Tag: environmental catastrophe

Meet the other part of the iceberg.

Honey fungus mycelium on a tree stump. It’s called a rhizomorph because of its shape – like a rhizome.

Sometimes it seems – although I don’t believe a word of it really – sometimes the stars get themselves into a truly malignant alignment and the boils, frogs, flies and rain just keep coming without remission. This last year, what with the campervan constantly breaking down, the extreme weather and an onslaught of health problems has been an all-round shitter! Add to that the election of a malignant government whose big idea is to preserve everything that was wrong about the past 50 years and crush the best in order just to stay in power and ….. ? well, you decide.

I’ve written before about the challenge of accepting good news amidst a sea of effluent but this last few of weeks, having got rid of the polyps in my bowel which were causing iron deficiency anaemia; last week I finally got an appointment to fit my new hearing aids after waiting 8 months, and another appointment to sign off on the laser peripheral iridotomy so I can get some new glasses. Oh joy! and to cap it all I feel better – which is a non scientific way of saying that it’s marvellous to be able to wheelbarrow full loads of wood chip down to the allotment without having to keep stopping to catch my breath. I can see the end of the tunnel although it’s just a small disc of light at the moment. The campervan is fixed, we have a list of adventures planned for 2026, the allotment is all but ready for next season and –

  • – having met my targets for plant species and records, I’ve now turned to processing my fungus photos – and this is going to be an altogether harder task because until a couple of years ago I had no idea what, apart from field mushrooms and fly agarics, what most of them are called. Yes it’s true; I am a proper propellerhead. Anyway I thought I’d start with this image because the fungi – OK toadstools – we see are only a very small part of the actual fungus. Most of it comprises minute underground threads, collectively called mycelium, that can extend for many feet and occasionally miles around the part we see in the autumn. As instanced by the Honey fungus at the top of this piece, Honey fungus species actually weave their minute thread-like hyphae into ropes and so we can glimpse the underground world on a tree stump.

Getting ready for this festival of bafflement I’ve done what I always do and read a lot of books that are way beyond my understanding, in the hope that some of the research sticks . I won’t bore you with a list except to say that for the last year I’ve been gradually searching for second hand copies of the most important ones. I can never afford to buy new academic books – they’re ridiculously expensive and only for well-heeled university libraries. There’s also loads of good stuff available online; especially on the British Mycological Society Facebook page.

What I’ve learned has given me an entirely new perspective on the benefits of fungi not only to our ecosystem but to our health and wellbeing as well. These days we’re very familiar with the importance of pollinator plants at the beginning of the life process. We’re not so thoughtful about what happens at the end. At its simplest, without fungi we couldn’t survive because whatever lives also dies, at which point the fungi move in and reduce the senescent remains to their original constituents. Without fungi the earth would be covered with a layer of dead material of unfathomable depth. Sometimes, as any farmer or gardener could tell you, the fungi move in too soon and finish their lunch and our crops before we’ve been able to harvest them. The problem with drenching the field or the garden with fungicide is that without the silent work of fungi there would be no soil in which to grow the next crop because the overwhelming majority of plants and trees have what’s called mycorrhizal relationships with fungi; a constructive and complementary relationship in which the fungi supply essential nutrients to the plant in return for some of the photosynthesised sugars which its leaves produce. There is some evidence – because mycelial relationships are so important to the health and therefore the eventual crop; that fungicides can weaken the plant and make it even more vulnerable to fungal pathogens. The invisible work of fungi is immeasurably more important to us than merely filling a forager’s basket. Of course there are many more gifts from the fungi than I’m going to write about here but I want to concentrate next on the meaning of those beneficial relationships.

Porcelain fungus on beech tree

Let’s begin with Robin Wall Kimmerer whose books – as she describes them – focus on how “The factual, objective view of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people”. When we talk about ancient knowledge whether we’re embracing plants or religious, spiritual issues, it’s almost impossible to say anything without using metaphorical language. I’d argue that myth is the way that we try to tell some species of truth about mysteries. When Kimmerer writes about “mother trees” she’s using a metaphor to describe a positive relationship. “Mother trees” don’t breast feed their saplings or worry when they get home late from a night out. But it may be that there is a mycelial fungal connection between trees that allows the older trees with more resources to share those resources to nearby younger trees. What the metaphor achieves is to communicate in simple terms an important concept awaiting scientific verification. A wood or a forest is an unimaginably complex network of invisible connections which can sustain mortal damage if it’s damaged by thoughtless management. It’s a way of looking at trees which takes a broad, almost spiritual view of their meaning to us.

But just as I was about to write, I caught sight of a recent piece in the Guardian referencing fungi purely as a kind of industrial and scientific feedstock. It’s an interesting article about some possibilities of extending the use of fungi to produce building materials, packaging and even for biodegradable nappies (diapers). The science of using fungi to clean up industrial pollution is well advanced, so this is hardly big news. But what caught my attention was the way in which the article perfectly captures the contrast between two ways of looking at nature in general and fungi in particular. Kimmerer’s almost spiritual account, inflected by First Nation tradition and wisdom versus the highly instrumental scientific and rationalistic way of looking at nature as a free resource and a means of making money.

The question, or perhaps the takeaway from the two perspectives is that if we accept that climate catastrophe; species extinction; mass migration; global instability; pandemic and the degradation of the environment are all the result of our almost universally instrumental view of nature; wouldn’t it be better, rather than to join in the ugly scientific pile-on dismissing the ideas of Kimmerer and many others to allow that without a reset of our perspectives towards nature there can only be one result – and that’s the destruction of the earth.

Before your very eyes – Cheshire cat plants are the lost smiles of nature.

If you’re up to speed with the latin names you won’t need me to tell you what they are. I’m using the common English names because they’re the place most of us start our journey as well as expressing the poetry of nature.

Actually (so far) one of these plants – the one at the top left – hasn’t yet joined the ranks of the disappearing but it’s still early days in the crisis of species extinction that’s barrelling down on us. So on the left, top to bottom there are the Small Scabious, The Sheeps-bit, often called Scabious as well, and the Devil’s Bit; ditto. The one on the right is a Common Restharrow – which was the initial impetus to write this post. I’m writing about these plants, and the reason I think you should be interested too is that seeing them is like looking at the prelude to a slow motion car crash.

