Category: The Potwell Inn Library

Small is beautiful – smaller still is ravishing.

This photograph is not of a twig but a moth; the Buff-tip moth, Phalera bucephala. I’m not showing it because I’d want anyone to think me an expert of any kind, but because its camouflage is so perfect at the same time as being very lovely. It’s eye-watering to think how many evolutionary twists and turns it’s gone through to arrive at this perfect twigness in order that it can rest up safely during the day. Our friend Kate uses a moth trap to identify record and release any number of moth species high up in the Bannau Brycheiniog; the Brecon Beacons in old money, and we took this photo, along with many others, early one morning when we were staying up there.

I’m often struck by the lack of attention we pay to the very small when we talk about the beauty of nature. We tend to look for swathes of flowers; forests; endless mountains and the most grandiose hills when we speak of beauty, but if we take a magnifying glass to, let’s say a weed like a dandelion, it’s like crossing a boundary into another world. A single seed under a low powered microscope can reveal such a complexity of pattern and structure that we’d be hard pressed to capture it in a drawing. Nature presents herself as an artist and many artists would admit to gaining inspiration from the almost reckless generosity of living forms. Moths are just one example. From the aerial view of a river basin or wetland marsh down to the double helix of DNA and the complex fibonacci sequence of seeds on a sunflower head or the seed flask of a poppy, there’s inspiration to be found. Speaking through my artist’s hat, as you might say, I’ve shared a lifetime exploring the colours and forms of living things through the medium of drawing, botanical illustration and ceramics. I’ve needed to embrace some of the science as well, but the wellspring of my explorations has been aesthetic rather than scientific. I’m far more excited by the earthy colours of rust and ochre than by shouty primaries, and a multitude of green hues relieved by occasional touches of scarlet can turn a humble lichen into an aesthetic feast.

Nature is beautiful, but not in the guide book sense. You can’t measure beauty by counting oohs and aaahs and you couldn’t propose a unit like the Milli-Helen which would be the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. It’s expressed perfectly in my mother’s distinction between perfume and scent. I should mention here that I’ve been trying out a new phone app to help identify moths – in anticipation of a Christmas present from our son. In fact it’s good with all kinds of UK insects and designed and promoted by the UK Wildlife Trusts. The app is called ID UK Insects and it’s good for bees, hoverflies, spiders, wasps – in fact for pretty well any insect you might encounter on a slow walk and is free for a basic 500 species or £18 a year for the full version. Well worth a free go! It won’t excuse you from any of the hard book work when you get home to identify your find, but like all the best AI it will save the horror of flicking through hundreds of pages in the vain hope you might run across it! For those old hands who would assert that it’s cheating I’d say – “so’s a cake mixer!”

It would be wrong to settle on the moth as a sole exemplar. As I suggested at the beginning of this post, nature should be regarded as everything on earth including us, and my friend Chris would make a strong claim for the whole universe to be included as well. In fact – and this would be a bold and almost spiritual claim – I’d argue that the default condition of a fully functioning human mind would be wonder.

I’ve never forgotten an exercise I did on a retreat years ago. We were a group of a dozen or so, all strangers to one another. We were divided into couples and asked to grasp both hands of our partners. Then we were invited not just to look at one another or chat about our journey there but silently to explore the possibilities of beholding. As you might expect, it was a deeply challenging thing to do but it was also very powerful; an intuitive exchange of our deep selves and a letting go of embarrassment and ego. I’d suggest that the default position of wonder at natural beauty is facilitated by its twin faculty, beholding.

With such a mindset even the destructive powers of nature which, for the most part are recycling the elements of existence, can lead to the sense of wonder. Nothing is ever wasted by the woodland rotters like the Sulphur-tuft fungus above. I can contemplate my own vulnerability and transience without being afraid.

Around 1970/71 I had a long period of what was diagnosed as phobic anxiety, and not being able to face going into art school, they put me on probation for a couple of terms. I took to visiting the valley behind our cottage through which By Brook flowed, and drawing there. My memory ever since is that I only made one drawing – very laborious and forensic pencil rendering of a twisted tree trunk growing at the edge of the river. The drawing went into a folder and it’s travelled around from house to house ever since. I’ve looked for it from time to time but never found it among the hoardings; until last night I dreamed that I was able to thank all the people who loved me over the years – beginning of course with Madame – even when I didn’t love myself at all. I was awake at 5.00am and got up after a couple of hours musing on what Robin, my one time psychoanalytic psychotherapist would have called a significant dream and went into my study and found the drawing almost immediately in a heap of unsorted papers.

