Tag: environmental catastrophe

The spuds are in at last

Madame wielding the rake with the Couch grass growling just outside.

I see from the newspapers that the national potato crop is in trouble again. On our way back up from Mendip last week we took the motorway and passed two heavy tractors attempting to plough a couple of sodden, clay rich fields on the Somerset Levels. The resulting mess was disturbing as it combined the pointless destruction of the soil with the consumption of a lot of diesel fuel. The grass pasture on either side of the hedges was looking green and fine. A bit wet for grazing, maybe, due to the probability of poaching the ground, but nonetheless recoverable. How anyone can claim that this terrible unseasonable weather is not connected to climate breakdown angers me. The Guardian reported that this is potentially the smallest potato crop since the last crisis in – wait for it – 2020. Separating out two events four years apart as if they were random acts of god, and seen in the light of record breaking temperatures with crazy winds and rainfall. In my book that’s not two short crises but one long one. Figures of speech like ploughing on make themselves ridiculous first and then redundant soon afterwards.

So I was almost pleased to see that George Monbiot had written a piece in the Guardian on beef farming. I say “almost” because almost every time I read his pieces I find they make me crosser and crosser. Here’s a writer who – on the face of it – should be a firm supporter of campaigns to de-intensify farming but instead completely loses the plot and shrieks at potential allies like a fundamentalist preacher. He starts badly enough by insisting that anyone who fails to agree with him must be the victim of some kind of sinister neuro linguistic programming conspiracy. Not, you see, someone who has also done their best to examine the facts and come to a different conclusion. Having sawn any possible objections off at the knees (a non vegan metaphor I’m afraid but I can’t find a comprehensible alternative); he then goes on to attack regenerative farming by claiming there is no acceptable (that’s a key qualification) scientific evidence to back any of its claims. Here’s a little bit of incontestable evidence that should encourage Monbiot to decide whose side he’s on.

Jeremy Padfield and his business partner Rob Addicott, farm about 1000 acres of the land under Higher Level Stewardship Agreements of which 80 acres are specifically conservation managed for wildlife.  Their combined Duchy farms became LEAF demonstration farms in 2006. Over subsequent years soil organic matter averages out at around 5%; no insecticides have been used within the last 5 years; weed killing is targeted only reactively; antibiotic use has been reduced by 58% and  plastic use is down by 60%. Minimum tillage leads to a 68% drop in fuel consumption; water is intensively managed and stored, and solar energy meets much of the needs of the farm buildings. As well as wider wildlife field margins, Stratton Farms have been experimenting with skylark plots and wide strips of wildflowers and companion plants sown through the crops. Additionally, 20 acres of trees and 2000 metres of hedgerow have been planted. 

Notes on an indoor meeting of the Bath Natural History Society, written by me.

This isn’t, by the way, a kind of bucolic lament for the blue remembered hills. They achieve this by using extremely high tech equipment and it’s that convergence of scientific know-how with boots on the ground that makes these farms profitable. Monbiot, on the other hand takes up what I like to think of as the Amos Starkadder position. I sometimes think he’s got a bit of an Old Testament prophet in him; possibly a new Jeremiah – I suspect he’d like to think of himself as a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness; but in the end he’s always going to be Amos Starkadder – the fundamentalist preacher to the Quivering Brethren in Stella Gibbons’ lovely 1930’s novel Cold Comfort Farm. Amos Starkadder was unable to distinguish between the sins a bunch of small-time village dwellers and the inhabitants of Dante’s inferno. I’m always delighted, by the way, that Dante enlisted the first circle of hell for the eternal punishment of those people whose sin was not to give a shit!

Anyway the price of separating Amos from his flock was a small Ford van to travel the country and trouble thousands of moderately innocent souls who might once have cast a lustful glance in the direction of the squire’s son. or daughter (oh go on then, wife)! and then worried too much about it. George Monbiot makes the sixth form debating society’s error of allowing the perfect to drive out the good. Far from encouraging small and achievable gains to fight climate destruction, he treats a 30 acre mixed smallholding as identical to 50,000 head of cattle in a gigantic American feedlot, and then denounces the both of them with his shrill rhetoric. The thought of going after the biggest threat first seems not to cross his mind, which suggests to me that his views on farming are -to misuse an old Marxist term – overdetermined by a prior commitment to veganism and the memory of an unsuccessful attempt to live the rural life in Wales. He implied that the farmers didn’t take to him and the locals treated him rather dismissively in Welsh! How very dare they! They’re all dammed!

The haunting premonition of a vegan future leaves me shivering amidst 100.000,000 lonely wind lashed trees surrounded by huge industrialised vegetable farms and stainless gloop tanks all operated by (who else?) Monsanto and Cargill. I’m not badly disposed towards veganism, but I’m in no sense attracted by it. We’re walking up in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) this week and the local pub does excellent faggots at half the price of the cheapest steaks. The slaughterhouse is a ten minute drive away. There’s a lesson in sustainable living, somewhere in there.

But finally I want to draw your attention to the quality of the allotment earth. It’s been mollycoddled, sheeted , hoed and fed for nearly 8 years now, during which time it’s changed from intractable and shallow alluvial clay and stones to deep, black, friable soil. The 10X4 beds that took a week to clear of couch grass and nettles when we took the plot on can now be shallow tilled in a few minutes. Of course it’s not going to save the earth, but there are probably 300 allotments on the whole site and half a dozen sites in Bath. Every day we see bicycles delivering organic veg to cafes and restaurants around the town and regenerative farms getting going everywhere. So I’ll end with a question. Hi George do you really believe that all this is a waste of time and a greenwashing campaign by shadowy industrial finance? Is it all a distraction? or have you been out eating too much rich spring grass and got blown.

Immersive plant hunting

Two of our grandchildren playing in Dyrham Park

There was a moment on Tuesday’s fern hunt when a troubling thought occurred to me. “Why” – I wondered – “do I get so emotional about finding plants?” I think it’s a good question and a useful one. I remember we were once walking on Black Down (Burrington Combe) up at the top where the carboniferous limestone has been eroded away exposing the Old Red Sandstone underneath which is more acidic than the limestone everywhere else, and has an altogether different mix of plants. I was confused about this eccentric outcrop in the Mendips for years until it was explained to me how different the geology of that little area is. So there we were wandering along one of the tracks when suddenly a tiny flower caught my attention and I saw at once that it was an Eyebright, Euphrasia. As usual for me it’s not tremendously rare although it’s difficult to identify fully because it hybridises so readily. But what ran through my mind wasn’t the rational sequence of questions such as a professional field botanist might ask, as much as an explosion of joy; an anschauung, the intuitive understanding that comes with something discovered or revealed. No-one loves a list more than me, but that encounter involved a beholding such as might inspire a poet or artist; but when it comes to describing it, it’s just like trying to hold a writhing eel – trust me on that one, I’ve done it and failed on both counts!

The troubling moment on Tuesday came when I wondered if this emotional response might be no more than a form of sentimentality.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’
    ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
    ‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’

Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

Obviously you can take a fact and wrap it in sentimental drivel but it will always lie dead and cold on the page. On Tuesday the first fern we found was an almost perfect Rustyback; a textbook example if you really must but I’d prefer to think of it as an expression, an outpouring of natural energy which, when you give it its name, connects itself to you. The plants become my sisters and brothers – hence all the emotion – love, gratitude, respect not to mention aesthetic pleasure. The naming doesn’t create the plant; but it gives it an address, a point of reference to which I can return – named, and therefore capable of being found and greeted again in a way that makes the earth a bigger, more relatable place.

The Rustyback fern

What is undoubtedly the case is that my childhood was full of such moments because – especially during the long holidays – I wandered (unsupervised) for miles through the countryside with my friend Eddie; laid in the grass on Rodway hill and watched the wind as it swayed the harebells, swung on the trees in the big woods, fished for Sticklebacks in the Oldbury Court ponds and picked bunches of wildflowers for my Mum who always placed them reverentially in jam jars. I suppose we all have that sense of a lost Arcadia. If there were any clouds in the sky we would rarely notice. My Mum was a country girl and she knew the names of plants and taught me and my sister how to love them too as we learned their names.

So yes of course plant hunting takes me back into my happy place, not because I want to be ten years old again, but because it was my ten year old mind in which I first experienced what I came to know later as the “oceanic feeling” and which seems to occur more and more as we search for the ferns, plants and fungi out in what’s left of nature after Thomas Gradgrind has had his filthy way with it.

In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to “a sensation of ‘eternity'”, a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole”, inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics.

Romain Rolland (From Wikipedia)

The kind of earth we need to aspire to rediscover is not just a rewinding of the calendar to the nasty 1930’s; of Janet and John books, Ladybird and iSpy. More than anything else I’d just like to create the opportunities for our grandchildren to walk in the woods at night; count the stars and name the constellations; find and name plants and know some of their uses and qualities; feed the hens as my sister and me used to do in Stoke Row, and understand and practice the art of growing and harvesting. We need to rediscover and celebrate our relatedness to the earth, not in empty, sentimental, bound-to-fail aspirations but fully and deeply; surrendering any thoughts of domination. It is religion, you might say – but not as we know it!

“UK genetics project looks for lost apple varieties to protect fruit in climate crisis.” George would have known what to do!

Here’s a fascinating and chastening story from the Guardian newspaper at the weekend. It’s all there above, but you’d need to have sharp eyes and plenty of patience to join the dots. The common factor that joins the threads together is a name you’ll probably never have heard before. I always feel I knew him well because he was Madame’s boss for the four years that she worked at Long Ashton as an Assistant Scientific Officer helping to record experimental field trials of apples and pears; especially for their cider making properties but also as eating and dessert apples. If ever there was a man who knew his apple varieties inside out it was George Gilbert. After he retired he had a considerable hand in designing the orchards at RHS Rosemoor and for the Lost Gardens of Heligan. He could name many varieties simply by closely examining them; the markings, the shape and structure of the flower end and the stem end, and no doubt that word beloved by field botanists and birders – the jizz.

It was George’s great misfortune to live through an era where the brewing of cider shrank to a vestige of its former self, and the justly mocked Golden Delicious apple, grown mainly in Europe was feted as the apple of the future flavourless, unattractive but capable of being used in a cricket game without bruising and easy to grow. The Cox’s Orange Pippin – one of the few apples to come true from seed – always was, and still is liable to disease and difficult to grow. Hybrids galore have been bred from the Cox, but the emphasis was always on yield at the expense of flavour, and they have to be sprayed with a cocktail of fungicides and insecticides every ten days from fruit set until just before harvest.