I wonder if there was a smidgeon of irony in choosing bonfire night to launch the latest Red List – or to give its full name “A new vascular plant red list for Great Britain”. I can hardly imagine the great British public queueing around the block to get a copy before the ink dries, and it is very technical (but over the years I’ve already put in the hard miles); however it’s a duplicitous ten quid’s worth of ebook masquerading as a scientific survey when it’s really a requiem for a disappearing earth. Every paragraph is damp with tears – it’s the saddest list of names you’ll ever find in a book about plants.

Here’s a Google Gemini summary of the findings:

Increased Threat Level: The proportion of species assessed as threatened (Critically Endangered, Endangered, or Vulnerable) has increased 26% (434 species) are now classified as threatened, up from 20% in the previous 2005 list. A further 140 species are listed as Near Threatened, suggesting their conservation status is of concern.Widespread Declines: Many plants that were once common and widespread in the countryside have continued to decline and are now assessed as threatened.

So let’s start with the larger picture at the top of the page, in a way that’s also a defense of English plant names. The name Common Restharrow at least paints a picture. Having driven a little grey Massey Ferguson 35 and towed a chain harrow to aerate and tear out the thatch of dead grass whilst flattening molehills I get the joke. If I’d been doing the same job a century ago and leading a horse-drawn harrow I might have called the plant “rest horse”, because this little plant in a typically tangled mass can stop a harrow in its tracks. I’m thinking of the rain soaked agricultural labourers in Peter Brooks’ film of Ronald Blythe’s book “Akenfield”. Ononis repens defines the plant’s place on the spreadsheet down to ten decimal points, but fails to tell the story. Of course, unlike my Fergie, a giant turbo charged tractor would pass over without noticing – but it wouldn’t need to notice any more because Restharrow is disappearing altogether. It’s been moved up the parade of shame from “least concern” to “vulnerable” under the onslaught of intensive farming. I can still take you to see it, but it’s mostly on the coastal headlands in west Wales and Cornwall at the field edges, beyond the reach of sprays and ploughs.

And that’s where the sadness comes. The loss isn’t just technical – an entry on a spreadsheet – but a loss of memory, of relatedness, of history; it’s personal. Sun, wind and rain; strolling and rolling together with Madame; hours, days and weeks of searching followed by the moment of joy in finding. These are not the simple pleasures of an ice-cream at the end of the day’s plant hunting; they’re the joys of complete focus and engagement; of falling in love. This is a big deal.

In a recent posting I was writing about human grief in a very allusive way (which I hinted at in the title), and in parallel, I can’t stop wondering whether the loss of meaning when we lose someone close to us isn’t just damaging when what’s lost is a part of the physical world in which all our memories are embedded. In Stoke Row on, the edge of the Chilterns, my grandparents had a smallholding. More even than remembering what they looked like I can’t escape from associating them with the Beech trees that surrounded their cottage; from the sight and smell of the paraffin stoves on which granny cooked, and of the rich oily smell of chicken meal. I remember that the first squirrel I saw was a red squirrel, and I remember the line of trees at the back which my Mum would examine and proclaim that there was rain over Granny Perrin’s nest. My Mum’s favourite flower, she would say, was Lady’s Slipper – but which – of about ten alternatives did she mean? The orchid is now extinct so that leaves nine. When she died my sister and I were trying to decide where we could bury her ashes and we did a bit of research to see if we could return her to her childhood home. It was a powerful blow to discover that the Crest smallholding is now covered with an industrial estate. In fact it was even more of a bereavement to discover that I would never see the tarmac road dressed with flint pea-gravel again, nor gather primroses nor help to gather prickly and itchy hay to be stacked in stooks and ricks.

So let’s go back to the three Scabious, only one of which (top right) is really a Scabious. The other two, united by their similar appearance and vibrant pale blue-violet colour, kept me bewildered for several years although, once you know how, they’re worlds apart. I was always dazzled by the name Devil’s-bit. Such a plant must be special, I thought – like Viper’s Bugloss and Deadly Nightshade; it’s the names that draw me in like a moth to a flame. But Devil’s Bit and Sheep’s-bit never seem to grow side by side so the moment of revelation is more likely to happen in front of a decent macro-photograph or, in my case looking at the illustrations in Collins Wild Flower Guide and seeing – actually noticing – for the first time that the stamens on Devil’s-bit are like little mallets and on the sheep’s-bit they’re tiny little trumpets. Oh floods of joy! except what I recall more than anything else is where they grow, and they grow there because they are perfectly suited to their homes; to the weather and climate, to the soil, and to the grazing or cutting regime under which they can thrive. Change any one of those things and they’ll likely dwindle and disappear – not waving you might say – but drowning. One blisteringly hot day in the midst of a drought we shall go back and they won’t be there any more.

Maybe the flowering plants are nature’s way of smiling at us. I used the metaphor of the disappearing Cheshire cat’s smile at the top. Perhaps it’s the canary in the mine; whatever – it’s nature sending us a message that when the flowers go they take the joy with them.

Thrift growing on a clifftop in St David’s Pembrokeshire

Somewhere between the recycling depot and the destructor bridge there’s a spirituality of hope – but I can’t find it.

The new Destructor Bridge

Bath is a city divided by the river. Walking west to east along the towpath between Windsor Bridge and Churchill Bridge you follow the northern half of the city which bears the postcode BA1. BA1 is posher than BA2 because it’s got most of the expensive and Georgian parts. Then, at Churchill Bridge – (I’m sensing a bit of a pattern here because you will already have passed beneath Victoria Bridge) – it all takes a bit of a dive on the northern side as you pass the bus station, the railway station and the Southgate shopping Mall and then Royal Mail sorting office before you approach the end of Pulteney bridge where (if you dare) you can pop into the public loos over Waitrose and change back into your Jane Austen inspired Emma costume or pretend you’re Knightly according to taste and preference.

In many cities they demolish the old and build the new on top but in Bath, given that the tourist money has come from the old, for several centuries, they built the heavy industry and the ugly/smelly bits across the river out of sight. The Destructor bridge linked the upper Bristol Road to a giant incinerator which was next door to the gasworks and just along from Stothert and Pitts where they specialized in heavy engineering; cranes; bridges and transport across the British Empire. As industry died, plans were hatched by friends of the developers to “improve” the city by demolishing older buildings in favour of concrete tower blocks. You can read about this in the excellent and angry book “The Sack of Bath” by Adam Fergusson. We bumped into his daughter once in a pub in Hay on Wye and immediately recognised one another as kindred spirits.

