Tag: ethnobotany

Castle Class 4-6-0 No 4079 – if you can name it you probably need professional help.

In the plant world there are the exact equivalents of famous railway engines worth hanging around at the end of a windy and wet platform for hours, and then, of course, there are the weeds. Steam engines still give me the shivers even seven decades after my first illicit cigarettes on the Pines junction waiting for the Cornish Riviera express to fly past. There’s a Castle Class plant in this gallery of rogues; in fact it may even be a Pacific Class but of course, because it was expressing no clouds of steam or haunting whistle I must have walked past it and failed to notice it for nearly fifty years before I finally put the time in and found it, sharing the moment with Madame – windswept and even eager to find it so we could go down to the cafe and get warm. It’s a very rare Quillwort so if you’re a fellow trainspotter you’ll know exactly where we were.

Sometimes these excitements just happen. I’ve had to stop any work that involves bending over (so no weeding or watering) while my cataract procedure heals, and so I was watching Madame weed a raised bed of carrots as she pointed to a tall but familiar looking plant poking through the crop. We both knew it was a nightshade of some sort, but there was something odd about the flower. Putting all doubts aside, I chucked it in the bucket with all the other weeds (mostly Fat Hen) and consequently there is no photo for the record and I have to consign myself to never being able to prove its identity. * but see postscript below

Later I realized that what was odd about it was that the flower wasn’t purple and yellow like its cousin Woody or its great aunt Thorn Apple, always blowing her own trumpet or Henbane with her lace collar and Deadly whose name exaggerates her gifts a bit with dull brown flowers but still as murderous a family as you could ever hope to avoid. This shy little assassin was a Black Nightshade with white flowers who hides her poison in shiny green berries which, joking aside, are a bit safer to eat when they’ve actually turned black, and I’m furious that I failed to take a photograph because it would have been (still is I suppose) a first for me.

Before I wrote this I thought I might try to work in the metaphor of trophies and tramps but it seemed a bit of a forced image and I’ve already been rude enough about the militant trainspotting tendency. (It takes one to know one)! But the whole idea for this little piece sprang precisely from my wilful failure to notice something growing on the allotment that we couldn’t eat; threw away without a thought and yet – given a bit of a reverse ferret – turned out to be really very interesting. How many other plants live and die under the radar because they have no immediate value to us. Just for starters, many of these little treasures have had a long and valuable life as herbal remedies – phytomedicines – if you must – before they were overtaken by big pharma who may have done us all a disservice by eliminating every molecule that wasn’t on their power list. And never think that herbal remedies should be eliminated because they can be poisonous. Just think of Paracetamol; and while we’re on the subject, don’t assume that herbal remedies strip the planet of protected species because I ran a check comparing the British list of rare and protected plants with the plants listed in the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia and there was just one single species listed as appearing in both lists. We are talking for the most part about what we now call weeds. It correlates well with being old (like me) which some younger people seem to believe is contagious; crossing the road to avoid the possibility of an outbreak of wrinkles and boring stories.

There’s a whole layer of cultural history down there at our feet, and ripping it all up or poisoning it because there’s no profit in it is ecological vandalism. As we consider this growing season just ending, and the five heatwaves that turned our legumes into lectin factories making them inedible and dangerous to eat raw, it’s a moment to consider our relationship with the earth. Is it purely instrumental? or is it something more. A history; a culture recorded in remedies and songs, times of plenty and times of starvation? are we too clever by half assuming that the shelves in Sainsbury’s will always be full? What does it say about us that we’re so content to destroy the lives of plants whose names we don’t even know and whose gifts we will never be able to benefit from; new cancer treatments, undiscovered strengths and properties that might give us some understanding of plant stress and how we can overcome it?

We live as if our allotment has just two layers – food at the top and dirt at the bottom. But what about that third layer that we simply ignore. Even the earth layer has its own lively presence, teeming with microscopic life and miles and miles of fungal threads, and the surface between earth and profit deserves better than being treated as if it were a plague of squatters. Nature hates bare earth and will always fill the bare patches with plants from across the world that have names and histories and gifts to give. Even dogs know that Couch Grass has valuable uses, and Ground Elder isn’t just a pest if you’ve got gout. We have to think that in tolerating weeds we may be entertaining angels unawares.

  • Postscript

So today we went up to the allotment to do a bit of harvesting and I made sure I took my phone so I could at least photograph the wilted remains of the Black Nightshade and now it will eventually reach the official database.

There must be a story here but I don’t know where to start

So here we are back in the Bannau Brycheiniog, thirteen hundred feet up the side of Mynydd Bychan on a hill farm which is emphatically shouting “history, history” in my ear. There’s an odd feeling that this place is peculiar; not quite right by the culture of the surrounding hills. We were in desperate need of a bit of peace after months of building work on the flat during which we’d had to move out several times and equally tough times on the allotment with the heatwaves and drought which I’ve already written about; not to mention the continuing saga of the campervan engine. That’s a very inelegant sentence but it perfectly shows how stress gets inside our heads and muddles them.

