By Brook seen from the lawn of the White Hart in Ford
I’m wrestling with half a dozen recalcitrant strands of an idea that just might make a story. Of course it might also just make a WTF? mess – only time and a patient reader will tell.
So the first strand is this. I mentioned last week in The Potwell Inn blog that my copy of Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellously useful book “An Englishman’s Flora” is falling apart and I’d have to buy another copy. My clapped out paperback is a 1975 reprint of the original hardback published in 1958 and the pages are now turning brown and are foxed. The glue binding is breaking down and it’s just at the point where the pages start dropping out. I bought it for next to nothing in an Oxfam shop and I see that the cover price was less than £2 when it was new. Anyway, prompted by my resolution it went into our very small bathroom where I rediscovered what a magnificent resource it is and immediately searched out a hardback secondhand version for £17, presently on it way from another OXFAM shop in Harrogate. That’s thread one.
Thread two emerged when I was browsing through the book and randomly came across the entry for Dwarf Elder which is given no less than seven pages by the gloriously erudite Grigson. Married three times, his last wife was Jane Grigson the food writer who – I discovered today during my flurry of research – believed that food is such an important component of being human flourishing that it deserves the same high standard of writing as any other form of literature. Of course she was absolutely spot on which is why I’ve got a shelf full of her books. That’s a side issue, though for the purposes of this piece of weaving, but what a family they must have been!
The main thread concerns the Dwarf Elder because I only saw the plant for the first time this year on the footpath to the north of the lakes at Woodchester Mansion. According to the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 it’s in steep decline across the country; probably partly due to the fact that it’s no longer planted as a medicinal herb often in churchyards in order, they believed, to improve its health giving qualities.
So threads three and four join the river at this point because Grigson points out that it’s a stronger version of the Common Elder, the roots and leaves of which can yield a blue dye and a powerful purgative. We should bear in mind that for many centuries (this plant gets mentioned by Dioscorides in his first century pharmacopeia ) – plants were prized more for their medicinal usefulness more than for their aesthetic qualities. However the more intriguing point is that its local name is Danewort and it was believed – perhaps due to the colour of the berries and leaves – that it sprang from the bodies, or more specifically the blood, of Danish invaders. The bloody colour and the doctrine of signatures gave the game away – it was thought. So far, so fascinating I thought, but then I (metaphorically) sat up straight because he wrote that the plant could still be found in 1974 in the village of Slaughterford which straddles By Brook. Hold on to that thought because I’ll come back to it for another thread. As it happens, and as you’ll know already if you’re a Potwell Inn regular, we drove over to Slaughterford only a few weeks ago in search of a pub which turned out to be in the next village of Ford. If you were even considering duplicating our trip I’d strongly advise approaching the pub from the A420 because the connection between Slaughterford and Ford is not much better than a muddy track.
But why Slaughterford? You have to ask don’t you? Grigson quotes the 17th century Wiltshire historian John Aubrey and then dismisses his assertion that Dwarf Elder aka Danewort or even Danesblood which still apparently grows in Slaughterford is the sign that a battle between King Alfred and the Danish invaders was fought in the village and resulted in the rout of the Danes with much slaughter. A quick scamper around Wikipedia establishes that the consensus today is that the battle was actually fought some miles away in Edington.
But in the early hours of this morning, I was mulling over what I’d discovered about Grigson, and another fact that came up was that he’d lived in “North Wiltshire”. Might he have lived in Slaughterford? was the tantalizing thought which kept me awake. The answer, after an early start on the laptop, was no he didn’t. But he did live quite nearby on the other side of Chippenham.
Gradually the picture was emerging that Slaughterford was not the scene of a famous battle fought by King Alfred and so how on earth did it come by such a gory name? The truth turns out to be that the name is a contraction from the Saxon of Sloe Thorn – and so the village name really means the river crossing where the sloes trees (Blackthorn) grows.
There must have been many crossing points on By Brook. At one time there were over twenty mills working there and we actually walked up the river past the last functioning paper mill in around 1970. Coming upon it while walking the banks from Corsham was quite a surprise – a semi derelict industrial site in the midst of the most beautiful valley. I’m waiting for my newer and more durable copy of the book to arrive, but what a fascinating journey from a Greek botanist to a 20th century poet. The Slaughterford myth gets repeated even in quite recent herbals – Mrs Grieve’s 1920’s book “A Modern Herbal” quotes it without comment.
There are two further points about By Brook I could make. Firstly the photos I took from the pub garden strongly suggest that the water is far more polluted and eutrophic than it was when we first encountered it in 1970. You’d probably find it impossible to make paper there now, and the brown trout also need clean and unpolluted water. But secondly, there is strong enough evidence to make it to the Natural History Museum website, that there is at least one family of beavers living on the brook. Thank goodness the beavers are vegetarian and therefore no threat to the local trout. In fact the fly fishers commissioned a report on the condition of the brook which recommended some modifications to the river bed to improve flows and slacks to help with breeding the native brown trout. Maybe they’ll get their wish granted free of charge by nature. I’m sure beavers and brown trout have lived in harmony in previous centuries before the beavers were hunted to extinction.
Postscript
My secondhand book arrived today – big thanks to OXFAM in Harrogate. It’s wonderful – in excellent condition and properly bound to lie flat. I absolutely love it! The paperback version can go back for an honourable retirement in the bookcase.
This is the outline for a talk I was due to give to the Bath Natural History Society, and which had to be postponed due to unexpected death of the President, Rob Randall
This is Coltsfoot; Tussilago farfara It’s got a number of other names but apart from English tobacco – which I’ll come back to, none are really common. its name comes from the similarity of the leaf shape to the footprint of a small horse, hence colt. The tobacco bit comes from its inclusion in smoking mixtures which until recently were commonly offered as a herbal medicine for asthma and other chest complaints. However some recent research has revealed that the plant also contains some pretty dangerous chemical compounds called hepatotoxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids (liver toxins) which could cause more harm than good – plants and fungi are terrifically effective synthesisers; that’s why drug companies spend so much time and money investigating them. I did once try to smoke a herbal cigarette containing coltsfoot but it was truly horrible and I never went back for more.
But beyond the health warnings it’s a favourite of mine because it offers a ray of sunshine in the spring; often in the ugliest of environments; and also it’s a plant that taught me a huge lesson in plant hunting. My first awareness of it came when I was working as a groundsman on a school playing field. The second find came, years later, on a bike ride around the villages where I worked as a parish priest. It had been snowing but the snow was melting quickly and where it lay on the verge it was stained and brown with mud thrown up by cars and lorries. Suddenly, in the midst of this gloopy, brown stained, melting snow I spotted a little group of bright yellow dandelion-like flowers poking through. As an avid but very inexperienced botanist I knew that they were Coltsfoot from watercolours I’d seen in my battered field guide and on a grim day they cheered me up. I was also pleased to have seen them because I knew that they were often associated with healing properties. Then they disappeared for a decade – well actually they didn’t disappear at all but I never looked in the right places.
It’s a pound for the stone and ninety nine pounds for knowing what to do with it.
