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.
It’s not that I wasn’t warned – WordPress has been telling me for ages that something to do with Google apps was about to stop working but, being both lazy and unable to understand most of their technical information I ignored it and put it aside with letters from the bank and HMRC.
I ask this as a kind of rhetorical question: what could cause you most distress? …. a diagnosis of some rare but curable disease or losing your phone? Having been on three fast-track referrals for suspected cancers (none right) in as many months I can tell you that my world ended momentarily when I clicked on WordPress yesterday only to be told that “it” (no amplification) was no longer supported. It took a few minutes of intense meditation and heart-rate control to determine that the bereavement was far more limited than the extinction of ten years of work. The only thing that had happened was that a small shortcut app to the blog has been discontinued following a bit of a theological row between several behemoth sized companies about the number of blogger brains you can arrange on the head of a pin.
The remedy for this temporary extinction event was simple. I just had to search for the Potwell Inn and up popped my site with everything apparently working. However, my insatiable curiosity soon got the better of me and I ended up searching for my blog on Google Gemini, the AI app where I received a full report on the Potwell Inn which described all of my topics of interest in detail and (I thought) rather approvingly. There was a tendency to centre things on my more recent postings which gave the location of the Potwell Inn as Doynton – a small village near here where I once (maybe 50 years ago) did a talk for the young farmers but where we occasionally visit the local pub which I’m happy to give a shout-out to. The Cross House does some good food in a lovely atmosphere but it’s not the Potwell Inn, largely because the Potwell Inn – in the form that I write about – doesn’t exist anywhere except in my imagination and in my memories of HG Wells’ comic novel A History of Mr Polly from school days where it was a set book. The mere mention of the author and title should alert you to the archaeological nature of my affection for a short novel that, as a very shy and bewildered; possibly neuro-diverse teenager, built up as a safe space in my mind.
So the bad news for those of my readers who have wasted time searching for the Potwell Inn (one actually turned up on the allotment one day, and another wrote to me about one of the several imposters that actually exist in bricks and mortar) I’m sorry. The Potwell Inn is just a mental bolt-hole for an undiagnosed neuro-diverse old bloke, tumbling at speed towards his 80th year. On the other hand everything else, everything I’ve ever written about is real. Madame is my real partner of 60 years (we met when she was 15) we really have an allotment and all the plants, fungi, places and adventures are true, the campervan and it’s multiple vicissitudes is real too. So the really amusing fact is that Gemini got everything completely right about the Potwell Inn apart from one very important detail: it doesn’t exist.
Now I always thought that the power to confer existence on a being – and even the word being seems to confer some kind of existential reality – but stepping away from that whirlpool – the power to confer existence is reserved to God, or the Tao or some kind of immortal, invisible, ineffable superpower. If you look for Google Gemini in the scriptures you won’t find it lurking anywhere in the prehistory before Adam and Eve had to get their kit on in a hurry and Cain murdered Abel. I mean, seriously, Google doesn’t figure before sex and death (the subject of the only joke I can remember my lovely psychoanalytic psychotherapist Robin cracking. I’d told him about a dream I’d had of walking down Hotwells road being followed by two elephants. He replied with “I’m a Freudian, they must be sex and death!”)
Anyway, I think I’ve uncovered the Achilles’ heel of the whole AI bubble. It confers existence where it has no right. We avoid UPF’s – Ultra Processed Foods- but they only kill us one at a time. Ultra Processed Facts can kill whole families, cities, cultures; in fact there seems no limit to its potential for harm. Going back to the bible just for a moment (I promise) you might wonder why idolatry gets such a bad press; even making it to Moses’ ten most wicked things in the Guardian. The answer is that what idolatry does is worship the partial instead of the whole incomprehensible but beautiful thing. It takes the easy way around the mountain.
So to get back to the Potwell Inn, you’ll see one category that I never use – it’s the one entitled Uncle Jim. He is the violent drunkard brother of the licensee of the fictional Potwell Inn, known only as the fat lady. Gemini, by the way, can’t bring itself to use the word fat and substitutes plump thereby daring to change the text! Polly accidentally removes Uncle Jim from, well- life I suppose – in a farcically comical fight which accidentally gives him a new identity. I don’t use the Uncle Jim tag because in my version of the Potwell Inn he’s gone forever, vanquished and washed up on a beach wearing the wrong jacket. All other contenders for the Uncle Jim slot are automatically given life-bans from my pub. The little river runs gently by, unpolluted by agricultural runoff and raw sewage. Beavers build their dams upstream and wildlife flourishes on the banks. I just need one place in my head where the darkness has no dominion.
Dandelion – obviously! but more complicated than you might think.
Everybody knows what a dandelion looks like, I imagine, but there’s no shame in not knowing that there are around 250 species of dandelion in the UK and – if you’ve got time and a good psychotherapist you could learn to tell them all apart. The beloved blackberry is a similar case but even more complicated, with around 330 species. They’ve evolved an interesting method of reproduction -known by the academics as apomixis which roughly translates as having sex with yourself; don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it – or as Woody Allen said – if you’re going to have sex you might as well have it with someone you love.
Anyway, and moving on rapidly, the dandelion is a handy reference point for what you might call the “walk on by” plant which draws together two threads of the WOB phenomenon. The dandelion in the photo, for instance, has been there along with its definitely not cousins for all of the ten years we’ve lived here. Until today I’ve never photographed or recorded it because it’s too common and therefore not worth the bother. However fate has confined us to short walks near home for most of the summer and the local rogues and vagabonds of the pavements and towpath have been the only available source of botanical interest; which disposes me more kindly to the dandelion. I’m sorry for my casual disregard in the past but now I just have to walk on by not because they’re common and vulgar but because I haven’t got the time or the confidence to sort them out; although I did shell out for the standard handbook which has been sitting unopened on the shelf like a bishop’s bible for months.
After months of tests and investigations we’re near the end of the tunnel (you’ll see why that’s a highly inappropriate joke in just a moment), and all I’m waiting for is to have a 35mm polyp removed from my colon so I can stop being anaemic and feeling knackered. I’m relying on the expertise of the multitude of consultants, nurses, interns and doctors who’ve peered up my rear end, when they tell me that this thing – about half as big again and the same shape as a champagne cork- isn’t malignant. Like birdwatchers they know the jizz of a nasty one when they see it. I have great confidence in them.
But spending every moment checking the phone for the next appointment doesn’t just cost you time, it drains the creative springs and makes life a bit grey and dull. We’ve cancelled several campervan trips so we could both be available for appointments at the drop of a hat and so necessarily I’ve been focusing on the local weeds. It’s bad enough trying to take macro photos out in the wilds; passers-by tend to stop and ask if you’re OK. Do the same thing on a pavement or on the towpath and they’re likely to call the police. But don’t for a moment suppose that all you’ll ever find outside your city centre front door is dog poo and beer cans. I’ve been amazed at how many relative rarities make even a temporary home for themselves in the mean streets of Bath, and recording the ordinaries balances the books against the statistical over-representation of exotica in the field guides. If we’re going to keep tabs on the unfolding runaway climate disaster we’ll need to record the sparrows, silverfish and brambles of the earth.
Here’s another one I’ve never recorded except in some remote and rather glamorous wild place. There was member of the same family, the Sea-spleenwort for which I persuaded Madame to walk miles in freezing wind and sheeting rain in January to find it on the sea-cliffs where it belonged, only to have it shown to me on the basement wall of the Guildhall in Bath. Sadly it seems to have gone now and I thought its near relative, the wall-rue, which has always grown unrecorded by me on the wall below our flat might have died from drought this summer. But this morning I dodged the rain to photograph the dandelion and came back with Hemp-agrimony; wall-rue and field-speedwell – all within ten yards of the front door. I shall have to make a list of plants that grow with 100 yards of the flat and I’ll guarantee it will exceed fifty species.
There’s a bit of a knack to naming plants from their leaves alone and today AI threw me completely off track with the speedwell which it identified as ground-ivy. A most enjoyable trip to the books settled the matter in favour of the speedwell but the two plants are alarmingly similar until you see the flowers. The purple flowers scattered near the speedwell had me scratching my head until I remembered there’s an Argentinian Vervain in full flower growing in a pot next to it. You see, even boring plants turn out to be better than the Times crossword for getting your brain in gear.
Back in August 2024 I set myself the target of organising my utterly random collection of photographs, and identifying the names and locations of all of them with a supporting photo. It took me a whole year to get them on to a spreadsheet and now there are 898 records sitting there waiting to land on several unfortunate referee’s desks. My species total is up to 472, just 28 short of the 500 target. I also set myself the target of completing 1000,000 words on this blog and so far I’m up to 951,500 which leaves me around 49 more posts to write. As my old friend Joan Williams used to say – God willing and a fair wind I’ll get there. But I’m not a trainspotter by temperament and so if it takes until next february it won’t keep me awake at night.
Aren’t statistics a slippery thing to deal with? I read yesterday that this polyp that I’m entertaining at the moment increases my risk of colon cancer by something like 75%. Reading that statement carefully suggests that my real risk depends upon what percentage of any polyps of any size are malignant. The answer to that is 5-7%. So my real risk is more like 75% 0f 10% ie 7.5%. It’s possibly less significant than crossing the A4 on a zebra crossing with a Range Rover approaching.
