Tag: environmental catastrophe

Our allotment just grew up

A wooden raised garden bed filled with dark soil, surrounded by plants and trees in a garden setting.
The final set of four raised beds

The ambiguity in that title was entirely deliberate. It was some time last year when we were standing on the allotment and I said to Madame – “It suddenly looks as if it has matured”. Whatever it is – possibly the fruit trees which have really got their roots down, but also the fact that all the wooden structures are greyed and in some cases needing replacing; the polytunnel is theoretically due a new skin which we can’t really afford, and somehow when you add it all up it looks as if it’s been around the block a few times and decided to settle down to middle-age.

Of course, looked at through the eyes of love (how else should you look at ten years of your gardening life?) – it’s what the scholars call a palimpsest. Back in the day when writing was an expensive luxury, the materials were used more than once and traces of a previous, older message, letter or even book could be discovered lurking faintly under the younger. It’s exactly the same for our grown-up allotment. Every bed, and almost every other structure is just the latest version of an older one; complete with previous soil level, old screws and joints betraying their previous history. Beds have been re-purposed and re-designated over the years and the soil improved with tons of compost and leaf mould. Where once there was a difficult mix of clay and loam, there’s a much more fertile, sweeter smelling and friable soil. Despite all our efforts to find the best place to grow strawberries they migrated without any intervention from us to a spot in the lee of the polytunnel where they’re completely happy. Who says that plants can’t talk!

The latest batch of four raised beds are actually the top of four deep compost bins that I sawed in half horizontally a few weeks ago because they’d become an unofficial dump. They’ll be replaced by a single California Cylinder made from two concentric rings of sheep wire filled with cardboard and with a rough and ready chimney driven through the middle. It’s an idea we got (I think) from Lawrence Hills and it works a treat and heats up fast with the help of what he called “human activator” and you can work that one out for yourselves. An alternative activator is comfrey liquid but be warned, it really stinks.

Recycling of old materials isn’t just virtuous, it’s cheap. The eight beds I’ve just finished cost the price of a few new screws and some additional topsoil and compost for the new growing layer. I saved all the original topsoil in bags – they were hellishly heavy – and filled the resulting holes with fresh vegetable waste, cardboard and wood chip, then I put the original topsoil back on top and augmented it. The good soil is now 18″ deep and will be perfect for growing show-off carrots and parsnips.

The only constant factor in an allotment seems to be the unexpected. Last year’s pepper plants bought from a garden centre turned out to be Scotch Bonnets. We now have a lifetime supply of dried chillies. Each season is spent in negotiation with the weather, and with climate change advancing rapidly the old certainties and folk rhythms are becoming redundant. This year, for instance May and June swapped places whilst April showers were in short supply, and all we can do is ride with the volatility of the weather.

And so we soldier on. The allotment is less tidy and yet more interesting as the years go on. Plants come and go – last autumn the Tayberry got a savage pruning and this year the blackberry has stopped sulking after two transplantings and is, at last, showing the will to live. When we first moved on to it as an unkempt field we thought of the plot as a blank canvas on which we could do as we pleased. In the fullness of time we’ve realized that we can only do as it pleases – which turns out to be a much happier experience. The asparagus bed went the way of all flesh and now hosts a crop of new potatoes. The approach we adopt is a form of informed imagining in which we propose an idea, dispose the place in which we want to grow it by preparing the ground and selecting the spot and then leave it to nature to say yea or nay. Some we win and some we lose and that’s OK too. Allotments, like their tenants have previous history. Ours was probably once part of a Roman vineyard and then a nursery and has probably been in some kind of cultivation for a couple of millennia. Going back even further the origin of our soil is alluvial clay and loam formed by the ebb and flow of the river as it cut its valley through the soft oolitic limestone. We dig up fragments of clay pipes abandoned by the Georgian gardeners and some time in the future some hapless archaeologist could puzzle over the multitude of sea shells that stowed away in the bags of seaweed we once brought back from Lleyn to feed the asparagus. We may think that we live in the moment but as gardeners we only thrive within and upon the past. Some of the plants we grow we choose, and some that grow just happened in on the wind, dropped by a bird or attached to a car tyre. All gardeners have to learn to rule kindly and lightly over their kingdoms. We may think of ourselves as owners of our plots but in truth they own us and we can do nothing except by their permission. As butterflies and migrant birds cross the channel sans passports and permits so too do seeds, insects, plant diseases and all of the thousand things that charm us and taunt us. Most of the troubles of the world are due to people who misguidedly believe in control. We bend with the wind if we want to grow crops while growing ourselves comes free but not cheap.

It feels as if I’ve been scraped by a random bot!

A red digital camera with a black strap, a Garmin Etrex handheld GPS, a smartphone with a cracked screen, and a small microphone with a furry windscreen, all placed on a wooden surface.
Miniature waterproof camera with macro lens capacity, knackered Pixel Phone 6a,;cheapest available GPS (phone GPS is very inaccurate and unreliable and field microphone with “dead cat” windshield and receiver. In the other pocket and not photographed, hand lens, 6″ mm ruler and extending carpenter’s tape.