I brought four books with me apart from the usual Potwell Inn clutter of cameras and notebooks, and they are respectively “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold; “The Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwest Europe” by Julian Barker and, “A History of Wales” by John Davies which is a real 750 page clonker; also “Joseph Banks” – the biography by Patrick O’Brian. I grabbed the first one, the Sand County Almanac off the bookshelf as we left the flat to drive here and I’m so glad I did. The Flora was a chance find of the out of print volume which hardly ever comes on to the market second hand so I jumped on the only available copy on the internet. The history of Wales isn’t the most up to date or indeed the most radical; less fun than Jan Morris’ – “The Matter of Wales”, less political than Carwen Graves’ “Tŷr” and less focused on hill farming than David Elias’ “Shaping the Wild”. I’ve left out William Condry’s New Naturalist volume “The Natural History of Wales because I haven’t read it yet but I’d recommend the first five without reservation, and you need to read all of them plus the poems of RS Thomas too even to catch the flavour of the debates that still burn underground like peat fires. The Banks biography is the sole English representative because I wanted to get a feel for the plant hunters of his era.

Normally I’d be out there on my hands and knees searching for plants to record; I’ve even printed off lists of possible sightings but I seem to have hit a bit of a parting of the ways – I want to explore not just the names but the science, the habitats, the uses and the whole culture. In fact it increasingly seems to me that I need to focus on the meaning – in the broadest possible sense – the meaning of plants in our culture. Hence the disparate choice of reading for our break: Davies for historical context, Banks for the beginnings of scientific botany; Barker for the many uses of plants and Leopold who – even almost eighty years ago – was asking the most profound philosophical questions about conservation in a world where even back then species were disappearing and humans were becoming increasingly detached from the natural world under the cover of progress.

….. each [professional]n his own way is a hunter. And why does each call himself a conservationist? Because the wild things he hunts for have eluded his grasp, and he hopes by some necromancy of laws, appropriations, regional plans, reorganization of departments, or other forms of mass-wishing to make them stay put.

A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold 1947

So let’s be clear. Without plants we’re all dead. No oxygen to breathe, no food to eat and an empty windswept desert instead of a green and pleasant land. The glossy prospectus of life support under a big tech dome is a fraud; there is no white coated Seventh Cavalry hiding behind the hill, and without nature we would cease to exist; without meaning or purpose.

We were children, my sister and me, walking back along the road to Pucklechurch from the Rose and Crown in Parkfield with our parents. We were replete with red lemonade and crisps. Jenny was picking dandelions and we came across an old man, possibly a farm worker or miner who could have come direct from a casting agency as a typical peasant. He stopped us with a wave and asked her if she knew what the flowers were called and she told him dandelions. He tittered and leaned in conspiratorially -“we calls em piss the beds!” Our parents made conventional end of conversation noises, gathered us up into a safe huddle and we walked on towards the bus stop. I might have been eight years old and that experience felt as if a gap had opened in the evening sky and another world revealed.

Plants and memories have a powerful aggregating force between them; they’re sticky and accumulative. Only yesterday we were walking along a narrow lane towards an area of boggy heath called Rhos Fach which I’d read about and seen on the OS map when I spotted a harebell and some lesser Hawkbit among strangely familiar grasses beneath a bank on which, fifty years ago there could have been a hedge of hawthorn; now just a few elderly horizontal branches surviving from the last laying. Somewhere deep in my brain the neurons made instant connections and I was the same child just a couple of years after Pucklechurch, lying on the same grasses on Rodway Hill, gazing at the sky and feeling, well, ecstatic. The two experiences connected by a powerful force with no name other than memory in which every sense is stored and released – colours, smells sounds; every subtlety every nuance encoded like messenger RNA searching out its target and – once found – springing into life.

We don’t any longer know how to love

Needless to say, back at the cottage I turned to the AI and quickly discovered soil type, bedrock conformation, a series of predicted NVC classifications and a list of plants recorded there; oh and the national grid reference finally to drive the pin through the thorax. I was reminded of the fictional artist Gully Jimson’s priceless comment in Joyce Carey’s “The Horses Mouth” – “It’s like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?”

In the clash between the instrumental and the aesthetic there lies our culture’s dirty secret: we don’t any longer know how to love. It’s too nebulous, too fragile, too open ended, and like apomixis (that’s the way blackberries do it), just too bloody complicated.

This isn’t an attack on botany or botanists, but it is a serious warning about the dangers of idolatry (which should never be consigned to arguments about religion). Idolatry worships the part rather than the whole; in fact you might characterise it as the all too human root of reductive thinking which in turn is the cause of so many human tragedies. A form of ethnobotany could be a way around the mountain.

And so, back to the troubling garden

It seems that there is a real story behind the uneasy feelings that the surrounds of the cottage evoked. Walking around yesterday we found sheds, a couple of abandoned rotavators, a steel shoe tree, a lead model of a horse next to a horseshoe; any number of bird boxes and seats wrapped around out of place trees, a broken beehive, empty bird cages, and an overgrown vegetable garden; walkways mown through the site but with little sign of walkers. There is a strong sense of something abandoned. It didn’t take much research to find that this was once the site of a much loved Edwardian guest house run by a woman called Rita who was also a formidable gardener. She created an arboretum, dug a lake, planted an orchard and made a gathering place for walkers drawn to the Bannau. We are among the tail enders. Everything has a lifespan, even (or perhaps especially) gardens. They’re our attempt to bring nature close and under control on our own terms which is, sadly, both beautiful and fruitless. The circus moves on; the power and beauty of the hills is stronger than our dreams of upstaging them.