But it wasn’t just the one drawing; I found four of them – and each of them would have taken several days. Here they are seeing the light of day for over five decades.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that these are great drawings, but rather that they articulate a theme that had been at the back of my mind for going on twenty years after I walked to primary school through a lane bordered on one side by a hawthorn hedge which, in hindsight must have been laid in previous years. I was enchanted, almost literally, by the twisted and intertwined branches and it became a treasured part of my walk to school, a memory which returns joyfully whenever I see a similar hedge today. After I’d photographed the drawings this morning I realised that there was another subconscious link in the twisting and curling water of the brook and which I’d tried unsuccessfully to capture in drawings of the sea when we lived in Cornwall. Drawing – to pack a huge proposition into a very short sentence – has been a way back into a transient moment. A mill-race; the Devonshire leat on Dartmoor; any kind of fast flowing water especially if, like a canal, it was the outcome of human intervention. No surprise then, to recall that my favourite winter job as a groundsperson was hedge laying. The spot where I drew By Brook was downstream from a paper mill where the mill race joined the brook. The mill is now disused and abandoned, and the brook itself is milky and eutrophic; quite unsuitable for papermaking.

If there is any kind of takeaway from this biographical fragment it’s that I didn’t get this ecstatic, aesthetic response to nature from a guru or a book. It was always there and all I had to do was channel it into tangible form. So the next great adventure was in ceramics. I’ve already written about this and I won’t go over it again, except to say that the making of ceramics feels like participation in creation itself. All the essential elements; earth, air, fire and water are there. The transformation of clay into fired ware is a geological process, The colours are made with elemental minerals and ores – cobalt, iron, lead, melted and rendered transparent in the kiln and transformed by the control of the available oxygen. English iron-based slipware glazes, mixed with lead rich galena and fired in an abundance of oxygen emerged the colour of honey and in China, a similar iron based glazed fluxed with wood ash and and starved of oxygen in the final stage of firing emerged as celedon, a muted and lovely green the colour of lichen.. The making of ceramics is an exhausting creative process which is affected by so many variables that if the potter doesn’t learn both intense focus and how to survive failure they will soon give up.

Nowadays I use photography to try to capture nature. I don’t edit or enhance anything and if it doesn’t work I delete it and try again. I remember once having a battle with my art school Head of Department over the characteristic form of an apple tree. I contended that trees are hard to draw well because by forensically rendering their internal structure and the form of the whole tree, its colours and its leaves it would be easier to identify its species. To prove my point I’d knocked up a black and white sketch of an apple tree on a piece of cardboard with a wide brush and some house paint. He dismissed the drawing and the idea with a lofty wave of the hand. It was rubbish and all trees looked pretty much the same. This week I’ve mentioned an apple tree called Arkansas Black several times already and today I returned to that discussion by photographing the tree on the allotment. I hope I won’t offend anyone by saying that the form of the tree is completely distinctive. Pears plums and (at the time) English elms are incontestably different.

My old music teacher A F Woodman used to to shout at me if I was particularly inattentive and say “I know you can hear it Pole, but are you listening?”

Wonder; the capacity to behold and not just gawp; inexhaustible curiosity; focus; listening; some measure of humility; the capacity to fail, try again as Samuel Beckett said, and fail better – all these are the portals through which we must pass. To adopt a religious idea, we must approach nature as penitents – not least because we, collectively, have done so much damage. The technical understanding, the skills, the science need essentially to be led by the revelatory moment. Most truly great scientists and mathematicians would agree that the revelatory moment is the beginning of the process of understanding rather than the end.

Which brings me to a penultimate point. If there is ever to be a real green spirituality it will need to begin in the same place. I remember Ken Leach preaching that orthodoxy is closer to its Greek roots when translated as “right glory” and certainly not the slavish following of some ancient canonical text. I’m not sure what we could call theology without Theos, but I treasure Wittgenstein’s joke that “wherof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent” except that it’s never yet stopped a daft or cruel idea from being broadcast.