Sorghum? where the hell did that come from?

It just so happens that we live near the towpath – just far enough away to avoid the smell of sewage as long as you hurry past a couple of the outflows in the summer. The towpath is my plant hunting ground; the place which never fails to reward me with something new; often a squatter or a vagabond. I reckon I could easily account for 50 species in my records, probably more. On Friday I went for a walk along the path to clear my head. On the opposite bank they’re clearing the old gasworks site in order to build hundreds of new flats – the river view would increase the value of an old air-raid shelter into six figures. The noise was horrendous, with drilling, piling and lorries everywhere. The spirit of the old destructor bridge lives on with a twenty first century sound-track. On my side of the river I passed the recycling centre which is joined by the relatively new version of the destructor bridge which clung to its name but lived up to its reputation when they discovered it was a bit too long or maybe too short when they came to lift it into place and retreated bloody but unbowed for months as the designers licked their pencils and tried to find someone to blame. Fortunately it wasn’t called the Prince Andrew bridge because that would have taken nominative determinism to the level of farce.

But I was there clearing my head because the previous week we had attended the funeral of a young friend, just 40 years old from bowel cancer and I needed to find that kind of safety in numbers that lets me escape into a spreadsheet for a couple of hours. Walking past the destructor bridge and the recycling centre seemed to be hauntingly significant as I recorded and photographed the ordinary, everyday plants that most of us ignore as if they were strangers in the street. Ivy leaved toadflax, cocksfoot grass, alkanet, broad leaved dock, ribwort plantain, blackberry, ivy, herb robert, false oat grass, buddleia, marsh figwort, common ragwort; red valerian, groundsel, bilbao fleabane, gallant soldier, pellitory of the wall, mugwort, tansy, several kinds of dog rose and annual mercury. I fear I’m writing a book of remembrance for the weeds I pass in the street as the climate catastrophe intensifies.

We tend carelessly to describe grief as a kind of temporary and solvable disturbance of the mind. Time, we say, is the great healer. But it’s not, I want to scream. Bereavement. and the grief that explodes in us when it happens, more closely resembles a stroke. It destroys memory, reshapes the world in unfamiliar ways so we can’t recognise the places we once knew. The loss of a limb just as the loss of someone we love, can’t be mitigated by positive thinking and we don’t get over it – ever.

And I feel as if I’m suspended between the grim spirituality of destruction and the optimistic recycling of fading memories. The river becomes the Styx in this uninvited metaphor. The noise, the roar and pollution of the bulldozers and lorries on one bank and on the other the recycling centre where we take the things we no longer want – to be reprocessed into something else. On the one bank letting go completely and on the other, clinging to the hope that something may be retrieved while we rather desperately make records and take photographs, out of which – one day – it might be possible to build a spirituality of hope in a world where God – like Elvis seems to have left the building.

Creeping Thistle – Cirsium arvense

Walk on by!

Dandelion – obviously! but more complicated than you might think.

Everybody knows what a dandelion looks like, I imagine, but there’s no shame in not knowing that there are around 250 species of dandelion in the UK and – if you’ve got time and a good psychotherapist you could learn to tell them all apart. The beloved blackberry is a similar case but even more complicated, with around 330 species. They’ve evolved an interesting method of reproduction -known by the academics as apomixis which roughly translates as having sex with yourself; don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it – or as Woody Allen said – if you’re going to have sex you might as well have it with someone you love.

Anyway, and moving on rapidly, the dandelion is a handy reference point for what you might call the “walk on by” plant which draws together two threads of the WOB phenomenon. The dandelion in the photo, for instance, has been there along with its definitely not cousins for all of the ten years we’ve lived here. Until today I’ve never photographed or recorded it because it’s too common and therefore not worth the bother. However fate has confined us to short walks near home for most of the summer and the local rogues and vagabonds of the pavements and towpath have been the only available source of botanical interest; which disposes me more kindly to the dandelion. I’m sorry for my casual disregard in the past but now I just have to walk on by not because they’re common and vulgar but because I haven’t got the time or the confidence to sort them out; although I did shell out for the standard handbook which has been sitting unopened on the shelf like a bishop’s bible for months.

After months of tests and investigations we’re near the end of the tunnel (you’ll see why that’s a highly inappropriate joke in just a moment), and all I’m waiting for is to have a 35mm polyp removed from my colon so I can stop being anaemic and feeling knackered. I’m relying on the expertise of the multitude of consultants, nurses, interns and doctors who’ve peered up my rear end, when they tell me that this thing – about half as big again and the same shape as a champagne cork- isn’t malignant. Like birdwatchers they know the jizz of a nasty one when they see it. I have great confidence in them.

But spending every moment checking the phone for the next appointment doesn’t just cost you time, it drains the creative springs and makes life a bit grey and dull. We’ve cancelled several campervan trips so we could both be available for appointments at the drop of a hat and so necessarily I’ve been focusing on the local weeds. It’s bad enough trying to take macro photos out in the wilds; passers-by tend to stop and ask if you’re OK. Do the same thing on a pavement or on the towpath and they’re likely to call the police. But don’t for a moment suppose that all you’ll ever find outside your city centre front door is dog poo and beer cans. I’ve been amazed at how many relative rarities make even a temporary home for themselves in the mean streets of Bath, and recording the ordinaries balances the books against the statistical over-representation of exotica in the field guides. If we’re going to keep tabs on the unfolding runaway climate disaster we’ll need to record the sparrows, silverfish and brambles of the earth.

Here’s another one I’ve never recorded except in some remote and rather glamorous wild place. There was member of the same family, the Sea-spleenwort for which I persuaded Madame to walk miles in freezing wind and sheeting rain in January to find it on the sea-cliffs where it belonged, only to have it shown to me on the basement wall of the Guildhall in Bath. Sadly it seems to have gone now and I thought its near relative, the wall-rue, which has always grown unrecorded by me on the wall below our flat might have died from drought this summer. But this morning I dodged the rain to photograph the dandelion and came back with Hemp-agrimony; wall-rue and field-speedwell – all within ten yards of the front door. I shall have to make a list of plants that grow with 100 yards of the flat and I’ll guarantee it will exceed fifty species.

There’s a bit of a knack to naming plants from their leaves alone and today AI threw me completely off track with the speedwell which it identified as ground-ivy. A most enjoyable trip to the books settled the matter in favour of the speedwell but the two plants are alarmingly similar until you see the flowers. The purple flowers scattered near the speedwell had me scratching my head until I remembered there’s an Argentinian Vervain in full flower growing in a pot next to it. You see, even boring plants turn out to be better than the Times crossword for getting your brain in gear.

Back in August 2024 I set myself the target of organising my utterly random collection of photographs, and identifying the names and locations of all of them with a supporting photo. It took me a whole year to get them on to a spreadsheet and now there are 898 records sitting there waiting to land on several unfortunate referee’s desks. My species total is up to 472, just 28 short of the 500 target. I also set myself the target of completing 1000,000 words on this blog and so far I’m up to 951,500 which leaves me around 49 more posts to write. As my old friend Joan Williams used to say – God willing and a fair wind I’ll get there. But I’m not a trainspotter by temperament and so if it takes until next february it won’t keep me awake at night.

Aren’t statistics a slippery thing to deal with? I read yesterday that this polyp that I’m entertaining at the moment increases my risk of colon cancer by something like 75%. Reading that statement carefully suggests that my real risk depends upon what percentage of any polyps of any size are malignant. The answer to that is 5-7%. So my real risk is more like 75% 0f 10% ie 7.5%. It’s possibly less significant than crossing the A4 on a zebra crossing with a Range Rover approaching.

A bit of a Marienbad moment in Gloucestershire.

The floow deer herd is back out in the park

After all the drama of repeated heatwaves, the weather has finally returned to relative normality and we’ve been rejoicing in the rain. We’ve had a few big thunderstorms but surprisingly in spite of very heavy rain, only the top few inches of the allotment were wetted adequately. We’d prepared the ground by emptying the waterbutts at the end of the last hot spell, hoping they’d refill – but then, when it was too late, I discovered that the gutter on the shed had come adrift of its mountings, leaving the water to travel uphill. Looking more closely I could see that an inexpensive redesign would capture rain much more successfully. The two butts on the greenhouse were working better but again the gutters are pitifully small and don’t cope with precisely the kind of downpours we most need to store.

This summer we came very close to giving up the allotment together. The hard work is OK but this year with Madame’s knee replacement and me visiting just about every department in the local hospital we ran into a wall. Happily, with just a couple of minor procedures still to do, we’ll be back firing on all cylinders by next spring, which just leaves the results of several months of neglect to sort out. The battle is 90% mental but for the first time in months it feels like we’re winning. It hasn’t all been bad on the allotment. The soft fruit didn’t do well at all but the fruit trees – apples, pears, damsons and plums have all yielded record returns. Even the poor old potatoes managed to give us a half-decent crop after the dry conditions, and the newly planted raspberry canes are thriving. Last night we ate our own potatoes, runner (string) beans and chard with stewed plums for pudding. Allotments are very friendly places, and it’s rare not to exchange surpluses with our neighbours. It seems to me that the allotment looks after our bodily and spiritual needs while certainly my intellectual (mind) needs are well catered for by plant hunting and studying their habitats and habits.

Anyway we decided to give ourselves a day off on Monday and we took ourselves over to Dyrham Park which we haven’t visited over the summer because it gets so overcrowded. Actually that’s not quite true because we made a couple of early visits to White Field to search for the orchids. At this time of year the pasture is cut for hay and normally we’d turn our attention to fungi, but apart from one fairy ring (Marasmius oriades) there was nothing much to see.

Black Worcester pears on a southwest Facing Versailles espalier

Anyway we wandered down through the terraces and visited the formal gardens which (sorry no photo) have matured brilliantly. We were a bit dubious when they were first laid out but now they look lovely. On the outside wall of the big house there is a fabulous example of espalier pruning which we were lucky to have explained to us by the head gardener a couple of years ago. This Versaille method is based on very short fruiting spurs, but by doing this he explained that you could take the espalier to a larger number of tiers. He’d spent some time actually learning the method in Versailles.

Crataegus orientalis

Below the formal garden we walked around the large pond which was choked with blanket weed and then onwards to the small pond surrounded by mown grass with its own waterfall. It was crystal clear, and we bagged one of the seats and sat quietly watching the other visitors. Then, inexplicably, we both said exactly the same word – “Marienbad”. Couples standing still, casting shadows, nor speaking – a kind of freeze frame – and I thought how I’d first climbed over the wall to the park something like 65 years ago, long before it was turned over to the National Trust. We’ve ridden horses there in the 1970’s and spent many hours cycling back and forth between Bristol and Dyrham to visit friends.

There’s a question that often gets asked.“What would you say if you met yourself at the age of 14; what questions would you ask?, what advice could you give?” and sitting there in the warm sun, I felt that there was no need for any kind of meeting. We were, in the deepest possible sense both there! connected in an almost surreal sense every version of “me” over the years, sharing the same moment. It was very beautiful.

Later, after a glass of apple juice and a shared sandwich, we wandered up the quieter back route to the top alongside Sands Hill, passing at the very bottom a rotten tree trunk which had been left available to house and feed every kind of wood boring insect. The photo shows the human palace lurking behind the insect paradise.

I was going to shrink this one down, but changed my mind

As we climbed steeply upwards I stopped to record a couple of everyday trees and soak up the view of a small stand of very tall pines. Then. right at the top we met a couple of volunteers who said that there was a group of deer just beyond us. The whole herd had to be slaughtered due to TB three years ago, and although we knew they were being replaced we’d looked in vain for them in their paddock. Then suddenly there they were; four larger stags and a young one which we could hardly see. We looked at one another silently, deer and humans, without fear or hostility. I think two magic moments in one walk is more than any of us have the right to expect.

