Tag: field botany

Plants can change our perspective too! – but only if we understand them

For ages I’ve wanted to broaden my approach to plants when thinking and writing about them, and I’d very much like to move a bit closer to Geoffrey Grigson (whose brilliant book “An Englishman’s Flora” is about to be republished as “A British Flora”. I really love this book for its breadth and scope; escaping the stamp collector’s view of field botany (the rarer the better) and wandering in his usual provocative way through the countryside picking up fragments of folklore, old country names, culinary and medicinal properties. You can still pick up a second hand copy very reasonably although the reprint is only £25. I’ve got a worn out paperback and a large format hardback – both treasured possessions. He’s not the only natural history writer who’s spread his wings in this way, Richard Maybe is another and there are more. I should include the early works of Henry Williamson and in the same breath dare to mention my Mother who was brought up in the deepest Chilterns and who once told us about her first encounter with a flush toilet which so scared her she couldn’t use it. I would dearly love which ‘Lady’s Slipper’ she mentioned as her favourite flower – and which could have been a geographically unlikely appearance of the now extinct orchid or one of six other more common wildflowers with similar names. Robin Wall Kimmerer gives a fascinating account of the encounter of western botany with First Nation Canadian ethnobotany. