Tag: environmental crisis

Foraging – like the curate’s egg, good in parts.

I’m allergic to plants in the obvious sense that I get terrible hay-fever between March and October and I always wonder if, when people see me in the street during those months, they might see my streaming eyes and nose and wonder if I’ve just had some terrible news. But I’m also allergic to the idea of picking them. Madame has no such inhibitions and it’s a rare day when we don’t have a small jug of wildflowers from the allotment in the middle of the table. Occasionally I suspect they make me sneeze but I wouldn’t be without them. Thinking for instance about the Cowslip, the dilemma about picking them becomes more insistent because they’ve declined so much in the past due mainly to changed farming practices and chemical weedkillers. The idea that we mustn’t pick them is a bit of an urban myth because they’re not legally protected if you just pick them for that traditional jam jar display. If, however, you’re making cowslip wine and need a bucketful of flower heads, your actions would be extremely thoughtless and reprehensible and if you uproot a few plants for your garden without the owner’s permission you’d be committing a criminal offence under the Theft Act 1968. If you gather flowers and leaves for personal use in making herbal medicines it’s lawful, but it’s unethical if you strip a whole cluster bare and illegal to dig the roots up without permission. If you forage to supply your phytomedical business then you might get an appointment with our learned friends. It’s a legal but also an ethical minefield which I prefer to resolve by trying to take the best possible photographs to use for identification and taking the bare minimum from a plant only if I need to take it home for further work. I’m bound to say that the decline of wildflowers is very little to do with over enthusiastic picking as opposed to intensive farming and chemical sprays but legal sanctions and self restraint engender a cautious attitude. There’s another reason – amusingly expressed on a T shirt doing the rounds at the moment with the slogan – “All plants are edible; some of them only once”. The gravest danger lurks for any ill informed forager who thinks that because it’s wild it must be good for you.

But this raises the issue concerning learning our plants which begins with falling in love with them. At that crucial early stage how is anyone supposed to decide whether a pretty looking plant is on Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act if they don’t even know that such an act exists. Wildlife programmes on TV rarely pay much attention to plants, and when they do it’s usually the show stoppers that get the attention. It’s hard to imagine getting a programme about common weeds getting on to the screen without a Dalek shouting “Exterminate”. My Mum learned her plants by osmosis. She only ever used latin names if they had become common by usage but most of the time it was the common name used in her part of the Chilterns. She not only knew their names and where to find them, she also knew what they were used for. Brimstone and treacle was the name of a very unpleasant blood tonic not the title of a Dennis Potter play. Glycerine and thymol was a gargle for sore throat; dock leaves eased nettle stings although broadleaf plantain is better and if you’ve got the patience you can peel off the outer layer of a Navelwort leaf leaving a cooling substitute for an Elastoplast. Zinc and castor oil (Zac) – probably made up by the local pharmacist was the go-to remedy for rashes along with calamine (zinc) lotion for chicken pox. These were all well known and traditional remedies for the everyday complaints – the piles and varicose veins, childhood illnesses, constipation (my Dad was a martyr to his bowels!). So there was nothing strange and technical about a licorice stick or a Dandelion root and conversely all country children knew about deadly nightshades and Foxglove. For the overwhelming majority of children today even those common plant names are another language altogether and so plants – because they don’t know what they’re called or what they do, disappear to the background of consciousness and the reach what’s come to to be called “green blindness”.

Herbal medicine or Phytomedicine as they now call it – possibly because it sounds posher and less attached to the peasantry – demands a wide knowledge of plants. Dying and weaving use many wild plants for colours, foragers introduce old foods to a new generation so long as they know what they’re doing and don’t flout the law but for the average person there’s a huge gulf between liking plants and understanding their names and broad place in the culture. Many £500 weekend courses suggest that the freedom of the earth is yours when you’ve seen a Thornapple or a Death Cap just once, and every year someone will have a final meal of Hemlock Water Dropwort. It takes time to know even the basics fully and because we’re no longer peasants, drip fed the meanings of plants; but we have to do it the hard way on our hands and knees, and through books.

My own very cautious venture into plant medicine is confined to making calendula cream which is wonderful for skin complaints and we make a great deal of it using marigolds we grow on the allotment. I also made a batch of medicine for Madame which took ages and tasted filthy with no notable result, but the experience taught me a great deal and showed me where to obtain the plants I couldn’t forage or grow myself. However many everyday herbs which we grow on the allotment are foods, packed with vitamins and trace elements as well as specific molecules which have an effect on everyday complaints. Here I am, sitting and typing in rude health, having taken a digoxin tablet with my breakfast. This is a drug synthesized from the Foxglove and deadly in the event of overdoing it. Plants – and perhaps this is one of the most exciting and staggering gifts they bring to the human race – have the gift of putting together complex molecules which Big Pharma is only too pleased to identify, synthesize or refine and then patent making shedloads of money in the process. The Foxglove doesn’t even get a cursory thank-you on my Digoxin packet!

Just out of interest I did a bit of research on any commonly used medicinal herbs which are also on Schedule 8 and therefore fully protected. A bit of jiggery pokery and a small Python computer routine – AI, not written by me – compared the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia with the latest Schedule 8 list and came up with the fascinating fact there is only one plant appearing in both lists – the Marsh Gentian, which I’ve never seen – and three near misses with Centaury Thistles which would be easy to sort out in the field. Bear in mind, though that the UK National Trust, many wildlife trusts and all Sites of Special Scientific Interest forbid any taking of even parts of plants so it’s not an open house on herbs.

If you read my last post concerning the ghost garden where we’re staying we did a bit more research and discovered that the overgrown garden is the remnant of the guest house nearby whose owner was a keen gardener and botanist. So yes – it’s a melancholy oddity bearing in mind the hill farms surrounding us but it must have been lovely in its heyday.

Hemlock Water Dropwort – don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Feeling slightly overwhelmed!

