Tag: environmental catastrophe

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.

The aesthetic gift of plants

A stacked focus macro photograph of the prickles on the cactus that lives on my desk

This is turning into something of a series. On January 5th I wrote about the plants being markers of the passing seasons after walking down a lane towards the beach here in Cornwall; none of them rare in any sense but all capable of lifting your heart as an avatar of spring. On 6th January I wrote about plants and their properties as irreplaceable sources of as-yet undiscovered drugs; but I warned that they’re also the canaries in the environmental coalmine warning us clearly about the danger of our extractive and instrumental abuse of nature. Then on the 7th January I turned towards the difficulties but also rewards of a meditative relationship with plants and nature as a whole. Notwithstanding the difficulties of talking about “soul” and “spirituality” I asked whether a loosely Taoist spirituality can build a deeper relationship with the earth and creation without resorting to religious fanaticism. Is there a way into a green spirituality that honours Wittgenstein’s wise aphorism – * “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” ? or perhaps more simply, can we ever attempt to explain mysteries without distorting and diminishing them?

So today, in the fourth of these I want to address another gift that plants bring to us – their sheer beauty. Anyone who’s ever loved a William Morris wallpaper or fabric design will understand his debt to natural forms. Any ceramic artist must surely be especially inspired by the natural forms, textures and colours of fungi. Any painter could learn how to replicate the colours, and any sculptor the forms of these exquisite parts of creation that were growing here long before the first hominids evolved and will still be here and still evolving long after we’ve gone the way of the dinosaurs. I don’t write this as a knockdown stand-alone argument for preserving nature, but I believe that the aesthetic can’t be left out of the argument because it’s the aesthetic dimension that helps us to value those parts of life that can’t be reduced to money. If you ask the question “what is a Cowslip worth?” could anyone respond fully without mentioning its beauty, its history, its place in the scheme of things? The value of a wildflower meadow could never be expressed without including its aesthetic dimension except – I write this with a heavy heart – a property developer who might pay lip service to its “recreational value” by offering to build a playing field somewhere else – a promise that will be waived away by the local planning authority if the developer pleads that they can’t make a profit unless they build on the football field too!

And if I might sound off a little bit longer, if we all watched nature programmes on TV from dawn ’till dusk, seven days a week, we’d be in danger of being as ignorant of nature as we were when we were born. Television is inherently passive entertainment more or less presented as education. The real stuff is out there in the cold and rain or, with a bit of luck, on those warm summer evenings when once, in France, I grumbled because a churring Nightjar was keeping me awake in my tent. Real nature is sensual, tactile and mucky, and it demands patience and fierce concentration as well as some ultra rewarding book-work.

When I was learning to do botanical illustration (I never got very far but it taught me the value of close attention), I took dozens of close-up photographs of a Hyacinth so I could paint it using just three colours. This is a great exercise for anyone to try. I’ll never be a William Morris, but I’ll never again dismiss a Hyacinth from a supermarket as “just a Pot Plant”. As I went through my albums looking to pick some appropriate photographs for this post, it occurred to me that one other gift from the natural world to us is to inflame our curiosity. But that would demand a separate post.

*Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The Potwell Inn New Year quiz – answers below

First image – which kind of Wild Carrot is this?

Second image – what’s so fishy about this?

Third (Bindweed) what’s the significance of the little pointed bit between the two reddish leafy things?

Upper fourth – Which children’s’ book character shares a name with this plant?

Lower fifth – which word does this plant share with the one above?

Left upper sixth – What part of the body shares a name with this fern?

Left lower seventh – what’s wrong with this Strawberry?

Right eighth – where would you look for this plant?

Left ninth – What punctuation mark shares the name of this butterfly?

For the photo at bottom right, check out the tree label!

Answers – 1. Sea Carrot, 2. Oyster fungus, 3. !t’s the difference between Large Bindweed, where you can see it, and Hedge bindweed where you can’t. Gardeners hate both! 4. Marsh Woundwort. 5. Marsh thistle. 6. Hart’s tongue. 7. It’s yellow, still a strawberry but it’s inedible, 8 Sea radish. 9.Comma. 10. See nameplate.

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz!

While we didn’t exactly come down to Cornwall to search for spring – after all it’s barely January – what you certainly notice is that everything’s at least a couple of weeks ahead of Bath. I listed a few early starters yesterday; none of them in flower but all putting in an appearance. So, in the depths of this grey and dreary weather I thought it would be nice to show a couple of plants from today that cheered me up no end. On the left Allium triquetrum, three cornered garlic, and on the right Poa annua annual meadow grass; both cheap as chips, common as muck and mutton dressed as lamb if you like, but lovely. I must have a slut’s eye for the local weeds.