Local drystone wall builder in conversation with customer
The quotation – the reply to a silly question – arose from a chat with a local stonemason who told me how he was once asked by a prospective customer how he had the nerve to charge so much for a cheap raw material like stone. It was a wonderfully tart response and I never knew whether he lost the job as a result of it.
Don’t get despondent get organised
If there’s any primrose path to finding your quarry in field botany it’s the ability to tap into all the information you can find for free in books and on the internet. After many field trips with some real experts I began to notice the secret they never revealed. They weren’t just wandering around hoping to bump into something interesting, they had all done reconnaissance trips in advance, and they had all researched the area we were visiting in extreme detail. It wasn’t the case at all that they had encyclopaedic knowledge of every UK plant. All they needed to do – and here’s where the experience comes in – was to search the chosen area on one or another of the huge databases available – I particularly like the BSBI Ddb plant distribution atlas (Google it and you’ll find it immediately) and specify the 2X2 Km square you’re visiting – there’s a bit of a learning curve here but a little patience will soon be rewarded with a neatly laid out printable list of plants that have been recorded inside what’s known in the jargon as a Tetrad. The 1800 wildflowers that grow in Great Britain and Ireland will immediately be cut down to three or four hundred which is much more manageable. If you’re a birder or fascinated by beetles and spiders, or if larger mammals are your thing, the NBN Atlas might suit you better. It’s like the BSBI database but for all species, and you can drill down to individual records. Another alternative is to print off the plant lists for the Vice County you’re in – these are already formatted on the BSBI website when you click on the “explore and record” pull down menu tab and click on “recording cards” and print the result off. The downside is it’s Latin names only, but if you get serious about plant hunting you’re going to have to use them anyway. Most modern field guides also have thumbnail distribution maps which won’t give you the grid reference, but will at least tell you that your plant only grows in Snowdonia.
Someone humorously pointed out that distribution maps are really maps of recorders and all of the large databases contain the possibility that the plant in front of you has just never been recorded before. I just checked for our present location on the NBN Atlas and none of the four ferns within twenty yards of me have ever been recorded. Some big databases haven’t quite kept up with the momentous changes brought about by DNA analysis, and so – again today – I was surprised to see that BRERC – the Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre still has the Harts Tongue fern as Phyllitis scolopendrium when it’s been in Asplenium for some time. But don’t be hard on the compilers, there are millions of records to be checked and processed. Sometimes plants just seem to be entirely in the wrong place. Having spent hours on the Cornish coast searching for Sea Spleenwort, Asplenium marinum; I mentioned the unsuccessful search to our Vice County Recorder and she pointed out several specimens in the centre of Bath.
If, on the other hand you think you’ve found a Ghost Orchid in the garden, you can access the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 and type in “ghost” and the orchid will surely arise as the only option. Click on it and you will be given a map of the UK with just four little black spots in it. If your garden is not marked by the black spot you can be quite sure that it’s something else – not certain, mind you unless you’re out for a walk with a man called Peter Stroh and he’ll soon put you right in the nice way that really good botanists always do.
Slumping cliff without Coltsfoot – yet – in Aberdaron.
So if you’re looking for a particular plant, or group of plants, these databases can give you a huge advantage. Then you can find out everything possible about the preferred habitat for your plant. This is exactly where I went wrong with the humble Coltsfoot whose black dots seem to cover the entire country until you enlarge the map and see the gaps. Somewhere in your research you will read that the Coltsfoot is something of a pioneer plant because it loves disturbed ground, is salt tolerant, and grows particularly well on what are known as slumping cliffs. Muddy cliffs with an inclination to break down and collapse on to the beach below. So first, check the maps in the databases for the black dots, and second, look at the flowering dates. Although Coltsfoot can be identified by its leaves (which grow when flowering has finished) that’s a bit trickier because there are at least two other plants with very similar looking leaves – so Coltsfoot, smallest; Winter Heliotrope, middle sized and purple flowers from December onwards anyway; and then Butterburr which has the largest leaves of all. If you want to see the Coltsfoot flowers it has to be around March. In my book that’s learning three plants – three for one offers are good.
99% of the effort goes in before you leave home
What you should be taking from all this is the fact that 99% of the effort in finding less common plants is in the research. You probably wouldn’t do it if you were looking for Dandelions, Celandines or Primroses because they tend to turn up anywhere – they’re generalists, but perhaps most happy in springtime hedgerows, so maybe start there. But I found the Coltsfoot in abundance as soon as I started to apply the “right place, right time” approach, one day when we were walking along the beach called Porthor or known in English as Whistling Sands, here on the Lleyn peninsula.
Most of us begin naming plants by flicking through a book. That’s about as effective as standing on a bus stop and asking people if they know John Smith. With the advent of AI there are a wealth of phone apps available to help identify plants you don’t know. HOWEVER they’re not infallible and there are both more and less reputable contenders in the market. Even Google Lens can usually give you a family name with reasonable accuracy, but never trust it down to species because it seems to want to help so much that when it’s stumped it starts throwing in silly answers. With all phone apps – I’ve got loads on my phone – try another and then, when you’ve found some consistency always turn to the books.
Just a word of warning here. I left the Apple religious community three years ago and moved over to Android, and so my photos are taken on a Pixel 6a and this is being written on a Pixelbook. I gave up on Windows when I retired. Everything is stored in three places on the Cloud. The information I’m giving should work with minor variations on iPhones and most Android phones.
So finally, there’s no finer instrument than the modern mobile phone for keeping records. Most phones store what’s called EXIF data (Exchangeable Image File Format) which sounds very technical but just means that as well as exposure etc. the phone records stuff like lat and long information for the exact place the photo was taken; date and time and is often editable so that you can add the name of the plant and any other information you think is important. This allows you to create a simple searchable database of your own photos. Google tells me I can’t do this, but as long as I separate the data with commas it works pretty well because the search facility is based on a very simplified comma delimited database . No need for endless hours designing your own. Phones also offer basic GPS but for proper accuracy it’s better to use a handheld. I’ve had photos given locations ten miles from where the photo was taken. The only problem with handheld GPS is that you have to carry a notebook and make sure you link the photo to the location in case the phone GPS turns out to be unreliable. But then, as an incorrigible compiler of lists I do that anyway. The latitude and longitude data can be loaded into the OS Maps application which will obligingly give you the national grid reference equivalent without any complicated calculations and pencil chewing.
Finally, but by no means least, there are applications which allow you to submit photographs of plants with provisional id’s and get them checked by panels of experts. Among these programmes one of the best is iNaturalist where, once you’ve signed up for free, you can submit photos and other details and – if you’re lucky – an expert somewhere in the world will verify the name. I only say if you’re lucky because there are so many records, most referees don’t have time to verify really well known things. I tried familiarising myself with the app at the beginning by posting some extremely common plants and they languished unloved and unnoticed until I took them down. The best and fastest responses seem to come from groups like mycologists (fungi) or pteridologists (ferns) but if you’re posting a less well known plant the support is good. Another virtue of iNaturalist is that verified records find their way onto the national and international databases and can be used for research. Vice County Recorders mostly use a Windows programme called MapMate which was state of the art when it was designed, but hasn’t been supported and has apparently become a bit clunky.
