Tag: environmental catastrophe

Botany on the Damascus Road

We’ve just got back from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) and things are getting desperate. Our friends, 1000 feet up in the hills, have already seen one major fire come perilously close to their smallholding which has hundreds of trees that they’ve planted and a small patch of ancient woodland. Despite two large water cisterns, and a smaller tank they came close to running out of water for their allotment, for their house and for the sheep, pigs and hens they keep last year, and things are worse now. Back at the Potwell Inn the allotment is suffering. The legume crop was a write-off, although a climbing french bean is hanging on in there and the polytunnel tomatoes have stopped setting fruit after the first truss. We’re having to contemplate a complete reset of our crops in the face of the inevitable heatwaves and droughts to come. We’re all living fear of the water to the troughs being turned off because we’re a third of the way through our stored water and most allotments have no stores at all. What’s clear is that the heat loving plants – cucumbers, aubergines, courgettes and squashes are loving it but the cool temperate plants are suffering.

There’s talk of forest fires joining up in France, but this is really about global warming and economic and societal breakdown and the last deadly throes of neoliberal greed as exemplified by the brutal and illegal wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. There is a very disturbed young man in our street who will lean out of his first floor window and scream at the top of his voice “the earth is burning” for hours . Sometimes the dog walkers and picnic loungers on the green will join with the sunbathers and shout abuse at him. But he isn’t wrong and taking an ostrich attitude isn’t going to turn away the wrath of the damaged ecosystem.

So, it being too hot to do anything much more than keep the plants alive I’ve been forced into a big think. My lifelong passion for plants was really rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of their lovely forms and colours. Later on I got interested in identifying them, photographing, painting and writing about them and of course growing and eating them. But I’ve always had a particular love for the urban rogues and weeds; the plants that love to send their roots into places other plants just couldn’t tolerate. I love the survivors who cling to life by modifying their life-cycles and surviving as seeds and underground rhizomes during the hot and the frozen seasons.

So I’ve paid particular attention to the plants that grow outside our flat in the most hostile positions on and below a tall south facing wall. They survive not only drought and frost but inundation with weedkiller, vinegar and salt not to mention the attentions of the local council workers who scrape them up with metal tools; but still they grow back with almost heroic stoicism. The kind of stress that would send tender F1 Hybrid into seizure and death seems to be an accelerant to these guerilla weeds.

Over the years I’ve been so focused on the identity, form and appearance of wildflowers that I’ve barely thought about how they do their thing. I was aware that the study of plant DNA has driven any number of family changes as we realize that relatedness isn’t all about appearances and so many different species might share the same evolutionary outcome without actually being related at all. So a couple of weeks ago, and totally fed-up at my ignorance of anything to do with DNA or the difference between chromosomes and genes I resolved to find out more.

There were two slightly different results of my binge reading. Firstly there were proper eureka moments as I began dimly to understand how plants reproduce, grow, deal with attacks, weather and soil differences with the truly breathtaking assistance of their DNA. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it became impossible to see the life of plants in the same way, once I understood that they possess amazing powers of sentience with which they are able to negotiate with their broader environment, I could almost feel the tiny electrical charges flowing through the plants and triggering the needed response through a series of chemical, biological interactions initiated by a jigsaw like connection between the smallest molecular components of cells. If you think plants are wonderful to look at, knowing something about their invisible inner lives will blow your mind.

I talk about this almost as a kind of conversion experience – hence the Damascus Road of the title. All my spreadsheets and careful labelling of thousands of photographs suddenly feel like butterflies pinned to a board. If plants can sense what’s going on around them, anticipate and initiate an appropriate response, then they’re doing the kind of thing that we do but using a very different set of “plantish” properties which are bafflingly and beautifully complex. The western world’s so-called “tree of life” with diatoms at the bottom and us (and some kind of god) at the top sets us into a colonial earth. But there are some first nation cultures which see the plant world as part of the community. Without plants at least a couple of the drugs that keep me going are plant based or synthesized and that alone seems to make thankfulness appropriate. It doesn’t seem entirely bizarre to say thank-you to the cabbage you’re cutting or the carrot you’re pulling. This afternoon I made fig compote and that (the flavour, not my cooking!) deserves a round of applause. Plants give us so much; nutritionally, aesthetically, and for healing us because many cancer treatments are synthesized from plants. They’re amazingly clever at making the kind of molecules that we can use to our own benefit. The kind of attitudinal change we desperately need if we’re going to avoid being caught up and killed in another extinction event would be to treat our plants – and not just the delicate hybrids that feed us but all our plants with the respect that they deserve. Maybe those roguish and indestructible weeds have the exact secret we need to ensure the survival of the earth.

