Category: Uncategorized

On this beach

Twenty or thirty years ago I was sitting on this beach reading Stanley Fish’s book “Is there a Text in this Class?”. I write this not to impress, but because on holiday I had time and energy to do some hard catch up reading in literary theory. As it happens it’s a very provocative and often humorous book as well. Stanley Fish is presumed to be the inspiration for two of David Lodge’s comic trilogy including “Changing Places” and “Small World”. He’s a laugh out loud character in his fictional form and can imagine that he rather enjoyed seeing his exaggerated portrayal as an academic. Sadly most academics I’ve encountered have more in common with Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch.

Anyway, as happens on family holidays, our oldest son who was in full teenage flow, took up with a girl whose parents were sitting close to us. Naturally he, being polite, insisted on introducing us to her parents and getting a conversation going so he could escape parental supervision with her and take her off to a more sheltered spot. Children eh? Stay with me; I’m creeping up on the point of all this.

So I got chatting to the Dad and we started with the usual “what do you do” conversation – which is a male thing, I think, and after fobbing him off with “I work with people” which was my favourite avoidance of the inevitable embarrassed silence which always followed the words “parish priest” – he told me that he worked in computers and like true propellor heads we went straight for it. What he told me then, twenty five perhaps more years ago, was that he worked in a data centre near where I was born where they processed data in real time. I talked about a visit I’d made to a car factory which surprised me because it seemed to be run entirely by computers. He was perfectly blasé about it all and when I asked him what would happen if the computers went down, he told me that another data centre in America would simply take over and no-one would even notice a machine slowing down. When I got home I looked at my Amstrad with renewed interest.

We like to think that the data centre bubble suddenly appeared a year ago but the technology (in far more primitive form) has been with us for several decades. And here’s the point. Every day, in these times of overnight computer programme updates I sit down in front of my laptop and discover that something new and useful has appeared. I’ve talked about my collection of Google Photos many times before. It’s now the home of every picture I’ve taken since around 2009. Early on I discovered that it made a free but unacknowledged searchable database and all my records are on it. But now that AI has been introduced and with the advent of multi terabyte detachable drives, it’s become technically possible to get them all into one place as long as you upgrade all the peripherals and leads, otherwise it’s cripplingly slow. Only a couple of days ago I moved the last of the separate files on to Photos which, conveniently, automatically excludes duplicates. My filing system now has 28,000 photos and using AI I can type in the brief description of the features I’m looking for and Gemini will make a lightning fast search and come up with some likely hits – even at the cost of the lights going out over a small town in America. It’s cut the time it takes to find botanical files or find an illustration for the Potwell Inn to a fraction of what it was only a couple of weeks ago. To me it’s an absolute boon, and every minute I’ve saved I’ve wasted again by typing in daft search terms and seeing what turns up. Looking through old photos has its melancholic downside but I’m still here and still enjoying a challenge, running a downhill slalom with the doctors and – ’til now – getting away with it. Just to tempt providence I’ve just ordered a rowing machine as an 80th birthday present to myself because I’ve always loved rowing and I can use it even when its raining – plus I never feel freer or more creative than when I’m fit. In my last meeting with a consultant his opening remark was “why are you here?” I replied that I’d hoped he would tell me why, but in any case it was the GP who’d referred me on a belt and braces ticket. We agreed to wait and see and parted on good terms although he was slightly peeved that I’d brought a pile of printed questions and test results. The rowing machine is a kind of prophylactic against unwanted events.

Of course the downside of rediscovering long lost photos is that I now have a whole winter’s worth of names to figure out. Wildflowers that caught my eye long before I learned how to photograph them adequately and fungi which take a bit of identifying even when they’re right in front of you. The upside is that I’ve got my new eyes – lasered with tiny pressure valves for glaucoma and a new plastic lens where there was once a cataract. It is bliss when the sun shines. I’m inclined to get a bit down in the early winter and it may be due to some form of Seasonal Affective Disorder – the lows seem to have clustered around the period between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. So I’m writing this bathed in a mediterranean sunshine of daylight lamps but nothing beats the real life feeling of a walk in the park and finding the sticky horse chestnut buds just waiting for the spring, and there are few more lovely sights than the trees across the Green looking like Joseph’s coat of many colours as they shed their leaves. Meanwhile we’ve been idling away the evenings binge watching Jane Austin adaptations (very uneven) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch which – weaving a connection between the nineteenth century and the present day- seems to have a prophetic edge that I’d never noticed before. The guilty and the innocent seem to straddle the centuries under new names. Plus ça change!

A Melancholy river III – Putcher fishing

The remains of one of the last putcher ranks near Shepperdine in 2010

What makes history? I’m bound to say that I’m with Alice Oswald on this one. Her long poem “A sleepwalk on the Severn” looks away from connected and confected narrative “A caused B, therefore” – and gathers fragments; the flotsam and jetsam of real life and turns the overheard conversation, the bus tickets, dog ends and litter that flow past us like a river and fashions them into an evocation. History comes back to us after the event. In retrospect the ordinary – ‘the way we did things in those days’ glows with a last ray of sunlight before the sun drops below the horizon. Memory lends new life to the events.

I was sitting in a very boring meeting, gazing out of the window when a tractor and trailer passed slowly down the lane loaded high with salmon putchers, turned off and took the track down to the river Severn. It took years to realize that I might have been witnessing the last time putchers were set up. Of course they haven’t disappeared. They’re good to grow sweet peas up and I daresay they feature in the Chelsea flower show, but like cobblers’ shoe lasts and salt glazed gin bottles they’re more likely to be repurposed as decorative patina by interior designers.

Putchers go back to the 5th century, they’re a five foot long conical basket with a wide opening tapering to a point. They were set up in a rank and the ones I remember and in the photo were arranged in a V shape with the arms opening upstream to catch fish on the ebb tide which, with the poor visibility in the water the fish would enter and find themselves trapped in the putchers which were attached up to five high in the rank. There was another type of putcher called a kype which was longer and the hazel whips were woven tighter towards the end to trap smaller fish.

There was a small shack upstream from Shepperdine and near the ranks which were thicker stakes embedded in the mud. It was here that one of the last fishermen wove his putchers from hazel or withy during the tidal slacks. I met him on the riverbank one day and we had a long conversation in which he told me that he hardly ever caught salmon. He was an ardent royalist, and he said he always sent the first salmon of the season to the then Prince Charles, but the previous season the first fish was also the last. Nonetheless he packed it up and sent it to Highgrove, waiting in vain for any letter of thanks, which left him deeply disappointed rather than angry. The fish, he said were often marked with raw lesions which he suspected were caused by pollution in the river. Some time later I was taking to someone who worked for Imperial (Commonwealth) smelting and asked him if they dumped waste in the river. He freely admitted that they did, but said it was only gypsum, a byproduct of one of their processes. Nearby Albright and Wilson who made some very noxious chemicals, and a fertilizer plant also nearby almost certainly dumped waste in the river. Then only a few weeks ago we watched Michael Sheen’s documentary about the dumping of PCB’s around Wales. It emerged that some of this dangerous waste was being dumped further upstream in the river.

The river bank is wild, and cold winds sweep up the valley forming waves as they blow upstream. Birds gyre and tumble above. The water is bitterly cold, the tide menacing and ignores normal working hours; the mud is thick and glutinous – no place for an easy life. The putchers were emptied at low tide and before the great ecological silence, the salmon were sold locally at a subsistence wage and yet nothing the man said implied that it wasn’t a fulfilling life. Increasing regulation finished what pollution had begun and the only evidence of the practice, the ranks, were left rotting in the mud. I think he was the last one. It still staggers on in the Chepstow side being kept alive by the few remaining licence holders who still practice lave netting.

Elver omelette

Another form of fishing which once provided food was destroyed by industrial poaching and yet more regulation. Our local baker once told me how they would go to some secret spots with nets to catch elvers, baby eels. He described to me in detail the making of elver omelettes: break the eggs and beat them with pepper and salt, tip in the live elvers, cook and eat making sure they’d all stopped wriggling. The perfect breakfast for a young man with a bike and a net who’d been up half the night. But, like wild garlic, black headed gulls’ eggs and wild fungi they represented a lot of money to professional foragers and poachers. The elver population dropped like a stone as they were overfished and sent to Japan as a delicacy. Incidentally the baker, Brian, was one of the few remaining people alive who knew where and when to cross the Severn in the shallows somewhere around Arlingham.

I can see Brian now; a Severnsider to the core getting up at four am every day to make bread for the village. He began his career as a baker by making deliveries with a horse and cart as far away as Oldbury on Severn. He would slip away when the shop was opened by his wife – who came from the forest of Dean across the river – and take his dogs for a walk wearing a Loden cloth jacket and a cloth cap. In the winter he would go rough shooting with Les, the funeral director. He didn’t say much but what he did say had deep roots. The rooted people in the community were its soul; families going back generations and who, as you walked further upstream, would sometimes offer a hint of Welsh in their accents. The river is also a border – the border, porous, without barriers and gun emplacements or men in fatigues but when you cross the M48 bridge you soon realize you’re in another country.

The M4 bridge; Wales in the mist the Severn Beach railway line in the foreground.

Across a crowded pavement

Seaside Daisy

I really did meet someone who fell in love with someone they’d never met before, across a crowded room; or at least in that instance a crowded airport departure gate. The outcome was a bit messy so I won’t enlarge on the story any further. But is it, however, appropriate to use the expression in relation to a plant?  If love is redemptive, is it alright if the redemption looks back at a single pub lunch that was an unrelentingly miserable betrayal of cooking; the corpse of the idea lying dead in a shroud of soggy batter and a fish stew in a Cornish fishing village whose contents contained nothing but tasteless cornflower water and a handful of imported jumbo prawns. That is something that takes a bit of getting over. 

The god of surprises on the other hand must have had that redemptive moment in hand already as we walked back to the little park overlooking the bay. It won’t come as a shock to anyone who knows me, especially to Madame, that I’ve become a bit of a stalker in spite of all that I’ve written about trainspotter botanists recently. The Fleabanes are an attractive quarry precisely because they’re quite hard to identify. Some of them are regarded as weeds, but the upside is that some of them grow near us in Bath. I took a look in Stace IV (he who must be obeyed) and he lists thirteen species and subspecies, two of which grow in the pavement outside the flat and one in Charlie Stirton’s garden just down the road. The challenge is just that they have an inclination to cross-breed and unlike the ones that grow under supervision in a botanical garden, they rarely if ever show up in the same place and at the same time, and so it’s hard to get a detailed understanding of them. Of course there are a number of other Fleabanes that aren’t in the family I’m most interested in, so to be more precise I’m hunting the Erigerons – and that is the end of the Latin lesson. 

So I’ve found four members of the family within walking distance and there are a couple more slowly making their way up the river. But one I’ve never seen before is not often referred to as a fleabane because it’s commonly called the “Seaside Daisy”  and after my dyspeptic walk down the road from the pub – there it was! – growing and obviously naturalised alongside the narrow pavement. The pavement isn’t really that narrow but there are always builders vans and SUV’s which are too corpulent to fit their allotted spaces.  