Flora incognita, another freebie uses AI and gives a useful percentage figure for certainty; and there are more coming on to the market all the time and may suit your needs completely.Finally, for birders I can’t resist recommending Merlin. I was out on a trip with the Three Musketeers in the autumn and we all heard an unrecognised bird song coming from a dense hedge. We all pulled our phones out and then discovered that we were all using Merlin.; an American app that comes with add-on national databases.
But saving the best until last, often the very best support and advice comes from your (in the UK) local Vice County Recorder. If you join a natural history society you’re bound to meet them very quickly. They’re all volunteers and many of them act as referees for iNaturalist as well. Ultimately every record comes down, in the end, to human judgement. AI is good and getting better, but rather like Satnav it can let you down spectacularly if you don’t use your own judgement or tap into someone else’s.
So I seem to have slipped into writing about records. You may, of course, spend a lifetime finding beautiful plants, fungi, mosses and ferns purely for your own pleasure, but in this epoch of ecological crisis every single record – even of daisies and dandelions contributes to the global picture. Natural history is a field where volunteers make a huge contribution. We can’t all afford our own scanning electron microscopes and perform DNA analyses on the dining room table but we can observe and record so that the scientists with all that expensive kit can pore over the trends and direct their research towards the most pressing challenges. As Joni Mitchell has it – “You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.”
I was just adding up and I’m pretty sure our first visit to the Lizard would have been in 1969 while we were at Falmouth Art School. It must have made an impression because when we moved to Bath Academy of Art in Corsham we went back for three weeks, camping in a heavy cotton tent on a farm for 50p a night with access to an outdoor toilet and a cold tap in the corner of the farm garden for washing. The farmer was an amazingly good looking young man with blond curls who was experimenting with milking three times a day. We quickly got through the small amount of money I’d earned as a temporary groundsman and I had to phone my sister for some additional funds. The journey down began with a car drive to Penryn with a friend who was visiting her brother and then after an overnight stay we caught a series of buses beginning outside the Methodist Chapel where they were singing in tongues so loudly you could hear it through the three foot granite walls. We finally arrived in Lizard hours later, just in time for a snack in the Regent Cafe on the green (still there). For some reason I’d brought my little portable Remington and a coffee percolator (I didn’t type a word the whole time we were there!), and everything we needed was packed into two rucksacks; mine was so tall I could barely lean to one side without toppling.
I was determined to walk across to Kynance Cove to camp, but I was equally determined to navigate across the most direct route rather than follow the coast path. On sober reflection and more than fifty years later I understand that every mark on an OS map has a meaning. Not least the little wavy blue lines that signify some very rough and waterlogged ground. I had no idea then what botanical treasures we were stumbling across. We finally made it across Lizard Down in the dark having scrambled down and up the precipitous sides of a valley quite unnecessarily and erected the little yellow tent on the first bit of flattish and dryish ground we could find. In the morning Madame went for a wee behind a rock, having barely slept a wink for fear of being inundated by the sea which – although it was noisy, was 100 feet below us – only to be approached by a phalanx of bemused walkers. We’d pitched the tent in the middle of the coast path. Words were spoken and we packed up and walked the coast path back to Lizard.
The three weeks were blissfully hot and we walked and sunbathed all day, discovering the small villages, eating at the cafe when we got back from our explorations and drinking at the pub in the evening. On one occasion I tried to drink every whisky on the bar while Madame had her first taste of brandy and Babycham. It didn’t end well and I banged my head on a farm shed lintel so hard that I saw stars. On other evenings we really did see stars; millions of them.
This was the holiday we discovered Cadgwith. We stopped off in Ruan Minor and found a little pop up cafe doing cream teas in the garden, and then we walked on down to the Cove and – although I couldn’t swear to it – I think we probably bought fresh crab. Cornwall had been a revelation to us; both of us born and brought up in Bristol and, for the first time, seeing Dracaenas, (which were Palm Trees as far as we were concerned), growing everywhere. The sea there, after the familiar mud soaked grey brown of the Bristol Channel, was a miraculous blue. It was there I discovered the name of the exotic looking clifftop weed called Kaffir Fig. It was there too that we saw the last few Choughs eking out a living before becoming extinct for several decades. Intensive farming and chemical cattle drenches finally did for them and almost did for the Ravens too. It was there that two intertwining threads were born in us; a passion for natural history and a passion for this extraordinary part of Cornwall.
When we go back anywhere along that coast, the first thing I do is take in a great draught of the air; of the sea, the grass, the cowpats in the fields – not the ammoniac stench of huge silos but crusting there on the grass for flies to lay eggs which hatch into maggots which in turn feed the Choughs. The second thing I do is to pause and listen to the sea, the wind and then the birds. Jackdaws, Choughs, Rooks, Crows, Magpies and even Ravens if you’re lucky – they’re all such voluble chatterboxes. The Lizard is known as a botanical hotspot which, translated, means there are so many plants I don’t recognize and can’t name, that I exist with a permanently cricked neck and spend the evenings poring over books and photos. I’m a slow learner.
Then for some reason we stopped going there. It felt overrun with tourists not like us, and the ambivalence of the Cornish towards us was occasionally hard to bear. Too many Tarquins and Cressidas; too many labradors; too many wannabe sailors and posh wetsuits; too much Guinea Fowl and too many places we could no longer afford to eat; too many times being ignored in the bar whilst the barking classes sharp elbowed their way to the front.
We eventually had three boys and for most of the time life was a struggle but we found a wonderful and cheap campsite in the extreme west of Wales with amazing beaches that you could only access on foot after a long walk; and where we could go skinny dipping if we felt like it and build driftwood bonfires on the sand. The boys were happy there and soon found friends among the AT (alternative type) campers. It was like Totnes by the sea. On one occasion one of the other parents asked us if it was really true that we cleaned our teeth with twigs – the boys had rather exaggerated our commitment to low impact living.
I was learning plants more quickly by this time – making long lists of them as we walked down the lanes, whilst barely keeping my head above water at work. There were several occasions when I drove back home – a 300 mile round trip – to take a funeral in the middle of a holiday. I always felt responsible, but we survived the worst that a few of the church congregation felt entitled to throw at us and gradually they left to attend other churches where the vicar was more malleable and would do as they were told. Pastoral care for us was a joke, because the bishops felt threatened by therapeutic groups that might reveal abuse and bullying in the Church of England.
One lovely summer we took three weeks off and went camping in West Wales and by the end I felt like a wildly excited dog, charging around the field. I think that was when I realized that some jobs will crush the life out of you if you let them. There was me preaching about life in all its fullness and slowly fading away myself. That summer I let my beard grow and when we got back one of the congregation told me I looked frightening. I felt that was a good start.