If you know Mendip at all well, you’ll know that this thatched building holds a stack of sheep hurdles on Priddy Green
Nostalgia can be a poisonous affectation. It’s all too easy to use the wistful, often wilful mis-remembrance of the past to reduce the past to a coddled egg; good to eat but with no future. Real history is troubling; often leads in two directions, and ambiguous to a fault. On the other hand, the sense of rootedness in a place, or in a community in which the two ideas often overlap, is foundational to our practise of being human. You’ll probably think I’ve lost the plot if I write about Cornbrash, Brandon Hill stone and Bath stone and yet the glimpse of a building made with any of these three will as good as a six figure OS grid reference. They would not just signify districts but the era they were built in and the likely social class of the people who lived in them. Add to that a dialect, a particular way of sounding a troubling “r” in Gloucestershire, or a single sentence in Bristolian would tie the speaker down to something like a parish. There’s a sawmill in Wick and when I go there, I could curl up on the counter like a cat – I feel so at home. This isn’t something you can fake. You’d have to live not just any lifetime, by my lifetime to pick up the resonances.
I understand this better now than ever as I’ve learned about plants, where they grow and what they prefer to grow in. As I child I learned to love lying under beech trees growing on a moss covered bank on the boundary of our grandparents’ smallholding. My mother’s whole vocabulary of local names was learned amongst the winding lanes of the Chilterns. We looked in vain as children to see what Granny Perrin’s nest was, and why our mother could see it when we couldn’t. Even the roads had their own language of shiny flint pebbles, and hiding in the depths of woods once worked by bodgers who turned chair legs and wheel backs was Margaret’s Beer Shop where we could drink cherryade as a treat. I came to know what I now understand as acid heath, on Rodway Hill as slowly I came to understand how localities have their own unique floras.
Mendip is famous for its abandoned lead mines and again there are plants that can survive heavy metal pollution and environments which have their own special designation, Calaminarian, which is how the calamine lotion that our mother dabbed on our chicken pox spots brought zinc from the ore into Mr Ladd, the chemist’s armoury. Nowadays my old friends are the pavement scoundrels, constantly harried by the council’s strimmers. The poor council workers don’t seem to know about tap roots and seeds, or annuals and biennials and so they knock em all down like skittles and within a fortnight they’re up again. Then, of course there’s the riverbank with its own royal flush of perfectly adapted plants. Stones, dialects and plants store the local memory as certainly as books. Footpaths and shortcuts, streams, hiding places abandoned dramlines and climbing trees marked our territory and as we spread our wings, our bikes were the means by which we invaded and occupied other peoples’ places.
So much, then, for a rather lyrical take on the sense of place. The Greeks might have dignified it as the genius loci but we were unconscious of our hefting. It was just home as far as we were concerned.
A couple of nights ago we watched Peter Hall’s film “Akenfield” which I’d seen years ago but completely forgotten. I read the source and inspiration for the film , Ronald Blythe’s book “Akenfield” when I was in my twenties, along with Henry Williamson’s long cycles of novels, and I read J A Baker’s book “The Peregrine” a little later. In truth I consumed voraciously just about any scraps of natural history writing I could lay my hands on. Akenfield is a groundbreaking oral history of rural Sussex at the beginning of the 20th century and both a celebration of the skills of farmworkers and denunciation of the appalling conditions in which they worked. The extractive philosophy of modern agriculture was cultured in the minds of landowners centuries before the first tractor appeared on the land. I watched most of the film near to tears.
But one of the happier lessons of the film was that whatever happened to them, the farm workers had song. They sang in church, they sang on army service in the first world war, they sang in pubs and they sang as they took the harvest in on wagons loaded high, with the children riding on top as a treat. I suddenly remembered that my sister and I had shared that triumphal ride in Stoke Row one hot summer’s day, and how insecure and prickly our perch was. It was the strangest feeling to recall the stooks and ricks of the days before the chequerboard plastic wrapped fields we see today. That overarching sense of history is disappearing and, because of our failure, we’ll never be able to bring it back.
Some forms of nostalgia are a positive waste of energy except perhaps that we still, we always will have song. Barely fifteen years ago I sat in the kitchen of a farmhouse in one of my parishes and watched, through the window, as a procession of combines, trailers and tractors drove along the lane, headlights blazing, to come in for supper and then go back to harvesting the fodder maize that feeds the cattle. Today we went for a drink in the pub in Doynton. The village has changed beyond recognition but if the flow of traffic could be staunched for a while a couple of horses and their riders persuaded to pass by and a rookery installed to provide the music. If a sunset could be organised to bathe the cornbrash walls with evening light and if the conversation dropped just a tiny bit in volume and we stepped outside, I think we could almost see the ancestors in the shadows.