Sitting in bed reading during the week, Madame emitted a noise somewhere between a screech and a hoot and waved her Pixelbook at me. “Look at this!” she said, with a great grin. I leaned over and with the wrong glasses on completely failed to interpret the page or draw any conclusions from it. Then she said “I just typed in a question about Mexican Marigolds – Tagetes minuta and up came the Potwell Inn alongside the RHS and Sarah Raven. I felt like the little child at the pantomime who gets chosen to go up on the stage and help Buttons find his hat. Such is the indiscriminate nature of AI bots that I was swept to prominence simply writing something about it recently. The RHS will have warned about its aggressive nature, and Sarah Raven sells the seed so she thinks it’s alright. All I wrote was that it’s certainly not a miniature it’s a six foot monster that will leave thousands of seeds in your soil if you let it flower. However it has a reputation for deterring pests and even (and I’m crossing myself here) – deters bindweed. In this drought we’ve had a badger digging up our wood chip paths in search of food every night and even he leaves those devil’s guts behind. So when it comes to organic pest control, we’re staging the battle of the giants on our allotment!

Thank goodness this drought is slowly losing its grip and we’ll soon be released from the chore of endless watering. Given the season we’ve been keeping dozens of seedlings and transplants alive under temperatures in excess of 30C, and I’ve still got to join four more 250 litre tanks together to store water when, (not if), we’re plunged into another one. Sorry about that dreadful pun. One of my favourite occupations on the allotment is a bit of civil engineering.

So things are going reasonably well tand we’ve been getting the work done very early in the mornings while its still cool. Our family seem to have come out on top of all their crises with one having the best weather ever for a family seaside holiday, another being promoted to the kind of job he’s always dreamed of after a period of great uncertainty, and the third finding a lovely flat after being evicted in the rush of Section 21 orders. If there is a hell, it’s going to be crowded with greedy landlords.

Meanwhile I’ve been focusing on developing a completely new way of recording plants, combining new technologies of lightweight cameras, GPS systems and a tiny field speech microphone and transmitter to organise all my plant data into one place – rather than spread over half a dozen notebooks (mixed up with shopping lists and telephone numbers) and constantly lost pens; photos that have to be searched for individually among the thousands and a persistent failure on my part, to record half of the details I need to make a proper record.

Typically, on my first dress rehearsal on the allotment yesterday, I talked too quickly for the recorder to transcribe, the lanyard of the camera kept banging against the microphone, I didn’t follow my own procedure and jumbled up the notes and never even thought of establishing a temporary ID using an image recognition app because I ran out of hands. You might call it a learning opportunity but I’d have to hit you because I knew a glorious and hilarious cock-up when I read the transcript back. Notebook LM (AI) – which was supposed to do the heavy lifting simply shrugged and walked away claiming that without more contextual information there was nothing it could do.

Ah well, I’ve been through this before. Computers are very single minded and can’t make silk purses from sows’ ears, but like all new technology, they demand practice. Luddites, and there are many, dismiss the whole idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence without understanding that it requires the user to formulate exquisitely focused questions; and these can only arise out of a deep understanding both of the subject and the way the computer “thinks”.

This is anything but taking the lazy option, because every plant observation that’s properly recorded, then has to be thoroughly tested against the standard texts i.e. the old way because we’re not yet at the stage where the new technology is 100% reliable. In fact it probably never will be. It’s all very exciting, but it all begins with catching a glimpse of an unfamiliar plant, or of a familiar plant with an unfamiliar detail and knowing that it’s worth investigating.

We’ll soon be off to West Cornwall where I can test and practice the new methodology, hopefully without annoying Madame too much. It reminds me of a story about a famous pianist who was once praised by a fan who said “you’re lucky to be so talented.”-his reply was “- and the more I practice the luckier I get!” Amen to that.

So basking in my quite undeserved online reputation I’ve abandoned the pointless attempt to win the approval of the magisterium and grown my hair almost as long as when I was young and annoying my Dad. To my great surprise it came out curly – and white – and distinctly mad looking. This final thought comes from a much used catechism in church circles.

Question – what are the last six words always spoken in a church that closes down?

Answer – we always do it this way.

Back in the day there was an Anglo Catholic theological college (now closed down) whose motto was “Guard the good deposit” a quotation from St Paul, which was emblazoned on all of their china; including the chamber pots. Change really is in the air, and it’s always helpful to examine the good deposits – we all have funny habits – but really we should be prepared to replace them when they’re wrong and before they start to smell.

Finally some photos from yesterday’s disastrous rehearsal with part of its its unedited transcript. Beta minus I think – could do better.

Cut these cranesville then. This. Oh yeah, it’s got a huge leaky one really long six millimetres. So this one is Rough Meadow cross.

25th May 2010

Scenic countryside with lush green fields, grazing cows, and rolling hills in the background.

So it’s sixteen years since Andrew and I reached the highest point on the Aubrac Hills in Southern France. We’d – well I’d – failed to realize during the planning, that following a river can be a bit of a nightmare because every tributary makes its own valley and the line on a map becomes a relentless combination of long downhill valley-sides and punishing climbs to the crest of the next. We’d also failed to realize that the Camino has been monetized like everything else and was crowded with trippers who filled the cafes restaurants and refuges while we were carrying our rucksacks and all our possessions and often struggled to find somewhere to sleep, We did a lot of trespassing!

A winding dirt path through green vegetation, leading to a panoramic view of rolling hills and valleys under a clear blue sky.