However long we garden, every year takes us by surprise when the crops seem almost to overwhelm us. This isn’t bragging as much as an admission of poor planning. In early spring when we’re working out what to grow we always seem to forget that the seeds and vegetables we plant out will need more space than we expect, and that to grow all that we’d like to grow when we’re looking at the seed catalogues in the winter we’d need to take on half a dozen volunteers and several acres of land. For instance the polytunnel cucumbers planted next to the fennel looked absolutely fine when we put them in but now the rowdy cucumbers are overwhelming the smaller plants so Madame had to spend an hour this morning pruning some of the exuberant growth back and whilst doing so she discovered a large cache of fruit which had hidden itself among the leaves. Sadly our peas couldn’t cope with the heatwave and, like the broad beans have lost their flowers. The broad beans were so stressed they were attacked by some kind of fungal infection. We’ve known for years that this was coming, but it’s now serious enough for us to abandon some old favourites and hope that the plant breeders are ahead of the game when it comes to drought resistance in plants. A quick look online today suggests that we shall be trying out entirely new varieties of peas next season. In fact all our cool weather plants are going to fail very soon and plant scientists are already looking closely at the DNA of likely plants . This is a subject I know nothing at all about but I’m very curious to know more.

The other problem is when the produce comes in fast, we have to cook and eat it all, and with only two mouths to feed we really don’t need ten cucumbers or five large aubergines at once. I banged hopefully on Charlie, our neighbour’s, door this morning but I discovered he’s allergic to cucumbers, and so the only answer will be to pickle as many as we can. Fortunately the dill is in full flower and those of our neighbours who were silly enough to plant horseradish are glad enough to get rid of some – “take more!” they often plead. This doesn’t really solve the problem because we have cupboards full of five year old pickles, chutneys and relishes not all of which age well. The good news is that our youngest son will cheerfully munch his way through a jar of pickle and a pound of cheese in a single late night sitting.

The heatwave continues and we’re still getting up extremely early and putting a couple of hours in before it’s too hot to work any more, but the knock on effect of that is that we need to go to bed at 9.00pm. However we don’t complain about it because early morning gardening means we get entertained by a resident song thrush who will work through his entire repertoire of phrases dozens of times without ever stopping. The battle with the weeds never eases up, but I’ve discovered that three pronged cultivators loosen their roots quickly and then I can rake most of them out or leave them in the sun to crisp up and die. Watering takes up a lot of time and although a hose would be quicker, watering by hand gets you up close and personal with the plants, and it’s always lovely to see a large pumpkin lurking in the shadows, or scrump a few strawberries, tayberries or an apple, or pull a few weeds on the way round.

Tomorrow we’re expecting the last of the builders to lay new vinyl in the bathroom and that will end an unbelievable ten year battle with our landlord to deal with our serious issues with black mould. They’ve finally connected the bathroom and kitchen extractors to the outside world and cleaned down and sealed the affected walls and repainted them. They even replaced the asbestos cupboard door in the hall which we were told not to use soon after we moved in.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours looking for a second hand book I need to use. It’s a rather academic 600 page tome which I discovered would cost over £300 to buy new or just under £100 second hand. I made some enquiries about the astonishing cost and it seems that the academic book trade is surviving but only just. A typical print run has gone from several thousand to several hundred because universities and their libraries are so financially overstretched they can’t afford to buy them. It’s a bit of a death spiral. The solution seems to be renting, and so I’ve rented the ebook for a year for thirty quid and I’m bound to say it’s a great way to read because you can search and mark-up with all the power of the computer and enlarge the size of the type to suit your own eyesight and it’s even accessible on my phone. I guess an eagle could read it but not me. I’m hoping that very soon I’ll have a better – if still underwhelming – grasp of DNA and all that stuff. I went to the doctor once with a very painful big toe. “Oh” he said breezily, “you’ve got Hallux rigidus”. No-one in my family was brought up in ancient Rome so I’m a bit rusty on the latin, but even I knew that it meant “stiff toe”. I remonstrated with him that I knew that before I walked through the door. He never tried it again. I often read appeals to get more people involved in botany, but (I speak from experience here) all too often a beginner runs into a brick wall of scientific language which – when used out of context or an appropriate setting – feels like you’re being pushed back. All the research suggests that if you can’t explain a difficult idea simply you shouldn’t be trying to teach it.

A few good things that gardening brings us without going full guru.

A close-up of a cluster of hollow plant stems, showcasing their circular openings and colourful outer layers, surrounded by green foliage and a garden backdrop.
This is a home made insect hotel made from Angelica stalks. No takers!

Instinctively; the statement that Being in Nature and gardening is good for us is a no-brainer. You’ll notice the grace bestowing capital B on Being. But that doesn’t stop me from asking “Where’s the evidence Dave? – especially since time in the bosom of nature is now available on prescription on the NHS. We can say that all too many new gardeners end up in A&E with fork through boot syndrome, or infected thorns; back trouble and even coronaries; so, like sleep remedies and strong painkillers, nature and gardening are probably approached cautiously being both addictive and potentially lethal.

However – and you knew that was coming – and speaking entirely for myself; controlled immersion seems to have some great side effects. I’m absolutely not trying to be an influencer here I’m simply saying how it works for me and if that’s an encouragement to anyone I’m delighted as long as you don’t overdo it. Thirty years ago I found a lovely and inspirational book about fitness for the over fifties and got my first gym subscription. I absolutely loved it, especially as I discovered that however sweaty and painful it got – it made me feel better. But our bodies and brains get older, slower and less reliable as time goes on and now, with 80 just a few months away Madame and I have a large allotment which involves a fair amount of lifting, carrying, digging and banging in posts all or any of which have exact equivalents in the gym. For what it’s worth, after a long fallow year with various complaints now fixed by the glorious NHS, the allotment has increased my strength and stamina and radically improved the arthritis – especially in my hands. The other unexpected side effect is that constantly negotiating narrow paths and beds whilst harvesting, hoeing and weeding have improved my balance. Gardening has made me feel well, and that soaks into my mood. Having plants to care for and particularly having agency in planning it, really is good for the soul – whatever that might be! And of course the allotment produces food; fresh lovely food uncontaminated by any chemicals at all and in all kinds of ways; once again the cooking and eating makes us feel good. So ten out of ten for doctor allotment. On a day like today with the sun on my back there’s no better medicine than preparing a patch of warm earth where we’ll grow winter squashes and a giant pumpkin for the grandchildren at hallowe’en .