Yet we still have song. Those who believe that their mission in life is to make life harder for us should beware of our spiritual and revolutionary songs of resistance. They too have a long and deeply local history; often rooted in the sense of place, hidden in the DNA of songs and carols that still speak deeply to the most irreligious of us. Of all the things I miss about my ministry it’s the raucous Christmas carol services, packed to the gills with people who were drawn back year by year into the old ways; the funerals where for a fleeting moment we could believe that all would be well and all manner of things would be well as we sang Abide with me. But perhaps most of all on Easter Eve when I was able to sing the exultet; a long plainsong solo hymn of hope for the coming year.
I think I must have some kind of aura that encourages complete strangers to come and engage with me. I’m not claiming any supernatural powers here, just the very ordinary skills of getting alongside people. I’ve spent hours on empty railway stations listening to very troubled people (more often than not, other men) who just want to unburden themselves. Maybe it’s my general scruffiness or perhaps because I seem not to have my head stuck up my arse and so I represent the unthreatening type. I’m short and a bit overweight and only Madame could see my gleaming virtues – and that’s not all the time! Funnily enough I was just typing that sentence and the doorbell rang. It was a young delivery driver and as he helped unload our groceries he opened up at length about his sadness that his army career hadn’t worked out as he hoped.
But this gift – if you can call it that – seems to be extending itself to plants. This year I’ve spent hours and hours searching for different species of fleabane. I’m ashamed to admit that I was provoked by the sheer competence of our County Recorder – call it the positive side of envy – and decided that I needed to get my head down for some serious plant hunting. So far I’ve found five of them, four of which I’ve found the jizz for – that’s a term birders use to explain how they can identify a peregrine falcon diving at 60mph without thinking about it. But having done all that work; photographing, measuring (size matters) and even buying a couple of second hand books, blow me if one of them didn’t pop up on the allotment next to ours. We’ve had Peruvian apples, rare fumitories, stone parsley and bullwort all dropping in to say hello and this week after an eighteen month stalking of a Hungarian mullein on the canal, two of them popped up on other allotments on the site and I’ve no idea why, except for the absence of herbicides and a general aversion to tidiness. It feels as if they’re coming to me for a friendly welcome.
Plants are surprisingly mobile and some – like my fleabanes betray something of that in their names; Canadian, Mexican, Argentine and Guernsey – usually referring to where they were first found. But some also are brought in by the plant trade and another one I saw this week – an Eastern Catnip – moved from Eastern America to a nursery near us and then strolled across the towpath to set up shop in a crack in the pavement. As I’ve recorded all these migrants it’s clear that words like “native” need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Even the sycamore is a bit of a boat tree, brought in from overseas, and the Sweet Chestnuts here and in the mountainous parts of France and Corsica were probably brought there by the Romans and have now embedded themselves in the “local” cuisine. Those who carp on about strangers and foreigners should obviously get a life and stop prowling suspiciously around the subject like a goat meeting an unfamiliar food for the first time. Looking back to some arcadian ideal time forgets that Britain (or if you really must – “Ingelland” could as easily be described as a desert, a sea or an ice sheet and the original inhabitants coming from almost anywhere in the world, east of Greenwich. We’re all more or less foreigners here; on this “septic isle” as William Connor of the Daily Mirror once described it back in the days when the Mirror was a proper newspaper.
Anyway that’s enough nostalgia for a bank holiday weekend. Things have been happening on the allotment at the dog end of one of the worst growing years we can remember, and after Madame staged a major rebellion when the idea of packing it in was mooted, we’ve been back on the job non-stop, clearing the ground ready for autumn and winter. I was watering the borlotti beans this evening when I realised that one of the key arguments in favour of gardening for improving mood is that caring for just about anything seems to release a flood of endorphins into the blood. The feeling of warm satisfaction I get when I’ve given some time to listen to someone is almost identical to the feeling I got tonight watering the beans which were looking a bit sorry for themselves. Today we filled the pond, weeded the fruit bushes and I fed and mulched the summer raspberries after giving them a good soak. We rarely talk while we work, but it’s always good to be there. There’s a lovely biblical image about being at peace that goes
Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid,
Micah 4:4
As it happens we have both a vine and a tall fig tree next to our plot and the heat this year has yielded a bumper crop. It’s been good and the good is invulnerable to the evil we see day by day on in the media.
Before you sigh and turn away for a bit more doomscrolling because I used a bit of latin at the top – be assured that this post is guaranteed to make you happy, so happy that I can’t imagine why I’m not charging you to read it!