So to conclude this rather long post, I have to write briefly about education because it seems that these core skills – “Wonder; the capacity to behold and not just gawp; inexhaustible curiosity; focus; listening; some measure of humility; the capacity to fail, try again as Samuel Beckett said, and fail better” all these are being expunged from the curriculum of both school and university. If we don’t bring our children up to allow wonder and curiosity into their lives they will be stunted like wind deformed trees .

Hell is heaven designed by venture capitalists

Meet the other part of the iceberg.

Honey fungus mycelium on a tree stump. It’s called a rhizomorph because of its shape – like a rhizome.

Sometimes it seems – although I don’t believe a word of it really – sometimes the stars get themselves into a truly malignant alignment and the boils, frogs, flies and rain just keep coming without remission. This last year, what with the campervan constantly breaking down, the extreme weather and an onslaught of health problems has been an all-round shitter! Add to that the election of a malignant government whose big idea is to preserve everything that was wrong about the past 50 years and crush the best in order just to stay in power and ….. ? well, you decide.

I’ve written before about the challenge of accepting good news amidst a sea of effluent but this last few of weeks, having got rid of the polyps in my bowel which were causing iron deficiency anaemia; last week I finally got an appointment to fit my new hearing aids after waiting 8 months, and another appointment to sign off on the laser peripheral iridotomy so I can get some new glasses. Oh joy! and to cap it all I feel better – which is a non scientific way of saying that it’s marvellous to be able to wheelbarrow full loads of wood chip down to the allotment without having to keep stopping to catch my breath. I can see the end of the tunnel although it’s just a small disc of light at the moment. The campervan is fixed, we have a list of adventures planned for 2026, the allotment is all but ready for next season and –

  • – having met my targets for plant species and records, I’ve now turned to processing my fungus photos – and this is going to be an altogether harder task because until a couple of years ago I had no idea what, apart from field mushrooms and fly agarics, what most of them are called. Yes it’s true; I am a proper propellerhead. Anyway I thought I’d start with this image because the fungi – OK toadstools – we see are only a very small part of the actual fungus. Most of it comprises minute underground threads, collectively called mycelium, that can extend for many feet and occasionally miles around the part we see in the autumn. As instanced by the Honey fungus at the top of this piece, Honey fungus species actually weave their minute thread-like hyphae into ropes and so we can glimpse the underground world on a tree stump.

Getting ready for this festival of bafflement I’ve done what I always do and read a lot of books that are way beyond my understanding, in the hope that some of the research sticks . I won’t bore you with a list except to say that for the last year I’ve been gradually searching for second hand copies of the most important ones. I can never afford to buy new academic books – they’re ridiculously expensive and only for well-heeled university libraries. There’s also loads of good stuff available online; especially on the British Mycological Society Facebook page.

What I’ve learned has given me an entirely new perspective on the benefits of fungi not only to our ecosystem but to our health and wellbeing as well. These days we’re very familiar with the importance of pollinator plants at the beginning of the life process. We’re not so thoughtful about what happens at the end. At its simplest, without fungi we couldn’t survive because whatever lives also dies, at which point the fungi move in and reduce the senescent remains to their original constituents. Without fungi the earth would be covered with a layer of dead material of unfathomable depth. Sometimes, as any farmer or gardener could tell you, the fungi move in too soon and finish their lunch and our crops before we’ve been able to harvest them. The problem with drenching the field or the garden with fungicide is that without the silent work of fungi there would be no soil in which to grow the next crop because the overwhelming majority of plants and trees have what’s called mycorrhizal relationships with fungi; a constructive and complementary relationship in which the fungi supply essential nutrients to the plant in return for some of the photosynthesised sugars which its leaves produce. There is some evidence – because mycelial relationships are so important to the health and therefore the eventual crop; that fungicides can weaken the plant and make it even more vulnerable to fungal pathogens. The invisible work of fungi is immeasurably more important to us than merely filling a forager’s basket. Of course there are many more gifts from the fungi than I’m going to write about here but I want to concentrate next on the meaning of those beneficial relationships.

Porcelain fungus on beech tree

Let’s begin with Robin Wall Kimmerer whose books – as she describes them – focus on how “The factual, objective view of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people”. When we talk about ancient knowledge whether we’re embracing plants or religious, spiritual issues, it’s almost impossible to say anything without using metaphorical language. I’d argue that myth is the way that we try to tell some species of truth about mysteries. When Kimmerer writes about “mother trees” she’s using a metaphor to describe a positive relationship. “Mother trees” don’t breast feed their saplings or worry when they get home late from a night out. But it may be that there is a mycelial fungal connection between trees that allows the older trees with more resources to share those resources to nearby younger trees. What the metaphor achieves is to communicate in simple terms an important concept awaiting scientific verification. A wood or a forest is an unimaginably complex network of invisible connections which can sustain mortal damage if it’s damaged by thoughtless management. It’s a way of looking at trees which takes a broad, almost spiritual view of their meaning to us.

But just as I was about to write, I caught sight of a recent piece in the Guardian referencing fungi purely as a kind of industrial and scientific feedstock. It’s an interesting article about some possibilities of extending the use of fungi to produce building materials, packaging and even for biodegradable nappies (diapers). The science of using fungi to clean up industrial pollution is well advanced, so this is hardly big news. But what caught my attention was the way in which the article perfectly captures the contrast between two ways of looking at nature in general and fungi in particular. Kimmerer’s almost spiritual account, inflected by First Nation tradition and wisdom versus the highly instrumental scientific and rationalistic way of looking at nature as a free resource and a means of making money.

The question, or perhaps the takeaway from the two perspectives is that if we accept that climate catastrophe; species extinction; mass migration; global instability; pandemic and the degradation of the environment are all the result of our almost universally instrumental view of nature; wouldn’t it be better, rather than to join in the ugly scientific pile-on dismissing the ideas of Kimmerer and many others to allow that without a reset of our perspectives towards nature there can only be one result – and that’s the destruction of the earth.

It’s not so much the camera as knowing what to do with it.

Herbie was a drystone waller and he mainly built the regional styles from Gloucestershire – the ones in the photos above go from Cornwall to Cumbria and they’re often dependent on whatever local stone lay at the waller’s feet. The southern part of Gloucestershire provides several different kinds of stone; Brandon Hill Stone; Oolitic Limestone (a Bath and Cotswold speciality); Cornbrash, even some sandstone. The geology of the districts is written in drystone walls. I’d often see Herbie at work around the area, occasionally on churchyard walls – but for some reason he disliked going into churches and would never work inside them. As an amateur botanist I relish his work because drystone walls are a paradise for all manner of interesting plants, not to mention the invertebrates and vertebrates, the lichens the bacteria and fungi.

Someone told me a story about Herbie one day that not only made me laugh out loud, but also taught me an invaluable lesson. I’ll call it Herbie’s ratio and it applies in all manner of fields, not least hoping that a new, more expensive camera will always take better pictures. It seems that someone once pulled up in their expensive car and, after watching him work for a little while, asked how much he charged. “£100 a yard” he said. There was a pause and the man said “That’s a lot of money for a pile of stones”. Herbie also paused and then said – “well it’s £1 for the stone and £99 for knowing what to do with it”.

Single edged razor blade, steel ruler, ring flash adaptor, macro lens adaptor for phone, hand lens,TG-7 camera, Etrex GPX, Pixel 6a phone, waterproof notebook and space pen.

I use photographs – more than for any other purpose – for making notes. Mostly it’s my phone camera which is by no means state of the art because it’s a Google Pixel 6A which is rapidly approaching retirement (or obsolescence). But whenever we go for a walk I’ll take dozens of plant photos as a reminder of what we’ve seen. I recently found out I’d taken 22,000 photos over the past 10 years. For plants I know well, there’s no problem. But I’ve learned over that time that if you don’t identify, label them and get them on to a spreadsheet straight away, in a month you’ll have the photo of a plant that you can’t use to make an identification because it doesn’t have some key feature in focus or even visible at all.

The upside of phone pics is that there are some very good apps around which will suggest an identification with a percentage of certainty; but they’re by no means always right (the software designers claim upwards of 90%) and they can exude a false sense of certainty. The old manual way to ID plants is to narrow down the possibilities one question at a time with a list called a key. The difficulty for a beginner is that keys often use off-putting technical language – they have to of course; so there’s a steep learning curve. The great advantage of keys is that you can retrace your steps one at a time until you get back on to the right track. The great disadvantage of the AI apps is that you have no idea what steps they took to reach their conclusion; no idea which features of your photo were decisive and so you don’t accumulate the knowledge of what’s essential and what’s not. I should also mention that the more sophisticated phone cameras get, the more jiggery pokery goes on behind the scenes and I often land up fighting the phone over what it’s important to focus on or lamenting the brightening or colouration changes that it imposes.