But the hard work was redeemed by the wonderful scenery, the wildflowers (spring comes late in these high places) and a chance encounter with the transhumance – the seasonal festival that accompanies the movement of the cattle from their winter quarters in the valleys to the high pastures. If you look closely at the photograph you’ll see the cattle and their horns decorated with flags. We heard the clanging of bells and the sounds of celebration from miles away. Festivals in France have deep, deep roots and with many of the local villages quite isolated, the chance of a gigantic piss-up feels like all their market days in one. We watched from a distance and camped outside the towns where the riotous fun seemed to go on all night. The maximum height of the Aubracs in the Massif Central is around 3000 feet but I think we must have climbed it half a dozen times before we finally dropped down to Cahors. Somewhere up there I overheard a conversation between a couple of immaculately turned-out women from Nice when they spoke in tones of horror about a couple of elderly farmers we’d seen . “La France profonde!” one of them said.

As it happens I like La France profonde for exactly the same reason I love Wales. The culture is often a bit obscure to outsiders but its very isolation has protected it from withering away, and even ceaseless promotion by the tourist boards can’t seem to erode the central power with which it feeds a deep connection with the past, present and even the future. It ain’t cute, that’s for sure, but it’s the cultural matrix that frames life in a harsh place.

25th May 2026 – the same canicule, but a couple of decades later

Here in Bath we grow some, at least, of our own food in the centre of a Roman city which feels – today in the unseasonable heat- increasingly like Avignon. We shall call it Sulis en Provence and – like them – lay down our tools some time in July and spend the next six weeks in idling, chasing bulls down the streets trying to catch them by the tail, wearing white T shirts stained with red dye as a form of simulated bravery and getting very drunk whilst eyeing up the adoring girls and presumably boys as well. We should join the festivities and play football with the plentiful melons by the light of thousands of fireflies and breathe in the wine infused night air as if we might live forever whilst the gammon faced elders scream abuse into the internet because they couldn’t find anywhere to park their Range Rovers on the pavement. Ladies and gentlemen – at the risk of being thrown into prison by Sir Keir and the Brigade of Goons I’ll quote Eldridge Cleaver – “If you’re not part of the solution you must be part of the problem”. Interestingly when I verified that quotation on Google Gemini I got a little homily on the middle ground . Sadly the middle ground is on fire. The time for discussion, committees and forward planning seems to have passed us by.

In any case, we’re keeping a Provenĉal timetable here at the Potwell Inn. Rising at five followed by two or three hours on the allotment – mostly watering at the moment – and then breakfast followed by cooking, preserving and bottling as required and then writing; after which it’s eating and telly, avoiding the poisonous news and early to bed. Nil Carborundum is our motto. I’m celebrating my inner peasant.

Finally some photos of various places in France including a small chapel just beyond Le Puy en Velay, A park in Uzes near the Roman aqueduct to Nîmes, The Musketeers outside the cathedral in Albi and below that, the fortified Cathedral. Then there’s a scorpion that came to play, the bridge at Cahors, a street corner in Nîmes – that’s from memory; the beach at Collure, and a couple more from Uzès.

It’s said that figs prefer stony ground and produce more fruit when you prune their roots. Maybe that’s it. The aqueduct that crosses the Pont du Gard and goes through Uzès and on to Nîmes was sealed with the juice of figs. Maybe if I think of myself as a kind of fig, that story makes me feel better because some good comes out of the pain and – as Jung said – we’re most creative where we’re scarred. Perhaps spiritual energy really does flow like water in a thirsty place. I had my roots pruned on 20th June 2016. My European passport has since expired and I didn’t bother to renew it. I was rendered a stranger in a place I once felt at home and it was my own folk that did it.

The question is … Can I tell my Asteraceae from my elbow?

A community garden with raised wooden beds, featuring a variety of vegetables, including potatoes and herbs, alongside a greenhouse in the background.
This was the left hand half of the allotment yesterday – the other half is the same size

Sorry Mr Eliot but April isn’t the cruellest month for gardeners; its May, when nature moves from the subjunctive to the indicative and blesses all our hopes with the sheer thereness of weeds, frosts and withering droughts. Four seasons in the month when dreams can disappear in a night and the fragments of bindweed we left behind in the autumn come back roaring back at us like belligerent teenagers. Nights spent staring at seed packets and saying shall we or shan’t we sow them? as if we were a couple of lonely souls contemplating a bit of adultery. But in May, no-one knows what will happen next.

So we plod on as always, fearing the worst and hoping for the best. Gardening is an excellent training for the virtues. Patience, courage, temperance, and modesty are all as useful in on an allotment as in public life; in fact if we refused to vote for anyone who was not a true gardener the world might become a better place.

So in the midst of this all too predictable heatwave we’ve been up at 5.00am some days, to do a few hours on the plot before it gets too hot to work . In May we have an abundance of small and vulnerable plants which need constant watering until they get their roots down. You can hear the bindweed muttering dark thoughts of strangulation below ground and even repeated watering, waiting and hoeing fails to diminish wave after wave of germinating dandelions, cresses and willowherbs which just love a bit of bare ground.

In addition we’ve both been waiting for minor operations (that’s in the eyes of the NHS) for which the queues reach all around the block and back to the crematorium. The boys (all approaching their forties) still keep us awake at night worrying about how they’re coping with jobs and flats in the midst of Section 21 evictions being handed out by the thousand.