But what about Cornwall? One summer after the boys had left home and we were both working full time we’d arranged and paid for a holiday in the South of France and needed to hire a car which you can’t do without a credit card. That’s so the hire company can remove hundreds of pounds from your account without asking you, on the spurious grounds that you didn’t refill the tank until the fuel ran over your shoes. Anyway, the credit card never arrived, the holiday and our money were lost and three weeks later the bank rang to say that they’d found the card in a drawer in the office. No word of apology or any offer of compensation. Madame was devastated and I felt responsible but she immediately started searching for a new holiday. Needless to say looking for a campsite in August is tricky but she stumbled on a long established campsite in Cornwall that had just changed hands, which had led to a bit of a boycott by the longstanding patrons. So we were in, and found our Cornish heaven again. We’d had a couple of damp squibs in the intervening years. One cottage near St Ives, owned by another vicar, turned out to have walls running with damp and squatting in a sea of mud. The tenants on the farm looked terrifyingly inbred and we drove straight home again before the banjos and shotguns came out.
The new campsite on the Roseland Peninsula was everything we needed and had its own microclimate with its own flora. But working eighty hours a week precludes any serious botanising apart from a few short holidays and so we had to wait until we both retired and moved to Bath before we could settle to some serious plant hunting. Nowadays we alternate between the Lizard, Portscatho and the Llyn peninsula for longer breaks and do local field trips with the Bath Nats where there are abundantly qualified members to help us identify plants and fungi, even insects sometimes.
Cornwall is a difficult place to get your head around. I’ve often written about my attraction to post-industrial landscapes, which the county offers in abundance. There’s barely a square mile that hasn’t been dug up, turned over and mined. A century later it all looks like a film set; ferns growing tastefully from the crumbling pitheads against the pyramid backdrop of china clay spoil heaps; footpaths glistening with mica flakes; cliffs stained blue and green with copper and arsenic leaking from flooded mine adits.
And then there are the fishing villages. Hardly anyone outside the big ports like Newlyn and Penzance goes fishing any more, apart from a few small day boats after mackerel, crab and lobster to sell through the back door – but the fishing myth persists in a miasma of half remembered better days. It’s kept alive because we all need it to be kept alive. What cottage or pub connects better with the imaginary past than the one with a few coloured glass floats and a brass barometer on the wall? In the winter the pretty villages empty out and go dark. Village schools, churches and shops close every year as the locals move to damp and poorly maintained rentals inland.
But we go back like lemmings to the edge of the sea every summer because we need to feed some remote part of the soul that can’t be fed anywhere else. We take our own soul food; a few folk songs, remembered paintings, some Leach pottery maybe – because the essence of twenty first century life; the high wall that keep us chained to neoliberal stupidity is the constant erosion of historical memory. Memories of the real past, like languages don’t just wither away, they’re deliberately suppressed and the resulting holes are filled with the polystyrene foam of costume drama on TV. Cornwall is Poldark; Poldark is Cornwall. Believe what you like! Truth is so last year! A bit of wrecking or piracy or smuggling is OK, after all it’s only a film!
I suppose for a botanist, even a very amateur one like me, it would be simpler to ignore all that stuff and just enjoy the plant life. But there is a live interface between, for instance, unemployment and a dirty industry like lithium mining. Polluted land might provide a niche interest for people like me, but it’s polluted all the same. In West Penwith there’s a battle raging between Natural England and some of the local farmers. There are about 3000 hectares of moor and downland that constitute one of the largest semi natural sites in the country. We’ve walked the footpaths there for years. But nutrient enrichment and changed land use towards intensive farming is slowly destroying the habitat. There’s more heat than light in the debate because the farmers will be compensated for any effect on their income, but there’s no doubt that the way of life they’ve become accustomed to for – say – fifty years, will have to change. That’s a toughie because a fifth generation farmer didn’t sign up to become a nature warden and very properly wants a bit more flesh on the bones of how it’s all going to work. The problem is, organic change is very slow and incremental but the environmental crisis is more akin to a tsunami. There’s no time for a generational change and some farmers there find it threatening and oppressive to be told their traditional way of life is less important than a tiny plant or a spider.
The Cornish, like most threatened communities, have become defensive and suspicious of the government. The fishing industry has been hammered by brexit whilst simultaneously overfishing because you have to make hay while the sun’s shining. Lack of housing is a huge source of anger – it goes on. Tourism is a constant irritant; there are too many buy to lets and airBnb’s and, just as with the tin mining, much of the money is exported to the wealthier parts of the UK.
And yet ……. and yet, when the beach side building that houses fishing gear in Cadgwith came onto the market, threatening the livelihood of the last few fishing boats, the local community launched an appeal which was supported by people all over the country and the building was saved.
When we are there my greatest joy is to stand at the kitchen door of our rented National Trust cottage – in truth an otherwise derelict cattle shed – and absorb the smell and plangent sound of the sea against the rocks below. I don’t need to own it, or control it in any way. The thought of it just being there is a sustaining one when the going gets tough in Bath. A week is all it takes to fill the tank, and we’ll come home with dozens of photographs and maybe identify some never seen before (by us) plants, oh and we’ll eat fresh fish from the fishmonger in Porthleven, drink wine, sleep like innocents and feel the life running through our veins.
If there is a solution to the conundrum to the disconnect between real Cornwall and the competing fantasy versions, it will surely include tourists like us; but let’s make it sustainable tourism, buying locally to support small businesses, parking thoughtfully without blocking the lanes and respecting those who live there the year round. Let’s support any initiatives to bring sustainable non-polluting green jobs to the county and behave like ethical grownups!
Although I didn’t agree with the general conclusions of Charlie Gilmour’s piece on foraging in this weekend’s Observer newspaper I’d agree that the craft of foraging can be a great builder of relationship with the natural world. I’ll never forget the sense of gratitude that followed a blackberrying expedition with Madame in which we harvested many pounds of free fruit and subsequently ruined all of them in a truly disgusting chutney. Foraging will always entail a few culinary skills as well as the observational and identification skills that should keep you out of Intensive Care. That said, we have safely foraged and eaten many pounds of field mushrooms and enjoyed them greatly; but even a field mushroom has close relatives and lookalikes that demand identification skills. Most of the folk tales – can you peel it? does it blacken silver? are absolute nonsense and so we come back to experience and prior knowledge. If I can share the single most important question to ask of any fungus (or indeed plant) is – “where’s it growing?” The immediate environment; open field or field edge? maybe woodland but if that, what kind of trees? What kind of soil or underlying rock is it – acid or limestone? Is it growing on dead wood or in the ground? There’s always the possibility, as on the Mendip Hills, that an otherwise harmless edible plant or fungus has absorbed poisonous heavy metals, and many fungi have confusing lookalikes. Fairy Ring Champignons which are edible and dry well; can sometimes even share a ring with Fool’s Funnels – Clitocybe rivulosa which is poisonous.
It’s the kind of breezy confidence that all will be well which short circuits the hard labour of learning plants and fungi; I should know because the only reason I’m here writing this is that on several occasions I’ve prepared poisonous fungi and even started cooking them, when a last minute change of heart saved my/our skin. I even poisoned the cat on one occasion but mercifully after a good heave and a rash, she lived to tell the tale. Even worse, two highly experienced mycologists I know have developed an intolerance for the St George’s Mushroom after decades of eating it safely. There could be long queues of very sick people waiting for liver transplants if foraging became suddenly fashionable. The idea of sending naive collectors out into the fields and forests after a one-day course really scares me.