So a long time ago we moved to Stoke on Trent to run a small but doomed pottery that lasted all of six months before it fell to earth. We were there at the same time the last bottle kilns were being demolished just down the road at Price’s teapot factory and one of our team was a wonderfully skilled, but recently redundant mouldmaker who’d helped to unpack the last kiln load as the factory shut down. It’s true he had a bit of a drink problem, and once came in from a 48 hour binge and mistakenly cleaned his beloved Triumph 2000 with kitchen scourer but I never met anyone else who could look at a complex sculpture, turning it one way and another and plan exactly how to make a twenty piece plaster mould from it.
Anyway, the local pubs had not then evolved to the point where Madame could drink in the public bar, and we were always directed to the snug where foul language and boy’s banter were banned. The snug in our local sported a lovely Busy Lizzie in a pot. It was huge, and when Madame mentioned what a lovely plant it was the landlady simply picked it up and gave it to her with a big smile. A couple of months later it travelled back to Bristol with us in our overloaded Morris 1000 pickup and it spent the next couple of years following us around in our peripatetic existence. We were often surprised by the kindness of people we hardly knew.
The Busy Lizzie is a member of the fairly large family known as Impatiens, one of which is a bit of a rogue and causes all manner of problems in this country where, since it escaped from gardens in the mid 1800’s has spread rapidly across the country with the help of its explosive seed pods which can fire their contents twenty feet. Its name, of course is Himalayan Balsam. There are four members of the family listed in my go-to list of British and Irish wildflowers, and two of them grow on the Kennet and Avon canal – on the left Orange Balsam and on the right Himalayan Balsam – the plant that the Daily Express loves to hate.
There’s another member of the family charmingly known as Touch me not Balsam that’s much rarer and only a couple of days ago I was wondering how I could lure Madame into the campervan for a quick trip to mid-Wales where it grows wild. I claim not to be a trainspotter but I can confess to getting a bit over obsessed with photographing whole families of plants. There’s another family I’ve got (Madame might say) overfamiliar with; they’re the Fleabanes and so far I’ve found four of them growing locally but five and six are harder to find.
So with this in mind, I must introduce our friend Charlie who is a taxonomist (but I forgive him), a retired professor, no less, who has worked in some very high-profile positions which I won’t mention to protect his privacy. He lives about four doors down from us and we meet up weekly to chat and for Madame to blag plants from his unusual garden. Charlie and I share a bit of a passion for the plants that eke out an existence on the walls and pavements and waste ground that surrounds us in Bath. They have a classification all of their own; ruderals, aliens and survivors – like most of our neighbours here. In fact we agreed yesterday that it would be fun to work together on as comprehensive a list of local bruisers as we can manage given our arthritic knees and hips. I’m getting used to people stopping and asking if I’m alright as I struggle to stand after getting down and dirty with my phone, photographing a pavement specimen.
There are rules about recording plants on the national database, but plants rarely pay any attention to rules and so seeds attach themselves to car tyres and shoes and travel distances from their proper places before dropping off and starting a new life on the streets. Other seeds blow in on the wind and fall out of window boxes or get a new start in life outside a pub where someone had too much to drink and – need I continue? The tomato is a favourite addition to the local flora. The rules are quite clear. “Thou shalt not record a plant growing in a garden.” By chance both Charlie and I were inspired in the last few weeks by reading Trevor Dines new book “Urban Plants” which is one of the few botanical textbooks either of us have read from cover to cover and I’ve also been reading Clive Stace and Michael Crawley’s “Alien Plants” , and we both came to the same conclusion – that the word “wild” is so poorly defined as to be almost impossible to use. Field botanists have a whole lexicon to separate different classes of wildness, but gardens – especially Charlie’s garden – present some proper challenges.
My Mum would carry a large and larcenous handbag marked swag in which she would carry away thumb and finger cuttings of any plants she liked without regard for their rightful owners. Charlie’s garden does the same but with an international range, which makes it a lovely place to sit and drink tea,or coffee and yesterday – tragically – I spotted two of my hoped for “wild” flowers growing right in front of me. The first, which is the photograph at the top of this post, turned out not to be the hoped for Touch-me-not balsam but the Chinese species daymonii which is a proper garden plant that shouldn’t be recorded because it doesn’t grow in the wild and hasn’t been recorded even as a garden chuckout survivor in this country. But isn’t it beautiful? such lovely markings on the petals and a worthy posh cousin to the others. Good news, then, the Mid Wales trip is still on but don’t tell Madame.
However the next plant to catch my eye was a nice specimen of Tall Fleabane (Fleabane number five) which has never been recorded close to Bath and, in any case was growing in a pot. But at least I’ve photographed it and I’ll keep it for reference until I find a genuine wild version.
Tall Fleabane in Charlie’s garden.