Tens of thousands – if not millions of apple trees were grubbed out on government subsidies, many of them irreplaceable local varieties naturalised within their unique microclimates. Our son helped grub up an orchard on Severnside until the farmer discovered that he was only thirteen years old and not allowed to drive the tractor. Apples for the most part don’t come true from seed and so resurrecting these lost varieties can almost never come from seed banks, they have to be grown from grafted budwood. Back in the day if the question “which variety of apple is best adapted – let’s say – to growing on a windswept island, battered by the salt winds of the Irish Sea, a hundred people would have shouted out – “The Bardsey you idiot!” The good thing about the Bardsey apple is that it survives in specialist nurseries and orchards and could form part of a grafted apple renaissance in the midst of a climate catastrophe. The real challenge is that there must be hundreds, even thousands of micro-adapted apple varieties which were grubbed out and burned; so the scientists in the study cited by the Guardian are taking samples in Rosemoor Orchard – planted up by George Gilbert who must have had an eye to their future usefulness. The key point is that these are just a tiny proportion of the varieties that once grew in gardens and orchards over the previous centuries. Stripping out and comparing DNA samples is not the best way of discovering their unique properties, but the only way that’s available to the researchers – post orchard-apocalypse. As Joni Mitchell sang so beautifully – “you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone!”

The battle to save the lost varieties takes on a much more than antiquarian significance as the search to find apple varieties for a very different climate future gets more intense. Many important insects have a mutually important role to play; they pollinate all kinds of fruit but many have evolved to emerge at exactly the time the apple blossom appears. They gather nectar and pollen for food, and the trees get pollinated. If that partnership fails we get a catastrophic failure of biodiversity and we lose a valuable crop. Just to take one example, most allotmenteers like us, no longer have any clear idea of when to sow and plant. Spring weather is so unpredictable now that we’re always trying to second guess the date of the last frost, or those destructive easterly gales. Will April this year bring showers of soft refreshing rain or portend the beginning of a prolonged drought?

I very much hope that the scientists can make rapid progress towards a DNA database and find ways of combining the growing and eating qualities of even a very few traditional varieties. This, surely is just the beginning – there are lovely collections of Welsh apple varieties (some of them in the photo above) in orchards run by the Marcher Network in the Welsh Borders. There’s another lovely collection at Plas yn Rhiw on the Lleyn peninsula in North Wales; and the National Botanical Garden of Wales also has an extensive collection of Welsh apple varieties planted by our friend Charlie Stirton, the first Director and now close neighbour. There are the Lost Gardens of Heligan and probably hundreds of other unknown collections nurtured for their qualities in remote farmsteads across the Western side of the UK. The writer and singer Raynor Winn and her husband are custodians of one of these. Cider has become a big business now, and so-called varietal ciders – Katy, Kingston Black and probably somewhere in a Dartmoor village even such melodious relics as Slack ma girdle fetch premium prices, although a now-passed cidermaker universally known on Severnside as ‘Doughnut’ – once told be that he always blended his cider and always included a few Cox’s.

My grandfather, a carpenter by trade, had a huge collection of tools, many of which he’d made himself. The point about them wasn’t that he used them very often; there must have been some that he never used – but if he’d ever needed it for the once in a lifetime job it would have been there waiting for its moment in the sun. Biodiversity is crucially important to us because when we move into unpredictable times is when we most often discover the irreplaceable usefulness of a single species. The apples are teaching us a lesson we simply can’t afford to ignore because – to quote a memorable sermon I once heard preached by Bishop David Jenkins “if we don’t act now there may be hell to pay!”

Back on the allotment again

Tall Ramping Fumitory – Fumaria bastardii, var hibernica

Everything about the name of this wildflower is correct. It is tall, it’s ramping and it’s definitely a Fumitory. It’s also quite rare in this part of the world and in order to get the ID verified as correct, I had to take it to the national expert. If there are any other Fumaria experts out there who think that’s wrong then please write and I’ll find ripping it out by the handful in our polytunnel less ethically challenging, because the thing is – however tall and rare it may be, the ramping bit of the description is a problem for us. It sets seed prolifically and spreads like wildfire tangling itself rather weakly through our vegetables which makes it very hard to weed out. It started out as a single plant one plot up from us on a path next to a compost heap and it caught my eye. By the next season it had spread to one of our beds and now it’s competing with the Chickweed that also grows prolifically after the beds are cleared in the autumn. We would normally have covered the beds in the polytunnel to suppress weed growth but last autumn we had a bit of a punt with ultra early potatoes broad beans and carrots and so the beds were left uncovered. Apart from the beans, neither potatoes or carrots grew at all and the weeds had free range to strut their stuff. We’ve now had three years of different crops terminally weakened by what I now feel happy to call a weed and Madame rebelled against any protective thoughts I might have been secretly harbouring and so I reasoned that there was no form of weeding short of chemicals or a flame gun that would effectively kill the seeds. Flame guns and polytunnels or nets are not a good combination. And so my plan is simply to fight back by hand weeding, knowing that the process is inefficient enough to keep a few field botanists happy for decades whilst allowing us to grow some crops.

Allotments aren’t always well tended, and weed invasions – whether underground; Bindweed, Creeping thistle, and Couch grass – or by air; Dandelion, Willowherb or by human transfer, the infamous allotmenteers boot with plants like Fumaria – are always a danger’ especially on organic plots. Nature abhors a vacuum and bare earth can be seen from Mars especially if you’re a weed looking for a comfortable and well fed berth. I’m quite sure that one of the biggest reasons for new gardeners giving up their plots is when they leave them in October looking pristine and then in February and March return to an unmanageable jungle. The other reason is probably pigeon attacks. This year we lost much of our purple sprouting crop to a pigeon who managed to crawl in under the nets and then get trapped. We probably spend far more time dealing with weeds than we do sowing and harvesting. We don’t dig unless we really have to remove Bindweed for example.

It’s been an awful beginning to the new season and our plots are still sodden. Even the soil in the polytunnel is wet due to an underground stream running deep beneath it. However the warmest and wettest February could easily be followed by an April heatwave in this unpredictable age of approaching climate disaster. But we’re back with dirt under our nails and with aching backs. It’s good to feel better, but six months of fretting about AF has taken its toll on my confidence and I’ve been approaching physical tasks with my foot on the brakes. I haven’t felt like me at all until quite recently, and all the advice I’ve had is just don’t overdo it – what does that mean when it’s at home? (Sorry that’s a bit of a local phrase).

So there we are – onwards and upwards, but not too far we hope. The campervan is fixed and we’ve got places to go.

First Bluebell – but which one?

Overlooking the Kennet and Avon Canal on the footpath next to Cleveland House

A bit of a shaky start today because both of us had put an Extinction Rebellion procession in our diaries, but neither of us had written down the time or venue. I had a vague recollection that it began at the end of our street – it didn’t, and Madame thought it was at the Guildhall – and it wasn’t – which left us wandering around Bath listening for the sound of crowds or beating drums. We were just walking through Henrietta Park when we thought we heard some kind of rhythmic noise and some very loud shouting, so we sped out of the park towards Pulteney Street where we discovered that the whole of the noise was down to a single team of scaffolders. Aside from the veg market in Stall Street there’s no-one in Bath with voices half as loud as scaffolders who often need to communicate over five floors and heavy traffic. The trader with the huge voice in Stall street market can be heard half a block away “Free pounds of strawberries for a pahnd COME ON!” – with the rising and falling cadence reminiscent of a song – and come we do. It reminds me why barkers gained their nickname; he really does bark; but strangely when you hear him talking, his voice is perfectly normal. Sadly it isn’t quite posh enough to get the Town Crier’s job.

So with the possibility of being arrested as green, woke, communist terrorists receding we wondered whether we should just beat each other up, or go for a walk along the canal. On balance the canal seemed the more attractive proposition. It’s been an interesting few days anyway. When we got back from Snowdonia we noticed that one of the cars in the car park was swathed in blankets and polythene. We also noticed that one of our neighbours had disappeared with her children, leaving husband behind. Later, we discovered that the car (his car) had both front and rear windscreens stoved in with a hammer or – more theatrically in my mind – a baseball bat. The irresistible urge to clothe the evidence in a story involving someone being caught in flagrante took hold, but none of our neighbours seem to have seen who did what and to who(m). Who says that city centre life is boring? The funniest event ever – shared by about 250 twitching curtains – was the incapably drunk couple doing a bit of dogging after a hard afternoon in the sun. Naturally it was never spoken of again.

But back to grim reality, I decided to do a bit more plant ID practicing and chanced upon the first bluebell we’ve seen this year. Bluebells are a great test of the software because (like the dogging couple) they’re promiscuous hybridisers, and most of the ones you see in towns are hybrids between the English and the more vigorous Spanish Bluebells which, some say, will eventually drive out all the natives. I think that’s a bit alarmist and I also think there’s a whiffy smell of botanical racism about it. Anyway, the software turned out to be rather sniffy about Bluebells in any case and refused to applaud our find without a photo of the leaves. You may notice that it was growing through a bed of nettles so for the second time today discretion trumped valour and the ID was left at taxon level. I remember driving past a church in Essex once and seeing the signboard with the words “Strict and Particular Baptist” printed there. I’ve always wondered what minor peccadilloes managed to split a church three ways. I also hope never to have to listen to the explanation!

Anyway, one further benefit of feeling well again is that my appetite is slowly coming back. Last night I cooked the first mushroom risotto in ages and one of our sons joined us for a jolly (and greedy) meal where we drank too much wine and fought for control of the sound system as we played through all our favourites. I find it intensely rewarding that even forty years apart, we share a taste for the same music. He’s a good bass player and we’re so pleased he’s back taking lessons again.

Below, some flowering Blackthorn and some Green Alkanet; both common garden escapes . We also see Lungwort – Pulmonaria officinalis which has a long history (fuelled by the medieval doctrine of signatures) and probably originating from narrowboat herb gardens. The boaters had little access to medical care apart from a few charities, and so herbal remedies were really important to them.

C.A.T. sessions (close attention to text)

The battery charger in the campervan.

I was going to call this post “punkt, point, period, full stop”. But decided to call it C.A.T. in honour of a very fine teacher I once had. His name was Canon David Isitt and he was the joint Principal of the Bristol and Gloucester School of Ministry and I was there to teach some sessions on communications but when David was around I was always a student. On training weekends when the weather was good enough we would sit in a circle on the grass outside the retreat house as if he were Socrates and we were the oikos and would spend a couple of hours distilling the myriad possible meanings of a verse or two from the Bible. The relevance of this charming memory is that today I solved a longstanding problem (my idiocy) by paying minutely close attention to a single Google generated password. For over a year I’ve been beating my head on a wall over my inability to access the OS map app on my phone because it kept rejecting the password. Today in a moment of sub religious ecstasy I noticed a single full stop at the end of it which my smartass phone had never copied because it thought it signified the end of a sentence. I added the dot and the app sprang into life as if by a miracle.

As of now I’m handing in my tools

I wish I’d paid the same attention last September when I replaced the £250 charger unit in the campervan by taking a photo of the original one (see above and despair) and replacing it wire by wire with the new one. That never worked either and in all our subsequent campings we would sit in the van with head torches watching the batteries go flat. Previously I’d done the same with the gas jets on the three way fridge with the same result – didn’t work – which was the point of our hideously expensive trip to the workshop on Dartmoor a few weeks ago when my handiwork was repaired but mostly replaced by some great guys who actually knew what they were doing. So the batteries now charge, the fridge works, the sink that always leaked after I replaced the plug has been renewed, and the satellite dish which fell off the roof on the way back from Brecon has been replaced by a new miFi router which works like a dream. As of now I am handing in my tools.