Hefted

If you know Mendip at all well, you’ll know that this thatched building holds a stack of sheep hurdles on Priddy Green

Nostalgia can be a poisonous affectation. It’s all too easy to use the wistful, often wilful mis-remembrance of the past to reduce the past to a coddled egg; good to eat but with no future. Real history is troubling; often leads in two directions, and ambiguous to a fault. On the other hand, the sense of rootedness in a place, or in a community in which the two ideas often overlap, is foundational to our practise of being human. You’ll probably think I’ve lost the plot if I write about Cornbrash, Brandon Hill stone and Bath stone and yet the glimpse of a building made with any of these three will as good as a six figure OS grid reference. They would not just signify districts but the era they were built in and the likely social class of the people who lived in them. Add to that a dialect, a particular way of sounding a troubling “r” in Gloucestershire, or a single sentence in Bristolian would tie the speaker down to something like a parish. There’s a sawmill in Wick and when I go there, I could curl up on the counter like a cat – I feel so at home. This isn’t something you can fake. You’d have to live not just any lifetime, by my lifetime to pick up the resonances.

I understand this better now than ever as I’ve learned about plants, where they grow and what they prefer to grow in. As I child I learned to love lying under beech trees growing on a moss covered bank on the boundary of our grandparents’ smallholding. My mother’s whole vocabulary of local names was learned amongst the winding lanes of the Chilterns. We looked in vain as children to see what Granny Perrin’s nest was, and why our mother could see it when we couldn’t. Even the roads had their own language of shiny flint pebbles, and hiding in the depths of woods once worked by bodgers who turned chair legs and wheel backs was Margaret’s Beer Shop where we could drink cherryade as a treat. I came to know what I now understand as acid heath, on Rodway Hill as slowly I came to understand how localities have their own unique floras.

Mendip is famous for its abandoned lead mines and again there are plants that can survive heavy metal pollution and environments which have their own special designation, Calaminarian, which is how the calamine lotion that our mother dabbed on our chicken pox spots brought zinc from the ore into Mr Ladd, the chemist’s armoury. Nowadays my old friends are the pavement scoundrels, constantly harried by the council’s strimmers. The poor council workers don’t seem to know about tap roots and seeds, or annuals and biennials and so they knock em all down like skittles and within a fortnight they’re up again. Then, of course there’s the riverbank with its own royal flush of perfectly adapted plants. Stones, dialects and plants store the local memory as certainly as books. Footpaths and shortcuts, streams, hiding places abandoned dramlines and climbing trees marked our territory and as we spread our wings, our bikes were the means by which we invaded and occupied other peoples’ places.

So much, then, for a rather lyrical take on the sense of place. The Greeks might have dignified it as the genius loci but we were unconscious of our hefting. It was just home as far as we were concerned.

A couple of nights ago we watched Peter Hall’s film “Akenfield” which I’d seen years ago but completely forgotten. I read the source and inspiration for the film , Ronald Blythe’s book “Akenfield” when I was in my twenties, along with Henry Williamson’s long cycles of novels, and I read J A Baker’s book “The Peregrine” a little later. In truth I consumed voraciously just about any scraps of natural history writing I could lay my hands on. Akenfield is a groundbreaking oral history of rural Sussex at the beginning of the 20th century and both a celebration of the skills of farmworkers and denunciation of the appalling conditions in which they worked. The extractive philosophy of modern agriculture was cultured in the minds of landowners centuries before the first tractor appeared on the land. I watched most of the film near to tears.

But one of the happier lessons of the film was that whatever happened to them, the farm workers had song. They sang in church, they sang on army service in the first world war, they sang in pubs and they sang as they took the harvest in on wagons loaded high, with the children riding on top as a treat. I suddenly remembered that my sister and I had shared that triumphal ride in Stoke Row one hot summer’s day, and how insecure and prickly our perch was. It was the strangest feeling to recall the stooks and ricks of the days before the chequerboard plastic wrapped fields we see today. That overarching sense of history is disappearing and, because of our failure, we’ll never be able to bring it back.

Some forms of nostalgia are a positive waste of energy except perhaps that we still, we always will have song. Barely fifteen years ago I sat in the kitchen of a farmhouse in one of my parishes and watched, through the window, as a procession of combines, trailers and tractors drove along the lane, headlights blazing, to come in for supper and then go back to harvesting the fodder maize that feeds the cattle. Today we went for a drink in the pub in Doynton. The village has changed beyond recognition but if the flow of traffic could be staunched for a while a couple of horses and their riders persuaded to pass by and a rookery installed to provide the music. If a sunset could be organised to bathe the cornbrash walls with evening light and if the conversation dropped just a tiny bit in volume and we stepped outside, I think we could almost see the ancestors in the shadows.

Yet we still have song. Those who believe that their mission in life is to make life harder for us should beware of our spiritual and revolutionary songs of resistance. They too have a long and deeply local history; often rooted in the sense of place, hidden in the DNA of songs and carols that still speak deeply to the most irreligious of us. Of all the things I miss about my ministry it’s the raucous Christmas carol services, packed to the gills with people who were drawn back year by year into the old ways; the funerals where for a fleeting moment we could believe that all would be well and all manner of things would be well as we sang Abide with me. But perhaps most of all on Easter Eve when I was able to sing the exultet; a long plainsong solo hymn of hope for the coming year.

Sunset through the campervan window at Priddy

It’s difficult to sort out the rogues: a rather abstract question.

28th July 2025

The Monmouth and Brecon canal today

We’re back next to the Monmouth and Brecon canal in the campervan and today, walking towards Brecon we noticed that the canal is a tad shallower than usual; so much so that boats passing in opposite directions need to take especial care not to ground themselves as they move to the side. This is the place where I saw my very first Kingfisher in the 1970’s and since then we’ve camped here, paddled up and down the canal in our kayak and walked the towpath in winter frost and summer heat. Spring is the most exciting time when the banks of the canal are alive with emerging wildflowers. It’s a truly inspiring landscape – rich and still diverse with flora and fauna. Last night, over the hedge, we heard a man exclaiming to his child “look up at the tree, there’s an eagle sitting there!” In all probably it was the Osprey that’s taken up residence nearby. Hearing the man’s excitement was almost as good as seeing it for myself.

There’s a reason for the low water level and it’s a dispute about water abstraction from the river Usk which runs almost alongside the canal, and it’s between four principal parties; Welsh Water, the custodians of the river Usk, and the Canals and Rivers Trust who are now obliged to pay £1 million a year in what you might call ransom money to Natural Resources Wales whose explanation of what they actually do with the money boils down to “because we can – it’s really expensive collecting all these tithes!”.