Last but not least, I’ve been designing a new workflow for recording plants which will be much faster and more accurate with the use of some AI – which turns out not to be in the identification department but in sorting out my dispersed data and separating plants from shopping lists. If it works it’ll be a life-saver and will reduce the weight of the kit that I need to carry around with me, moving from rucksack to pockets. To celebrate all this we’re just booking a holiday in Marloes where I made my first ever plant list many years ago and we’ll be staying in a cottage we’d seen a thousand times but lacked the means to rent. All this to celebrate my 80th birthday and our 6oth wedding anniversary. I had my first botany lesson from a delightful scotswoman who found me lying on the sandy footpath around St Bride’s bay and trying to identify Hemlock Water Dropwort. She told me she was a botany teacher and that she always recommended Francis Rose’s flora to beginners. I took her advice and never regretted it – in fact I’d love to see her again and thank her personally but I fear it may be too late.

All of which will (I hope) explain why I’ve been a bit remiss recently in writing regularly. Life is just so exhilarating that I find acting my age a more and more ridiculous idea. I’m off now to make Elderflower cordial – the flower heads which were steeped in boiled water overnight, smell lovely – and it will only tale an hour to bottle enough cordial to last the summer.

A rocky formation emerges from a calm sea under a clear blue sky, with gentle waves lapping against the shore and pebbles scattered on the beach.
Marloes beach

It’s a mess – but a holy mess!

A small pond surrounded by tall green grass and clusters of yellow and white irises in a garden setting.
If you look closely enough you can see a tiny patch of pale blue painted plaster where St Francis keeps an eye out for frog spawn

I know there are all manner of gardening styles, from Gertrude Jekyll’s gingham and lace to Beth Chatto and all the way to the regimental ranks of RHS Wisley. Our allotment neighbour Pete is definitely Midlands in style and we are – frankly – untidy. Some plants blow in on a gardening wind and some settle down. We don’t have weeds but we certainly have some pestilential visitors like couch and bindweed, who outstay their welcome. Other visitors are harder to evict – we have a longstanding relationship with some Tall ramping Fumitory, Fumaria bastardii whose nearest relative seems to grow in a quarry thirty miles down the road and came over from Ireland at some time in the past. A proper traveller you might say. Ours is a polymorphous, polyglot and pollyanna plot with attitude.

Madame is the seed sower and nurturer and I am the surly under-gardener who nails things together muttering dark threats, and does all the heavy work; which is OK because I like the civil engineering bit. My present project is turning four underused compost bins into eight raised beds using as much free material as possible. When I sawed it horizontally in half – as you can imagine – it became a bit floppy and so old screws were removed with my worn-out driver set and new ones driven in with the wrong heads because the others were all worn out from previous bad choices. My arms were consequently purple with bruises due to the blood thinners I take. What with the constant dripping nose from hay-fever and the ugly arms and the cursing, our neighbours gave me a wide berth. They think, maybe, that old-age is something you catch from people like me. I say my language is a homage to my maternal grandfather who taught me almost everything I know about swearing. You’ve no idea how much pleasure I get from celebrating my disused vicar status by creative cursing.

The trick to recycling old topsoil into new beds is to work out a way of minimising the distance each shovelful has to travel – so bed one which can’t be lowered because of the damson tree roots – gets the soil from bed 2 with some composted manure for good luck. Bed 2 then stays empty until some wood chip can be sourced when it will be topped up with the soil from bed three which I stored in old compost bags. That leaves bed four to be filled with much more expensive nursery-bought topsoil and compost. The upside is that beds are much easier to work and much deeper so we can grow longer carrots and parsnips and we haven’t bought a single plank or post.

So its been a good week on the whole, without paying too much attention to the elections. The fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the artists’studios of which we’re almost the last surviving founder members were such fun we returned there for the May holiday open studios. I was having a rather difficult conversation with a disarmingly lovely young welcomer and fiddling with my pixel watch nervously when I managed somehow to turn on a podcast which was sent straight to my hearing aids. Our conversation became bewildering and she must have thought I was quite demented. Madame had another such conversation with a rather deaf man when she was talking about Vermeer who did many of his paintings in pairs and he mistakenly thought that she was saying something about him painting pears. As I’m sure Sam Weller says in Pickwick Papers – ‘collapse of stout party!‘ There’s nothing funnier than a cross-purpose conversation with a complete stranger.

On Sunday, after a family meal our youngest son – who’s a chef – brought around the experimental sourdough pizza dough he’s been working on with my 20 years old starter. As we chatted he said that he’s got three of my favourite family favourites onto the menu at the restaurant. I felt absurdly proud. They’re not really mine at all but dishes I picked up over sixty years and worked up for fun. Some I’d eaten on our travels, and some came from books, all inflected with the local availability of ingredients.

He’s being evicted by his landlord (a so-called Christian charity on a Section 21 no-fault notice. As the evictions deadline has approached over the last weeks we’ve seen any amount of furniture stacked on the pavement outside their empty flats. This so-called charity has turned out thirty people from their properties in order to sell them off, under the pretext of rediscovering their original charitable aims; so it’s all perfectly legal and they make it sound as if it’s some kind of moral obligation to turf people out of their homes. Isn’t it just a bit puzzling how much suffering is caused by ultra respectable people who wear suits to work and worship the gods of commerce and profit? I think of Dante’s vestibule of hell; the place where the uncommitted, those who refuse to take sides on moral issues, those who just don’t give a shit are sent to continue their pointless existence in an eternity of suffering.