The other work; reading, researching and recording the plants especially the waifs, strays and sturdy beggars that eke out an urban living between cracks in the pavement, keeps the brain active, curious and grateful for the sheer diversity of nature in cities. My childhood was spent playing on bombsites and derelict houses, old coalmines and abandoned brickworks so these plants were my first hefting. My second hefting took place in the very centre of this deindustrialized neighbourhood – on Rodway Hill, where I went to school and I explored an entirely different environment on the tiny cap of old red sandstone which, I now know, hosted a rare patch of lowland acid heath – the name of which I only discovered a few months ago. I was so delighted to discover that the harebells were diagnostic of habitats I grew to love in other places without ever knowing the reason they were related by an accident of geology. Yes, wild places are good for us as long as we allow ourselves time to wonder why they are as they are.

The key to it all is complete engagement with the wild and the reward is those flow moments when the world stands still and we escape our restless minds and let the earth do the talking. Whatever it is – this strange capacity of nature to bring us to our senses – it’s relational. Rather like falling in love we have to relinquish ourselves, step aside from our neediness and make space for the other. And that’s as far as I’m prepared to go down the narrow path to spirituality. True flourishing is so much deeper than simply doing well for ourselves. All of Aristotle’s virtues are learned and practiced through relationships and our biggest mistake is to believe that money and success can be a substitute for real happiness. That we can somehow shortcut around the messy and difficult business of relationships and avoid thinking at all about our place in nature. We are in nature, we are of nature and like the earth herself we are vulnerable and needy. If that thought troubles anyone I’n sorry; but if you find it comforting then you’re halfway there already!

Meet the Cranesbill Trio

I used to work as a community artist on a large satellite housing estate on the North West of Bristol. This wasn’t of those six month temporary contacts, I was there for ten years nd I got to know a lot of lovely people I’d never otherwise have met; like the stripper who caught the same late bus as me into Bristol to work, and often had to walk home alone, and told me she never felt safe until she’d re-entered the estate. I loved overhearing conversations on the buses because I learned so much – and one day I heard a comment on another community leader which has never left me. “That Jack B” said one passenger to her neighbour – “He can’t tell shit from pudding!” The estate was one of those places where everyone was related in some way to dozens of others. You quickly learned not to express any opinion about anyone without checking carefully whose cousin they were. Anyway, I’ve been profoundly glad of that phrase over the years and today I especially commend it to those of us who are feeling a bit down at the success of election candidates whose tastes and opinions are wildly weird. If you’re hoping for a tasty meal never order the pudding on the say-so of a waiter who might be called Jack B, because it will probably turn out to be – well, need I say it?

So in order to escape from all that I was casting about for a cheerful story and as I wrote about the cousin challenge in the first paragraph, I remembered that yesterday whilst preoccupied about raised beds on the allotment, I spotted three botanical cousins just above our plot; Herb Robert, Geranium Robertianum, Hedgerow Crane’s-bill, Geranium pyrenaicum, and Cut-leaved Cranes-bill, Geranium dissectum all within ten feet of each other and – as far as it’s ever possible to know – growing wild. I wish I could say I’d stridden forth, vasculum across my shoulder and a copy of Stace IV in my poachers’ bag in search of them, but I was leaning on my spade gasping for breath after shovelling a mixture of compost, manure and topsoil into the four beds. Most good spots like that happen when – for whatever cause – I’m standing still. Please don’t run away with the idea that any of these geraniums are rare because they’re not. It’s just a lovely coincidence to see them together because the differences aren’t that great until you know what to look for and then it’s easy. Like the residents on the estate they are related but quite separate species and their antecedent connection, whether lawful or one-nighters are lost in the mists of thyme. Harm one and you offend them all.

Wooden raised garden beds filled with dark soil, positioned beside a greenhouse.
The cause of the pause – approximately 3000 kg of home-mixed topsoil.

It would be easy to mistake the total weight of four raised beds of soil. Once I’d added some strengthening posts, and mixed together the components it came to around 3 metric tonnes in weight and because I mixed them in situ it meant an awful lot of leaning and turning. Not to worry, though I’ve finished half of them now and the other four – which is to say the top sections of the dismantled compost bins – will have to wait until it’s time to plant up in the the autumn. My back will probably have recovered by then.

We’ve been very focused on the allotment this week because now is the time where – if you sit back and relax – you will discover the extraordinary energy of plants in the spring. Our plots are infested with bindweed, and we run a general (but not religious) policy of not deep digging but working just the top 3 or 4 inches of the soil with hoes and a three or four pronged cultivator. Bindweed spreads by way of underground rhizomes – thick and white and known as devils guts. It’s worth saying that, unlike those who spray them, they’re immune to glyphosate and other chemicals and so the only way to control them is to hoe the tops off regularly and pull out every bit of root as you find it in order to starve them. There are jobs you can leave for another day, but bindweed must be pulled up on sight! I’ll put some photos of the current state of the allotment on at the end.