As does the idea of French style hunting days – otherwise known as circular firing squads – with inexperienced people thrashing around in the woods with no idea how to fire a gun safely. Once again I speak from experience having almost been shot by an overexcited man who – having paid his £500 for a day’s pheasant shooting, forgot the rule about shooting above the trees and gave me and our son the fright of our lives, with lead shot hitting the trees all around us. He was, I’m pleased to say, sent home immediately! Frankly, if you want to eat a pheasant – and spatchcocked mice and roast fox don’t float my boat (see article) – then buy one from a game dealer and save yourself retching over the entrails when you finally find out that most living creatures are full of glistening plumbing, oh and well hung squirrel and other roadkill can give you all sorts of weird diseases that will keep the doctors from their beds. I have no absolute problem with killing and preparing living creatures but the taking of any life should never be done for fun or sport but to meet a genuine need and it requires some skill, so it’s important to seek a good teacher.
When we were at art school we had to work all the vacations to make ends meet, and one summer I worked next door to a slaughterhouse where hundreds of pigs were killed every day. That was my first and best ever lesson in industrial meat production and it left an indelibly negative impression on me. But I learned about gutting and skinning rabbits sitting on the shed step with the head groundsman where I worked another two summers and who made it all look easy. When we kept chickens I got the local butcher to show me how to kill them without cruelty and he showed me why it was never really worth plucking pheasants or pigeons. If, as Charlie Gilmour says, you feel the need for foraged meat protein then you have to take responsibility, be a moral grownup and learn to do the job well. Does all this sound off-putting? Well – it’s the reality – and there’s no escape by trying to pass the responsibility onto someone else.
So that’s fungi and foraged meat dealt with, but what about plants, grains and suchlike? My big fear is that hordes of indiscriminate foragers could do untold damage to precious environments. Already, in Cornwall, professional foragers from outside of the area (obviously they come from Devon or worse still, down from London) have stripped whole roadsides of wild garlic and in Epping Forest mushroom hunters have been caught with upwards of 30 Kg of fungi. People I know well think nothing of harvesting thousands of Psilocybe mushrooms on the Bannau Brycheiniog but maybe that’s a different issue! However – and here I’m with Charlie Gilmour – if the end result is a new generation of naturalists who understand and love the natural world, coming to it via an interest in foraging, then what’s not to like? We should stop being so sniffy about people who ask about edibility on fungus websites and at least point them in the direction of the best help. I appreciate the caution about liability and insurance and all that, but duty of care can be expressed more helpfully than blanket prohibition accompanied by harsh words.
The world of plants is absolutely fascinating but foraging is never going to be capable of feeding the world short of some catastrophic collapse in the population, so let’s just see it as a getting to know you operation where our knowledge spreads out from the focus of interest like the spokes of a wheel and we land up grasping the wonderful interconnectedness of all living things on earth. Perhaps then, and finally, we’d know our place in it.
The view down the valley last Tuesday morning. Sometimes the whole valley fills with clouds below us.
Fascinating though it may be to revisit the Camino journal after 13 years – (in fact I’m finding it pretty painful going) – life goes on at the Potwell Inn with the last of the tomatoes to be processed into two sorts of passata; one roasted and the other simply simmered with onion and indecent amounts of butter. It’s been an odd year, but we’ve now pretty well replenished our stores with a big crop of tomatoes from the polytunnel and our biggest ever crop of aubergines. Our only real failure was the broad beans early on and we’ve resolved to sow next year’s crop in November rather than wait until the spring reveals its hand. The asparagus bed failed yet again to rise to the occasion and so I’m afraid it’s going to come out in the autumn. It’s in the coldest part of the allotment and that may have something to do with it; but for the last three years we’ve spent out more on saving the crop than the value of the harvest and we can’t afford the indulgence. The surprise crop of the year was the Tayberry vine which gave a lovely crop of berries; and the apple trees which all fruited for the first time since they were planted.
The trip to our friends’ smallholding on the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) was partly to celebrate Madame’s birthday and partly because it’s a joy to spend a few days there with our friends. There’s always work to do on a smallholding – fencing, feeding animals and suchlike – but this time we helped to butcher a couple of two year old sheep (AKA mutton) which had just come back from the slaughterhouse. Vegetarians may prefer to look away now but as a meat eater on a modest scale, I have no moral difficulty with eating organic, free range sheep whose lives are entirely natural and whose lifetime travel takes them just ten miles to a local slaughterhouse.
Butchers – I mean real butchers – are highly skilled at what they do. As for me, confronted by a quartered carcass, it was a matter of trying to remember where all the joints come from and what they are supposed to look like. Three of us worked as a team in the kitchen and reduced the carcasses to joints, cuts and mince and enjoyed playing silly games whilst avoiding chopping our fingers off. Then we made a vast pot of stock and boiled all the bones down while Nick and me made trays of faggots – that may need translating for some readers – basically meat patties made from all sorts of offal; we only used the liver and hearts. By the time we’d finished we had four leg joints, four shoulder joints, 15Kg mince, 4Kg diced, 4 hocks, fillets for stir fries, leg steaks, racks, whole loins, 32 faggots in gravy, a gallon of stock and 36 blocks of dog food using every left-over scrap of meat from the bones.
I always feel, when I’m writing like this, that I should explain or defend hill farming and the killing and eating of animals. There’s no denying that intensive farming is the source of terrible cruelty and much avoidable pollution; but to equate what goes on in a 20 acre hill farm with what happens when two million chickens are crammed into sheds is a bit of a debater’s cheap shot. I go back to Michael Pollan’s wise motto – eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables. The consumption of ultra processed foods has been shown to be the cause all manner of illnesses and, if we all took to eating ultra processed vegetarian and vegan food we’d soon be totally enslaved by the gathering disaster of the food industry’s war on healthy eating, quite apart from swelling the profits of the industrial grain giants and the growers of palm oil and soya beans. Of course the killing and eating of animals raises all manner of ethical issues but we’re far too prone to exporting the hard questions as far away as possible. Buying your meat shrink wrapped and trimmed doesn’t detract from the big moral question of killing it in the first place. The taking of life is a big deal and so we should try never to eat more than we need, and endeavour not to waste any part of it.
We came home to the Potwell Inn with meat for the winter; we had dined on the freshest eggs you’ll ever see and we also brought a fleece back. Kate has used them for weed control, composting and also for lining hanging baskets. Nothing ever goes to waste on the smallholding. We’ve known them for over thirty years and from day one we treasured our fellow inner peasants. It takes a certain kind of personality to get so much pleasure from shaking plums out of a tree. I also fell in love with their Welsh terrier Dilys and proposed to her secretly but she rejected me, saying she was already suited.
Anyway, that was a long day and the following day we gathered plums, identified moths from the overnight trap and baked bara brith. Moths are attracted to a strong light and then they drop down into the depths of the box where they find egg boxes to spend the night before being identified and released in a manner that minimises the risk of them being eaten by birds. The wall outside the kitchen is used for feeding birds throughout the year and it’s fascinating to see the variety – most of the tits, nuthatches, robins, yellowhammers (increasingly rare) and finches too. At night we listen to the tawny owls and in the early spring there are cuckoos – it’s the last place I heard one, four or five years ago; pure joy. A family of field mice live in the crevices of the wall and pop out nervously from time to time to grab some grains.
