Tag: amateur naturalists

Charlie’s radical garden

Impatiens taymonii in Charlie’s garden

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.

Fools Parsley -Aethusa cynapium –poisonous!

How dare you stare at my binoculars?

For the last, probably three, years we’ve been puzzled by an apparently invisible bird that’s almost always heard on the grass covered clifftop between the cottage we stay in and Nefyn to the East. Now I’m not about to reveal anything here except my own ignorance, so if I were a less combative person I’d beg your indulgence BUT …..

Being an autodidact, that’s to say having studied nothing formally except ceramics and theology; everything else that’s crammed in my head is stuff I’ve learned informally, over the farm gate as it were. The downside is that I seem always to be running to catch up with the people who really do know what they’re talking about. However the upside is that for me, every little discovery is an amazingly exciting blast. Not being an expert turns out to be a boon because I get to see things in all their strangeness; I can make connections that institutionalised knowledge might forbid – and – of course I can flatter the intelligence of the cognoscenti by mispronouncing latin names and asking a lot of silly questions.

So to get back to the invisible bird, I probably need to say that the tiny trickling spring of an idea that started this blog began one bitterly cold morning in January five years ago as we leaned over the sea wall at St Ives in Cornwall and looked at a seagull. We had retired four months previously but those four months had been marred by long delays in getting the flat to a habitable state, and a family event that threw us into turmoil. After the worst Christmas we had ever experienced, we fled to Cornwall to try to recuperate and found ourselves staring at a seagull.

I’d been keeping a very personal private journal for several years while I was seeing a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, in fact I’ve kept notes and journals on and off all my life, but that day I made two decisions that have had the most amazing repercussions. Firstly I resolved to find out what sort of gull we were looking at, and secondly I resolved – hubristically as it turns out – not to allow myself to pass anything that I couldn’t name – ever again. It was, by the way, a black headed gull we were looking at, and my first lesson as an aspiring birdwatcher was that black headed gulls don’t have black heads in January, just the smudge of a grey crescent at the edge of the place where the black will appear later in the year. It was a useful lesson in ambiguity and so I wrote about it in my journal. Then, of course – given my ludicrous resolution to name things – it all snowballed, the restless lists began to get longer, and my working knowledge of things, lagging a couple of years behind the moment of recognition, slowly got better and it all found its way into the journal.

Then the software I was journaling with was updated suddenly and I found that half of my equipment stopped communicating. I emailed the company responsible and they loftily suggested that my equipment was obsolete and I needed to spend a wad of cash just to stand still. I told them to piss off and moved to WordPress. Months and months later, after I’d got the hang of it, I took the blog online.

So – clifftop plus regularly heard bird sounds that sounded more landlubber than seaside had us scouring the clifftop with our binoculars looking for the unknown bird. Then two things happened. In amongst the generic seagulls I spotted something completely different but definitely seabound. For no apparent reason the idea that they could be terns popped into my head (thank you Adam Nicholson) and so I noted it and, as I said yesterday, scoured the books when we got back to the cottage to get a better picture in my head. The second thing was that having lifted my eyes from the clifftop to the sea I discovered that the unknown sound was moving in the same direction and at the same speed as the group of possibly could be terns.

Is that what you call a lightbulb moment? I can almost hear the Oh for God’s sake groans of the experienced birdwatchers but for me it was a blast, a triumph, a decisive blow in the war against ignorance, and as is always the case, once I’d made the connection all sorts of other new knowledge was waiting. When we walked along the beach yesterday there were herring gulls and black headed gulls in abundance, and in amongst them were common terns – completely different in the way they flew, in their elegance, in their sounds, in the way that they could hover and dive. They made the herring gulls look like overweight bouncers outside a nightclub.

Later we watched a kestrel hunting the exact terrain we’d hoped to find our mystery bird in. Kestrels are rarer these days and if you ever catch a look at one from above, the chestnut brown colour positively glows in the sun. These moments of recognition are almost transcendent. Overnight the trailcam finally got a decent video of a visiting fox – ignoring my carefully scattered peanuts completely and walking up the stream’s edge to find something decent to eat. Since we arrived we’ve been filling the birdfeeders with seeds, fat balls and peanuts to attract as many as possible while we find the best place to film them and after 36 hours, while the birds overcame their suspicions, they’re flocking to them in huge numbers. It’s been pouring with particularly wet Welsh rain today so the bedraggled birds have been grateful for easy pickings. Out of the blue, a pair of ring ouzles appeared out of the thicket of sloes and sallows that line the stream, fed briefly on the fat balls, and disappeared again as suddenly as they arrived. Sadly the trailcam was recording another feeder. Oh and I added chamomile and woody nightshade to the list of plants in flower.