Meanwhile I struggle but mostly succeed in finding time to read because things are changing so fast in our understanding of the earth and our role in its destruction. At the moment I’m reading Michael Pollan’s new book “A World Appears” in which he explores ways of understanding consciousness in plants and is absolutely fascinating, as are all of his other books. The parallel read is Mary Midgley’s philosophical book “Beast and Man” first published in 1978 which explores the roots of human nature and which overlaps slightly when it comes to the higher animals. She’s the most lucid philosopher I’ve read, and avoids technical language as a matter of principle. One stand-out insight from Pollan’s chapter on sentience is his sudden exclamation – “So that’s what a theory of consciousness is going to generate – Art!” Writing, reading, gardening, botanising, cooking are the key to flourishing for me. You can keep your profits and huge bonuses because I know better than most that there are no pockets in a shroud.

And so – a few more photos of our magical allotment that turns sunshine plus water into food and releases oxygen as it does so.

Canal Reflections

A tranquil scene featuring reflective water, with the sun illuminating the surface while green foliage and delicate plant stems are visible in the foreground.
Cow Parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris on the Monmouth and Brecon Canal
A close-up of a white flower with six petals, surrounded by green leaves and grass.

Maybe I’m being a bit evasive here. Obviously the photo is partly about reflections on the water – largely due to the inbuilt wizardry of phone cameras which make a photo with a huge tonal range like this so easy. However, as everybody knows, a stroll along a canalside towpath on a beautiful sunny day, is apt to promote a reflective frame of mind. This season of the year is especially beautiful because the emerging plants all look so pristine. I started taking a few photographs principally as notes for the blog, but within twenty minutes I was in full-on recording mode. One such photo was of the abundant Greater Stitchwort along the canalside. I can remember the first time I saw this plant; it was on Dartmoor on March 16th 2016, ten years ago. Yesterday they were everywhere, among many other favourites – 27 species in the end.

A cluster of small white flowers with purple accents, surrounded by green grass and leafy plants.

Another old friend that set off a chain of thoughts was the Cuckoo Flower, Cardamine pratensis which I’ve often seen but never once connected its flowering with the coming of the Cuckoo. “Why didn’t I notice?” I thought, metaphorically banging my head against a tree. The reason of course is that Cuckoos are becoming ever rarer, and it just so happens that we were lucky enough to hear them twice in the last two days. It may seem to us a bit like metaphysical poetry to yoke the two phenomena together but to my mother – born in a cottage in the Chilterns in 1915 – it was part of the the natural calendar that structured her days. The clouds over Granny Perrin’s nest foretold rain, and that was that.

A close-up of a person's hand holding a purple violet flower, with green grass and yellow flowers blurred in the background.

We wandered on, stopping to note a couple of dead Bream floating in the water. One had a deep nick in the side, suggesting a fatal encounter with a narrowboat propeller. There were more signs of the season’s perpetual motion; the Wood Anemones past their prime and ready to shed their petals, Lords and Ladies in their priapic stage but awaiting the big red berries; Herb Robert, Yellow Archangel below, Bird Cherries above our heads, Dog Violets nestling in the lower layer with the Primrose, Bluebells of course, and a single Barren Strawberry barely noticeable in the understory. With the canal on one side atop a bank, with a large marshy area below we spotted hosts of Ramsons undamaged so far by foragers and beside the canal the young leaves of Hemlock Water Dropwort, ready to administer a fatal punishment to those who gather incautiously.

I was lagging behind as always, when Madame waved me closer and told me to be quiet. She had spotted something interesting down on the edge of a marshy pool below us. We waited in silence until something moved, ran along a log and disappeared into the undergrowth. Too pale for a ferret, too large for a stoat, and unlike any squirrel we’d ever seen. Back in the campervan we searched diligently and decided it was a pale Polecat – possibly a hybrid ferret polecat cross – and it had obviously been stalking a mallard perching on the log. What a find!

We spent the afternoon (after dropping off at the pub) reading and cataloguing today’s finds. I’m reading David Elias’s book “Shaping the Wild” at the moment and in the chapter on moorland birds in a discussion of the present state of the Kestrel population, he quotes Mary Midgely who wrote in one of her books:

The world in which the Kestrel moves, the world that it sees is, and always will be entirely beyond us

Mary Midgley, “Beast and Man: the roots of human nature”

All of which brings to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Windhover” which fails to bridge the gulf magnificently.

Later we watched (part of) David Attenborough’s latest TV series “Secret Garden”. I say part of it because we both found its anthropomorphism both saccharine and misleading, and turned it off. I spend a lot of time and words here on the Potwell Inn trying to say something sensible about our connection with the natural world. There’s no doubt we are dangerously detached from nature.

Last night our son recounted a truly worrying account of a difficult conversation with his neighbours in Birmingham. He overheard them discussing the lovely mature oak that overlooks his, and their garden and it was clear that, for them it was nothing but a nuisance. They complained that it blocked out the sun and the birds made an intolerable noise. The tree had probably been there for a century before their terraced houses were even built and yet they were trying to enlist him in a neighbourhood campaign to have it felled. Yes we’re dangerously if not fatally detached from the natural world.

However the manner in which we re-attach ourselves is questionable, and here’s my beef with Attenborough and the BBC version of wildlife. It’s all too cuddly, and smooths over the immense difficulties with a commentary that reduces everything to winsome little human stories, as if animals were simply miniature and cute versions of ourselves. Attempting to engage with nature on those terms reflects an almost colonial attitude.

Yesterday’s encounter with the Polecat, as David Elias’s and GM Hopkins with a Kestrel is a form of engagement that takes seriously the otherness of the species we share the earth with. As long as we think that we can batter the natural world into the shape we invented we’re lost. If our love of nature, or if the idea of green spirituality strays too far into the religious mindset we’ll repopulate the horrors of religious extremism with an equally dangerous set of ideas taken from misunderstandings of nature with all the witch trials and heresy hunting thrown in.

If we can confine ourselves, in these occasional and wonderful encounters, to behold the inscrutable strangeness of the creatures, plants, insects, mammals, fishes, birds, moulds and fungi in silence then maybe we could begin to rediscover our own creatureliness which could be the foundation of a true green spirituality.

Close-up of two butterflies resting on a green leaf with a blurred background featuring water.
Crane flies mating

Back in Cornwall

If you look carefully above the familiar Beech hangar known as the Nearly Home Trees, or more properly Cookworthy Knapp you’ll see the glimmer of a wind turbine propeller blade just peeping above the trees. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to allow it to be built there but it does little to enhance a view that always lifts our spirits when we return to Cornwall. In fact it’s not actually in Cornwall at all but still in Devon – providing a useful, if overworked, scapegoat to blame for the indignity. I feel slightly guilty about calling them “Nearly Home” because we don’t live here, but we’ve both loved coming down here for over fifty years since we lived in Falmouth for a year and fell in love with the place.

Since the first time we discovered the Lizard it’s been our go-to destination. We’ve camped here, stayed in cottages when funds permitted and brought the campervan down on many occasions. Writing and drawing have always been a part of the agenda, but photographing and recording some of the amazing plants have been added to the list so we bring a faintly ridiculous amount of kit here, up to and including the portable WiFi gear that weighs far less than the portable Remington typewriter I insisted on stuffing into my rucksack on our first visit. A second and equally eccentric corner of the bag was filled by an Italian aluminium coffee percolator. The last time we stacked our kit up in the hall our neighbour asked us if we were moving out.

Storm Chandra – the latest of three named storms has changed our idea of what’s possible while we’re here. In fact I don’t remember us having a “storm season” at all until quite recently but now it’s a thing, like the monsoon season and the hurricane season. No doubt Keir Starmer will be bending every sinew to discuss the climate crisis with the Chinese government; just after he’s signed off on buying a few more nuclear power stations and secured some juicy weapons contracts. How blessed we are to have such Nelsons at the head of the ship of state, (Sorry; that sentence was auto-corrected from ” such Nellies at the head of the shit of state”).

Anyway, our journey down was largely unaffected by the storm apart from fierce rain as we drove through Devon and a 30 minute delay on the A30 when traffic was funnelled into a single lane so that four blokes could dig out a blocked drain. We were so glad of the new windscreen wiper blades! There were flooded fields to the left and right of us almost all the way, but we managed to load the car in a dry spell and once we got beyond Helston it cleared up beautifully. Chatting to a lost delivery driver this morning he told me that the side roads hereabouts are still blocked by floodwater and fallen trees, and on the television news we learned that the Environment Agency hadn’t even begun to assemble their array of mighty pumps on the Somerset Levels until storm Chandra had made landfall. There was a worrying moment as we drove through Redruth, when we heard an awful noise and smelt something like burning rubber which thankfully turned out to be outside the car and leaking in. It looks and feels like a town where whole industries go to die. They voted against the EU down here but the new A30 improvements are a stark reminder of what a few billion pounds worth of help from the neighbours can do. So now there’s fantastic roads infrastructure for the bailiffs to haul the machinery and the jobs out of the county.

Anyway we’re here and in, and after the usual hour of curses and hand-to-hand combat with the mobile router we even have the internet. It didn’t take long to Google up what’s on locally and we’ve already signed up for a talk at the village hall on Monday about the Lizard Flora. There are two rare plants that we’ve been seeking for years – one of them – Spring Sandwort – also occurs on the Mendips and although we know roughly where they ought to be we’ve never found them. But they also occur down here on the Lizard and the reason is that it’s a plant that’s tolerant of the post-industrial mine waste that occurs from lead mining on Mendip and Serpentine on the Lizard which has large surface areas of the mineral. The other plant we’d love to find is Land Quillwort which, being not much larger than a 1p coin and also not producing flowers but spores is loosely associated with ferns and is one of the plants we have in danger of becoming extinct. The Lizard is the only place it grows. So – as my Mum would have said Hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful (actually Alexander Pope said that first but I prefer my Mum’s identical version.

Spring Squill (I think!)

One of the problems of identifying the Quillwort is that it bears a strong resemblance to the emerging leaves of the Spring Squill which also grows here – it’s just much smaller. We were wandering on the clifftop some years ago before we got quite so interested in plants and we met a woman who was scanning the grass as only botanists do. “What are you looking for?” I asked. You probably need to know that this was before I discovered how deaf I’d become. I was sure she’d replied “squirrels” and so not wishing to display my ignorance I asked “what sort? grey or red?” – “Spring”- she answered” and then the penny dropped. I hope you’ll also be pleased to know that just before we came away I got my third set of NHS hearing aids which are absolute game changers. Apart from being able to hold a lucid conversation with Madame (my mishearings were becoming hilarious), I can now receive phone calls, listen to music and even connect them to the satnav. Madame finds this bit troubling because now I shout at thin air and have conversations with people who aren’t there.

While I was waiting to intercept the lost delivery driver at the top of the lane I chatted to a ninety year old local man who was born here and still lives in his grandfather’s house. He looked as fit as a flea, and told me how he still gets pleasure from pushing open the door knowing that his grandfather’s hand had touched the same ironwork. The air must be pretty good around here.

Who knew that the world is so noisy?

Hazel catkins on the riverside path

Well, this is a new one! At last, yesterday I had my new hearing aids fitted after a six month wait. I mentioned the long wait to the audiologist at the hospital and she looked so troubled I immediately changed the subject. Poor things, they must have had a battering from angry patients. These new ones are a bit of a game changer because they’re bluetooth capable and they’ve also got some kind of wizardry built in that generates faint white noise which subdues the tinnitus noises. They’re caused by the brain which doesn’t like the silence of deafness so it generates some very unappealing whistling sounds to compensate. I think the hearing aids, by making sure that it’s never silent, stop the brain having to fill in the gap. Nature abhors a vacuum even when it’s between your ears.