Sea Spleenwort in Bath city centre!

My mind was actually set on higher things because I set out with a grid reference that I hoped would lead me to some Sea Spleenwort. We’ve walked miles along this bit of coastline looking for it but if it’s there it’s no more than a millimetre tall (which I know isn’t true because I’ve seen it growing in Bath). I know it was here years ago because it was recorded by an impeccably qualified botanist, so I guess it may just have died out – like so many species in these times of climate and wildlife destruction.

It’s been freezing cold and wet here since we arrived and I was thinking that if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) should change direction (which is a real possibility with global climate change) we shall have to stop pretending we live in a warm and temperate climate and put up with living at the same latitude as St Petersburg. At the moment we’re in denial about the effects of climate change. We dream of uninvented, uninventable technologies coming over the hill to save us, like the Seventh Cavalry in an old cowboy movie but the bad news is that they’re not there.

Maybe we focus too much on the loss to science with species destruction. OK there are a million reasons why we might need to learn from life-forms we haven’t yet even discovered; powerful drugs to be discovered and so forth, but the sheer loss of beauty that comes with species destruction is a loss to our souls (and don’t ask what I mean by “soul” because even though I couldn’t say what it is, it’s still an important intangible something which raises our humanity above the instrumental.

The weather here, even in the far South West, has been pretty awful, although not as bad as it’s been further north, but those flowers (even grasses have flowers) are a kind of token that we know will be redeemed as February turns to March and our hearts begin to thaw.

The beach today

We’ve got the hots for the winter

It’s true to say that I don’t really like this time of year very much. The botanical fairground has packed up and gone, and I’m left standing in the midst of the yellow grass and the mud wondering if there will be another one next year. Of course – short of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), doing a quick U turn – there will probably be an improbably wet/cold, dry/warm/generally unpredictable winter followed by another floral circus some time between february and April. Plants seem to be much more adaptable than humans because we spend so much time wittering on about difficult ideas like normal we can’t see what’s happening in front of our eyes, and I for one have no idea how to run a successful allotment in somewhere as cold as St Petersburg – after a spell in Babylon with Deacon Starmer and the funeral band in charge.

So in times of botanical dearth I turn to cooking, drying and preserving. On the stove at this moment is a large batch of ragu – enough for a dozen meals – and a gallon of stock reducing down. It’s a very homely smell and it’ll all go into the freezer against those days when we really can’t be arsed to cook. Good stock is the pixie dust of the kitchen. In the left hand jar photographed at the top is half of a large crop of Habanero chillies, dried in the oven ; an entirely unexpected gift, as it happens, because the nursery label said they were going to grow up as sweet peppers but obviously weren’t. So this summer we were pepperless and this winter we will have to cook Mexican if we’re not going to waste them. They did smell rather beautiful as they dried – even if they made my eyes water! Alongside them is the usual crop of surplus tomatoes, reduced and turned into sauces and passata. The crusty looking layer is butter from our favourite Hazan number one sauce which, with a lump of chopped chorizo and some of the (small) crop of Borlotti makes a decent ribsticker meal on a cold day.

We’ve got a couple more outings to look forward to; a trip up the Kennet and Avon canal in a narrow boat and a long weekend in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) with our friends Kate and Nick and perhaps one last adventure in the campervan before Christmas – probably on the Monmouth and Brecon Canal. But the flowers just aren’t there any more and there’s nothing much to report on the allotment (another load of wood chip today – etc), so given that I’ve taken Trappist vows not to spend my time grumbling about the state of the world I’ve very little to get my creative juices flowing.

I know, I really do know, that this time next week I’ll be enthusiastically photographing fungi and going through my endless list of unidentified fern photos ready for next season; and perhaps it’s because Madame and I have crammed a whole years worth of vaccinations, dentist appointments, X rays, cardo assessments, scans and physio stuff, that we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by our vulnerability; but, to be honest, I’m feeling fitter than I have done for a year or more. The Cardiology department of the Royal United Hospital is on the third floor, up six flights of stairs, and I can now climb then without collapsing halfway. There’s a notice at the top that says “if you can read this you don’t need us!”– (that’s a joke, they’ve been great).