The other litigants are the multitude of smaller environmental groups who love the river, love the canal, and the businesses which bring millions of pounds from tourism in the area and the farmers who can’t grow our food without either rain or irrigation. It isn’t a surprise that there’s a shortage of water; well not at least if you’ve read a newspaper since the middle of the last century or stepped outside your front door in the last three or four years. Droughts, heatwaves and then fierce storms are the symptoms of global heating and we’ve known for decades that this time was coming. Decades during which we could have prepared for an entirely new kind of climate.

It’s widely thought that much of the Usk water being abstracted from the river Usk is now being diverted to depleted reservoirs in order to maintain the water supply in South Wales. I did a quick Gemini search and came up with this answer about pollution incidents involving Welsh Water and here it is:

Natural Resources Wales (NRW) has recently reported that Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water was responsible for 155 pollution incidents in 2024.

This figure represents a significant increase, being the highest number of sewage pollution incidents in a decade, and a 42% increase in incidents over the last ten years. Of the total, 132 incidents were from sewerage assets and 23 related to water supply. Six of these were classified as serious (category one or two) incidents.

NRW has expressed serious concerns about the deterioration in Welsh Water’s performance since 2020 and is demanding urgent and fundamental changes to their operations. They have also pursued a number of prosecutions against the company for various pollution offences.

So the canal is being held to ransom and the river Usk is still being depleted by Welsh Water which – astonishingly – isn’t run by greedy venture capitalists but as a non-profit distributing community asset which is supposed to apply all of its surpluses to improving the environment and resources. Needless to say Welsh Water hasn’t done very well, not having built any reservoirs or, evidently improved its sewerage processing plants. The great and good appear to be standing around wringing their hands and whining that they’d like to get their hands on the people who did this. If they’d like to email me or any of the millions of fuming customers I think we could point them in the right direction. “We have seen the enemy; it is us!”

So inevitably someone will argue – it’s not the fault of the water companies if demand outstrips supply or if, as in the case of sewage supply exceeds capacity. Let’s be frank, there are a multitude of government agencies whose whole raison d’être is to plan, to supervise, to administer, to anticipate demand and to sanction the organisations under its supervision when they fall short. We, the great British public (I could have said unwashed), pay these agencies to do those jobs that can only be done at all at a large – macro – scale.

Any public body that fails to anticipate that increasing housing will require more schools, more water, more sewerage disposal, more doctors and schools whilst planning for thousands of new houses is a few sheep short in the top paddock. Any government that abolishes environmental regulations and then goes to all expenses paid conferences to boast its green credentials is asking for its collective dismissal.

Meanwhile we saw a large dead fish floating on its side in the canal today. If the water level drops too far the oxygen level will fall to the point where it doesn’t support life; the clay lining will dry out and when it’s wetted again it will break up and allow the water out. We saw it happen on the Sharpness canal several decades ago. The writing isn’t just on the wall like a piece of graffiti; it’s eaten into the mortar and the whole edifice is crumbling before our eyes. Parts of it have already collapsed on innocent victims. We grieve for the earth and feel utterly powerless whilst the politicians are still in the denial phase and we’ll be well into anger while they’re asking us all to go straight to acceptance and, by the way, would be kindly stop using so much toilet paper to save the earth. Some time. One day.

There are no winners, only losers in this sterile dispute. Large organisations cost money to run, but in return they really must do what they’re paid to do. We all need clean, unpolluted water and we all need to share in the solution even if it means making do with less. Our attitude to water is pretty depressing, wasting it without thinking and treating our sinks as somewhere which is directly joined to another world so it doesn’t matter what drug residues and chemicals go down them. We love rivers and canals and want to use them for leisure and renewal, we love wildlife, we like eating locally grown food and we like taking a shower and we can’t achieve any of these goods by setting one charity to bankrupt another.

I started this piece intending to write about some of the lesser known and interesting plants we found today. I’ll write that tomorrow – it’s predicted to be raining! Here’s a taster.

Words really matter

Beautiful Demoiselle on the Monmouth and Brecon canal

I was inspired to write to the Guardian letters page many years ago to take issue with Waldemar Januszczak over a piece he’d written loftily dismissing the worker writer movement (in which I was locally active at the time). He’d dismissed the whole idea of working class writing with a contemptuous wave of his silk scarf. The Guardian is one of those media outlets that has never understood that its constituency largely comprises that group of people who are totally unaware of life outside their bubble, and I return again and again to an idea I’ve carried for decades which says that it’s what you say when you’re not thinking that betrays your true personality. Not thinking led a colleague of Madame to pronounce on the situation in Russia during the Yeltsin era, saying there was no poverty there and cited as evidence that the local Starbucks in Moscow was usually crowded.

Recently, a Guardian piece described the people who go out with electronic devices searching for treasure hoards as “Hobbyists”. Had the writer paused even for a moment to consider the inappropriateness of that word “hobbyist”? In the writer’s defence they might argue that they were saying there’s a place for the aforementioned hobbyists to make a (tiny and supervised) contribution to professional archaeology. “Oh gosh – anyone for coffee? mine’s a macchiato Tracey” . Forty years ago I worked as a part-time instructor in a prison. One of my class members was a little and very volatile Welshman who was doing nine years for an affray in which a TV went through a window and one of the protagonists was dangled through the same one. The thing about him was that he was one of the greatest experts on Roman British settlements I ever met. People can be much more complicated than the parodies we invent when we’re not thinking. I remember saying to one particularly nauseating man who’d found more Jesus than me (or could it have been the tea and biscuits?) – “don’t patronise me; I’ve been patronised by much better Christians than you.”

Hobbyist, then, and how about amateur? another word that the insiders use to put the outsiders in their place. Did you instantly recognise the damselfly at the top of this post? Bob Talbot would have known instantly – another man who would never make it to the church Oyster Supper, but who ran a fishing tackle shop in Bedminster, tied flies for pleasure and took me under his wing when I was struggling with my work. I would take the ten o’clock communion in the Lady Chapel wearing my fishing gear and wellies under a long cassock, and dash straight through the house discarding my clericals and out through the back garden gate where Bob would be waiting in his three wheeler to take us out to a river or a lake somewhere. He said to me once “you can keep your god, Dave; this is all I need to be at peace.” On tough days I would go round to the shop and sit with him drinking coffee and setting the world to rights.