Then finally, before driving home, we had a dip in the pool; filled with rainwater and warm from the combination of sun and solar panels. Paradise indeed!
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens, And today we have naming of parts.
Henry Reed, “Naming of parts” 1942
I love the way that, when I’m writing, images and ideas surface in my mind. My first thought when I sat down to write this post was that these four Cranesbills would have been exactly the species which inspired William Morris in his designs. Next I pondered for a while (it’s 5.00am after a sleepless night) on the extraordinary fact that in nature these closely related species are so plentiful. Do we really need twelve of them (Harrap’s “Wild Flowers”). Colin French’s “Flora of Cornwall” lists 34 species and subspecies; such an abundance that the only possible conclusion is that abundance, excess and diversity are somehow hardwired into nature. To return to a previous thought, if Nature is structured like a language then this abundance represents the dialects; the regional and environmental inflections of the same idea – like each one of us; all (potentially) beautiful if only we could break out of the prison we create when we each see ourselves as the only show in town.
And then Henry Reed’s poem plopped into my mind and I had the clearest recollection of myself in my early teens, sitting in a hot and airless classroom and gazing longingly out of the window as our teacher struggled to interest us in this poem. Not me, though. The poem sold itself to me in an instant. Here was another human being, feeling exactly like me at that moment and I took it to constitute permission to daydream. I’m quite sure that our teacher had no such aim in mind, but that’s the dangerous and disruptive power of poetry.
Peacock butterfly resting on a Charlock plant.
I’m indebted to Alan Rayner, by the way, for the idea of walking in nature rather than through it. It came up during a long conversation on a Bath Natural History Society field outing when we were overtaken by a runner pounding by us and seeing nothing at all. This last fortnight the experience repeated itself endlessly as we stood and watched a Kestrel hovering, or knelt in the grass delicately uncovering Spring Squills or – in this specific instance paused to photograph no less than four species of Geranium along a quarter of a mile of sunken lane bordered on both sides by Cornish walls as butterflies jazzed around tracing marvellous curlicues in pursuit of rivals, mates or nectar.
Without that special kind of relaxed mindfulness none of this diversity would have been visible. I suppose you could go out after a specific quarry – some rare or interesting plant – and cover more ground – eventually dragging your photographic elk back to the cave; but my favourite way of walking in nature is to move slowly, turning up all the senses to ten and let the plants do the talking. I’m not sure what practical use this kind of meditation has, other than cleansing the mind of thoughts about the endless dishonesty and stupidity of some politicians or the grinding anxiety that all this beauty is being threatened by the greed and selfishness of war and oil. Perhaps that’s the link with the poem about sitting in a stuffy room and learning how to assemble and fire a rifle in the context of the Second World War.
A wild Strawberry ripening on the warm top of a wall
Looking, seeing and beholding seem to me to constitute a hierarchy of mindful attention. For all the superficial similarities, each one of the Cranesbills is quite distinct. The shape of the leaves, for instance is crucial; compare the deeply incised lace-like divisions of the Cut-leaved Cranesbill in the larger photograph with the more modest Dove’s-foot Cranesbill in the centre of the strip of three to the left. Notice the fern like leaf of Herb Robert and the unusually pale flowers of the other * Dove’s-foot Cranesbill – each one an expression of the irrepressible creativity of Nature, and each one asking of us to name them because naming something – in a strange but powerful way – brings it into existence for us. The more we can name, the bigger the world becomes and the more intense our relationship with it. Even the word “Cranesbill” tells us something about the history of our language. If you look at the forming seed behind the flower at the top left – the Herb Robert – you might see the resemblance to a bird’s head and beak. But when was the last time that the sight of a Crane (the bird, I mean) was sufficiently commonplace to attach its name to a plant? Some centuries, I guess!
So it was farewell to Cornwall on Wednesday as we woke early and packed the campervan. This time we were on the Roseland peninsula, a very different place from the Lizard and a very different feel to the natural history as well. But we’ve already booked to return in September. Curiously, we were talking to our allotment neighbour when we got back and we discovered that without ever meeting one another we had been staying on the same campsite for over a decade. He was planning to drive down today for the half-term week. It’s a small world – worryingly and vulnerably small!
Back home, though, we turn our full attention to the allotment which – thanks to some good neighbours – survived the very hot weather, but urgently needs weeding and TLC.
*I submitted just one of what I initially thought were four species to the local BSBI Recorder – the marvellously skilled Ian Benallick for verification – and he corrected my identification earlier today, so apologies for any apoplexy caused by my mistake. His kind correction led me to double check all my ID’s in Tim Rich and A C Jermy’s “Plant Crib”. Geraniums, it seems, are a difficult group. Yet another example of the way we learn so much more from our mistakes than we do from our successes.
Having enjoyed every moment of sunshine on holiday, we spent some of today working at 35 C in the polytunnel which is now almost planted up with summer residents and looks lovely.
I can’t find a single photograph I’ve ever taken of the Lizard Village. We’ve visited it many times and, in the past camped there; in fact yesterday we saw a decommissioned helicopter parked incongruously in the paddock of a farm where we once washed ourselves in with nothing more than a cold tap and an outside privy. The post office where we waited for an emergency bailout from my sister has closed; the pub where I tried to sample every whisky and ended up knocking myself half senseless (the other half had already gone), on a low beam – closed. The little restaurant where we spent the last of our money and I tasted guinea fowl for the first time, closed. The only supermarket has gone and the last of the serpentine turners appears to have turned his last lighthouse ornament and then turned up his toes. The trippers still arrive like locusts in the summer and strip any green shoots of the old culture bare, so everything is distorted and could ultimately be destroyed by tourism. There’s barely a pig shed in Cornwall that’s not been converted into a holiday let or an airBnb, and hardly a spoil heap that’s not been turned into an “experience” by a small time entrepreneur.
Years ago John Betjeman described the Lizard as depressingly full of buildings like army married quarters, and it hasn’t improved over the past 50 years. The only remnant of our first ever visit is the Regent Cafe on the green where, a few summers ago we saw a poster advertising the ancient Cornish sport of whippet racing.
All that said, we still love the knackered old place and come back year after year because a short walk beyond the village takes us to the coast path and the lighthouse whose fog horn is a thing of wonder. I’m sure I permanently damaged my hearing, sitting as close as I dared when it was working and listening to the fan starting up and build steadily until an almighty blast straight from hell poured into the air and echoed all around the surrounding bays. It hit you in the belly and rattled your teeth; the tinnitus lasted for hours afterwards then there was silence. For a while.
Why so, then? As politicians often say “I’m glad you asked me that” and then go on to talk about the new cycle lanes they’ve personally fought for in their constituencies. Cornwall’s a mess but nobody could argue it’s all the fault of the English or the tourists. The road improvements to the A30 and the A38, and many other important infrastructure and cultural projects were paid for by the EU which the Cornish voted in force to leave. The fishermen who were especially keen to regain our sovereignty soon found that they could no longer afford to sell their fish in a Europe from which we’d separated ourselves. Some skippers known locally as slipper skippers sold their boats to the scrapyard and their quotas to the Spanish who repaid their naivety by dredging the sea empty. The NHS failed to receive the promised £350 million a week and the GP surgery in Lizard is now in a single tiny prefab building, and in spite of the enormous success of the lost gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project which have brought money and good jobs to the poorest part of Cornwall, when Tim Smit tried to open an education centre in Lostwithiel the objections from the locals poured in and the project looks like being scrapped. It seems that finding a future for Cornwall other than hospitality and seasonal homelessness is rather like the kind of hopeless task presented by what Michael Balint the psychoanalyst called “heart sinkers”.