Madame had an unusual conversation with an old parishioner in the week. He must have seen or heard about this blog because he mentioned that we knew we were now running a pub (presumably the Potwell Inn) and living in a council estate. Wrong on both counts I’m afraid. There are no longer any council estates because all the council houses have been sold off – making a cultural stereotype redundant at the same time; and the Potwell Inn isn’t a pub, it’s a metaphor stolen from an HG Wells comic novel called “A History of Mr Polly”. I think I was banned from posting on Facebook because an artificially intelligent (stupid) algorithm decided I am a business. I wish! Anyway Chris – rest assured that we are fine and living near to some Georgian terraces in a cold concrete building with damp and black mould and this is not a pub but an HMO with a lively drug subculture outside on the green; always entertaining. The river outside is pretty but often quite smelly. We’ve always suspected that it’s got sewerage in it – largely due to the frothy schooners that float down from Pulteney Weir when the river floods. But a couple of days ago our friend Charlie posted a copy of a video sent to him by a scientist friend across the way, clearly showing a dense brown slick pouring from what is supposed to be a stormwater outfall. Worse still, the swans seemed to be swimming in it – I’ll never kiss another swan.

So just to cheer up gardeners and allotmenteers everywhere I’ll finish with a photo of everyone’s very favourite plant. Please welcome the Large Bindweed- cousin to the Hedge Bindweed, the Field Bindweed, the Sea Bindweed and the Hairy Bindweed. We used to have a couple of families like that in one of my parishes.

Large Bindweed, Calystegia sylvatica

Traveller’s Joy

Old man’s beard, Traveller’s joy, Clematis vitalba.

This new database of mine is already driving me crazy. I’ve got thousands of photos of unidentified plants and hundreds of plant records – the ones I know I’ve seen in the past – easy ones like Elderberry – without any photographs. I try to keep a list of the photos I need to take in my head, but in reality I spot something I might need to photograph for the database and then go back to the laptop to check. It’s never too soon to get organised!

The love of nature is very peculiar. I’ve been vocal in my suspicion of the endlessly asserted factoid that nature is good for you and cures more human ills than the finest snake oil – but that’s just my sceptical nature. When I stop to think I can recall the first time I experienced what I later discovered was called an oceanic experience. The phrase was coined by Romain Rolland in a letter to Sigmund Freud.

“a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded”, a “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”

Harebells on Rodway Hill

Which is a bit grand for my unforgettable experience but it was real enough for me – aged maybe 11 – lying in the grass on Rodway hill, listening to the wind fingering the fine grass while I watched a group of Harebells swaying in unison. These days I understand the geology of the Old Red Sandstone and the acidity of the thin soil, but none of that grown-up knowledge comes close to explaining the experience. I’d just want to say that it’s the memory that sustains and inspires me and it’s vanishingly rare in my experience – it doesn’t happen every time I go out botanizing and it doesn’t cure my anxieties but rests there in my mind as a permanent reminder that it’s not all confusing and bad. There’s something indescribable but good under the chaos of events.

Two weeks in Cornwall with an average internet speed of around forty kilobits per second – really! – has tested my saintly patience! Anyway, I took the Old Man’s Beard photo on our last holiday walk and it suited my wicked purposes very well today as I started to write this, because the two words -“traveller” and “joy” were never more inappropriately joined together as we drove back from Cornwall. Our holiday had to be curtailed by two days because one of the components of the campervan water system had failed and we needed to stop off at MURVI headquarters in Ivybridge where it could be repaired. That entailed a considerable detour across-country from Roseland to the edge of Dartmoor via Plymouth; a pleasant drive avoiding any rush hour towns. We arrived on time and the job was done in half an hour by a brilliant fitter called (I think) Chris, who made it all look easy. Thereafter we were on the A38 and later the M5 travelling at about 20 mph all the way. This wasn’t due to flooding, accidents or even roadworks but sheer traffic overload. There was a long queue beyond every single slip road and we chugged along in a pall of pollution and bad tempered driving. It’s my proud boast that we kept up with a Ferrari all the way. Not bad for a 2009 campervan eh? By Saturday the motorway was flooded and the road surface of the new Severn Bridge had lifted so the bridge was closed. More huge queues. Is anyone planning for the impact of a global climate catastrophe? Peaceful demonstrators can get 5 years for protests which may be annoying, while children develop lung disease from pollution.

Comma butterfly in the lane

There are a number of familiar walks from the campsite we’ve been staying at for years. But our familiarity with the resident plants is always challenged by new finds – I wrote about some of them in the most recent post – and so we walk with our eyes wide, scanning the verges waiting for something to stand out. These lanes have plants you’d never see anywhere else and some of them are so shy and retiring we’ve walked past them for years without spotting them. Luckily in the past couple of weeks we’ve spotted something new almost every day. Alongside the Percuil river where we found orchids in spring, we stood and listened to the heartbreakingly lovely call of the Curlews.