The ideal compromise,then, is to use both apps and keys to hunt your plant down. I’d add one additional step which I find invaluable. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI finds it on Google) have a public access database called the Plant Atlas 2020 which gives a huge amount of information including photos, flowering times and distribution (ie where they grow). So phone camera + app (Flora Incognita is one of the best, and free) + field guide ( Collins Wildflower Guide; Francis Rose’ Wildflower Key are both reliable illustrated guides but there are many others) + Atlas 2020 on the internet will get you closer and faster than flicking through 10,000 illustrations.

Monarch’s Way trail, Stockhill woods

There’s another advantage of the phone, and that’s the fact that you can look alongside the image and find the EXIF data which records where and when the photo was taken. However the “where” bit – usually a latitude and longitude reference – needs to be treated with caution because it can be wildly out so I always make a note on the photos app of where it was taken in real life – “Stockhill Plantation Priddy, on Monarch’s way” – so a whole heap of contributory local information is immediately available.

You’ll have noticed, of course, that I’ve barely mentioned cameras so far. That’s because of Herbie’s Ratio. As I look around my study I can see four or five cameras and half a dozen lenses in their cases. The most expensive lens cost £1000 in New York (thank goodness I’m not a birder!) and it’s a Leica macro lens that fits my Panasonic Lumix camera. However, the closer you get to the subject the longer the exposure gets and in many cases the plant or my hands are waving around a bit so blurred photos are a regular curse. Carting all that equipment – including a hideously expensive carbon fibre tripod and lightweight magnesium ball head + flash gun etc – slows things down to divorce point since Madame is always with me. Of course you can uproot the plant and take it home to photograph in the warm, but in many cases that would be illegal and in my view it’s almost always unethical. So how often do I take the full big camera kit out on a plant hunt? – almost never, because the phone is light, always in my pocket, and is a perfect notebook, although there’s the question of locations in the EXIF data and I carry the cheapest ETREX GPS in my pocket in case something exceptionally rare turns up. It’s one of my least used bits of kit.

But, as always, there’s an alternative. I’ve also got a little Olympus TG-7 that totally fits the bill as lightweight, portable, waterproof and shockproof and with some eye watering capabilities such as built in focus stacking, macro settings and decent zoom. There are ring flash accessories and blah blah extras including wireless connection to my phone so I can mount the camera on a small tripod and control it using my phone as a remote viewer and trigger. It even downloads pictures to my phone so I can wander off into the AI apps wherever I am as long as there’s some kind of phone signal.

So marvellous! but does it help to identify plants? No it doesn’t; because as Herbie the stone-waller knew perfectly well, however expensive the camera, it’s knowing what to do with it that really counts. One important fact to bear in mind is that plants display considerable plasticity of shape and colour, depending on where and how they came to be where we find them. They change as they grow, flower and die back so the best photographs, illustrations and keys will always accept that there’s limit to what any description can achieve and sometimes that mysterious intangible quality called jizz will be the only show in town. We take the photographs and then we have to prove that what we say it is, is what it really is and the devil – as always – is in the detail.

So when I’m photographing an unknown plant I have to try to imagine what the questions in a key might be asking. because even if the AI app is 100% certain I still need to stand it up, as it were, in court. And so leaf shape, veins absent or present, if hairy is it hairy on one side or both? are the leaves opposite or arranged up the stem singly? What shape is the stem? how tall is the plant? if there are flowers can you see how many petals there are? what colour are they and are there lines and patterns? Are they daisy like or hooded like a foxglove?Are they all along one side of the stalk? What shape and colour are the anthers (the pollen parts)? What’s the overall shape of the plant – is it scrambling along the ground or climbing up another plant? Is it growing in deep, fertile loam or in a crack in a wall? There are more questions but I’ll stop there because I don’t want to put anyone off.

The thing is, a thoughtful photo taking these questions into account is going to be a lot more useful next week than a hasty out of focus snapshot, whatever camera it’s taken on. More often than not the phone camera is fine, but sometimes the features you need to look at are tiny – these flowerheads from a Fleabane are only 3mm wide, but the anthers and the hairs are diagnostic. This photo was taken at home (there were thousands of them so taking one of them was not going to make them extinct). This photo has to be considered with several others taken on the river near where we live.

Taken on my Olympus TG-7 using a damped down flash ring and processed by focus stacking.