But that’s enough. Let’s get back to the allotment and finish this rather anguished piece with a couple of photos that say something about our messy manifesto. We found our first ripe strawberry today, lurking under its water-cooler micro-greenhouse. The two water butts are going to be plumbed into a row of four and could even be purposed to circulate lukewarm water beneath the greenhouse in winter, powered by a solar panel and a recycled radiator in a system we say years ago in the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth. Until today, the latest frost we’d ever experienced on the plot was on May 6th but we had a frost yesterday, today and possibly tomorrow, so- 11th, 12th and 13th May. Luckily we’d covered anything tender with fleece, but our neighbours potatoes were all frost nipped and damaged. They’ll recover but it will take them a while.

Beltane

A greenhouse interior showing rows of small tomato plants staked with bamboo canes, planted in rich brown soil with gardening tools and trays in the background.
Grafted, blight resistant tomatoes planted in the polytunnel today

I’m not a devoted follower of pagan festivals except for the neat way they divide the year into horticultural seasons that resonate with me. Checking back today increasing day length, frost free nights, warmth and sunshine which all shout summer’s coming – get the tomatoes in! and we’ve been doing just that for as long as I can check our records. Good Friday – the traditional day for potato planting is a lunar festival and varies by six dangerous weeks which means in some years we’d be coping with frosts and cold winds – so we compute the day from commonsense data. Today we also planted out ridge cucumbers, red peppers and aubergines in the warm soil of the tunnel – it was 22C this morning. The tomato plants and the others are all grafted onto vigorous rootstocks and although they’re expensive they repay the outlay with greatly enhanced crops. We harvest around 80 lbs of tomatoes every year and turn them into delicious sauces and passata which, like the home-made stock and home baked bread, are constant staples in the kitchen.

Sumer is icumen in,
Loude sing cuckou!
Groweth seed and bloweth meed,
And springth the wode now.
Sing cuckou!

This is the oldest secular song that we have; 13th century and still as vibrant as ever. I only dare quote it because this week we heard cuckoos calling in the Bannau Brycheiniog for the first time in years and they filled me with an inexplicable anxiety that we may never hear them again. Anyway I want to celebrate my mood of optimism and the return of my energy now that I’ve been given a new lease of life by our ultra observant GP who came up with the right diagnosis after all the consultants had tried and failed. Now I can prepare a 15 foot bed in one go, walk up hills without being breathless and carry bags of compost around the allotment. I sleep like a log, eat like a horse and read difficult books without losing my concentration. I go to sleep each night with a joyful idea of what needs doing on the allotment and still have the energy to write and cook when that’s done. So yes – Beltane’s a great festival this year even if green face paint would make me look a bit weird.

A close-up view of a raspberry plant featuring green and yellow leaves, set against a background of wood chips.

However, just to remind us that allotmenteering isn’t always a primrose path, the summer raspberries we planted last year are looking very chlorotic. We’ve seen it before and the cure is a foliar spray or a watering with Epsom Salt for the missing magnesium, and then just in case some chelated iron because the two deficiencies are strongly related. The long-term solution would include powdered dolomite rock but we’ll also give them a good feed with liquid seaweed stimulant and we should see an improvement within a week.

At last – a Cuckoo

A hand holding two small salamanders near a pond, surrounded by greenery.
Probably young Palmate Newts – a cryptic diary entry

I know that the last time I heard a Cuckoo was Monday May 6th 2019, and that’s because it was the same day we photographed these two young (probably Palmate) newts in the pond at Kate and Nick’s smallholding in the Bannau Brycheiniog. We were up there on the hill yesterday for a few hours, and although it was my dearest wish to hear the cuckoos call again it didn’t happen until this morning – back at the campsite – when a single cuckoo called just three times and then fell silent in the woods below the high ridge that overhangs us. I’d thought I might get quite tearful when it happened, but in fact my predominant feeling was a kind of resignation that to spot any threatened species nowadays could be the last time ever. It was more of a ghostly reminder than the vibrant song of a returning pirate, fluting their two note song in anticipation of plundering more nests and displacing more nestlings.

When we got back to the campsite yesterday the air was thick with smoke from the many barbeques making their burnt offerings to a warm and sunny evening. I’ve gone off the whole idea of barbecues in recent years; they seem to celebrate the same kind of disappearing culture as the Cuckoos. But to balance the picture another lovely sound on the campsite was the thumping of footballs and the chatter and laughter of the children as they played while their parents and grandparents, uncles, aunties and cousins – South Wales has a big family culture – sat in their folding chairs as if they were the cast for a Martin Parr photo-shoot. We’ll miss his kindly eye.

There’s always something botanical to celebrate up here; often it’s not even rare but just happens to catch your eye. This little plant was concerning Kate because it’s swamping the grass above their cottage. It’s Doves-foot Cranesbill. Geranium molle, which has found its way on to a sunny spot at the top of a high wall supporting the bank outside . It’s the perfect spot for a sun-loving plant but in the thin soil it was much smaller than its family might be in deeper richer soil alongside a hedge. In a close-up photograph it displayed its full glory. I’m not a trainspotter and for me ubiquity and weediness would never dim my affection for them. The wall was also home for a multitude of Spleenworts, Foxglove, Mullein, and a Wren which seemed unconcerned as it shot out of a small gap in the wall and past me.