Spadgerland

Forget the vanilla perfume of a madelaine for one moment and think of a single sound that takes you right back to your childhood home. Mine would be the sound of the House Sparrow, or rather sparrows, because they’re such convivial birds it’s hard to imagine just the one on its own.

I’ve renamed this campsite for entirely selfish reasons. If you recognise the tin roofed reception building, the cider press and the orchard then you won’t need me to tell you. If you haven’t a clue where it is then Eldorado is waiting for you – provided you can find it. There are enough clues scattered through the ten years of the Potwell Inn that you stand a real chance of getting here if you can be bothered to wade through a million plus words. Years ago I saw my first kingfisher nearby. Today I heard and then saw a red Kite circling overhead; I’ve never seen the Ospreys that hunt across the area but hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful. What makes this place so much greater than the ornithological creme de la creme is the abundance of the peasant birds, the fish and chip birds; the ordinary everyday types that are rapidly becoming extraordinary as we continue to poison and disturb the environment. This paragraph is illustrated by a tall and slightly unkempt looking hedge. The campsite has taken all the best ideas from the French sites and there is a small enclave in which every pitch is a self-contained enclosure surrounded on three sides by tall hedges. The hedge at the top of this paragraph is barely ten feet from the campervan door. There are no dogs allowed to disturb the wildlife, and the customers self select after their first visit. The quiet campsite policies make every day feel like the Sunday afternoons of my childhood. In fact the sound of children playing outside every evening is an equally chilling reminder that children once played outside and had never seen a Playstation on a smartphone. Happiness doesn’t always need to come commodified and packaged like a supermarket turkey.

Running a pub, even an imaginary one called the Potwell Inn with its name stolen from an HG Wells comic novel is extremely hard work and – dare I say – very poorly paid or rather not paid at all. And so these little campervan breaks are an essential escape. I often call them adventures because with a seventeen year old campervan almost anything could go wrong. Yesterday, having packed everything, I turned on the ignition and there was a profound silence. It was a glum start but I had a cunning plan. If I could just get the engine running, I could get to the campsite running everything off the alternator; as long as I didn’t stall the engine, which could leave us blocking a narrow road until I could get it going again -because I’d already used the emergency NOCO jump lead battery twice. It all went swimmingly until we arrived at reception and I turned off the engine without thinking. Oh gloom, oh silence. Mercifully the NOCO delivered for a third time and we managed to park up and call the AA who came this morning with a new battery and fitted it in ten minutes. He was a cheerful South Walian. Yesterday’s groceries were delivered in the evening by another cheerful delivery driver who shared my surname. There followed a long and serpentine conversation as we tried to establish some connection between us but I’m afraid we Somerset Poles cannot claim any legitimate Welsh blood although according to the driver the other kind of illegitimate bloodline was just as likely.

Anyway back to the birds. The sparrow is known in some places as the spadger, also spuggie, or (inexplicably phillip!). They were constant companions and the soundtrack to my childhood in suburban east Bristol. In fact they’re a bit complicated to identify because there are three species that are what sometimes get called little brown numbers. House Sparrows, Hedge Sparrows and even Dunnock rarely stand in an ID parade for our benefit – and so to my untrained eye they will have to look similar until they don’t any more. Last night just before sunset a flock of sparrows prepared to nest in the hedge on our pitch. My goodness they’re a chatty lot. Chickens roost in much the same way, each of them competing for the warmest spot in the middle. They’re much safer from predators in a thick hedge so I can see why they do it but they make quite a hullabaloo while they greet each other, quarrel a bit, shove each other off their respective branches and settle for the night. We became fascinated by the range of sounds that they can make without ever producing anything in the least tuneful. As the sun set they stopped their fidgeting and as twilight came they were silent. It was surprisingly moving to share that moment.

Today, using the Merlin app, apart from the sparrows I recorded Woodpigeons, Swifts, the Red Kite, barn Swallows, Blackbirds, Robins and Collared Doves; bread and butter birds in terms of rarity but many of them declining in numbers. Coming here always reminds me of the sheer joy that the natural world brings to us if we just stand, watch and listen. There is an ancient bond between us and the wildlife that surrounds us and it’s not sentimental or gushing leftie nonsense to hold that thought close in a destructive culture fed by greed and division.