Some time ago I joined a botanical illustration class for a couple of years and apart from learning a great deal about watercolour painting I learned to look intensely at my subjects. That has been the most tremendous help as I struggled to understand plants. The practice of painting the same thing over and over gives insight into colour, texture and form, and rendering that into a different medium is invaluable for taking photographs.

Technique v creativity – a phony war?

At art school in the 1970’s there was a rather stupid fashion for fostering what was called creativity as opposed to technique, and I ran into trouble for insisting that creativity was strangled at birth without it. My obsessive experiments with glazes, firing technique and chemistry got me marked down when it came to the crunch, but as far as I was concerned, technique in any discipline, sets you creatively free. There is no battle between the two, not in ceramics or botanical illustration nor in photography. The more technique you’ve got, the more freedom you’ve got, regardless of how much your kit costs. Herbie was right all along. A trowel is a trowel and a stone is a stone but the bringing of the two together in a wall is a work of art rooted in technique.

An example of a photographic set with notes

Green Bristle Grass, Setaria Viridis, Found on pavement in New King Street Bath. Occasional, prob birdseed. Height 37 cm, panicle 5cm. Very loosely rooted in crack – came out entire when I tried to break off a seed head. Checked in Stace, Cope & Gray, Sell & Murrell + Ddb. Around in UK since mid 1666. It’s a theraphyte – completes its entire lifecycle in one season and survives through seeds. Perfect desert/pavement dweller. Listed p 579 in Stace & Crawley “Alien Plants”. Olympus TG-7

  • and an early attempt at rendering a grass in watercolour:

Touching the fullness

St Anne’s Well where the spring emerges

I’ve written about this special place before after I rediscovered it on a recce with some friends in Bath Natural History Society, and you can read a fuller version of the background there. What I didn’t explore in that piece was the much broader context which involves a brief encounter with psychogeography which is part of the explanation of my curious habit of walking about a mile to Downend to catch the number 18 bus into Bristol rather than catch the number 4 which would have been much less effort. Psychogeography examines the why of our relationship with places. However there are a few bear traps once you get beyond the material explanation of springs, sinkholes, clumps of trees and notable hilltops which can take you straight to Alfred Watkins and his leylines which I’m not going to write about.

The hard bit – freel free to skip to the next paragraph

The basic premise of these thoughts is that for me – and this is a highly subjective discussion – there are certain places which seem to be associated with raised mental energy; with a sense of connection which, after all the factors of memory, intellectual and aesthetic interest have been factored in, still leaves a surplus. I guess it’s hardly pushing beyond the boundaries to describe this in terms of energy because although the brain is only 2% of our total body weight it consumes 20% of our energy. The exact relationship between the brain and what we call the mind is a bit of a hot topic, the two are obviously closely related in an energetic process. The problem as always is that the laypersons’ language we use to describe these elevated senses is always metaphorical. ‘We feel inspired’, we say, and the scientist in us says ‘that’s all very well but what does it mean? – do you mean that that we feel breathed on? ‘

Back to earth

Maybe this is a job for the poet and storyteller. There’s the Greek myth of the omphalos, the navel of the earth which in their case was in Delphi where they built a temple and where, for a fee, you could be told about the future in ambiguous terms which avoided any possibility of reprisals after a wrong answer. I was sent to a Primitive Methodist Sunday School as a child, and I somehow managed to take away from it the unexpected conviction that I needed no guide, priest, or guru to instruct or shape my imagination. There were abundant facts, certainties and structured thoughts in the municipal park of the ordinary where we were told to keep off the grass and respect the ranks of tulips and daffodils. I always wanted to walk on the grass. My imagination would not be contained by the iron gates and the cracked chime of the clock in the park. I was taught that God was an angry old man whose principal joy was smiting. There was a lot of smiting at Sunday school which was up a narrow lane that led to the back of the butcher’s shop, passing their small slaughterhouse where there were no windows but iron bars. There was never any doubt about the torments that awaited us since they were listed most weeks by preachers whose lips were flushed with the anticipation of the ruin of most of their neighbours. From the age of six I was planning my escape.