Just up the track our friends have bought a field which was absolutely overgrown with brambles, bracken and shrubs. It would have been useless for any kind of grazing and so they’ve cleared it during the winter leaving a huge pile of brash in the middle. It was very dry yesterday although the stream that feeds it was still flowing fitfully. Not quite a mire but certainly not a conventional meadow, it’s an interesting place with the potential for recovering many species of plant which – like the Dove’s-foot Cranesbill – have their strong preferences. Meanwhile I was fascinated to see what had appeared already from the seedbank. The were bluebells, of course; daisies, dandelions, Mouse-ear and barren strawberries all of which must have been waiting in the soil for their moment. The bracken was just at its crozier stage so it will need dealing with- Nick says that the best way of getting rid of it is to bruise the stems with a kind of roller which disrupts the flow of sap feeding the rhizomes.

I’ve been reading a new book by David Elias called “Shaping the wild”. It’s an account of his long association with a hill-farm and its occupants near Bala lake over a period during which the farmers struggled to comply with the contradictory demands of various government subsidy demands. It describes how entrenched the battle is between conservation and environmentalists as opposed to those dedicated to so-called improvement. If, when the results of the May elections are counted, the previous incumbents are kicked out they’ll have no-one to blame except themselves.

As I write this, a flock of house sparrows is working the hedges in front of the campervan. That’s what I mean when I write about the ordinary. As Joni Mitchell’s song says – we don’t know what we’ve got ’till it’s gone!

The moon and the weather – their effect on the shed door and me.

Exterior view of a potting shed with a wooden sign labeled 'POTTING SHED' in a window framed with wire mesh.

Our shed goes up and down – not in a major way but enough to make opening the door quite difficult at times. When we first put it up we’d seen enough tottering sheds to know that if you just stand them on the ground – sooner or later the footings will rot and they’ll fall over – and so our shed has foundations – a thick layer of gravel topped with sand and then capped with level paving stones. What we couldn’t have known is that our clay subsoil seems to rise and fall in harmony with the water table, thereby twisting the frame and jamming the door.

I share this entirely uninteresting fact because in my earlier reflections on the way in which gardening is the kind of practice that leads to flourishing, I left out some threads which can be woven into a bigger picture. The rising and falling of the shed always seemed to me to be down to the rising and falling of the water table. The allotment is close to the river and we have at least one small underground stream running below it. In flood conditions it occasionally breaks out from under the apple trees and runs across the surface. The piece of pipe that secures the polytunnel door is driven into the earth and you can see the water level at the bottom of it. There’s no serious hydrological kit involved at all, if the door is hard to open the foundations have dried out and QED the allotment will need watering.

I once visited a pottery factory in Wrecclesham near Farnham where they used the local clay to make traditional pots of all shapes and sizes. Their kiln, a large brick built bottle kiln had no obvious pyrometers to measure temperature and when I asked, our guide said that they didn’t use seger cones or any other indicator. They packed the kiln the same way as they’d always done, and when the pots at the top had shrunk to the same height as a corbel that you could see through a spyhole in the intense heat they knew – along with a great deal of practice – that the firing was done. It was a kind of organic knowledge rooted in history and experience.

Where’s this all going then? and what’s the moon got to do with it? Well the missing thread from the previous post was the concept of seasonality. We live in a world a world dominated by constant artificial light, supermarkets which (just for the moment) seem to be immune to the seasons and sell the same food the year round and fly it in, or drive it up from southern Spain in convoys of heavy lorries. If we want sunshine we can just travel towards it and with the benefit of air conditioning, warmth and cold only affect us on the walk from the car park.

The allotment necessarily puts us in the midst of a constantly changing seasonal world and we live in a subtly different seasonal timetable. The weather forecast becomes as important for us as it would to a farmer or a fisherman. Sunrise and sunset are as important once again to us as they were to our distant ancestors, spring, summer, autumn and winter aren’t just words any more, and anyone who reads books on gardening or farming will encounter the esoteric theories of Rudolph Steiner who wrote a great deal about horticulture and who thought that the moon emitted some sort of invisible and undetectable force that influenced the growth of plants. These days the Biodynamic method has crept in at the edges of the mainstream and the moon certainly has an effect on the tides. Our campervan is parked within 100 yards of the river Severn and we get flood warnings from the Government whenever winds, river level and tides combine to make a possible flood. As gardener I’ve always wondered whether the passing moon has any effect on groundwater and a little bit of research suggests that the moon has a greater effect on groundwater levels if you’re very close to the sea but that it also has a much lesser effect on groundwater – measured in a few millimeters at most and that the probable cause is the gravitational pull on the earth being sufficient to cause these tiny distortions.