If you are sensing a new resolution and vigour in my mood, it’s because I’ve finally found out what level of beta blockers I need to take without becoming a zombie or listening to my heart thrashing itself to death. I’ve found the sweet spot, I think, and I feel better than I have since last September. Perhaps there’s a clue in the dates! Never undertake electrical repairs when your brain isn’t working.

So today we went down to the van and tested the new systems and they all worked. We have booked a couple of short breaks in some favourite places with good botany potential, and I’ve spent the past two weeks designing the best possible workflow for submitting records – which included learning an entirely new application; iRecord – if you’re at all interested. Having offered to do a talk on useful apps to the Natural History Society, I wandered off into the impenetrable scrub of phone apps for identifying and recording wildlife. As ever, I entered the thicket with the fullest knowledge of what I might find there and promptly discovered that my understanding was mostly cobblers. I began by being quite certain that iNaturalist was by far the best recording app, and then after a few small irritations I fired off some emails to naturalist friends who mostly thought there were big problems with it – not least the verification process which, it seems, might allow three or four people with even less knowledge than me, to tick a box and elevate my incorrect identification to “research grade”; good for my ego but very bad for science. It seems I was conflating easier to use, with best; an error from which none of us are immune.

So, if not iNaturalist; which? Most of my enquiries trickled into the sand when it came to the big beasts at County or National level. Natural history recording, it becomes clear, is like Italy before unification; awash with fiercely defended kingdoms about the size of your average hamlet, and one particular bone of contention is the use of artificial intelligence – please feel free to rub that clove of garlic on your laptop.

The problem with identification is getting worse and not better. DNA analysis has thrown a boulder into the pond – I’m a stranger to any deep understanding of the subject, but the names and familial connections of living things seem to change all the time. The identification of plants by their appearance – morphology in science speak – is no longer as valuable as it once was; and that pulls the rug out from under one of the great strengths of AI – its ability to scan tens of thousands of photographs in less time than it takes you to find your notebook and come up with a plausible ID and name. Like stocks and shares, identifications can also decrease in value. Most of my learned friends prefer to lean on their many years of experience rather than trust a phone app, and if I had that much experience I’d probably feel the same way.

But what about those of us who love to look for plants. birds, mammals, fungi and all the rest – and regularly get stuck in an identification but would still like to make our contribution to the records in this era of environmental destruction. Getting your records confirmed can take weeks and even months but it’s imperative that records are checked by the best available experts before marshes are flooded and rivers diverted to save things that were never really there. Sometimes it’s best to give way and beg forgiveness when your record is rejected but sometimes – more rarely perhaps – it’s worth backing your hunch and asking for a second or even third opinion. So my money, at present, is on iRecord which uses the same family of software as iNaturalist – designed by an outfit called Indicia; hence the similarity of web design. In the iRecord app, you have to enter some kind of identification before you can add photos – then AI will tell you in percentage terms whether you nailed it or failed it. The saved data is made available to hundreds of skilled volunteers who can either agree or disagree with the machine intelligence. The software puts human intelligence firmly in charge. The other great advantage of the programme is that when all’s settled, the record is shared with all the appropriate local and national recording schemes (the warring states?). The data from iNaturalist is also now passed to the British databases but has to go through the same verification process as it would coming off my phone – which is a tremendous waste of volunteer effort.

What’s in it for us apprentices? Well I’ve found that the process of getting some sort of name necessarily involves turning to the books; learning families, environments, seasons and relationships through a process of reinforcement – good educational practice – we all get quicker and more accurate; and therefore more useful in the fight against environmental destruction.

I’ve had a comical vision of future field trips in which participants carry enormous pieces of computer and electronic kit across the fields on converted trolleys with old pram wheels (we’re like that) and stand in silent circles around wiFi aerials and routers gazing at our phone screens in silence. Actually, that’s not funny at all, and in any case hand-held DNA sequencers can already be had at huge cost; sequencers which rely on pre-existing DNA databanks, which can be searched using (you’ve got it) AI. I much prefer crawling around on my knees in the rain and mud. AI is alright for some jobs, but it will never have those moments of left-field inspiration that human minds are so good at. I shared that thought over coffee this morning with (name drop alert) our neighbour Prof Charlie Stirton who came up with exactly the same proposition. High fives then!

So in the next three weeks we’re off in our newly and fully functional campervan and spending a few nights on the beloved Mendips and in the Brecon Beacons – Bannau Brycheiniog means the peaks of Brychan’s kingdom – and later a grand tour of Dartmoor, then West and East Cornwall to catch the spring flushes of flowers while I test a few more phone apps and websites for my talk. Life is good!

Red Kite causing a food stink – and look who’s stirring the pot in Wales

Any guesses where this was taken?

I suppose most of us can remember our first view of a Red Kite – ours was, predictably, whilst driving on the A470 past the Red Kite feeding station in Rhayader. The folks who pioneered the return of this lovely bird deserve all our thanks. Now they’re spreading across the country and we see them regularly in Bath and east of Bristol. On Saturday on our drive up to the Lleyn peninsula we took a back road across the hills beyond Rhayader where we have often seen them in ones and twos, but we were completely taken aback at a flock of maybe fifty birds massing like seagulls behind a plough and swirling noisily in the air. It passed through my mind that either a new – and in my mind unnecessary – feeding station had opened up; or that there was a dead elephant at the very least lying there somewhere. The truth, though announced itself with a horrible putrid smell and explained the excitement. They were gathered over a large waste disposal site which we thought had been closed and capped but which looked and smelt as if the recent rains had flooded and possibly even ruptured the covers. There were pools of water everywhere; a hazard to local watercourses but paradise to a flock of hungry, or more likely greedy scavenging birds.