Anyway, she also said that although it would be uncomfortable it was better to wear them continually so that the brain would get used to the change in sounds faster. I now know what she meant. We walked down Green Park road yesterday and the high frequency noise of passing car tyres was almost unbearable. By the evening I was completely exhausted by beeping kettles and roaring washing machine and so (as you do) I asked Google Gemini whether the tiredness was a known side effect of new hearing aids. And it seems that it’s well known enough to have a name – “listening fatigue” which results from the brain – which even on a quiet day burns 20% of your energy – desperately trying to catch up with this new sound environment. The upside is that I can now (with some help from my friend Kate) listen to music, take phone calls and turn off the subtitles on the telly while reducing the volume. Our neighbours will be rejoicing . My dad used to have the telly on so loud you could hear it halfway down the road.

When, last January I had a routine blood test I had no idea what a storm of hospital appointments and procedures would be unleashed. I am now grimly familiar with the Royal United Hospital and hope – in the nicest possible way – that after one last appointment with the glaucoma clinic in January and one more blood test, we’ll be able to go our separate ways; but I can’t leave without saying how great they’ve been and how grateful I am that the many overseas nurses and doctors who helped to find out what was really wrong were prepared to stay here and keep the NHS running in spite of the racist abuse they have to put up with. In the end it turned out to be a pretty non-lethal and treatable combination of troubles and I’m glad to say that the engine is now running smoothly again; my appetite is returning along with a lovely touch of optimism. Madame too is practically back to normal after her knee replacement and the campervan is back on the road with a reconditioned engine, new clutch, cambelt and alternator so 2026 is filled with the promise of new adventures. In a month’s time we’ll be back in Cornwall armed with the trailcam and moth trap. Can’t wait.

On an equally celebratory note, I managed to fulfil two of the three resolutions by going back through all the old jumble of photos, stored – shoe-box style and beyond reach. I managed to turn the 22,000 photos into 1000 records and I identified 500 species of plants growing in the places we visited. The only resolution I didn’t meet was to complete a million words on this blog – but I’m only 8000 words short and they’ll be written before we go down to Cornwall and start a new set of lists; this time including moths. I’ve started the fungus records as well, so there will be hours of head scratching to look forward to.

2025 was the year in which we decided to give up the allotment and then changed our minds when I was well enough to walk up to the track without stopping three times. So now we’re ready for whatever the climate crisis throws at us next season. As always the point of growth is the place of injury and we’ve learned a great deal about gardening through extreme weather and even managed some decent crops right at the end of September. The apple crop was magnificent and we’ve still got a few fresh allotment apples in store.

At home the Pensions Board have finally begun to plan how they’re going to deal with the black mould in our flat – it’s only ten years after all since we first complained, and the Church of England never rushes a decision when it can be kicked into the long grass for a decade.

So that’s it. The Potwell Inn is signing off for 2025 but the doors will probably be open again tomorrow. I suppose someone will call last orders at some point, but for now we seem to have escaped, Bon Voyage mes amis!

Catch a bus – it could change your whole perspective on life.

Bath bus station – there are no pretty views!

I’m working up three posts at the moment and hopefully I’ll publish them all by the end of next week One of them is about what I’ve always called “nodes” – which is about places that seem to exude a lot of energy, hopefully without going full leyline over them. Secondly I’m researching a piece on the ways I’m trying to improve my photography to make it more helpful in identifying plants. The third, this one, is about buses and what travelling on then can teach us.

It’s a kind of in-joke among plant hunters that the maps we use to find and record plants are really maps of plant hunters. Cambridge, for instance, has a very high score when it comes to plant records, but it also has a very high score in terms of botanists. Statisticians have had to find some very smart mathematical models for removing the bias. I had a friend, now sadly dead, who was a prolific recorder of wildflowers. I’d describe him as brilliant and difficult, but he was always ready to help me out and taught me a great deal. The thing about him – Rob, his name was – was that he didn’t drive a car and so he travelled mostly by bus or by hitching lifts with other botanists. I’ve been watching a particular group of plants called Fleabanes for several years now. They can be quite tricky to identify and there are three very similar species, two of which grow in Bath and another which seems to be making a slow journey up the river from Avonmouth. So two possible reasons for the slow journey are firstly that the seeds float or blow up the river. Floating is highly unlikely because the Avon flows in the opposite direction. Wind dispersal is more likely because the prevailing wind direction is south westerly and the seeds are like miniature dandelion clocks. But looking at the maps, the records could as easily be explained by their position on bus routes. I’ve seen Rob on his hands and knees searching in the central reservation of a dual carriageway, so it’s entirely possible that the records really reflect bus journeys. I now feel obligated to search for the wandering Fleabane every year to continue his work.

These days I find doing the washing up infinitely more rewarding than listening to the recycled press releases which hide under the banner of journalism in these diminished days. But yesterday I caught several mentions of “the next war” being touted by almost all of them in a brain dissolving teaser for some kind of announcement about building more weapons factories. It reminds me that we all live in a particular cultural context from which we can never really escape. One of my radio producers once told me that she thought my best writing came when I was being lyrical. Well, it’s not a big stretch from being unable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Babylon) to struggling to find the lyrical voice in a context like this, where lying, thieving from the vulnerable, accepting bribes and trading in weapons that dismember children is regarded as good business.

Rob was finding his lyrical on his hands and knees surrounded by the roar and fumes of fast traffic. Several people, Chris Packham for one, have mentioned hyper focus recently as one of the features of neuro divergence. Perhaps that’s it for some of us, although my own experience is that almost no amount of focus can get me past the feeling of despondency and gloom that this government promotes. If it has a vision at all it’s to spread passivity like a virus through the population.