Of course it immediately raises the issue about whether it’s a true native so to be clear: it’s not; it’s a boat plant you might say which – like most of the residents of the depleted local population – blew in from somewhere else like London or Birmingham. You know this because the local Spar shop sells sourdough bread and wines at £30.

Anyway, to return to the redemptive moment, the second I set eyes on it I knew exactly what it was – the photo is, as always, at the top. I can’t begin to express the pleasure of seeing that little outsider; outrider of a plant. A naturalized neophyte boldly asserting possession of a yard or so of someone’s garden.; someone who had the good taste to let it be. Somewhere down that little harbourside road there’s a gardener with vision, running a mission to those with eyes to see that even weeds and gnarly incomers have their beauty. I still haven’t forgiven the pub, but the takeaway memory of the day is of the seaside daisy; petals faintly purple like Michaelmas daisies, succulent salt resistant leaves in rosettes making the best of an Indian summer’s day overlooking the bay. Love at first sight. 

Spring is waiting in the wings

The little yellow flowered strawberry

We walked down Treloan lane again today in full autumn attitude. I would guess that with the strong winds we’ve been having here, half of the leaves are down and bare branches are the norm, silhouetted against an unexpectedly blue sky; a midwinter Chinese blue sky – pale cobalt as featured on the best porcelaine pots. Is this an Indian summer? We were in the cafe at the bottom of the lane when a couple of walkers came in. His T-shirt was soaked in sweat; it’s mid October so yes, this is a bit of an Indian summer.

I guess the default position for autumn would be to switch our attention from plants to fungi, but in spite of a lot of excitable pre-publicity, it doesn’t yet appear to be much of a bumper year for fungi. Our total haul today was a couple of small horse mushrooms under a tree. We left them where they were, mainly because it’s surprisingly hard to distinguish them from yellow staining mushrooms, and because they were heaving with maggots.

So all of our attention was on the basal rosettes and the few plants in flower. We were (as always) looking for promises of spring before winter really begins.  Years ago I was greatly cheered by realizing that the sticky buds on horse chestnut trees are real buds just waiting to open and release their lovely candlestick flowers and new leaves. These days, being old and full of words it would all be blah blah if I let it ; but I don’t want to lose that sense of excitement in the changing seasons. I’ve come to realize that the seasons don’t pass like a string of sausages but each one births the next. 

Of course there are always the usual suspects if you’re looking for a splash of colour on a walk. Could there be any scarlet and yellow to equal an elderly blackberry leaf putting on a final show of glory after the foragers have left? The red campions and herb Robert can usually be relied on for even a winter walk, and – well – dandelions; ubiquitous and difficult to nail down even for the trainspotter tendency. But it’s the “surely nots” that make us stop and kneel for a closer look. Yesterday it was a yellow flowered strawberry – deep within the undergrowth – and next to it a single fruit, bright red and ready to fall into the ground. It could have been the earliest or the latest celandine I’d ever seen until I noticed the fruit. We met a Danish woman on the same walk several years ago who insisted that at home they made jam with them but I wasn’t sure if she was thinking about Potentilla indica or the true wild strawberry whose fruit looks very similar. The yellow flower is the giveaway, but of course you need to have seen the plant through a whole season to know that.

It’s interesting to recall chance meetings in the same place. Yesterday we chatted to a couple on a bike ride who’d once worked at the big house which, at the time, was owned by a retired Chancellor of the Exchequer who sold it for £3 million. Recently, after a spell as a posh wedding venue it was sold for £12.5 million. In a gushing piece in Country Life it was described as “unique in owning a large length of foreshore”. It’s an interesting concept, and fascinating to reflect on whether a deed of title could add anything at all to the pleasure of sitting on a log and contemplating the sea. But whatever turns you on.  We also once had an amusing encounter with a couple whose local accent I recognised at once as from South Gloucestershire. As we chatted about our shared experiences near the river Severn they began to talk about a pretty dreadful character – the Vicar who’d taken the pews out – and we realized they were talking about me. There was an amusing moment when they did a full reverse ferret and we went our separate ways. 

Another yellow flower caught Madame’s eye. It was an uncharacteristically small nipplewort plant enjoying the last warm sunshine. I did a bit of research later to try to find out the origin of the name. So often plants have gathered names via the medieval doctrine of signatures which had a benevolent god designing every plant with a clue to its healing properties. The flask shaped flowers of nipplewort are a bit of an imaginary stretch – they look far more like the grease nipples on old steam engines to me, but my vocabulary of nipples is a bit limited. In short, though, the nipplewort was used for cracked skin and soreness in the past and even today it has a place in expensive face creams.

So aside from occasional flowers the main pleasure of the walk in autumn is the pristine rosettes and basal leaves of plants waiting their turn for spring. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned about nature is the succession of flowers in hedgerows. It is quite wonderful that the hedgerow in spring isn’t the static joy that we often see when we don’t look. It’s like one of those country circle dances where everyone changes places. The carrot family are the stars of the show as each appears, flowers and dies back allowing the next cousin to shine for a couple of weeks. Among the detritus, skeletal remains and leaves of the last season we found a multitude of shoots of three cornered garlic. 

Treloan Lane is one of our all time favourite walks. We’re getting a bit old for yomping across difficult tracks for miles but the enforced slowness brings its own joys. Small really is beautiful, and one and a half miles of Cornish lane can beat many more popular wildflower habitats into a cocked hat.

Back in Treloan Lane

You’ll notice the difference in formatting in this piece. Apologies, I’ll correct it when WordPress restores my access to my own site.

Our journey down here was a bit of a nightmare. It wasn’t just the usual kind of rain but a malignant blanket of fine drizzle that forced us to use the fastest wiper setting, which drummed back and forth like a pair of demented festival goers. In heavy rain even the landscape and the roadsigns disappear as lorries pass leaving con-trails of greasy spray and we passed our usual stopping place and drove towards the next which was on the northern side of Bodmin Moor. The moor is a moody place at the best of times but this time it wasn’t snow, sleet or driving rain, it was like driving through a ghostly white tunnel. When eventually we found a service station, filling the tank was a literally immersive experience, being battered by the horizontal drizzle blowing in sideways. Luckily I was wearing my favourite, moth eaten oiled Welsh Black woollen jumper which kept the worst of it out and I steamed dry in the car as we drove the last eighty miles. Our destination was a hay loft which we’d seen being converted for a couple of years and we rented it on a whim after a long season of hospital trips and building work. 

We’ve been walking down this lane for years; it’s one of four places whose plants I know pretty well. One and a half miles each way, it combines tarmac, grassy path and a small section of sunken track – but its composition; sunken for most of its length between high banks, hedges and Cornish banks has obviously evolved alongside its surrounding culture as fishing declined and farming rose and then tourism came along and insisted that the access to the holiday cottages did not jeopardize the paintwork of the family car. Normally at this point I’d insert the picture of flail-mower butchery that greeted us a few years ago but a hiccough in WordPress has got me locked out and you’re reading this via a circuitous workaround which can’t cope with photos; so that demanded a bit of  change in writing style as I try to say with words what I would otherwise have served up on a photographic plate. I had a cataract removed five weeks ago and once the swelling had cleared up and the double vision resolved, I found myself in a startlingly new world. I’ve mentioned this to other people who’ve had lens replacements and it seems we all experience an almost psychedelic period of colour and sharpness. Even Sainsbury’s car park looked amazing in the sunshine. I was captivated by the sharp edges of the cars. As soon as I was cleared to drive by the hospital we came here to a characteristically misty and rainy Cornwall for a bit of R&R.

It’s in the nature of sunken lanes that they provide a sheltered environment for all manner of plants, insects and animals. Here on the lane there are some of the richest hedgerows we’ve ever seen. My biggest problem for several years was that the cataract in my right, dominant, eye meant that I was unable to clearly resolve the things I was looking at. I’d pretty much decided that this was due to a faulty prescription, but it’s obvious now that a semi transparent film covering the lens was the real problem. Back here in Cornwall I was hoping that my greatly improved vision would allow me to see as well as the camera linked to a large screen hi-res monitor. Wow! Now, with the inspiration of improved eyesight and the opportunity presented by WordPress problems has prompted another big think …… how can I better express in words what I see as we walk slowly down the lane?

But there’s a catch here because I normally use carefully composed photographs which are rich in technical information that I can take to the identification guides without exposing the complexities of the process. It’s a hidden scientific process based on data and measurements and precise observations – all as boring as a bad preacher on a rainy Sunday to the average reader because the photo doesn’t need to brag about its contents But the writer’s tools are very different; bafflingly metaphorical to a scientist; woolly and suggestive rather than descriptive. You get the picture I hope. We’re dealing with two different languages and cultures, like trying to describe love in a spreadsheet populated only by temperatures and breathing rates. 

So back to the lane where we stopped to admire a cone from a felled Monterey Pine, covered in foliose lichen, the living expression of a fibonacci spiral but not designed by a mathematician but rather circumstance and evolution. A little further up the lane the hedge is covered with Old Man’s Beard, now covering the hedge with a snowlike cloak. But stepping forwards from the path to take a much closer look, you can see the stunningly beautiful mop-heads of seeds whose feathery tops curl like punk hairstyles waiting for the wind to call them away to service somewhere else. Below them in the hedge a brave few Red Campions risk a flower; pale pink after a hard season. Ivy berries, terrific food for the birds and the bees are clinging like tiny green and black mustard pots to their vines. A little clump of Babington’s Leeks is still, just about surviving atop one of the Cornish hedges. They’re quite unusual and we were pleased to see them a couple of years ago. By this time we would have expected the bulbs to open up exposing the bulbils which grow shoots before dropping to the ground, This time they are dried up by the summer heat and drought. This little patch will probably die off unrecorded. As we stroll further down we see evidence of the first of the carrot family to appear in spring. Large green rosettes (and some with stems and leaves) are the promise of next year’s Alexanders. Later, returning up the lane we find some seedheads hanging on. They’re easy to identify because Alexanders, AKA Herb Gerard, is the only member of the family with black seeds. There’s Mugwort  growing along the length of the path – once used in brewing beer – hence the name – still in flower. Near the beach there are wild radishes and also sea radishes. Their leaves differ slightly, the sea radish has slightly thickened shiny and tougher leaves, like its neighbour the Sea Beet, but both have magnificent basal rosettes and slightly different numbers of seeds in their pods. Unfortunately for the purists they hybridize together freely – like the wild carrots – and it’s sometimes impossible to be sure which one you’ve found. Returning up the path after an ice cream we see an abundance of Winter Heliotrope which will flood the path with its peculiar almond scent in just a few weeks around Christmas. We see the beginnings of the Yarrow and the end of the Charlock; tall, crisp and dead against the sky and finally an exciting little find right at the bottom of the cornish hedge, with the stones catching the last heat of the sun – a small clump of Wood Calamint.

Did I say how much I love this place?

Dancing around the mulberry bush

Salisbury market stall – a few years ago.

I don’t seem to take many happy families photos or snapshots of the pier at Weston Super Mare – in fact I think I’m a bit of an old stick in the mud or, perhaps, all those church teachings about it being sinful to enjoy anything threw some switches in my DNA and I just can’t help myself. Of the thousands of photos on my computer the vast majority concern plants, flowers and locations. They’re all catalogued and recorded and tidy – although anyone who’s seen my workspace will insist that’s a barefaced lie but it’s not – it’s industrial strength masking!