Buckwheat,
There was also a rather nice Buckwheat plant which could easily have blown in on the wind, or been hiding in some garden compost – again not one for the record, but then – just as we were leaving – my eye caught a very small member of the carrot family which I vaguely remembered because I’d seen it twice before, growing in a newly planted municipal border and again wild near a stream south of Bath. It was almost hidden below its more showy neighbours but I had to check it out and when I did it brilliantly demonstrated the dilemma for those of us who like to make records. Here it was growing just inside a garden – so it shouldn’t be recorded – but on the other hand it’s hard to imagine why Charlie would have sown it deliberately in such an unsuitable position. The plant is Fools’ parsley and it’s short, not remotely beautiful (apart from to me) and extremely poisonous. One for the record then because I’ll call it a weed – and thanks for the coffee Charlie. See you next week.
My granny often said “curiosity killed the cat” – it was one of many ways she would close down a conversation just as it was getting interesting. As for me I seemed to leak curiosity from every pore and so it was a push-back I knew well. The campervan has many virtues but its fatal deficiency is that I can only take very few books with me and so the real research begins when I get home, and this time I came home with a question – “why Gypsywort?”. Many plant names reference a particular use – like butterbur, milkwort, pilewort, fleabane; or a place – Jersey, Argentine, Cheddar- I could go on for pages – but gypsywort unusually references an ethnic group. Why’s that? I wondered.
I’ve got a dozen or more herbals of various vintage on my shelves, and so I soon discovered that the plant is well recognised as a dye (black, grey or blue ). It’s also known as a treatment for thyroid problems, diabetes and as a sedative. It’s also very potent (dangerous when used carelessly – before you ask). My copy of Gerard doesn’t even mention it – not all modern versions are complete, and none of the others suggest anything other than medicinal uses and occasionally as a dye. So I turned, as I always do with any question of plant names, to Geoffrey Grigson’s wonderful encyclopaedia of English folk names – “The Englishman’s Flora” where the true reason leaked out like effluent .
The story that gipsies [sic] stain themselves with Lycopus europaeus runs from one book to another, beginning with Lyte’s translation of Dodoens , 1578: ‘The rogues and runagates, which name themselves Egyptians, do colour themselves black with this herb’.
And so it goes on; half a page of bilious historical references to gypsies without a shred of evidence that they ever dyed their skin. The word ‘runagates’ caught my ear; so very close to ‘renegades’ its almost a homophone. Unusually, Grigson doesn’t list any alternative names but in the US and elsewhere it’s known as Bugleweed, and in some places water horehound – surely worth adopting here. True Gypsies, Romanies, wouldn’t need to dye their sin because they have naturally darker sin. It’s said that they ultimately came from India – who knows?
Anyway, it’s a lesson in how deeply embedded racial and ethnic prejudice can be even in a remote subject like herbal medicine or field botany. So – with reference to my previous post – even if Gypsies did use gypsywort they only shared it as a herbal medicine with the world and his wife, (even pale skinned rabble rousing populists) and it grows on the sides of canals and rivers because (like me) they find it a very congenial place to be.
Madame and me were sitting companionably on a bench in Henrietta Park when I suddenly blurted out “maybe this is what we’re meant to do“. I’m having real trouble adjusting to getting old and I think I must have been doing a bit of subconscious bargaining with the grim reaper – “Look I’ll just sit around staring at the wallpaper and shouting at the telly if you’ll leave me alone and go away!” Madame – not surprisingly – gave me a funny look and the subject was dropped. There is nothing more remote from my ambitions than giving up and staring at the wall, and yet it’s all too easy to accept the general view that old people should shut up, stop moaning and step aside from the industriously youthful as they go about their important business at 100mph. “Oh dear”- I’m inclined to brood – ” I’m getting progressively deaf and without nightly eyedrops I’d probably get irreversible glaucoma, my asthma’s getting worse and the medication maintains its iron grip on my heartrate; oh and there’s the skin cancer and the oesophageal problems waiting like hungry dogs on the threshold and my knees hurt. Actually that’s the core of another argument against assisted euthanasia viewed as a form of equity release by helpful relatives. The next morning, with nothing further said on the subject, we both woke up with the same plan. Let’s renew our gym subscriptions! And so we did.
Good ageing seems to be far more about what we think of ourselves than what other people think about us. I’ve got some big plans, all of which involve getting about and thinking straight. For instance I’ve written almost a million words on this blog without the slightest financial support of my loyal readers who have more sense than that. I’ve built a database approaching 1000 plant records and later this year I’ll have identified 500 species of wildflowers – all of which gives me immense joy. I recently read a newspaper article suggesting that age is just a number and – well – it is a number in one sense, but more importantly it’s a usefully predictive number whose predations can be ameliorated, softened and reduced when you realize they’re not a script. The key to a happy life is having some agency and the nerve to use it when the need arises. Most of the things I can’t do any more are also things that I’ve had the privilege of doing and enjoying in the past.