Anyway, to get to the point – which is about travelling by bus – one of the major causes of passivity is isolation, and that isolation is enforced by illness, poverty, going everywhere by car, wearing headphones and creating your own impoverished environment by doomscrolling on the phone and listening only to your own curated soundscape. A bus, on the other hand is a tin box with six wheels and virtually no suspension which forces you into the company of people you’d never normally meet or speak to. At Bristol bus station a couple of days ago, paramedics were treating someone who’d collapsed on the floor. There were local and international travellers, shoppers and people going home from work looking grey; homeless people, students, schoolchildren and pensioners like us, taking advantage of the free bus pass. There were people of diverse colour and nationality, several slightly deranged people all jammed in, thigh to thigh and standing well inside my usual comfort zone. It’s a challenging and immersive environment in which anything could happen – and I love it. The late night bus is even more gripping. You always get one or two people the worse for wear. One one journey back to Bath there was one man who had no idea where he was; just got off the bus and wandered away in the dark. Another fell asleep with his kebab in is hand and it went all over the floor. Yet another man waved contentedly at his own reflection in the window, half recognizing a familiar face.

The point is – the people you meet on the bus aren’t your carefully curated version of reality but the real thing. Poverty and neglect of the elderly isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet, it’s the old man with his zimmer frame sitting in front of you who hasn’t had a bath or a shower in months and smells so bad that only the smell of a Mcdonalds being eaten by an overweight young person nearby manages to cover the crime like a cheap deodorant. These, dear Mr Starmer are the people you are supposed to be thinking about and working for, but you don’t travel on buses so you’ll never know about them. It’s no use blustering on about the deprivations of your own childhood. Your dad was a toolmaker, and many people will think he made tools like shovels and chisels. But that’s not what toolmakers do. They make the tools which are used in factories to manufacture aeroplanes and cars. Their work is immensely skilled and they have all done long apprenticeships – as long as many doctors. They work in tolerances of fractions of a thousandth of an inch on machines that cost more than a mansion and they are paid accordingly. I worked as a labourer in a tool making company in the 1960’s and they were paid more than double the average wage. They were and probably still are the creme de la creme among engineers because they could work for weeks on a press tool that, if it warped when it was sent off for hardening and cost thousands of pounds. Give it a rest, then, Starmer. All that carry-on about gathering around a single smouldering coal and eating stone soup doesn’t pass the Ernest Hemingway test for bullshit. You lived in a comfortable house and had a good education. Go ride buses for a week – I’d happily buy your pass for the good of the country – and meet the electorate. Get off the bus now and again and learn the names of some flowers; learn Welsh, (I slipped that one in – I never have, but I can pronounce Welsh place names properly; who needs vowels anyway? – work a day or two on a trawler; pick orders in an Amazon warehouse.

So how do I find the lyrical; find peace of mind in a culture of lies, failure and violence. Well, there is still beauty; beauty especially in nature. There is still love; there is still compassion that trickles out from the earth like a spring. It just isn’t coming from the Westminster goon show.

“Where’s the plan?” we ask; “What’s the strategy?”. But as anyone who’s done a management course will know. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Our problems aren’t caused by lack of strategy but by a degraded culture.

Spooky coincidences on our latest trip

A visit to Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire shows the National Trust deeply involved in conservation and wildlife – but with a sense of humour!

Black Nightshade in Dyrham Park formal garden – my 1000th record, cue shark approaching music

Have I been droning on about targets recently? Well tough, because I’ve just met two of my three targets/resolutions by using storm Claudine as cover for a day at the computer – catching up with some plant data entry. And five minutes ago I got over the line and logged 500 species across 1000 records. It’s nothing much to brag about because not long ago I was chatting to the retired recorders for West Gloucestershire and this year they expect to submit their millionth record; but then I console myself with the knowledge that they started long before me – competitive – me??

So Madame and I took advantage of the nice weather yesterday and drove over to Dyrham Park for a walk in the fresh air, having been kept indoors for days with the terrible weather. I knew I needed nine new records and got my first one as we left the car park and I realised that I’d never recorded the lovely avenue of trees that I’ve used as a banner for the last ten years. Of course I knew they were Limes but when I photographed them and turned to the books I discovered that they weren’t going to give up their precise identity without a struggle. Yes, they are Limes but no they’re not what I thought at all and turned out with a bit of forensics to be hybrid Limes, confusingly called “Common Lime” because they are – well – common. If you look again at the banner at the top of all these posts you’ll see our youngest son and our oldest grandson walking down the avenue together hand in hand. You’ll also see that the trees have all been given flat bottoms by the herd of grazing deer which were culled when they contracted TB a few years ago and have now returned with the perimeter of the park fortified with enormous fences to keep out any infected cousins. So that was good news and we await the restoration of the unnatural fringes by the deer when the leaves grow again next spring.

So that was one for the record and we wandered on down through the terraces where the National Trust team have done a great deal of forestry work, thinning and planting Yew, Bird Cherry and numerous other plants. The Rhododendrons, I imagine, are for the chop later when the newcomers have established. Most of the affected Ash trees have now been taken out so the park is going to look very different in a few years time. But everywhere we went, we could feel a real sense of direction and purpose in the plantings, it was very pleasing to see, and well done to all the volunteers who do most of the donkey work.

I guess it’s the time of year but of course the evergreens have the stage at the moment, and I always feel they’re a bit funereal. Yews and Laurels; well that’s churchyards and wreaths as far as I’m concerned! Down in the formal gardens you can see how the vision is working out. To be honest I’m not keen on straight rows and tulips but the head gardener has introduced a very subtle subversive note into the plantings and so we relished the long borders of espalier cider apples with all their local names, although we looked in vain for “slack ma girdle” which was the name we gave our quiz team when Madame worked on apple trees at the research station. Better still we found Soft Shield ferns and Black Nightshade growing on the banks and some of the healthiest looking Harts’ -tongue ferns we’d ever seen. A deft hand with the planting scheme has completely swerved any feeling of the Parks Department and created a garden that we’ll return to many times. The pruning of the apples and pears – under the guidance of the Head Gardener – who did some training at Versaille, (he told us), is unusually tight and looks almost daringly tight to the branches.