So our understanding of the earth as an immutable lump of solid ground isn’t quite right. Times, tides, seasons, and weather systems are in constant motion around us whether or not we stop racing about and consider them in relation to our gardens and farms. When Copernicus used his mathematics to suggest the theory and later Galileo used his telescope to prove it, they risked their necks to describe the rhythmic motions of the solar system, because it upset the static view of of a universe with the earth at the centre, and bit by bit our view of the earth and our position in it began to change. Today just a few flat earthers tie their hopes to the idea of an immutable earth but all the signs point to its fragility. It’s a massively depressing thought unless we learn to live in this new dynamic which more closely resembles a complex dance or a multiverse orrery such as was invented by Phillip Pullman whose alethiometer discerns the truth in his novels. But that’s a beautiful fiction; a mythical object that tells the truth about mysteries.

So our choice is whether to retreat to the bunkers in bafflement or to see this immense mutability as a source of wonder – and here’s the link back to flourishing or if you prefer Aristotle’s word, eudaimonia . If human fulfilment can be found through the cultivation and practice of virtues until they become benign habits, then they need to be practiced in the real world, and not the wobbly stage set of “the good life”. Here’s another, longer list of the virtues:

Courage, Temperance, Generosity, Magnificence, Magnanimity, Proper Ambition, Patience, Truthfulness, Wittiness, Friendliness, Modesty, and Justice.

I hope to unpick some more threads from the delightful fleece in the coming weeks.

Two figures walking along a rocky beach with crashing waves and a misty landscape in the background.
Hell’s Mouth bay on Lleyn if you look carefully at that wave you can see how it got its English name

Storm brewing – in every sense!

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Rain clouds gathering over Lizard point today

The weather in Cornwall has been pretty terrible since we’ve been here, but we’ve managed to get out for a walk on most days. So far it’s always culminated in rain, and most of the time it’s been blown in by storm winds. Last night it was so strong I could make out the somewhat orchestral sounds of the timpani as waves crashed into the cliffs and the shingle harbour below us, then there was what Matthew Arnold called “the melancholy soft withdrawing roar” of the waves retreating from the shingle beach; clattering and sharp, more brassy than soft last night, like a chorus of a thousand stonechats – and then the woodwinds battering and flickering around the windows searching for gaps to whistle in. There are times when we miss being in the campervan, but not last night. Yesterday morning we tried to walk across to the Caerthillian valley to do a botanical reconnaissance in preparation for another visit in spring, but we were beaten by the cold wind and retreated to the pub for fish and chips. Then I spent the rest of the day researching how so many rare plants manage to survive the soil round here, with high levels of magnesium (poisonous to most plants) low levels of nitrogen, and low levels of calcium. It turns out that the magic trick is to grow in conjunction with invisible underground fungal networks which have almost magical powers to search out water and convert the dodgy soil into food for the plants while blocking the baddies in return for a share of the plants’ photosynthesized sugars. It was an afternoon well spent I think, leaving me excited that at the very core of nature lies millennia of cooperation. The rarities simply couldn’t exist without each other.

Naturally the Lizard, beautiful though it is, is not the center of the universe and elsewhere, politicians are busily trying to reverse that process of mutuality and convert our once rich culture into serpentine dust. You should treat that last sentence as a metaphor. The current news is as depressing and disturbing as it could possibly be. I’m very used to seeing the degradation of Cornwall through neglect, but that attitude which was so apparent in the past where it was said that at the bottom of any hole you could find a Cornishman, but it was rarely mentioned that at the top there was almost always an Englishman stuffing the money into his pockets. Now the contagion is spreading through the whole country as decades of neglect through profiteering are too obvious to be covered up by corporate or government doublespeak. There’s an ugly mood afoot and it’s growing so quickly that even a quiet stroll down a quiet seaside lane is compromised and diminished by fearful thoughts of the coming storm.

A little list

Montbretia (Crocosmia), Winter Heliotrope, Hart’s Tongue fern, Tree Mallow, Pellitory of the wall, Common Gorse, Foxglove, Sea Beet, Nettle, Black Spleenwort, Alexanders, Sea Radish, Purple Dewplant, Sea Carrot, Hottentot Fig, Bramble, English Stonecrop (17 species)

When we say that the Lizard is one of the most biodiverse places in the country, that little (and very incomplete) list is only the beginning. I’ve seen many of them in the centre of Bath, and the seaside specialists pop up along the whole of the west coast. But this was just a brisk fifteen minute walk in the rain alongside a lovely Cornish hedge. If we had time and a great deal of patience we could find over 900 in just this small area. You can rightly feel as if you’re touching a great beauty here.

How to flourish and live beautiful lives in a hostile world should concern us more than it often does. As nature struggles from extractive farming, chemical desolation , carbon dioxide, global heating and polluted rivers we’re neither winners or beneficiaries of all that bogus productivity. We’re the victims. We need to demand more than lowlife chicanery from our politicians, the so-called tech titans and the client media who feed us poisonous lies. Across the green from us there’s a man who’s probably got severe mental health issues and regularly bellows “The earth is burning“, sometimes for an hour at a time. He’s not wrong.

It’s today – weeeeeeee!