And as a beginner field botanist, (my retirement dream) ; although I was fortunate to find a very few highly skilled people who were willing to share their expertise, there were all too many – often retired professional academics – who consistently undervalued the contribution of thousands of unpaid volunteers who had no formal qualifications but were happy to put the hard miles in to record the ordinary and everyday plants without which we’d have no idea what is going on with climate change. You’ll never understand what rare is until you’ve mastered the common to contextualize it.

We’ve become sensitised to personal pronouns, the he and she, his and her bear-traps for careless talkers and that’s a good thing even if it does lead to some hilariously mangled conversations at times. If we must hurt people’s feelings and diminish them as human beings then at least let’s do it deliberately; be proper bastards and own our stupidity. Let’s banish the class-based hierarchies and accept that when the shit hits the fan we need an engineer not a colorectal consultant.

Words can encourage, inspire and move us but they can also belittle and demotivate us. I’m a writer and words, to me, are precious so I get angry with people who use them carelessly, thoughtlessly or untruthfully. A crime against language is a crime against our humanity. So let’s be clear – the only appropriate use of the word “amateur” should be when someone isn’t paid for what they’re doing and regardless of their level of expertise. As for “hobbyist” I can’t see it in any sense except for the purpose of belittling someone. In truth, if it weren’t for unpaid volunteers we’d barely know the extent of environmental damage and species depletion we’re causing. Yes, of course, the number crunching is a bit specialised and the drawing of subsequent conclusions from the data needs keen scientific antennae, but even those more rarified tasks are often being carried out by unpaid volunteers because the government and its ministries know that the best way to solve a problem is never to investigate it – just so that some smarmy politician can say (hand on heart) “there’s no evidence”. “Of course there’s no evidence you clown!“- I might reply – “because you refuse to look for it“.

But we, the great unwashed, will look for the evidence and teach ourselves the skills to do it well because there isn’t any other way.

Even 9mm can be a diagnostic factor.

Just bants mate, no offence intended.

Part of the Lleyn Pilgrim’s Way near Rhiw

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

GK Chesterton “The rolling English road” 1913

I suppose it was just what might be called light hearted banter, but Chesterton’s suggestion that ancient roads and tracks are the result of drunkenness is so way off beam. It’s also evidence of a mindset that’s at least one of the underlying causes of the state we’re in. The truth is, our forerunners and ancestors had an utterly different relationship with the landscape and there’s a far more important reason for winding roads than the suggestion that they were too pissed to make them straight.

We just got back from north Wales where the second half of our stay was in a rather inaccessible cottage on the steeply sloped side of Mynydd Rhiw below the hamlet itself. We were also on the footpath that’s been designated as part of a Pilgrims’ Way. Let’s not get too carried away by that designation because pilgrimage is becoming big business for pubs, cafés and anyone with an empty transit van willing to shuttle pilgrims and their luggage between sections. However Bardsey has been a pilgrim destination for centuries and these miles of track intersect with any number of sacred places. Since Chaucer’s days pilgrims have been a grand mixture of the pious, the curious, the culpable and lost souls looking for some spiritual treasure.

By reason of age, infirmity and knee replacements, the steep path became – for five days – the only way back to the car, and the best available nature reserve. I completely fell in love with 400 metres of stone wall and its associated plants. Breathless and a bit arthritic I had to stop every ten or fifteen paces in any case on the extremely steep slope and so a bit of botanising was inevitable. I even made a list, and I was necessarily directed into a thoughtful appreciation of the people who built the accompanying wall. Five feet high in most of its length and huge boulders- the largest at the base. Some of the stones were so large they would have needed the combined strength of half a dozen strong men. Some were obviously there already.

These walls are quite different from the many other regional styles, and the reason of course is that walls were built with whatever was immediately available and to-hand. In Wiltshire and Gloucestershire there’s a lot of flat brash; and in other parts there are flat slabs of slate. An experienced stonewaller could probably tell you where a particular wall could be found – just from a photo.

But look again more closely, and what you see is the most marvellous habitat for insects and small mammals. One highlight of our time there was to find a couple of bits of scat – poo – that possibly came from a stoat; black, and rich with the blood and bones of its prey and pointed at the ends as we discovered is the sign of a carnivore.

In the lee of the wall a pilgrim might have sheltered from the storms that regularly blow in from Hell’s Mouth bay below, and of course a large number of plant species were enjoying the comfort and warmth that a wall brings. But more important to my argument here was the sinuous course of the wall as it descended the hill. The reason wasn’t hard to imagine. The builders obviously took their stones from next to the proposed course of the wall, thereby creating a pronounced hollow, the grass punctuated by protruding clints waiting to turn an unprepared ankle. These builders must have had the strength of oxen. It’s all well and good to lift 200 lbs a couple of times in the gym, but to lift similarly heavy, muddy and irregular stones all day; time after time must have shown awesome stamina. However now and again they must have encountered rocks weighing far beyond their capacity. I’ve seen it suggested that they could have shattered stones using fires and water but here on the side of a mountain there were none of the makings for such technology, and so they just went around them. They read the landscape and bowed to the facts on the ground.

There’s a whole spirituality in that obedience to the landscape; a kind of Tai Chi approach to building a wall; bending and turning to the superior force of nature. When the Romans came they used their technology to dominate the landscape, building straight roads across the country. It’s a habit we’ve never shaken off in spite of it being so wasteful of human energy. We waste our strength and precious resources by demanding that the earth bends to our will, when the ancients accepted that as a part of the whole of nature we’re limited in what we can demand. So here are some of the perfectly ordinary plants that lived under the shelter of the wall, only occasionally observed by pilgrims in search of the meanings that have always just slipped away. As RS Thomas described it in one of his poems, it was like putting your hand into a hare’s form and feeling the warmth although the hare has always just fled.

Muckyannydinny Lane – or how to inspire, recruit and train an army of naturalists to save the earth.

I have no idea who mucky Anny was, although I can hazard a guess that she was not much loved by the godly wives of Seymour Road. I can vouch for the fact that the little cut-through alley was the scene of many a knee trembler; back in the days when a degree of broken glass and a few rusty cans were the inevitable setting for illicit cuddles before sex was invented.

Muckyannydinny lane peeled off from the more salubrious lane that led to the primary school and the little Methodist Chapel where Auntie Doreen and her extended family presided. She also presided over my school dinners where she could punish me for minor crimes by heaping extra swede on my plate. The end of the lane was guarded by a Mr Monks, a mortuary attendant (I’m really not kidding!) who would yarn to us about his macabre experiences whilst teaching us for our first aid badges with the Boy’s Brigade.