There isn’t a division between so-called forward looking and backward looking politics, or if there is it’s characterised by backwardness in the industrial and financial wilderness and forward looking amongst those of us who actually understand what’s worth saving when the earth is burning. I write the Potwell Inn, even on the rare sunny and dry Welsh days, not because I’m a politician with an A4 list of policies to mend the world, but because human flourishing depends on the much broader and complicated set of behaviours that we call a culture. I’m naming this campsite Spadgerland in honour of the rogues; vagabonds; weeds; fish and chip birds and vermin which collectively give our lives depth and meaning.

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Foodie business

There’s a mirror in the lift and today I caught sight of myself as we came back from getting a few last bits of shopping before we revisit God’s Own Country (Wales of course) yet again; I just can’t keep away. I’m ashamed to say I looked completely raddled – red eyed, my hair which has turned curly makes me look like Medusa in the dim light, and a million miles from the picture of me that I keep safe in my head – like Dorian Gray without the excesses.

The red eyes are partly down to hay fever which has been shocking this year; but three heatwaves in quick succession have taken their toll on my body clock and I’m irrevocably awake every morning at around 5.00am – the same time as I can hear the allotment screaming for water in my fertile imagination. So today we were on the allotment soon after six – to give it a thorough soaking – and then we picked anything that looked edible to take with us to Wales; dug some early potatoes for lunch and came home by 7.30am. Then we cooked the aubergines we harvested a couple of days ago by roasting them and stuffing them with richly spiced lamb mince giving them a distinctly North African flavour. I cooked some stewed apple, made up two jars of fridge pickled cucumbers with our own cucumbers and dill; some fig compote and then finally sat down at 11.00 for a cup of tea. So perhaps the red-eye was also to do with being knackered.

Going away, for me at least, is extremely stressful because I’m terrified of leaving something behind. I’ve left our beds behind, even the complete set of tent poles on one occasion – so remembering to pack all our plentiful meds, every computer and charger lead we could conceivably use, not to mention two portable routers (you can’t be too careful) various laptops, phones and Madame’s tablet; books, cameras, maps, GPS unit and so on. One of our neighbours asked if we were moving out last time we took the campervan to Cornwall.

But tomorrow we’ll set out on the busiest day of the year on the M4 and M5 to travel by our much practiced secret route, on which – unless we meet a tractor, a school bus or a herd of cows gets us there in rather less time than queuing outside Newport for several hours in the blistering heat. We’ll be tired I’m sure, but nothing is better guaranteed to give me a long night’s sleep than the sound of sheep on the hill. I have a rather higher clock speed than most people which has impacted my life quite a bit. I piss people off – mostly managers and jobsworths – because I can’t keep my mouth shut when one of them says, or does something really stupid. Our sons have inherited this tendency from me and we all need these regular breaks to let ourselves slow down and cool the brains a bit. Naturally this won’t stop me from a bit of plant hunting when I think Madame isn’t looking.

This is an inherently busy time of the year because harvesting and cooking are joined at the hip, and since the harvesting always produces a surplus of something or other (courgettes?) the cooking extends into preserving, freezing and storing so yes, the days can be very long, but home grown and home prepared food is in a league of its own when it comes to nutrition and flavour. It’ll be another early start tomorrow but the other reason we need to go away is because the builders are coming back to repair and re-lay the bathroom floor after its flooding last year, and they’ll be taking out the seat of mercy for two days. Neither of us fancy trudging around Bath looking for a friendly shop or cafe several times a day. The campervan has a very serviceable loo and it’s only eight feet away! Meanwhile some photos taken on the allotment in the early morning coolness today. The sweet corn has thrown out its first silks – it’s self pollinating and the upper male flowers shower the lower female silks with pollen which is in itself a bit of a challenge for me in the confined space of the polytunnel. However it keeps the cobs out of the reach of the badgers which otherwise would eat the lot every year. It’s our own version of that old government slogan – Protect and Survive. Thank goodness ours works very well and theirs is best left untested.