It’s not for nothing that one of my favourite poems at school was Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts”!

What was the date of the last time you heard a cuckoo?

Arrhenatherum elatius ssp bulbosum otherwise known as a bit of dead grass

To be able to answer that question you’d need to have heard the cuckoo, recognised it and made a note of where it was that you’d heard it. I know where I heard the last one – it was with friends whose smallholding is near Crickhowell in Wales and I could find the date by looking for the photos I took on that day. That was getting on for two years ago and sadly I haven’t heard one since which gives me a little pang of sadness. What if that was it? – no more cuckoo ever …..

So maybe there is a point in being a bit of a list nerd, even if becoming one means you have to irritate the hell out of all your nearest and dearest while you read (buy) incomprehensible and expensive books, spend hours with pencil and notebook writing in secret code and develop a pronounced bend in the spine as you spend days on end looking at the ground, and enthuse about tiny bits of plants that no-one in their right mind cares a hoot about …. except – I should stop there! But if you’ve done all those things and write the event up and even send an account of it to someone who also records these things but on a grand scientific scale; then it’s just possible that something could be done in time to stop the cuckoo becoming a footnote in an annotated student’s Shakespeare crib.

On Tuesday I gathered 10 samples of grass from Bannerdown and as I mentioned earlier, I was up early yesterday morning and after some pretty intense work I managed to identify nine species; and I even managed to match them with all the other plants we saw yesterday and come up with my first ever NVC (National Vegetation Classification) code. More than a year after my resolution to “do the grasses” I’ve finally reached the point where I’m pretty confident with identifying them, and half a dozen I can recognise from twenty paces. A red letter day for me and possibly of no interest to anyone else, unless like me you’ve embarked on a stupidly difficult quest without much by the way of experience.

So why bother then? Why not leave it to the professionals? Well the answer is that there aren’t nearly enough professionals to do what’s needed. There are now hardly any opportunities to study botany at degree level in this country. We’re in the midst of an environmental catastrophe that will lead to the disappearance or even extinction of a huge number of species from environments that no one has ever recorded – and I don’t just mean Amazonian jungle and Arctic tundra, I mean the derelict site next door, the unappetising urban stream with the supermarket trolleys in it, and the allotment sites that hard up local authorities would love to sell off. The article from today’s Guardian newspaper that I cited above is concerned with UK mammals, and just like the mountain gorillas and snow leopards, our wild mammals live on wild plants, insects and other wild mammals and they are disappearing because their environmental niches are disappearing. As meadows, hedgerows and streams disappear along with all their specialised plants, their larger and more glamorous inhabitants disappear too; so saving the hedgehog means saving the hedgehog’s environment and the multitude of invertebrates that it lives on – which means saving the plants on which those invertebrates feed in turn. The earth is a joined-up ecosystem – with the emphasis on system and it can’t work even if small parts fail. Just as when the hinge on my laptop breaks it becomes a pile of junk. During my grass binge I have spent a lot of time on the internet looking for answers and I promise you I found a website (run by a agrochemical business) headed “How to identify grasses and eradicate them. “Attaboy – lets civilise the lawns and fields of this great country!”. Letting the nettles and the couch grass flower around the edges of your allotment shows you’re a part of the resistance movement.

Natural history has always had its share of amateurs. There are few other disciplines where we can make such a significant contribution. It’s true we don’t have the knowledge or the equipment to study plant DNA at home, but increasingly we’re becoming the infantry in the battle to save nature, (with saving ourselves as a side-order). There’s a place for everyone at every level and the amateur recorders are the intelligence corps, helping to collate the evidence. I first got involved in this kind of thing when I was a schoolboy and sent postcards (remember them?) back to a science project investigating thunderstorms. I remember I had to record the number of seconds that elapsed between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder, and add a few details about the storm. I think I had to buy my own postage stamps.

However, the reasons for getting stuck in aren’t just about saving our skin. To lift a phrase from a well known naturalist:

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Karl Marx – “Eleven theses on Feuerbach” – (and inscribed on his grave)

So let’s hear it for the sheer beauty of nature, for the way it frames us and sets us within our proper place, for the way it inspires the sense of the numinous, the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans“, the terrible and compelling face of nature that draws worshippers and list makers alike to record what might be the last great moments of a collapsing civilisation. “Glory be to God for dappled things” said Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem “Pied beauty” and although these days I find the whole idea of God – especially the great gammon in the sky version promoted by most churches – impossible to understand, I know well enough what glory feels like!