Muckyannydinny lane was a side turn for the bravest souls to take a difficult route to the bottom of Seymour road; a short-cut for which wellingtons and a machete would have been useful. Opposite Mr Monks’ cottage was a hedge of knotted and writhing branches much like the ones in the photograph. The hedge absolutely fascinated me. If that image conveys a certain eroticism it’s because the first time I ever saw two people making love (after a fashion) it was just a little further on, at the end of Muckyanny …….. you get the picture. They were teenagers, she was crying and he was pressed into her in what must have been a practical rather than delightful manner. Hence the knee trembler . Obviously at around eight years old I had no idea what was going on and I hurried past, avoiding the hostile glare of the young man and struggling not to look back for another intoxicating draught of forbidden fruit. I could feel the forbidding teachings of the Methodist chapel crumbling, but far from any sense of bewilderment and trauma the experience welded together the experience of nature (the lane with the knotted hedge) with the eroticism of the teenaged couple.

Years later I spent several days perched on the bank of By Brook attempting to capture the same kind of entangled mass of roots in a pencil drawing. The exact same feelings were flooding back; which would seem to indicate a fine example of a psychological complex. The associations of one powerful experience flooding the field of another. So if you were to ask me about my love of nature – and if I were being strictly honest – I’d have to cut all the anodyne explanations, clear away the smokescreen and to say that from a very early age the natural world was suffused with a kind of aesthetic eroticism. For me it was infused with a wild amalgam of spirituality, poetry, art, and contemplative joy. The natural world could lead to ecstasy – being lifted out of myself; out of my troubled, complicated family; out of anxious meals waiting for the inevitable row, away from steamy windows and threats of awful punishment for unspecified crimes at Sunday School.

Bring immersed in nature

So I was planting potatoes on the allotment a couple of days ago when I was joined by a couple of fearless Robins who came up to my feet and filled their beaks with pests I was glad to see the back of. Somewhere back in the bushes next to the road, there was a nest with young and our two universes overlapped for an hour while I planted spuds and they fed their brood. Obviously I talked to them but apart from a beady glance in my direction now and again, the conversation never really got off the ground. So I wondered “whose allotment was this anyway?” as I watched them, and I concluded that it was obviously a shared space. Later I spotted a clump of grass that I’d identified using an AI app a couple of days previously. It said it was Barren Brome but being a bit of a belt and braces kind of naturalist I got the books out – sooo many books! – and double triple checked. They weren’t much help as it turned out except for one book that said that if you looked at the ligule – technical term I know, but if you look carefully at the stem just where the leaf branches off – you would see that in Barren Brome the ligule is sort of shredded; shaggy. Imagine wearing a T shirt under a normal shirt and that your neck is the grass stalk. The ligule is the bit where your T shirt shows. It can be all sorts of shapes and appearances from pointed to shaggy and even just a line of bushy hairs. The other important bit is called the auricle and not all grasses have them but they’re the equivalent of your shirt collar – little pointed lapels that sometimes overlap and occasionally aren’t there a all. If you really want to impress your friends you can wander through a field of growing cereals and identify what’s growing there just by looking at the auricles. That’s a trick taught to me by a retired grain salesperson on a pilgrimage years ago.

Anyway, and sorry for that looping distraction, I rather distractedly pulled out a stalk of this grass and looked for the ligule (and now you know what that is), and there was exactly the minute shaggy, threadbare looking structure I was looking for, and there followed not just the inner nod and a resolution to record it – no! there was a burst of joy; real song-like joy at my discovery.

Robins, Barren Brome, the sun on my back and planting potatoes became a totally immersive occupation. Wild nature is like that. I talk mainly about plants but the moment I saw my first Heron take off (it froze my blood with its ancient magic); heard my first Curlew call or caught sight of a Kingfisher on the Monmouth and Brecon canal, they changed me, reorganised the inner workings of my mind. A group of Adders sunbathing at the bottom of a buddle-pit on Velvet Bottom provoked a tectonic mind-shift.

Nature isn’t there for our amusement, or for showing off how clever we are. There’s no future in objectifying nature with our beloved reductive thinking; making more and more of less and less, as if it’s (she’s) there so we can exploit her for personal gain, like a victim of slavery. Nature isn’t really there for any fathomable reason at all which is precisely why it’s so wonderful. You will probably know the slogan “We have seen the enemy, it is us” coined, decades ago, to help celebrate Earth Day. I’d like to reverse that slogan in the face of the terrible emergency we’re facing and imagine ourselves as foot soldiers whose only weapons are poetry, philosophy, religion (properly understood and not mangled by worship of the status quo); spirituality; music; drama; dance ; healing and multifaceted cultures working together in creative resistance.

But in order to achieve that we need both to to inspire but more important to equip and enable ordinary people like us to take on the Magisterium and demand to be taken seriously, to be allowed to learn and grow in confidence and stature without having to resort to hand-to-hand combat in the corridors of influence. There’s an old, but useful proverb that I came across during my parish priest days:

The people who keep the church open are the same as the ones who keep it empty!

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been turned away demoralized and deflated by some self-styled expert whose instinctive response to new ideas is to destroy them in case they catch on. Being largely self-taught in botany, for instance, means that I have to start from nowhere every time; battling with the jargon, technical terms and latin that seem almost designed to lock out intruders. The plus side is that I’m extremely stubborn and I press on by building the conceptual framework that underpins the whole edifice. When I know something I really know it and so I push back, only to be labelled rude and aggressive. Someone once called me the rudest person they’d ever met. I thought at the time they’d been rather lucky.

How can we persist in a situation where millions, probably the majority of people know there’s an absolutely linked climate and financial crisis and would willingly do something to help, but feel intimidated by precisely the out-of-date ideas which got us into this mess in the first place. The current crisis is largely fuelled by fear, envy, greed and hatred. With all respect to the welly telly brigade, watching documentaries about nature is not a substitute for being in it; immersed in it, enraptured by it, possessed by it and – dare I say – guided by it.

There’s nothing like growing an allotment for teaching us how stupid is the idea of controlling nature for our own benefit. Nature is our mother, our lover, our spiritual guide and our friend.