Then, for the first time ever, we ventured into the house itself – well, actually the servants’ area – because I’d spotted a very pretty Delftware tulip stand through the window in the old kitchen. It’s only the second one we’d ever seen and with the exception of two genuine antique earthenware pots, the kitchen and dairy have been equipped with some very nice freshly thrown scalding pans. There’s a photo below.

So it’s a red letter today. Two resolutions fulfilled and the third, of which this post is a part, is to complete a million words before New Year; just 34,000 to write which is going to be tough. Next year’s resolutions are going to be about boiling down the ten years of the blog to its essentials, and next week I’ll make a start on logging the fungi. Targets are good!

Autumn continues to come good.

Well the last ten days were a bit of a challenge but at last the polyps (six more of them, including a real biggie) have been removed from my colon and my system is almost recovered from fasting followed by 24 hours drinking drain cleaner and a morning under sedation at the local hospital watching the job being done on a big screen. I found out later that they’d given me a combination of pethidine and midazolam which were the reason I was able to not wriggle/scream/ or change my mind. As is the nature of these drugs I can barely remember what went on and as for the bus ride home it’s blank. I can remember the exact moment they wore off, though, as if a curtain was lifted and when I read the consultant’s notes I had the usual post-operative WTF? moment. On the plus side the (award winning) team were lovely and kindness itself.

So …. the campervan was fixed on tuesday after being recovered for the second time with a non functioning clutch. On Sunday we checked out Morrison’s garage at the Mall and they still sell LPG, so we’ll be ready for the next adventure as soon as they re-open the road through Pilning, and today we had our flu and covid top-ups and pressed a big bag of apples for juice during the afternoon.

Having decided to carry on with the allotment we’ve been working hard every day getting beds cleared and prepped ready for planting up. There are over a hundred broad bean plants of different varieties growing steadily in the greenhouse in their root trainers and very gradually we’re getting back on track. It’s been a magnificent year for the apples, and all of the trees planted in 2021 have fruited this year, which has created a new challenge for us because in spite of my careful records, it looks as if the nursery had mislabeled some of the trees, and in one row of five the first and last had been wrongly labeled – so Winter Gem and Grenadier had been transposed. This was the first time we’d been able to see the problem. The red- skinned apple on the left was one we inherited and we’ve never known for sure what it is but have gone (provisionally) for Ribstone Pippin and the green one on the right is Winter Gem which, ‘though it doesn’t look all that nice is actually delicious and very fragrant. The red spots on the skin are caused by a reaction between oxygen and the skin as the apple ripens off the tree.

Apple identification is a difficult skill to learn because it includes consideration of the horizontal and vertical section of the fruit; its shape, whether conical or round; exact description of skin colour; streaking; degree of greasiness; flowering and ripening times, the colour of the exposed fruit and the degree of russeting and you have to do a lot of it before you can be proficient. We spend a lot of time on the National Fruit Collection website – it’s extremely thorough and well worth bookmarking.

Anyway, while I was feeling sorry for myself a very divisive philosophical issue came up on the allotments when a member wrote a rather cross Facebook message about “rubbish” being “dumped” along the fence line at the bottom of the site. Madame absolutely forbade me to respond, but I feel safe here to write that there has been a growing problem, and distance, between those allotmenteers who believe you are only closer to God in a garden as long as you’ve slaughtered every blade and leaf of plants which you didn’t grow for food or aesthetic pleasure. Wild animals too, but especially badgers rats and foxes, oh and squirrels and mice – oh alright then – cats too are not permitted either. As for insects and above all caterpillars, need I say more?! At the greener end are those who, like us, keep a trail cam to enjoy the nocturnal visitors (which also include deer); we control the rats by never chucking the remains of Friday night’s takeaway on the compost heap because we know that rats originally came from India and love a curry. We have a scuzzy looking pond in which rat-tailed maggots can grow into hoverflies, and we allow lots of weeds to stay – especially nettles – because some rarish butterflies love them, and some lovely seed-setting grasses for the birds to chomp on. We obviously don’t want the Whites to eat our brassicas and so we net them carefully. Sweetcorn needs fortifications to keep the badgers out and so it goes on. Our allotment is, by the standards of the evangelicals and fundamentalists of tidyness, messy; but here’s the point. Nature just loves messy, and over ten years we’ve been visited by a dozen relatively rare plants which stay for a year or two and then move on. There was Peruvian apple, Stone-parsley, Bullwort, A rarish form of Fumitory, and others too. All-comers are welcome to come and raise a family over a couple of seasons and if some people think they’re just weeds it’s their loss.

Our relationship with nature is a conversation in which (for instance – like the apple trees) no-one speaks for four years and then something important happens. We accept that the plot we rent is not ours, but belongs to two of us (two legged creatures) and all of the other creatures from deer down in size but not importance to amoeba and thence to pollens and yeasts. We cannot compel but, as the astrologers say of the stars, we can only dispose, and if you don’t talk to the plants how will you know what they need?

So if we empty our buckets of trimmings, prunings and nuisance weeds like couch and bindweed along the fence we’re not dumping them (with all the negative connotations of that word, we’re putting them there because as they rot down to return their nutrients to the earth they provide a place of safety for dozens of species like woodlice, spiders, ladybirds, all kinds of pupae, field mice, hedgehogs and slow worms whose contributions to pollination, clearing up infestations of blackfly and suchlike, eating rotting leaves and aerating the soil – we rely on. We are part of a vast interdependent food chain. We do not dump plastic waste, old pushchairs and mattresses crisp packets or discarded drinks bottles and cans.

But we do process and store all sorts of delicious food that would otherwise be wasted. These tomatoes were picked green from dying vines after the drought, and ripened in the dark so they could be reduced to a roasted passata which keeps for at least a couple of years and is as good as pixie dust for bringing a pasta dish to life.