We live in Bath which is also continually choked with traffic. Not only that but the size of cars (and therefore engines) seems to be increasing exponentially; driving behaviour is moving close to fairground dodgems – and speed limits? – don’t even ask. All this whilst lobby groups supported by deluded “locals” (they’re often not) are fighting tooth and nail for the human right to drive down narrow residential streets at whatever speed pleases them. It seems to have escaped their tiny thinking parts that the outcome of unrestricted and unregulated traffic is – wait for it – traffic jams. I once took this up with a campaigner waving a placard near to our flat and he admitted that he didn’t even live in Bath. And don’t come back at me about our campervan because it’s only done 52,000 miles in the past 15 years and we keep it in a compound way outside the Bath LTZ which is a price we’re prepared to pay for not clogging the streets or the air.

Sea Carrots – Daucus carota ssp gummifer

Of course autumn has its own unique pleasures, not least to look at plants that are more easily identified by their seeds and seed heads – this applies particularly to the large and confusing carrot family. I don’t know how you could distinguish wild carrots from sea carrots if it weren’t for the fact that senescent wild carrot flowers shrink and bend into tiny old fashioned wicker lobster pots or perhaps bird cages, whereas sea carrots remain fairly open. Then the scarlet fruits in the hedgerows could be Black Bryony, or Woody Nightshade, or Honeysuckle – it’s fun to know the difference.

Coming back home to the crowds and the drug dealers outside on the green was a painful reminder that all is not well in our country. Part of the A36 has fallen down the hill in Limpley Stoke and is closed and on Saturday the students all moved back into their accommodation which effectively closed the lower Bristol road all day. The new Labour government is already weakening environmental regulations and abandoning their election manifesto commitments at the behest of lobbyists and shady donors. Am I cross? Hell yes!!

Blue Moon over the sea

But I’m desperately sad for the young woman and two young men who sat on the bench outside on the green, smoking crack, slumped over; their hopes of better lives draining slowly away.

The lowdown on city centre streetlife

A local blogger posted a couple of pictures today rather like the ones above except that the left hand picture showed a pavement lined and ennobled by plants and the right hand saw the same picture with all the plant life taken out by the moaners and scrapers employed to humour tidy minded citizens. These two plants are respectively Knotgrass and Procumbent Yellow Sorrel, both eking out a living barely two centimetres above the pavement and inconspicuous with it – like all successful squatters; and you know how it is when someone passes a deeply upsetting remark without even realizing they’re being annoying. Like one of our neighbours who thought I’d be impressed by his decision to vote Reform in the recent election. I don’t think our blogger – one I follow and who is normally very sensible – thought for a moment that anyone would disagree with his settled opinion that “weeds” make the pavement look bad and upset the tourists. But urban plants are fascinating and I’d venture that they’ll get even more fascinating as the climate heats up and we all start to wonder what will survive global climate change. What lives on air, dust and heat ? What is it in their DNA that makes them such great survivors, and can we borrow a bit of it? Here are some more weeds.

So – left to right, Rue Leaved Saxifrage, Coltsfoot and the old Charles Street Telephone Exchange – all growing together. So tell me which of these three is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen? I’m all for uprooting the building which was built facing the end of a lovely Georgian street under crown privilege and therefore bypassing planning regulations. Our backyard – an old builders yard – featured 47 species of weed last time I counted. Every year a council employee comes along the street scraping them all off – he used to spray with glyphosate; then they tried rocksalt and now it’s down to a sharp hoe. For the sake of setting the record straight, the plants all regrow in roughly the same time whatever the council do. In Oxford a rogue urban botany group started to label the “weeds” so that passers-by could see that they had names and often uses too. Brilliant idea but I daresay by now they’re all banged up in prison for discussing writing plant labels on a zoom call intercepted by GCHQ.

Of course you might find the mean streets of central Bath so upsetting that you can only traverse them by blotting out the noise with headphones and adopting that curious mobile phone walk, head down with the phone held out ahead like the prow of a ship breasting hostile waves. The other day we were in Great Stanhope Street and we saw a Lesser Black Backed gull attempting to swallow a rat whole, shaking it around to try and align it into a suitable position; an operation which caused the rat’s tail to wave around rather upsettingly in the sunshine. On the same morning we saw a pair of pigeon’s feet on the pavement – pretty clearly the remains of the local Peregrine Falcon’s recent meal finished off by a fox or a carrion crow.

Throw away the mobile distraction unit along with the headphones and you too could enjoy nature red in tooth and claw; share the outrageous joy of the carousing teenagers on the green and talk to the flowers whose worldly experience as survivors exceeds all expectations. The countryside isn’t a nature reserve somewhere outside the city boundary, nature is right here and we’re part of it.