Anyway, personal reflections aside, there’s another photographic category that’s extremely important to me because of the way I work. Almost every piece I write begins with a photograph. I can’t do the ‘eyes meeting across a crowded room, stuff; I’m an intensely visual kind of person. I can remember in complete detail the appearance of a woman in a summer dress that was no match for the cold wind across the churchyard as we buried her dad. I remember the goose pimples on her exposed arms and how they seemed to express her lostness at that moment. I can’t imagine making written notes about the things I see – I just take photos, thousands of them. and they are my aides memoir. Over many years the technology has come to my rescue and now I can make notes with a very small Olympus camera and also with my phone. I remember standing on the bank of the Gloucester Sharpness canal one day alongside the collection of scuttled barges there and thinking how wonderful it would be to be able to unite pictures and words in a computerised internet form with powerful search capacities so readers could create their own path through the pieces. When I first had the idea it would have required technical expertise I just didn’t possess and technology that didn’t yet exist, but nowadays it’s easier. I take my photos, recall the moment and write the story of it. The photo is the starting point for the story that sits at the centre of a human mind at a particular place and time.

So when I sat down to write today we’d just finished packing away the emergency stores we’d bought at the behest of the (UK) government in case of shortages. It’s a sensible enough policy for a very temporary fix but whilst we filled the boxes with tinned food and pasta I wondered where were the signs of government policy concerning the risk of disruption through climate collapse, oil wars, organised crime and hostile governments . You’d have to be quite old to remember the government “Protect and Survive” campaign during the Cold War which urged us to whitewash the windows and sit under the kitchen table eating tins of corned beef as the nuclear bombs fell. A perfect example of the reliance of politicians on our gullibility to get them off the hook.

But we didn’t just pack the stores today; we also discussed seed orders and what we’ll try to grow next season in the light of inevitable shortages in the supermarkets. We discussed water storage again to help during the droughts which are now inevitable. We investigated getting a fitted mesh cover to the polytunnel to reduce sunlight by 47% and keep the temperature down. We talked about our diet and how we could be more self sufficient . We ordered bread flour in bulk and we sorted through our own stored food – this year’s tomato crop was severely affected so do we have enough of last year’s tomato passata and sauces to see us through until next summer? We need to revise the plan for the allotment and attempt to develop more shade through some judiciously planted taller trees, and we need to keep pressing the Council to improve security on the site because the amount of thieving has greatly increased. Food disappears from our plots, and even disappears from the charity veg boxes that we support, whilst the Government maintains a Trappist silence on the global climate issues and the chickens come home to roost.

Inevitably then, I searched the Photos library for inspiration and it brought to mind all those choppings and simmerings, crankings of the passata machine and other evidence of our semi peasant life at the Potwell Inn. I also remember how the head of ceramics at Farnham College got into terrible trouble for asking a female student if she was strong enough to lift a bag of clay during an interview. It was certainly tactless, but not on the scale of the question Madame was asked when we were interviewed together at Falmouth. “What if you get pregnant?” We need to expect governments to find ways of tackling the hard questions, formulating the right policies and acting urgently on them. We need the courage to evaluate whether they actually work rather than looking good on the headlines; but what all of us seem to do is dance around the mulberry bush, stick our fingers in our ears and sing “la la la” while the politicians throw elderly peaceful protesters into prison for daring to question their cowardice. The point of the metaphorical photo at the top of this piece is – as the proverb suggests – that you can only make pigs’ ears out of pigs’ ears!

Foraging – like the curate’s egg, good in parts.

I’m allergic to plants in the obvious sense that I get terrible hay-fever between March and October and I always wonder if, when people see me in the street during those months, they might see my streaming eyes and nose and wonder if I’ve just had some terrible news. But I’m also allergic to the idea of picking them. Madame has no such inhibitions and it’s a rare day when we don’t have a small jug of wildflowers from the allotment in the middle of the table. Occasionally I suspect they make me sneeze but I wouldn’t be without them. Thinking for instance about the Cowslip, the dilemma about picking them becomes more insistent because they’ve declined so much in the past due mainly to changed farming practices and chemical weedkillers. The idea that we mustn’t pick them is a bit of an urban myth because they’re not legally protected if you just pick them for that traditional jam jar display. If, however, you’re making cowslip wine and need a bucketful of flower heads, your actions would be extremely thoughtless and reprehensible and if you uproot a few plants for your garden without the owner’s permission you’d be committing a criminal offence under the Theft Act 1968. If you gather flowers and leaves for personal use in making herbal medicines it’s lawful, but it’s unethical if you strip a whole cluster bare and illegal to dig the roots up without permission. If you forage to supply your phytomedical business then you might get an appointment with our learned friends. It’s a legal but also an ethical minefield which I prefer to resolve by trying to take the best possible photographs to use for identification and taking the bare minimum from a plant only if I need to take it home for further work. I’m bound to say that the decline of wildflowers is very little to do with over enthusiastic picking as opposed to intensive farming and chemical sprays but legal sanctions and self restraint engender a cautious attitude. There’s another reason – amusingly expressed on a T shirt doing the rounds at the moment with the slogan – “All plants are edible; some of them only once”. The gravest danger lurks for any ill informed forager who thinks that because it’s wild it must be good for you.