All of which mournful thoughts floated around in my mind during what I thought was a terrible night but which my Withings watch scored at 100%. Re -reading Fred Pearce’s “The New Wild” recently I began to wonder whether our negative attitudes towards invasive plant, insect and animal species didn’t find an exact parallel in some of our instinctive responses to tourism. These attitudes in humans draw from deep wells. Apparently just as the English tell jokes about the Welsh and the Irish and never fail to wonder at the meanness of the Scots – none of which stereotypes have any foundation in fact; the Russians make fun of the Ukrainians, and we all know where that leads to; so the Cornish refer to out of county visitors as “grockles” who, given a moment’s reflection, are the one reliable source of income in a county which has lost virtually all of its traditional employment. The tin and the copper mines are gone. Fibre optics will probably mean that the copper market will never really gain strength. Fishing is largely gone due to overfishing which wasn’t all down to Spanish supertrawlers. The quota system is the bastard child of overfishing in the face of all the evidence.
Looking around there are no obvious replacements apart from tourism – I’ll probably get hate mail for this – so right now, any attempt to go back to some imagined past by legislating against the one reliable source of income is doomed to fail. The lithium mine being proposed is about the last thing Cornwall needs at the moment. The specialist workers may well be brought in from beyond the Tamar and in any case if you add in the principle that the polluter pays the environmental damage and the excessive use of water ought to scupper the project on the drawing board. The world needs what Cornwall needs – better mass transport systems and less cars on the road and a new vision of fulfilled life.
Living in Bath can feel a bit like living in a theme park at times but without the tourists (and the students) the local economy would collapse. We have become inured to the shock of crossing Royal Crescent in front of a battalion of portly Roman re-enactors, or weaving a course down Milsom Street between 100 variations of a Jane Austin character. I don’t suppose the Cornish are any more pleased at seeing people queuing on a beach to take Poldark selfies.
The Lizard is a real botanical hotspot as well as a half legendary miasma of once upon a time gallimaufry. In two days I’ve found a couple of real rarities and one local newspaper recently latched on to the possibilities of enticing visitors here with a different quarry than ice cream, pasties and fish and chips. Writers like Fred Pearce are arguing that alien species often bring new and vital energy to an ageing or damaged ecosystem and simply eradicating them is an expensive way of doing even more damage.
Changing the profile of visitors would be slow work and the massive problem of housing shortages would need a great deal of new affordable building alongside restrictions or (as in Wales) financial disincentives to second homes. Schemes like Tim Smits proposed Lostwithiel education centre need to be encouraged whilst perhaps steering them away from the NIMBY strongholds. There will need to be a huge emphasis on secondary and tertiary education because farming and fishing will remain profoundly important to the local economy, but embracing ecologically sustainable methods would pay a premium. Of course this would cost money, but the UK government seems to have £billions at their disposal for lining their rich mates’ pockets.
And let it never be said that the village communities are now broken beyond repair. We were chatting to a woman in a local Farm shop who told us that a local fishing boat had sunk just before Christmas. Luckily the crew of two were members of the lifeboat crew and did all the right things but spent 20 minutes in freezing water before they were rescued by their mates in the lifeboat. Within days the community had rallied round and raised thousands of pounds to support the two men who now had no means of earning a living. A few years ago the same village crowd funded the purchase of a vital building on the seafront that had been used by the fishermen for generations. What these threatened communities need more than anything else is a long term plan and the long term funding to bring it off.
I haven’t written for more than two weeks, which is an unusually long silence. There’s no particular reason apart from seasonal ennui and the slow collapse of our culture into angry senescence – OK so that’s a rather big reason, and the most dangerous of all. Whilst in Hay on Wye this weekend we scoured the bookshops and I came across a marvellous volume of essays titled “The Welsh Way – Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution” – which I devoured mostly sitting in bed in our hotel room because the drains in the building were blocked and the trenchant smell of sewage forced us us keep the window open, in spite of the outside temperature being -3C. It all somehow reflected my mood. Even on the drive home the sun struggled to shine and just hovered us like a black and white pastel drawing of a poached egg. Our dirty weekend had turned out dirtier in a different way than either of us ever imagined.
The book, on the other hand, is brilliant and gave me much food for thought hinging, as it does, on the continued fantasy of Welsh radicalism examined against its actual deployment over the past 50 years. “Could do better” hardly describes it. But the book also brought home how the individual and separate crises of our time are nothing more than related symptoms of the single malignant disease known as Neoliberalism. The book also gave me an unexpected metaphor expressing two ways of living with the crisis drawing on a structure I know well from the inside. Huw Williams writes of the contrast between the old independent and baptist churches that they were:
…… reformed beyond recognition by the Methodists. To [Iorwerth Peate] the Methodists performed a corruption of tradition, in particular in their aspiration to engage with the world, reform it and transform it. The true spirit of the original nonconformity was to distance oneself from the world, seek salvation in the next life, and carry the burden of this life with dignity and patience.”
Huw Williams; The New Dissent: Page 105. Neoliberal Politics and the Welsh Way
I was almost born into Primitive Methodism and later moved into the Wesleyans and from there to low church and then Anglo Catholic Anglicanism. A long path through the traditions that taught me a great deal about the ancient rift between the activists and the withdrawers. I learned well that withdrawal from the world, whilst it might feed the religious ego, just allowed the devil free range. Where’s the virtue in finding some new cruelty or horror to turn away from and ignore every day?
So the photograph at the top was taken – as the caption says – on the banks of the River Wye; now polluted almost to extinction by intensive chicken farms which have proliferated along her banks and which pour many tons of phosphorus and nitrogen from poultry manure into her water every day. The ray of light is that the tree was growing just a few yards upstream from the bridge under which I finally and suddenly realized that I had lost my faith somewhere along that long journey.
It’s December 14th and in just a week we’ll celebrate the winter solstice which signals the return of the earth from the darkness of the declining days and I remember the words of Mother Julian of Norwich ; ” … all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”
If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I’m not a fan of the recent changes to the seasonal calendar brought in by the Met Office. I know it’s tidier to begin the season of Autumn on September Ist and then rotate the rest on a three monthly cycle; easier but plain wrong. For me the seasons will always be marked by the solstices and equinoxes. Messy but holding tight to the astronomical events surrounding the hours of daylight. Last Friday saw the autumn equinox at exactly 2.03 am marking the moment of equal day and night and from now until December 21st the hours of darkness will get progressively longer.