And so to the photograph and its five subjects which include four plants and a building. Even in a small patch of weeds there’s a question to be pondered and the question with this photo is “how old is old?” , and it turns out that I’m by far and away the youngest participant in this little tableau. Once upon a time I used to think of wildflowers as universally ancient species – like first nation people; pristine examples of the way things were intended – (not sure by whom or what!) – and to be the enduring model for the future and end-point of environmental restoration. But that turns out to be nonsense. Here’s the batting order for our arrival in this country, leaving aside the little brown clump of annual meadow-grass which has died of drought but will be back next year as sure as eggs is eggs, and pretty well anywhere in the world with a temperate climate.
Photographer (me) 1946
Mexican fleabane 1895
New King Street, Bath 1764 – 1770
Ivy-leaved toadflax 1617
Green bristle grass 1666
Sun Spurge pre-1500.
However there’s a huge flaw, a kind of category error in my reasoning here because my six objects are all (including me) both species – types – of plant, building, human – and at the same time instances; unique, one-off and temporary. However much I’d like to imagine that I’m the single permanence in a world of impressions in reality I’m just another fleeting instance . The great fire of London may have ravaged our distant ancestors but neither me or the green bristle grass were there to witness it; nor were we there in the 2nd World War to witness the bombing of the neighbourhood or the drunkenness, the brothels and the stinking dye-works of the Georgian period. All that happened was that we passed one another in a quiet and sunny street and I took a photograph because I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at. My greedy ego wants to erect a monument to perpetuate the big moment, but the street that day was a river of un-noticed instances in full spate and all I took to the party was my temporary existence and my momentary consciousness of an unrecognised plant that isn’t even particularly rare.
So it turns out that firstly I’m not really a spring chicken and secondly the idea of a consistent unchanging natural world is a load of cobblers. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it more elegantly than I could ever manage – “Nature is a Heraclitian fire”; turning, evolving, climbing and coiling and occasionally flashing a blinding glimpse of an ungraspable truth. Even in my senescence I’m still a part of it; still in the dance albeit rather slower these days.
I’d never seen a specimen of Green bristle-grass, and I even thought for a moment it was some kind of meadow foxtail coming in from the cold. I just love the way that plants travel around the world, recognizing no borders and setting up home wherever they find a congenial place- even if that’s just a crack in the pavement. Looking at my little timeline I realize that we’re all boat people when push comes to shove. None of us have any right to puff out our chests and declare that we’re indigenous as if that carried some kind of mysterious moral weight. On my desk in front of me, four tiny (1mm) seeds have fallen out of the plant. I can take them and sprinkle them in the pots outside the door and see if they grow because they’re the plant’s message and investment in the future, although some would argue that would be an unwarranted interference in nature. I’ve had a couple of days of pure fun, photographing, measuring and recording something of a rare event.
The earth will get along with or without me and I’ve always hated self-pity in others, but meanwhile there’s work to be done. Every day’s an adventure if you get your head into the right space and stick to the things you can do rather than those you can’t.
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire, And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire; A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
GK Chesterton “The rolling English road” 1913
I suppose it was just what might be called light hearted banter, but Chesterton’s suggestion that ancient roads and tracks are the result of drunkenness is so way off beam. It’s also evidence of a mindset that’s at least one of the underlying causes of the state we’re in. The truth is, our forerunners and ancestors had an utterly different relationship with the landscape and there’s a far more important reason for winding roads than the suggestion that they were too pissed to make them straight.
We just got back from north Wales where the second half of our stay was in a rather inaccessible cottage on the steeply sloped side of Mynydd Rhiw below the hamlet itself. We were also on the footpath that’s been designated as part of a Pilgrims’ Way. Let’s not get too carried away by that designation because pilgrimage is becoming big business for pubs, cafés and anyone with an empty transit van willing to shuttle pilgrims and their luggage between sections. However Bardsey has been a pilgrim destination for centuries and these miles of track intersect with any number of sacred places. Since Chaucer’s days pilgrims have been a grand mixture of the pious, the curious, the culpable and lost souls looking for some spiritual treasure.
By reason of age, infirmity and knee replacements, the steep path became – for five days – the only way back to the car, and the best available nature reserve. I completely fell in love with 400 metres of stone wall and its associated plants. Breathless and a bit arthritic I had to stop every ten or fifteen paces in any case on the extremely steep slope and so a bit of botanising was inevitable. I even made a list, and I was necessarily directed into a thoughtful appreciation of the people who built the accompanying wall. Five feet high in most of its length and huge boulders- the largest at the base. Some of the stones were so large they would have needed the combined strength of half a dozen strong men. Some were obviously there already.
These walls are quite different from the many other regional styles, and the reason of course is that walls were built with whatever was immediately available and to-hand. In Wiltshire and Gloucestershire there’s a lot of flat brash; and in other parts there are flat slabs of slate. An experienced stonewaller could probably tell you where a particular wall could be found – just from a photo.
But look again more closely, and what you see is the most marvellous habitat for insects and small mammals. One highlight of our time there was to find a couple of bits of scat – poo – that possibly came from a stoat; black, and rich with the blood and bones of its prey and pointed at the ends as we discovered is the sign of a carnivore.
In the lee of the wall a pilgrim might have sheltered from the storms that regularly blow in from Hell’s Mouth bay below, and of course a large number of plant species were enjoying the comfort and warmth that a wall brings. But more important to my argument here was the sinuous course of the wall as it descended the hill. The reason wasn’t hard to imagine. The builders obviously took their stones from next to the proposed course of the wall, thereby creating a pronounced hollow, the grass punctuated by protruding clints waiting to turn an unprepared ankle. These builders must have had the strength of oxen. It’s all well and good to lift 200 lbs a couple of times in the gym, but to lift similarly heavy, muddy and irregular stones all day; time after time must have shown awesome stamina. However now and again they must have encountered rocks weighing far beyond their capacity. I’ve seen it suggested that they could have shattered stones using fires and water but here on the side of a mountain there were none of the makings for such technology, and so they just went around them. They read the landscape and bowed to the facts on the ground.
There’s a whole spirituality in that obedience to the landscape; a kind of Tai Chi approach to building a wall; bending and turning to the superior force of nature. When the Romans came they used their technology to dominate the landscape, building straight roads across the country. It’s a habit we’ve never shaken off in spite of it being so wasteful of human energy. We waste our strength and precious resources by demanding that the earth bends to our will, when the ancients accepted that as a part of the whole of nature we’re limited in what we can demand. So here are some of the perfectly ordinary plants that lived under the shelter of the wall, only occasionally observed by pilgrims in search of the meanings that have always just slipped away. As RS Thomas described it in one of his poems, it was like putting your hand into a hare’s form and feeling the warmth although the hare has always just fled.
Is poetry – or maybe drawing, painting: is any manifestation of creativity catching; is it contagious in the sense that being close to one of the inspirational places or people could arouse a sleeping talent within you and bring it to birth? This morning I was making tea in the kitchen here on Lleyn and wondered for a (very) brief moment if – after so many years of scepticism – such an idea might have a sliver of truth in it; because thousands of people believe something similar. How many visitors to Bath secretly buy an extremely expensive notebook or a new and hideously expensive fountain pen for the beginning (inspired by Jane Austin of course) of a new novel? How many visitors to St Ives seal their resolution to learn to paint with the purchase of a watercolour sketchbook at an eye watering price? I share the temptation of course but never believed in the magic until this morning, while making the tea and my mind filled with Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas’s famous poem.
Here’s me, blathering on in full romantic flow about RS Thomas whilst staying in his North Wales parish, putting the teabags into the pot and thinking about a poem by a South Wales poet. For a brief orgasmic (i.e. it didn’t last long) moment I thought I’d contracted poetry by contagion. Later I looked out of the window and counted four ferns – Male fern, Hart’s-tongue fern, Maidenhair spleenwort and of course Bracken all close to the back door. The winner, naturally, was the bracken which drives out all other competitors.
Competition plays a big part in plant life. I also spotted one of the smallest Dove’s-foot cranesbill I’ve ever noticed, growing close-cropped on the well maintained lawn. Another struggling plant caught my eye at the same time, this one a Navelwort barely two inches tall, subsisting on a bed of moss. To grow a fine plant we need to provide sufficient food and light and a suitable environment. But we tend not to think that the same criteria apply to poets and painters. You can read a dozen biographies of successful artists and writers without once being told about the family money that kept them afloat. The persistent and useful myth of artists starving in garrets fills in the many gaps in the ledgers of the famous. The upshot is that many self-effacing little gems are passed over in favour of the big, the tarty and the obvious; the Dahlias and Gladioli of the creative arts.
Navelwort, the leaves shrivelled by drought
So do I think the gift – whatever it is – can rub off on another person? Well yes I do, but not by visiting their haunts, drinking their favourite beer or buying a printed coaster in the local gift shop. Not will the gift embrace you when you arm yourself with pen and ink or laptop and sit there gazing into space waiting for some inspiration somehow to descend on you. But reading and studying their work with real emotional intensity does at least help you to discern something of the vision that drove them. Out there, in the world of the ten thousand things – as the Taoists say – are all the pieces of the puzzle. We just have to be patient until we’ve found them.
Dove’s-foot cranesbill, constantly shorn by the mower.