But this raises the issue concerning learning our plants which begins with falling in love with them. At that crucial early stage how is anyone supposed to decide whether a pretty looking plant is on Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act if they don’t even know that such an act exists. Wildlife programmes on TV rarely pay much attention to plants, and when they do it’s usually the show stoppers that get the attention. It’s hard to imagine getting a programme about common weeds getting on to the screen without a Dalek shouting “Exterminate”. My Mum learned her plants by osmosis. She only ever used latin names if they had become common by usage but most of the time it was the common name used in her part of the Chilterns. She not only knew their names and where to find them, she also knew what they were used for. Brimstone and treacle was the name of a very unpleasant blood tonic not the title of a Dennis Potter play. Glycerine and thymol was a gargle for sore throat; dock leaves eased nettle stings although broadleaf plantain is better and if you’ve got the patience you can peel off the outer layer of a Navelwort leaf leaving a cooling substitute for an Elastoplast. Zinc and castor oil (Zac) – probably made up by the local pharmacist was the go-to remedy for rashes along with calamine (zinc) lotion for chicken pox. These were all well known and traditional remedies for the everyday complaints – the piles and varicose veins, childhood illnesses, constipation (my Dad was a martyr to his bowels!). So there was nothing strange and technical about a licorice stick or a Dandelion root and conversely all country children knew about deadly nightshades and Foxglove. For the overwhelming majority of children today even those common plant names are another language altogether and so plants – because they don’t know what they’re called or what they do, disappear to the background of consciousness and the reach what’s come to to be called “green blindness”.

Herbal medicine or Phytomedicine as they now call it – possibly because it sounds posher and less attached to the peasantry – demands a wide knowledge of plants. Dying and weaving use many wild plants for colours, foragers introduce old foods to a new generation so long as they know what they’re doing and don’t flout the law but for the average person there’s a huge gulf between liking plants and understanding their names and broad place in the culture. Many £500 weekend courses suggest that the freedom of the earth is yours when you’ve seen a Thornapple or a Death Cap just once, and every year someone will have a final meal of Hemlock Water Dropwort. It takes time to know even the basics fully and because we’re no longer peasants, drip fed the meanings of plants; but we have to do it the hard way on our hands and knees, and through books.

My own very cautious venture into plant medicine is confined to making calendula cream which is wonderful for skin complaints and we make a great deal of it using marigolds we grow on the allotment. I also made a batch of medicine for Madame which took ages and tasted filthy with no notable result, but the experience taught me a great deal and showed me where to obtain the plants I couldn’t forage or grow myself. However many everyday herbs which we grow on the allotment are foods, packed with vitamins and trace elements as well as specific molecules which have an effect on everyday complaints. Here I am, sitting and typing in rude health, having taken a digoxin tablet with my breakfast. This is a drug synthesized from the Foxglove and deadly in the event of overdoing it. Plants – and perhaps this is one of the most exciting and staggering gifts they bring to the human race – have the gift of putting together complex molecules which Big Pharma is only too pleased to identify, synthesize or refine and then patent making shedloads of money in the process. The Foxglove doesn’t even get a cursory thank-you on my Digoxin packet!

Just out of interest I did a bit of research on any commonly used medicinal herbs which are also on Schedule 8 and therefore fully protected. A bit of jiggery pokery and a small Python computer routine – AI, not written by me – compared the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia with the latest Schedule 8 list and came up with the fascinating fact there is only one plant appearing in both lists – the Marsh Gentian, which I’ve never seen – and three near misses with Centaury Thistles which would be easy to sort out in the field. Bear in mind, though that the UK National Trust, many wildlife trusts and all Sites of Special Scientific Interest forbid any taking of even parts of plants so it’s not an open house on herbs.

If you read my last post concerning the ghost garden where we’re staying we did a bit more research and discovered that the overgrown garden is the remnant of the guest house nearby whose owner was a keen gardener and botanist. So yes – it’s a melancholy oddity bearing in mind the hill farms surrounding us but it must have been lovely in its heyday.

Hemlock Water Dropwort – don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Well that was a night!

Macro photograph of False Oat grass flowers

After a couple of weeks of waiting for the weather to improve, last night was the last grey and ill tempered shot from the gods before the promised heatwave makes life intolerable from a different direction. We’ve known for some time that the rooflight dome in the campervan is cracked, but at midnight the stormy rain started to drip relentlessly on the bed. We got up, shoved half a roll of kitchen roll where we hoped it would help; covered the bed with a waterproof picnic rug and went back to sleep. At three o’clock the rain hammered down again and the drip resumed. Sleeping while holding a washing up bowl is not a skill either of us have learned, so we found another roll of kitchen cloths and replaced the temporary dam.

We’ve had worse nights in tents of course. One pancaked in a storm and we spent the rest of the night listening to World Service on the radio while we held the flapping fabric away from the sleeping children. We became overnight authorities on some kind of African flea species. Another tent actually split in half in a fierce storm – so a leak in the campervan is, historically, not such a big deal. Our closest shave was when lightning struck a child’s bike just feet away and almost melted parts of it. That night we went to bed at a crowded campsite and woke up to an almost empty field. It wasn’t so much courage and resilience – I just didn’t really want to spend more time with the Mothers’ Union.

Anyway, after waking early for the third time to a slate grey sky and yet more sea mist; our hopes for something better were rewarded and, as I write this, the sky is clearing in defiance of the weather forecast. My inner Eeyore says it won’t last.

I like to go to bed on a positive thought, (see previous sentence), and so last night’s was the sudden realization, as I plodded around to the chemical disposal point with a full cludger, that my long standing habit of silently naming the plants as I pass them has extended to a few more grasses after a couple of weeks of intense work. Everybody except one thinks that grasses are hard, but I was challenged and inspired years ago by the “one” a fine teacher who dismissed my difficulties with the words “Oh … grasses are easy!” – and they are, provided you’re prepared to put the hours in.

