d have to be a genius to be fluent in all of them, but simply being aware that you tend to see better if you’ve some idea of the time, the seasons, the environment, the habitat and all the other factors that determine presence or absence within the natural history of where you happen to be, can bring into focus things you’d never normally notice. As the previous president of the Bath Natural History Society once said to me – “The idea is to walk in nature rather than just through it”.
My friend is presently hatching six elephant hawkmoth pupae which sounds greedy, but then she knows where to look. They’ll be released back into the wild as soon as they hatch. We’ve planted loads of nasturtiums a long way from our brassicas, to lure the butterflies away and make them happy at the same time. Does companion planting work, then? Think of the plates of leftovers after a children’s party – I bet there are loads of carrot sticks left behind because most children will always eat favourites first. I don’t know of a way to educate butterflies to stop laying eggs on cabbages, but I can give them a snack they much prefer.
If you detect a certain look of distaste on Madame’s face, it’s just what anyone might look like when they’ve just heard something that compels a rearrangement of the neural networks. How many of us go to the Lost Gardens of Heligan in search of Downton Abbey -you know, six residents lovely frocks and fifty servants – or perhaps in search of a lost time of horticultural innocence. I’m so exercised thinking about the poisons that we’re pouring on to the earth in the 21st century, that it really never occurred to me to enquire too deeply into what they were putting on it in the early 1900’s. So – meet what our guide today claimed was known by the gardeners as “the widowmaker’. It’s an ordinary hand operated spray, through which the gardeners dispensed weedkiller and insecticide. Substances like sea salts, waste manufacturing products, and oils were used as weed killers. In the late 19th century, additional materials such as carbon disulfide, borax, pyridine and other coal-tar derivatives, mercury, strychnine and arsenic trioxide were used, not to mention nicotine of course. So let’s not get too breathlessly sentimental about late 19th and early 20th century horticulture it was as much a product of the industrial revolution as any other aspect of life.
However, a century later – now we can see what havoc industrialised agriculture can wreak on the countryside and its ecology – anything before 1945 is going to look better than what we’ve got now. Time for a cheerful picture. Here we’re looking at about half of just one of several gardens dedicated to growing fruit and vegetables at Heligan and you can see some rather vast rows of shallots. This is the bed we photographed in the autumn under four or five inches of seaweed straight off the beach. We had a conversation with the head gardener and she was very reassuring, so we mulched our asparagus bed with a car-load of seaweed from North Wales and, just as she said, the seaweed has almost disapeared and we have a very healthy growth of second year asparagus. We’ve taken and eaten just a few spears but the bed will be fed and left alone for the rest of the season, just keeping an eye out for asparagus beetle which decimated our neighbours’ crops last season. Allotmenteers face the same challenges as the old gardeners of Heligan in controlling pests and we’ve turned our backs on synthetic chemicals, but we did have to use natural pyrethrum twice last year, or face the destruction of our plants. It was applied early in the morning when the impact of any drift on passing insects would be minimised, and the asparagus itself was not in flower. We try not to let the perfect drive out the best. Short of a major infestation you can often pick enough beetles off plants to set them back.
A couple of summers ago I was looking at an infestation of Corn Marigold in an arable crop in Pembrokeshire. I foolishly (what’s new?) asked the farmer where the plant usually grew and he said “there’s a bit of a clue in the name – Corn Marigold” – drrrr….
I never for a single moment thought I would be writing this, but last summer, on the basis of no more than a mention in a biography, we salted some runner beans just to see what would happen. Here at the Potwell Inn we read a lot of books – I mean a lot of them – and among them was the new biography of Patience Gray entitled Fasting and Feasting written by Adan Federman – and so when, in a passing remark, her son Philip said he actually preferred the taste of salted beans to their fresh counterparts, we were unable to resist.