We look at vultures with distaste and suspicion because of their feeding habits and I wonder how long it will be before a campaign against the Red Kite ‘menace‘ will leak out of the same filthy mess. As we know to our cost in Bath, rats and gulls will take the easiest available food source and if that happens to be human rubbish then that’s what they’ll have. In Bath we even have bilingual signs on the rubbish bins urging tourists to dispose of their leftover takeaways properly – although it seems a bit rich to have them only in English and French. Are the French more inclined to dump their leftovers in the street than other nationalities? – of course not! I suppose in a perfectly ordered ecosystem, the Kites would eschew the rotting burgers and concentrate on eating only rats but in the real world once an ecosystem has been disrupted the consequences simply cannot be predicted. Think of the consequences of introducing myxomatosis into the rabbit population, and of doing the same thing with freeing mink into the wild, releasing grey squirrels and of course allowing Muntjac deer to escape. Farm subsidies, along with the Common Agricultural Policy have skewed the whole food economy in favour of intensive farming for decades and we’re only just beginning to understand at what cost. The unpalatable truth is that in every case the disruption was caused by human intervention. “We have seen the enemy, it is us!” Red Kites prefer to eat carrion – dead flesh and roadkill, and were so efficient at clearing the filth from medieval streets they were protected by law.

Aside from that depressing episode we also passed a number of farms showing “No farmers no food” banners. I can totally understand why farmers with poor quality marginal hill farms are struggling at the moment, but even a quick look at the organisation pushing the campaign would show that it isn’t being funded and promoted by farmers but by rather shadowy and wealthy climate deniers and extreme right pundits who have no interest in the welfare or survival of farms here in Wales. This is one of those covert populist campaigns that spreads utterly daft ideas such as green campaigners are forcing us all to eat insects. What can’t be denied is that the Government is so much in hock to agribusiness and big energy, they’ve totally rolled over to the climate denial lobbyists. This is industrial strength ignorance and stupidity and we know it – and farmers would do well to refuse to have anything to do with it because if the No farmers no food gains traction the only beneficiaries would be the oil and agribusiness industry and the hill farmers will be thrown under a bus.

The underlying theme of the new subsidy scheme is public money for public goods. The Conservative government is now brain dead, bereft of ideas and capable only of pleasuring the biggest landowners. None of the major parties, to my knowledge, has come up with a plausible plan for farmers across the whole spectrum from hill to fen which is regenerative; sustainable and working within a market with its greedy exploitative ethos brought under control, and so if the Labour Party hope to run the show they’ll have to come up with something concrete for farmers to vote for. Any footballer knows that the easiest way to run in a goal is to get the opposition divided.

Aside from the polemic, there are dangers which I know have been recognised by Welsh farmers but which are easily buried under culture war rhetoric. In Wales the more isolated areas are also strongholds for the Welsh language and if the population falls below a certain level, the language will disappear. Why should that worry anyone? It worries me because a language, any language, is a kind of cultural DNA. All of Welsh experience and history is encoded within the language and allowing it to die is a tragedy at the level of burning the library at Alexandria in AD 48, and which was all the more poignant because it was said that the fire was the unforeseen consequence of Julius Caesar’s order to burn the ships in the harbour. But this isn’t a plea for a handful of academics to be given access to the language. It’s the language of RS Thomas’s imagined hill farmer Iago Prytherch, and the language of William Williams of Pantycelyn, and the language of the local butcher and the youngsters who served us our Guinness in the bar today. With a language you can write and say and even think some thoughts that are not encoded in any other tongue. Languages are the glue that holds communities together and introduce the memories and experience of the old to the young . Destroying a whole way of life is a terrible crime – so the plight of these farmers demands our fullest possible attention and the kind of policies that uphold the best and most sustainable practices, supported by clear and reliable subsidies. Demonising farmers as backward looking luddites on the one hand, or sending them off to block motorways on a false prospectus are both dead ends.

Dartmoor calls us back but first there’s Spring to survive!

No – we were looking forward to a more Wordsworthian sort of Spring

Much to our surprise we woke this morning to a couple of inches of snow. You might describe our present weather as topsy turvy, but that would trivialise it. We were chatting the other day and what seems clear is that one of the early warnings of climate catastrophe is the sheer unpredictability of the weather. On the allotment the old certainties are falling one by one. Good Friday, for instance, is the traditional day for planting potatoes (in the UK) and that gives it six weeks to wander over the calendar in any case, due to the synchronisation (or lack of it) between the solar and the lunar calendars. But today after February broke all records for warmth and rainfall, the snow came as a complete surprise. Madame and I sat in bed this morning feeling just a bit smug because we’d spent much of the week preparing the campervan for just such an event; draining the water tank and such like. Since we came back from Dartmoor – or more precisely from a workshop on an industrial estate outside Ivybridge – we’ve been preparing the van so we can get away and start enjoying the luxury of having everything now working properly. Only four years ago the electrics failed completely one January night and we had to huddle in the sleeping bag with only head torches for light.

I don’t know why we haven’t walked on Dartmoor for so long. We’re blessed for high country here in the Southwest, with Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin Moor to the south and across the Severn and westwards we’ve got the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons), the Cambrian Mountains and then mighty Eryri (Snowdonia). I’m not one of those people who grumble about the change of names from English to Welsh. Years ago I did a lot of bus journeys running writers’ groups in South Wales and I simply had to learn how to pronounce Welsh place names. Ystrad Mynach was a particular struggle, but Welsh is a phonetic language and once you know a few simple rules, like the fact that “y” is a vowel in Welsh, it’s painfully easy to sound as if you know where you’re going.

But crossing Dartmoor a couple of times last week – we had to commute between the campsite and the workshop – we felt very drawn towards it. Our first visit was more than forty years ago when we stayed near Burrator and found the Devonshire Leat, a quite wonderful piece of industrial archaeology, and one which – given my attachment to abandoned industrial landscapes – resonated within me. It’s not even that I search for them, they just seem to find me. I can almost hear the voices from the past in them; miners and quarrymen; shepherds and packhorse drivers; tinkers and overseers. Safe paths across the peat bogs mark their passage across the centuries and standing stones celebrate or warn of ancient beliefs and untimely deaths.

Part, I think, of the Grimstone and Sortridge leat on Whitchurch Common, Dartmoor

This photograph was taken in March 2016 and it took a bit of finding because there was no location amongst the EXIF data – those were the days! We were staying in the campervan near Tavistock and we’d come down from the northern area of the moor – just mooching about really, enjoying the early months of retirement and going through that long process of asking – if not work, what are we for? I’d asked an old friend whose partner had retired before me, how long it took her to embrace the freedom. Much to my consternation she replied “five years?”. Looking back, I’d say for me closer to eight. Here are a few more photographs from one of our very first journeys in October 2016.

Knowing next to nothing about fungi I photographed the waxcap among dozens of brightly coloured neighbours and then discovered years later that their presence is a sign of unimproved land. Patently obvious, I now know, but that’s how understanding happens.

This time in Ivybridge we went to the local bookshop and I bought a couple of books. One of them – Guy Shrubsole’s “The Lost Rainforests of Britain” is so good I read it – or rather devoured it -in two days. It’s a marvellous and accessible account of an almost unknown and rapidly disappearing habitat – and before long I’d gathered together all the resources on my bookshelves that would help me to understand these sites better. If that sounds a bit worthy it’s really not. For years I’ve been a bit obsessed with ferns, fungi, mosses, lichens and all the other woodland species that characterise this rare habitat; but my obsession has focused on their appearance – they can be very beautiful. Now I’m going to dig into the science and identification of them. Suddenly the new season has gifted me a project. The second book, Karen Armstrong’s “Sacred Nature” is altogether different and although she raises all kinds of ideas I’m familiar with, there’s no dirt under its fingernails.

The workshop removed the twisted wreck of a satellite aerial from the roof of the campervan and installed a much neater and lower profile miFi outfit. It seems a bit extravagant but I always need internet access on our travels to the public natural history databases which are so full of expertise and advice. We’re off very soon for some time in Eryri (Snowdonia) to spark up the botanical appetite, grease our creaking knees and get our eyes working.

Very appropriate! Fingle Woods March 2016

The Three Musketeers mount a reconnaissance

Clockwise – Peltigera, Dog Lichen; Scarlet Elf Cap, 2 views of Woodchester Lake at the bottom of a steep valley; a spring at Tinkley Gate about 500 feet above it, and a Musketeer at his lunch; plus a rear view of a fabulous borrowed Swarovski birding scope which another of us carried all day without complaining (or seeing anything except wood pigeons through it!)

Life is not always a primrose path, and these past weeks have not disappointed. We’ve (and I mean all of us, not just me), been suffocated by the evil miasma arising from truly shocking events. The continuing genocide in Gaza, the insanity of the forthcoming American elections, not to mention those here in the UK; the managerialist cruelty of the Post Office scandal and too many random instances of egregious evil, lying, fraud and misrepresentation in the government; not to mention breaking through the 1.5C barrier, licencing new oil wells and allowing millions of children to languish in poverty. It sucks all the air out of the room and makes me feel like a gaffed fish dumped on the deck of a boat steering into a maelstrom. To go out looking for plants or growing them on the allotment feels like a wilful betrayal. Like a grieving parent I feel guilty when a brief moment of sunshine brings a flash of pleasure. I shouldn’t be feeling this – I think – as I grimly return to the nightmare.

But needs must, and the past weeks have been filled with our annual debate about whether to sell or keep the campervan; and also prepare for a field trip which I’m co-leading. As for the campervan, it’s getting old now and so every year it needs some expensive TLC. This year it’s a new sink – the old one cracked and disintegrated; we’ve also decided to get the 3 way fridge repaired so the gas works again, and investigate the slow charge rate going to the batteries and then to remove the old satellite dish which had made a valiant attempt to tear itself off the roof coming back from Brecon one day. When I asked about replacing it I was told that they haven’t fitted a satellite dish for years, so now we’re having a new miFi which necessitates a new TV and a substantial chunk of our savings. That’s the downside. The upside is that the campervan is still a lot cheaper to run than renting cottages and in any case we love it, love the opportunities it brings to go botanizing and walking where we please.

As for the field trip in these days of elf and safety, there must be planning and risk assessment which needs to go further than a quick look at the OS Map. Just the kind of mission that the Musketeers love to undertake – even on a bitterly cold and windy day with intermittent rain. So to Woodchester, or rather to Tinkley Gate (Tickly Bottom as we decided to call it), and which is at the top of the steep sided valley. We three, being of mature years, decided to take the blue route which the notice board specifically admonished us not to take. It was, as advertised, wet and muddy, steep and slippery and also closed in part; denying us any possibility of an easier return to the car park. Of course it’s the wrong time of the year for bosky dells and wildflowers although we saw several seasonal fungi; and of birds there were almost none. A Mallard with two mates, Robins and Coal tits heard but not seen, a gang of depressed wood pigeons, a Raven, a pair of Cormorants – in fact a dark hue all round apart from a brief glimpse of what – by its chestnut wings and purposeful flight – could have been a Kestrel; but which appeared and disappeared in less than a second below us in the woods. Our trek back up the muddy path to the car park was a triumph of concealed athleticism – each stopping breathlessly every few yards to let the others catch up.

So this week’s task is to tabulate the risks and to access a few databases to see what could be there in late April. Funnily enough I was supposed to be doing a solo lecture on AI and the slew of phone apps and public databases that have taken out some of the sting of identifying wildlife. Unfortunately Cardinal Richelieu has decided that he needs to be on hand to correct every other sentence and spearhead a swift return to WADITW which is the guiding principle of all failing voluntary institutions. The acronym stands for we always do it this way, so I may withdraw and produce a version of the same talk on The Potwell Inn.

Coincidentally, a wonderful new book was published this month by Pelagic Press (I paid good cash for my copy, there are no sponsored pages on this blog!). The book is entitled “Frustrating Flowers & Puzzling Plants” by John M Warren, and it will be of most interest to UK and Irish readers. It’s not a flora as much as a compendium of ID tips for some of the most difficult plant families like Speedwells, or Dead Nettles, Mints and Woundworts for instance, which have baffled me for years with only transitory moments of illumination. It features some really excellent illustrations, and a new kind of tabular key that can take us from genus to species in some of the most complex families. All of this accompanied by a very dry sense of humour. Each section ends with a paragraph on how far should I go where he takes aim at some of the more obsessive corners of field botany and made me laugh out loud – occasionally at myself! There’s a whole chapter on one of the turning points in my botanical journey when I finally realized that not all Dandelions are, in fact, Dandelions at all. It’s called Yellow composites – things that look a bit like a dandelion. As I read it I realized, joyfully, how far I’ve come since that day sixty years ago, and yet how far there is still to go. I love this book. It’s going into my bag for a bit of a laser focused plant naming binge this summer along with Baby Stace (sorry, Concise Flora).

If anything can lift my mood at the moment it’s the prospect of a trip in the campervan, laden with books, smartphone and laptop. Madame even suggested the other day that we could go for a whole month. I felt the sun rise inside me.

Bewildered again. Back in Kynance

The view through the window of the marvellous cafe at Kynance Cove

Years ago we were on the Roseland peninsula, skulking along the coast path when we spotted a botanist. We knew she was a botanist because she was in the classic field botanist’s question mark pose – head bent over, walking very slowly and scanning from side to side like a faulty photocopier. “What are you looking for?” I asked. I should admit immediately that I’m quite deaf because I clearly heard her say “squirrels”. A conversation of stacking non sequiturs concerning little furry animals followed for a while when it finally dawned on me that she was looking for Spring Squills – Scilla verna – for the serious, and I was able to purge my imagination of the possibility of a colony of Red Squirrels living under the radar in Cornwall. However it was worth the embarrassment because I’d never seen a Spring Squill and then suddenly we knew where to find them. Now, of course, I wave a languid arm at them and say in my best Martin Jarvis/ Just William voice – “Oh them’s Spring Squirrels” whilst inwardly plotting terrible revenge on Violet Elizabeth Bott. If you’re interested, they grow profusely behind the coastguard lookout east of Portscatho and – what’s more – all the way around the Lizard coastline.

Anyway, the Spring Squill was the cause of even more confusion today, because we set out to find not just any old pond, but the precise pond in which I had come to believe I’d failed to identify a pretty rare plant last January. Needless to say I was wrong in every respect because once we got back with grid references and photographs and then defrosted our hands I waded through my pile of books and found that my hoped-for rarity had never been found anywhere near the Lizard but that there was another proper rarity growing down here that I also thought we had seen today.

It wasn’t the best day for a minute examination of the local flora. The gunmetal grey sky and a nominal temperature of 4C hardly describe the reality when you factor in the 20 mph east windchill. We were heads down all the way, and even with my new heavyweight oiled Welsh wool polo neck, two hats and a down jacket, we were very cold. Thank goodness for the cafe at the bottom which was open and selling tea and toasted buns.

Anyway, it turns out that Land Quillwort which does grow here is all but indistinguishable, at this time of year, from guess what? ……. Spring Squill- oh bother!! Now the Quillwort is so rare that you can’t just go uprooting bits of it, so the only way to see what it is would be to revisit in March and see what’s come up. This is how we amateurs go completely bonkers and land up with gimlet eyes and strange personal habits. I could cite the authorities I’ve consulted but this isn’t meant to be a student essay as much as a cri de coeur from a bewildered man.

But why’s this so much fun? Well you’d have to talk to a psychotherapist I’m afraid, but sitting here surrounded by photos, grid references and field guides I feel completely at home and in my happy place. No peculiar tics any more, I’ve been pretty successful at hiding them. Tomorrow there’s a possibility of snow which, in this part of Cornwall is a rarity. If I could offer just one suggestion as to why this is so rewarding, maybe it’s this. When you get to a certain age you become invisible. Even your children begin to see signs of senescence everywhere and turn away offers of advice or help, occasionally rather rudely. But then, as it happened today, emails arrive from older friends and younger people with real heft asking you to do something; a bit of proofreading maybe. Plans are laid for field trips which will go ahead because we – The Three Musketeers – will go out on a recce and we can make them happen; and you can ask questions of world class experts and get them answered and you feel useful. And if you should think that this is all nonsense then ponder this. The 202o UK and Ireland BSBI Plant Atlas is the result of as many as 170,000 volunteer days of recording. If you read anything in the newspapers that refers to plants and their current state in the midst of a climate catastrophe it will almost certainly come from this data. We oldies still have our uses!

Hm