Choices, choices. Should I illustrate the beginning of a new era with a sunrise, or the end of an old one with a sunset? And what should the photograph express? Should it be triumphal? a resolution achieved; or should it be a lamentation for the passing of the moment? In the end I opted for a misty sunrise over the river in spate, with the architectural vacuity of the Crest Nicholson development, the Dredge Bridge and a solitary seagull – because every adventure has to begin where you are. In any case I’m only meeting a personal target. Nothing will change and I’ll stagger over the finishing line wondering what all the fuss was about. The stars and planets will not align in any special manner; no flowers will bloom as I walk to the shops. It will be a perfectly ordinary winter day; grey, drizzly and cold enough to wear my favourite Shackleton jumper – scratchy, warm and smelling of the Welsh mountain sheep who gifted their woolly coats for my benefit. This blog, and my life will continue in much the same way as a celebration of the ordinary because ordinary becomes the capitalised “Ordinary” when you see through the distractions.

And what of it? ten years of trying to make sense of a stolen world that’s lost the will to live. Ten years of being governed by the clueless and the sociopathic, the narcissistic, the spineless and their goons – kept in power by the infinitely malleable consciences of Pavlov’s voters who’d kill their mothers for a Greggs sausage roll. I think I’ve explained that enough. I’m off to a quieter place where I can breathe.

Keeping a journal is one thing. Publishing it day by day is another altogether because there’s so little happening. No juicy confessions of sins committed or even intended because my life is straightforwardly dull. Got up; looked at my watch; made tea; ate five biscuits which I dunked; got up again and made coffee; counted out the day’s medications; emptied the dishwasher; went back to bed and read an interesting book on fungi. There’s nothing there to attract the attention because the real interest is always in the interaction between the mundane and the mind. Who was that rough sleeper outside Sainsbury’s? How did he get there? what were the crucial choices in his life that led him to the pavement and a life of begging? How did those two shoplifters teach themselves their routine of violent quarreling to escape investigation by the two police who stopped them and then backed away? Does this charity shop smell of old clothes? Is the man in that couple over there being attentive or controlling? Why is my plate cold?

The romance of life is always there but sometimes you have to look for it. The unusual plant growing in a crack in the pavement isn’t going to shout out to you; you just have to be interested enough to look. The otter swimming in the river, the little shoal of Dace glittering in the shallows, the Fumitory on the allotment that – aside from being an invasive pest – is just different enough to warrant further investigation.

When our first child was just old enough we would walk up Granby Hill in Clifton which still had its cobbled gutters and it could take an eternity because he was so fascinated by the discarded litter trapped in the cracks between the setts. Cigarette buts, silver foil, broken glass, bits of shiny metal and twigs all seemed to bewitch him. He would slowly walk on, head down, savouring each and every object as if it were a treasure waiting to be discovered. I was always happy when he was engaged in this way. It’s a fundamental human act to weave stories, myths and legends around the ordinary and everyday.

I’ve been around a long time, and worked in many places that were rich with stories. I suppose that’s where I learned how to value them. People, it turned out, rarely wear their experiences on their sleeves, but with a bit of prompting and some patience, the most unpromising lives can suddenly blaze, flame out like a reignited log on a fire. The Severn Pilot who would walk the banks of the river on his days off in order to memorise the shifting of the safe passages who was walking one day in thick fog when a small tanker heading for Sharpness came slowly past and a voice called out “Is that you, Peter?” The cider maker known by everyone as “Doughnut” whose name was bestowed on his first day at primary school when he wore a white shirt with a red band around it and whose drinking had put him into a hostel and who grew a lovely garden there and told me some of the unexpected tricks of his trade. The nickname persisted as long as the community that attached it. Another old man who told me how they hid barrels of cider from the Customs and Excise under the hedges to avoid exceeding their permitted limit. The oldest man I’d ever buried; 103 years old who moved in with his son who was in his 70’s when he was 90 and told him that the garden was a disgrace and then dug it from end to end. The electrical engineer who had saved a fellow worker’s life with his first aid training and told me it was one of the most powerful experiences of his life. You could easily pass any one of them on the street and not notice them, but give them some time and you’ll discover for yourself the power of the Ordinary.

I’ve never forgotten a visit to an old man to arrange his wife’s funeral. Back in the day he’d been an old Redcliffe boy and played rugby for the Old Reds. He was in a wheelchair with both legs amputated. As we chatted he asked if I’d like to see a photograph of his wife. Of course I said yes – I’m always a sucker for a photograph – and he pulled out a photo that had been taken on his honeymoon which only amounted to a single night in a Weymouth hotel. They were both standing on the promenade, he in his casuals; white open necked shirt and pressed trousers that, true to the fashions of the day, looked loose and baggy but you could see he was something of a catch. She – standing next to him – was just so stunningly beautiful I’ve never forgotten her. A faded and rather crumpled black and white photo came to me in a blaze of light and I learned something about the fragility of life and the way that love blesses everything it comes into contact with.

So yes, the Ordinary is anything but ordinary and – as the saying goes – for a hero the harbour is the place you set out from, although it’s good to get back to it when the sea’s rough and the wind is blowing a gale. I’ve had ten years of retirement and ten years of typing away at this blog and it’s been the most tremendous fun; learning entirely new skills, taking up field botany and doing some serious photography. I’m still struggling to get my head around an intellectually satisfying account of how the concepts green and spirituality could be linked into some way of fending off our collective descent into a hell of our own making and I fully intend to keep going with this blog and my love affair with the Ordinary as long as I can. Madame and I are very happy living in our virtual pub, even if outsiders might see it as a small flat in a concrete building. I knew this moment would be lacking in drama but there we are. I’ve just completed one million and thirteen words about the Potwell Inn.

Next!