I think my first experience of the Fullness must have been on Rodway Hill when I was in my very early teens. I lay there amongst a drift of fine grass and Harebells that I now understand are only there because there’s a cap of old red sandstone whose acid soil suits them. It was there I first experienced what came to be known by Rolland and Freud as the Oceanic and I disappeared for I don’t recall how long. I became attached to a physical landscape – acid heath – which I can never visit without recalling that moment but hefted also within a different inner landscape that came and went as it pleased. The real of science and materialism had been compromised by a newcomer – the really real or perhaps the Fullness. The Fullness was not and could never be the vengeful god of smiting and retribution because he was an imposter, a fraud, a projection of thwarted dreams. It’s important that I explain this because in the next section I take this strange dimension as a “given” in writing about places.

So is this presence really tied to a particular place? Are we talking here about the old Roman idea of the “genius loci” – the spirit of a place – or is it even possible to use the term spirit in the context of place in the 21st century. Certainly some places have associated powers. St Anne’s well – the one in the photo at the top- was known for healing eye complaints. There was a St Arilda’s well in one of my parishes which was associated with a very similar legend to the one about St Winifred in Denbighshire, North Wales. Both were martyred , and in both legends the water was said to run red at times as a reminder of their death. Another well in St David’s is dedicated to his mother St Non.

Just creeping in at bottom right is a plant named Pellitory of the Wall, Parietaria judaica, which was once used as a treatment for urinary complaints. St Non’s would be, for me, the destination for any pilgrimage to St David’s. Away from all the tourists and gift shops it’s even missed by many walkers; but I’ve dangled my feet in it when they were sore from walking and it’s very refreshing indeed. It marks the place where the story says his mother gave birth to him alone on the clifftop in a thunderstorm. No pressure then Dewi!

I would call all these sites nodes. They’re all places where the membrane between the everyday and the Fullness is very thin. and they don’t move. Springs, wells, valleys, sinkholes, caves and promontaries; hills, outcrops and waterfalls; the confluences of rivers and streams – all of them can open occasionally to contemplative walkers and embrace them with the Fullness; but many other moments of transfiguration can happen in totally unexpected places at the times we feel least prepared. There’s no virtue to be claimed in it and no call for anyone to start a school; build a monument or set up a gift shop.

So yes, there are some sites,some places that are certainly filled with concentrations of whatever energy these healing, revelatory moments are fuelled with. Christian evangelicals tend to call it the holy spirit and then treat it/him? like an indentured servant, forever being prayerfully ordered around with pious hopes. But whatever the nature of the energy is; it has the capacity – provided we’re just ready to stop what we’re doing, to listen and to respond – the capacity to excite what you might metaphorically call our resonant frequency, which is the same frequency as the one that multiplies energy to the point where bridges collapse and windows shatter. Rudolph Otto called it the mysterium tremendum et fascinans; the numinous; the holy. But what it does, as it did for me, is set up a powerful, culture bending alternative to the way we do things round here.

So which is the more powerful would you say? is it the first photo of the mighty and beautiful cathedral, or the impoverished clifftop ruins? I know what I think.

When we were at art school in Wiltshire in the 1970’s I became very anxious and quite disturbed for about six months. I think it was a reaction to the first death I’d experienced of someone my own age; a friend of Madame’s. I couldn’t face college, was in danger of being thrown out, and I took to wandering in the By brook valley below Castle Combe. Sitting on the side of the brook which was really a small river, I made some drawings of a tree on the opposite bank, The roots were deeply entwined and knotted and I made (on reflection) the odd decision to draw with hard pencils. I was using a good paper which would take a great deal of punishment and although they were not masterpieces the enforced difficulty kept me there for a long time. Looking back, it was a similar kind of experience to the ones I’ve been describing except that it was slow and accumulative – so no fireworks or eureka moments but healing from the inside out. If ever I think of what the river outside the Potwell Inn might be like, I invariably think of By Brook, another place where I touched the fullness.

These experiences can’t be ordered up like a Deliveroo and so whilst our walks these days are often in search of plants and fungi, or we might be chatting about our children, I’m always on open channel just in case of a Visitation, and I don’t give a monkey’s whether it makes me sound crazy or if the magisterium could declare it heretical.

The view from the clifftop at St Non’s

Oh yes it was!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a Google Gemini summary of the findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thrift growing on a clifftop in St David’s Pembrokeshire

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

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

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

@davepole.bsky.social

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

The new Destructor Bridge

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

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

Sorghum? where the hell did that come from?

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

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

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

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

Creeping Thistle – Cirsium arvense

Just give it to me straight, Doc!

Volvopluteus gloiocephalus – the Stubble Rosegill.

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

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

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

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