How to survive a heatwave

Taken over Alveston, sitting in Helen and Alan’s garden in July 2020

I think this was one Filton pilot’s attempt to cheer us all up by making smoke trails of smileys and hearts in the sky during the post-apocalyptic gloom of Covid, and it worked. This year we’ve sweated and grumbled our way through three heatwaves and by now we’re used to coping by completely changing our daily timetable. No more lingering in bed until 10.00am – I seem to have changed my body clock so much I wonder if I’ll still be waking up at 5.00am in the winter. There’s really no alternative but to reserve the very earliest part of the day for whatever hard physical work on the allotment needs to be done. It’s not that bad – I don’t set any alarms I just wake up, make a cup of strong tea and eat my regulation five fruit shortcake biscuits – that’s breakfast (sorry Doc!) . Today we cleared the failed pea crop away and hoed the plants off at the roots to gift any remaining nitrogen nodules to the purple sprouting broccoli which follows it. Then I sharpened up the hoe – always carry a sharpener when using hoes, scythes and secateurs and learn how to use it. A sharp hoe razors off the weeds with minimum effort. Two passes of the hoe and the spring tine rake is enough to clean the bed and then I spread compost or whatever on the bed and work it in with a three tined cultivator with a long handle. These are all simple hand tools and they’re worth their weight in gold. I once attempted to rotavate the bindweed and couch grass out of a new garden and it was a complete disaster. They both regenerate and spread from the tiniest fragment of their underground roots – but I didn’t know that at the time. My friend and mentor Don Streatfield once put a piece of bindweed root into the freezer for weeks and planted it again in a pot. It grew again with undiminished enthusiasm.

So then I marked out the two beds using a line and a long builder’s tape. I know it’s a faff, and measuring the distance between plants might look over-generous today, but next winter you’ll see they needed every inch of legroom. Then we water the holes and drop the plants in, firming the soil around them and water them again, and then we net them to keep out the cabbage white butterflies whose caterpillars will strip the leaves down to the ribs if you let them.

The peas and the broad beans were a complete failure this year. The wet spring retarded their growth and then the succession of heatwaves pretty well finished them off. They’re typical temperate, cool loving plants and the failure isn’t just down to our poor gardening skills; farmers have lost millions of pounds worth of crops this year and I expect both will be hard even to find frozen in the supermarket. If you live in an air conditioned house and drive to an air conditioned workplace in an air conditioned car it would be hard to gain any understanding of environmental breakdown such as growers and gardeners have.

So we work until it’s too hot and then we come home. Sometimes we have a late breakfast, but our preferred timetable is to have a late lunch followed by a siesta and then just a sandwich in the evening. It’s a Spanish way of life that suits the weather perfectly and keeps the allotment going through the hard times. Today I cooked a sort of paella, flavoured with smoked paprika, chilli, garlic and tomatoes in a strong fish stock and topped with pieces of roasted pepper and monkfish fried in a hot pan. Tomorrow we’ll be making dill pickles with the miniature ridge cucumbers we gathered today. Before that I need to finish digging the bed where the broad beans came to nothing and removing the bindweed as early in the morning as possible. It’s hard work but bindweed just has to be dug out every few years. We’ve been powering through our seven water butts and the next bit of civil engineering will be to link four of them together and install much bigger guttering on the shed and the greenhouse so we don’t lose a single drop of rain.

Above is a view of Bath from the top of the hill at Sham Castle taken in July a few years ago during a very hot walk, and the balloon below has been a regular sight during fine weather spells in the past, although there are rather fewer this year , perhaps due to the cost of gas to power them. I once had a flight in a balloon that took off at exactly. the same place. There are houses all around and so we launched as fast as a high speed lift and then flew pretty well up-river for an hour or so enjoying long moments of uncanny silence punctuated by awesome roars from the burner. It was a day not unlike today and at one point we sailed above a fox crossing a field which clearly had no idea we were there. The landing was less eventful than I had been fearing the whole trip and I got home with no idea how to explain, let alone describe the experience I’d just had. Improbably, the company which owned the balloon ( I was a guest of the pilot) was based just fifty yards down the road from where we now live.

It’s an odd time we’re living through. We’re researching plants for the allotment to give ourselves the best chance of landing a decent crop, and it may turn out that broad (fava) beans and peas will have to come off the plan – something we’ll deeply regret because they’re so powerfully better than their frozen supermarket equivalents. The upside seems to be that the cucumbers, melons and squashes all love the heat and the sunshine.

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.