As I think back to my childhood, back in the days when children were allowed to wander freely, playing wherever we liked as long as we turned up for meals, grasses were probably the first plants I knew; not by name (especially Latin names) but by purpose. Wall Barley provided darts to throw at one another, False Oat grass was great for stripping seeds with a finger and thumbnail and putting them down your best friend’s neck and the wide leaves could be plucked, held between your thumbs and blown into making loud screeching noises. Aside from grasses there was the ever reliable Cleavers which you could surreptitiously attach to someone’s jumper and Old Man’s Beard whose canes you could smoke just like all the grownups did. childhood is the place to start botanising – not smoking! – for sure.

Earlier this week we passed a couple and had a brief conversation about how dense and varied the wildflowers here are. She told me that she’d counted twelve different grass species on a walk the previous day. In her childhood she’d been really absorbed by finding plants and sticking them in her scrap-book. She didn’t know what the names of any of the grasses were but that really didn’t seem to matter. There is, I’m sure, a tremendous latent interest in plants but we don’t seem to be building a bridge towards beginners but tend to speak an arcane language and sound too clever by half instead of using English plant names and even telling the stories of how they got them. I ‘m sure if you shared the fact that Cuckoo Pint got its name from”pintle” which is the shaft which is (dare I say) inserted into the rudder- that “cuckoo” is a polite word for an adulterer and that one of its other many names is “Parson in the pulpit” you’d surely remember the name forever and then if you really needed to you could easily discover it’s also called Arum maculatum when it’s being used scientifically. It’s significant that one of the best and most entertaining books on English plant names was written by Geoffrey Grigson who was a poet. Plants aren’t just objects of study, but they feed us, heal us and make a walk in the countryside an aesthetic adventure.

So not surprisingly the first plant I was able to identify easily was False Oat-grass because I already knew what it was; just not what it was called. I could list the rest easily but only because in childhood they represented useful things like itchy powder and bows and arrows. We brewed elderberries in tin cans and puddle water and pretended it was wine and we scrumped apples in the abandoned orchards of a bombed house just up the road.

This weekend a large group of primary schoolchildren and their parents shipped up at the campsite and took over maybe fifteen pitches. The children’s voices filled the air and it was lovely as they kicked a ball around, threw water bombs at each other and annoyed the hell out of their mums and dads who just wanted to sit around and drink prosecco. Yesterday I made a collage of photographs of my first grass to celebrate its (and my) existence. It was good and that just leaves the other 2000 or so species to find and record. Back on the road tomorrow early and then the builders are coming on Tuesday to finish up the work that’s been waiting ten years. Then in the afternoon I’m off to the hospital for them to look at the cataract growing in one of my eyes. I’m so looking forward to be able to resolve distant objects once more.

The thing about Cornwall is it rains every day.

Greater Bird’s-foot trefoil

Rather like Wales but further south and therefore a bit warmer, Cornwall has its very own special kind of rain – like a tiny hole in a leaky hose it can soak you through in minutes and you never know where it’s coming from. When we woke up yesterday morning rain was beading up and running down the campervan windows, and just beyond was an impenetrable sea-mist. We turned as always to the Met Office to lift our mood but drew a blank. They referred to a “wobbly front” which is seemingly weaving a narrow band of misery across Roseland and northeast passing anywhere else we might think of escaping to. We made a cup of tea and sat in bed looking at the window. Driving home seemed, and remained a good option throughout the morning so we dried out the groundsheet, emptied the cludger, topped up the drinking water, blew up the tyres and packed away the table. Then we changed our minds (it was still drizzling) and I went down the field to take some macro photos of a plant that needed a closer look (see above) and suddenly for no reason at all we felt cheerful.

There’s an upside to rainy days in the campervan and that’s because it gives us an excuse to read books and do whatever we want without getting wet. So Madame read and I finally transformed my eccentric records into compliant form using AI and a staggering amount of memory and data. Then we ate pasta for the 73rd time this week and lived like students for a few hours. I absolutely love getting into a topic and hammering it. I can feel my brain straining and the synapses making novel networks until it feels like new life spreading through me; and no – apart from a syrupy and fiercely bitter espresso coffee first thing – (a holiday treat) – no recreational chemicals were involved.

Heath Bedsraw

Anyway I’m sharing this next photo because it’s a lot more representative of the tiny details that I spend most of my campervan time looking for. It’s just a bit of a leaf, but if you look very closely (the leaf is barely 5 mm long), you’ll see a line of tiny spike-like hairs and whether they point forwards or backwards is a determining feature between two species. The thing is that close-up examination with a hand lens reveals a truly exciting new perspective. Things that once looked identical look a bit different under 10x magnification; even more different under 20x and under a microscope oh wow! When I enlarge a macro photograph on a big screen when I get home I can see details that until the invention of the lens in the thirteenth century had probably never been seen by a human being. Many people tend to assume that science is driven by numbers and rooted in solid facts. In fact it’s driven by wonder and curiosity. It’s people with neither of those faculties who give science a bad name. We’re bedevilled by binaries and especially the ones that divide science from art. Mathematicians will willingly admit that theorems and solutions to old conundrums tend to come in inspirational flashes leaving all of the work to be done in proving the insight. They talk about “knowing” that a theorem is true because it’s beautiful or elegant. Philosophers agonise about mind/brain binaries when that may be an artificial division. Maybe they’re one and the same thing; mind, body, spirit, brain, even – dare I say – male, female, human and non human, native and foreigner. Fragments of a whole waiting to be reunited in a kinder vision – the kind of vision that a child is gifted with and is taught to forget.