Sea Spleenwort – living off Pepsi can, crisp packet, dog ends and McDonalds tray.
NB – no sea!

Gardening for the longer term

[Interestingly, there’s an AI tool built in to WordPress which I seem to have turned on accidentally, and which persistently interrupts and chides me for long or difficult words! I credit my readers with more intelligence than that!!]

This tree was on the allotment when we took it on – an old neglected espalier apple which Madame has retrained (restrained maybe). And yes those curled leaves are concealing Codling Moth.

If you’ve never read Michael Pollan’s excellent book “The Botany of Desire” then if you ever intend to grow apples you should go and get it right now. There’s a section in the book devoted to apples and among the fascinating facts and legends there’s mention of the fact that as the settlers crossed America and staked their claim on parcels of land, there was a legal requirement for them to plant apple trees in order to demonstrate their long-term commitment to the land.

Trees, of any kind, are a long term investment – for instance I marvel at some of the arboreta in the great estates of the eighteenth century where the landowners would have known they would never see the mature fruits of their planting. On any allotment site you’ll see many different styles of plot. Many will be cleared as annual plants mature and will spend the remaining parts of the season or year under cover. In a culture that lives for the moment, the idea of a long-term plan for an allotment might seem fanciful. Who knows when the landowner or the local authority will see it as a cash cow and flog it off to a developer.

But somewhere between the bland assumptions of a Humphrey Repton, for instance, that it was perfectly sensible to plant for future centuries, and the panicked sense of catastrophe of a 21st century environmental campaigner there’s still a case to be made for a commitment to slow growing perennials like fruit trees.

We’ve now planted two short (five trees) rows of apples, plums, damsons and pears – one row six years ago and the other three. It’s hardly an orchard and, until this year, we’ve barely picked an edible fruit but this year the first row of five apple trees has had an excellent set of fruit which should, if we planned it right, give us a few fresh dessert apples until October. The second row has given us a few Victoria plums and a decent crop of Bramleys – while we have to wait for any Damsons (could take years) and Conference pears. You’ve no idea how much pleasure it’s given to watch them grow from whips to cordon trees on MM106 or similar rootstocks. That’s a local authority rule, by the way, standard trees tend to swamp the allotments as they grow ever taller. One of our neighbours bought some standard apples cheaply off the supermarket and is only just learning the error of his ways. You can hear them growling at night!

Sadly, though, the deer are back on the site and nibbling away – especially the lower leaves and flowers of runner beans which are only just picking up speed after a very slow start. However the delayed gratification of the fruit trees has brought a whole new dimension to the allotment. Somehow it feels more mature, more long-term and more sense of anticipation of seasons to come. I remember our keen expectation of the greengages on our grandparents’ smallholding. I don’t think they were ever great croppers, but what they lacked in quantity they more than made up for in sweetness and flavour.

In the midst of the first and possibly the only heatwave of the summer we’ve been getting up very early and grabbing a couple of the cooler hours before we’re driven back behind the shutters in the flat. Our project has been to demolish the fruit cage which – given what I’ve just written – may sound counterintuitive but we’ve lived and learned a lot about weeds and in particular Bindweed (Devil’s Guts in one local name). Looking at the allotment earlier this year we realized that Bindweed just loves climbing up fences or nets. That raises two issues. Firstly you can’t strim or burn the young shoots off without destroying the cages and secondly cages are just as good at keeping allotmenteers out as they are at keeping out squirrels, birds and other roving pests. So we’ve taken away their climbing frames, let a lot of light in and given ourselves space to move around for pruning, watering, feeding and picking as well as dragging the long bindweed roots out whenever we see them. We shall see ….. I think we were rather affected by a protectionist frame of mind when we started out, but we’ve come to see the truth of that old saying – ‘the best fertilizer is the farmer’s boot.’ Wherever there’s a too narrow path or an inaccessible bed , or even perhaps a row of stakes the purpose of which you can’t quite remember, that’s where the weeds will flourish because you’re not constantly walking past and yanking them out. If you’re constrained by a fence or a low net you’ll avoid hoeing and the associated backache and go somewhere easier. At the risk of sounding extremely bossy you should avoid dumping full buckets of anything on a narrow path because if it stays there for even a week it will claim squatter’s rights and you’ll be tripping over it for a whole season – oh and when you finally tip the water off the rotting weeds it will go over your feet and it will stink. Trust me – I’ve done it all. By all means let a thousand weeds grow for the pollinators because nature abhors a vacuum, but let that be a matter of deliberate choice and make sure you know what’s in that cloud of parachute seeds passing you. Willowherb is a monstrously successful coloniser!