Nature is, by and large, pretty orderly in her seasons too and so we instinctively recognise them by the quality of the light, sounds and smells. I’m interested that these phenomena actually seem to speak to us. Our absorption in the earth and her seasons means the bare sensation, of a birdsong for instance, becomes encrusted with memories. The smell of newly turned earth in the Spring evokes in me a powerful memory of Good Friday when, according to tradition, potatoes were planted. I think of a steady queue of customers at Palmer’s Seed Store and the smell of National Growmore fertilizer and Mr Flook the fishmonger in his wellingtons and yellow oilskin apron.
So these accretions of memories make simple things like listening to a singing Great Tit into a deeply embedded, often emotional, complex. Scientifically, and some would say factually, it’s just a singing bird with a Latin name representing something so common as to be beneath a birder’s dignity; but in the far greater field of meaning it’s as affecting as a Nightjar like the one that kept me awake much of the night, camping in France, or the Nightingale that I heard on a retreat near Ilfracombe one evening as I walked in the grounds.
But to get back to the Great Tit and the Autumn Equinox, something profoundly odd happened on Friday morning. I was helping our youngest move some last belongings out of the flat he’s just left. It’s been a sad few weeks because his relationship with his girlfriend has broken down and everyone’s been walking on eggshells. Anyway I was parked up in a place I shouldn’t have been, close to the old flat and keeping a sharp eye out for Parking Wardens who are pretty ruthless here in Bath. Then, as he carried the last load across the road, with his bass guitar in one hand and a bundle of clothes in the other – he looked just like the cover of the Bob Dylan’s “Freewheelin” Album sleeve. I would have been sad to see him that way except that as I sat there in the car with the window wound down, completely out of the blue I heard a Great Tit singing its two note ‘saw sharpening’ song, somewhere in the trees above. It’s a song I associate so powerfully with Spring and new beginnings that it felt like some kind of omen. “Stupid, irrational, meaningless emotional nonsense” say the ghosts of the old Logical Positivist philosophers, and “Hear Hear” say the materialist scientists, and yet ……. and yet?
Nothing I’ve ever come across shakes my understanding that language – whether human language or the subtle languages of mammals, birds and insects; or flowers, or the incomprehensible silent language known as the “Wood Wide Web” – that language is more like a coral reef growing in a sea of meanings, with living ideas on the outside and deep within, the whole history of human speaking, singing and dancing. The simplest level of reference in that unexpected out of season birdsong is probably the least interesting.
It’s been a long hot and dry summer and so it must have been the case that the bird I heard was singing out of season because in this settled weather a second brood was still “thinkable” and “do-able“. But he said much more than he intended. That Spring embodying song on the very day of the Autumn Equinox was a portent of new beginnings, a sign of environmental crisis, a reminder that Nature has her own ways and heaven help us if we ignore her signs.
To be honest, after a two week break in Pembrokeshire I was dreading going back to the allotment. Two weeks is an awfully long time to leave any garden to nature and my particular worry was that our plot – in which we deliberately allow nature to have an almost free hand would have totally succumbed to the fatal embrace of the bindweed which has been an absolute pain this summer.
The reason, of course, is that bindweed roots travel deep and fast so it laughs at drought while many other shallow rooted plants keel over. Our strategy this season was to keep the ground covered at all costs, and so as a matter of principle when the drought began to grip we largely stopped weeding in order to keep the soil shaded and as cool as possible. I know people make the most tremendous fuss about weeds stealing sunshine, water and nutrients from the crop; but in our own wildly uncontrolled trial we found that our crop plants, so long as they had a bit of headroom, soldiered on through the heatwave, and whatever nutrients the weeds steal will be quickly returned to the soil via the compost heaps.
There were two other weed species that had a field day this year. One was the Sow Thistles, and the other was the clump of Fumitory which I was unwilling to weed out, because it is a notable rarity here in the centre of Bath. However two weeks of rain and sunshine tested the theory to the limit and it was that thought which was beginning to bother me as we recovered from a pretty exhausting harvest.
But what we didn’t expect was such a large late crop of vegetables, as we approached the Equinox on Friday. When we went to see the allotment yesterday we harvested two whole deep bags full of produce. Old potatoes were weighing in at a pound and a half each and of course it’s been so dry we didn’t have blight to contend with this year. That said we always grow blight resistant varieties of both potatoes and tomatoes. There were aubergines, peppers, runner beans, carrots, cucumbers, courgettes and apples and yet more tomatoes grown outside. The large crop of squashes have been hardening off in the sunshine ready for winter storage, so contrary to all expectations we’ve had the best overall harvest ever. We even managed to eat the whole crop of sweetcorn and didn’t concede a single cob to the marauding badgers.
The downside to all this was the excessive amount of watering we still needed to do. With just 1750 litres stored it’s clear that we would have lost crops if we hadn’t used the council provided cattle trough. Quite apart from the shame of using high quality drinking water on thirsty crops, there’s the physical wear and tear on us and our knees, carrying two cans at a time which weigh in at forty pounds and need to be carried down very rickety paths at the risk of damaging tendons and joints. I may just have muttered “I’m getting a bit old for this malarkey” once or twice! And so we need to think about drought resistant crop varieties and perhaps consider growing more perennials. The tap-rooted vegetables were left pretty much to their own devices and they’ve done amazingly well. The second issue will be weed seeds, but in early season it’s relatively easy to keep them down with a sharp hoe. The final part of the climate change conundrum is to keep the ultimate height of plants lower, which will make frost and wind protection much easier. That the climate is changing rapidly is beyond denial and hoping that next year will bring better weather is wilful magical thinking. The biggest sadness would be to lose the wonderfully flavoured -Robinson’s “Show Perfection” pea. Make no mistake, this is not a cardboard flavoured show variety, but it does grow easily to 6-8 feet.
We had also theorised that growing far more insect attractors and digging a pond would attract more predatory wasps and pollinating insects. For whatever reason the Ladybirds never really got going this year, but aphid numbers were well down so maybe the other predators took up the slack. It’s impossible to make any great claims, but our deliberately scruffy approach – although it looked terrible enough to earn reproachful looks from our tidy neighbours – kept producing abundant crops where the weed free and bare earth allotments failed on a grand scale.
I think obsessive tidiness is an entrenched value in British allotments. The catalogues are full of model specimens growing in straight rows on cleared ground, but our holiday in Wales, next door to a large organic farm, showed just how much of a role natural soil fertility and good, rich, moisture retaining soil, plays out in providing increasingly good yields over time. The grassland wasn’t overrun with any noxious weeds in spite of a no-till and no chemicals regime. What this means of course is that it’s almost certain that the kind of approach we’ve been trying to master on 100 square metres, could be upscaled to hectares. Sadly, though, the Council allotments Officer’s twice yearly assessments still seem to overvalue the straight row, weed free allotment over and against the holy disorder of our own attempts to garden thoughtfully.
So our holiday fears were not realised, and that was the most tremendous morale booster. But a second bonus followed quite naturally because all those fresh ingredients led straight back to the stove, just as the new seed catalogues were dropping into the post box. Today we ate the best mushroom soup ever, thickened with bread and made with one and a half pounds of field mushrooms brought back from the organic fields in St David’s. With the equinox two days away and the nights drawing in, there are a few joyful hours still to be had, planning for next year as we clear the beds and pile on compost and leaf mould ready for next season.