When we were at Falmouth Art School the Head of Sculpture was something of a reclusive genius. Without ever exchanging more than a nod with him – (Ray Exworth was pretty terrifying) – he taught me one of my most important life lessons. He worked every day except (it was rumoured) Christmas day. Even as fashions were changing and it was taken as read that creativity was like a special gland that only some people had – so whatever they did would be art on account of the secret gland – Ray Exworth just worked. I fell upon Samuel Beckett’s words when I first read them ;

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Sitting here in the campervan lost in a sea mist, the ghostly voices whisper words of discouragement and I tell them to piss off and go bother someone else. There’s a blackbird singing outside and soon the voluble family of crows will start their day-long group chat. The last few remaining campers are all lingering in bed like us, waiting for the sun to appear. It may take a couple of days yet, after all this is Cornwall where it rains every day. Hotter fiercer weather is on the way and this holiday will soon fade as the solstice takes us towards autumn. We’ll revert to our late summer heatwave timetable on the allotment and rise early to weed and water.

Life really is very simple if we allow it. Take out greed, petty disputes, ambition, pride and fearfulness and that leaves space for pondering, for growing, harvesting, cooking and eating, loving and allowing ourselves to be loved, and following our curiosity and wonder wherever it might take us and inviting those discoveries to share our lives and help us to fail better.

A rainy day in St Davids

They’re all Dandelions until they’re not

I was reading a new book this week – I know I could have said that any time in the last ten years and it would still have been true. I read a lot – period! Anyway this week I’ve been concentrating on Sarah Whild’s new handbook on biological recording and loving it apart from a creeping doubt whether I’d ever make the grade. Amateurs like me often face a Catch 22 situation where we find ourselves in an endless circular difficulty in which it seems (from reading this book) that the key to getting records accepted is to have a good reputation. How do you get a good reputation? Why of course by having lots of records accepted. We stand on the edge of the magic circle waving like a rapidly wilting wallflower; D listers in a school prom, and never being chosen.

I mean, I don’t mind too much because I’m not the train spotting type and I’m not even sure I’d like to be recognised for my botanical efforts alone. There are too many other non-wildflower subjects that I’m equally interested in. Sarah’s book is about the science of identifying and recording plants and goodness knows we need the science in this time of ecological crisis; but looking back at my long love affair with plants it seems to me that the true motivation was a combination of aesthetics and puzzles. When I first went to work as a very junior groundskeeper and school bus driver after leaving art school, I could easily identify Speedwells and Dandelions; enemies of the cricket square. However I learned very soon that not all Speedwells were the same, and more punishingly, that not all Dandelions are Dandelions. It was the struggle to tell apart and name the different members of their two families that really engaged me. It was a magnificent puzzle. The fact that almost all of them are extremely common and unworthy of the attention of the Magisterium made no difference – I loved the scruff-bags of the plant world, and I still do; probably because I’m a scruff-bag too. It also became apparent that Dandelions in particular are fiendishly difficult on account of their ability to clone themselves. I soon learned to walk on by!

So if I came to be a field botanist at all it was through trying to dig my way out of the slough of despond that all those Dandelion thingies inhabit, and when I hear one of the tweedies going large on their vast knowledge I retreat in case someone exposes my slim credentials. Imposter syndrome could have been invented just for me. I suspect I was a bit of a solitary from my earliest childhood and offering me a chance to do a course or take an exam would scare the living daylight out of me.

My real ambition is not to get an award or be recognised in the street. Years ago when I was doing a lot of slots and spots on BBC Radio, I was in the supermarket one day when a woman came around the corner after hearing me talk to someone and asked me – “are you Dave Pole?” – “Yes I am” – “ooh, I thought you were tall”. I am not tall. My only skill is as a communicator, although my several detractors would dismiss me as just being “clever with words.” Around the same time I was engaged on a project by the Bible Society who were recording the whole of the Bible. It felt less of an honour when I was told I would mainly be reading the devil’s voice. I’m quite sure that Jesus would have had a posh, English middle class voice but I never met my nemesis because I recorded alone in an empty studio and the editors joined all the bits together later. The only compliment came when I was told that my Gloucestershire accent went down a storm in Africa. A storm?

But this quest for a way of communicating hard ideas was the first glimmering of this blog. I was walking up on the River Severn when I found a row of abandoned concrete and steel barges hauled up on the banks at Purton. They were a sorry and desolate sight and I took loads of photos thinking how wonderful it would be if I could incorporate photos, text and HTML links in order to link the photographs as metaphors to illuminate the text. The links would be such that readers would be able to jump from place to place, choosing their own path through. I had to wait for years until the blogging technology came along and I’ve grown, along with the opportunities evolving programmes offered. My workflow always, without exception, begins with an image, a kind of Wordsworthian metaphor that acts as an armature for the writing. The hard ideas are what I’m really interested in and so my means are more creative than they are scientific. When I write about plants I’m often trying to shift a common misperception; to open up questions where there were once only answers. So I’m not so much offering answers to any particular questions but trying to suggest better ways of finding; better places to look for those answers. I use imagery from the allotment, the kitchen, the canal as well as our walks in which we are inevitably concerned with natural history not least plants; none of these in order to court celebrity but in the hope that readers can catch a glimpse of the power and the beauty of Nature. If I stray into the subject of Green Spirituality now and again it’s because I’m searching too.

Right now I’m experimenting with using my voice in some way, moving carefully towards video- who knows? I can blow the dust off my old devil voice once more or perhaps something a little less abrasive. There’s everything to play for.

Close-up of a dandelion seed head surrounded by green grass and wildflowers.
Goatsbeard, “Jack go to bed at noon” – Tragopogon pratensis

This is a member of the Asteraceae but not a Dandelion.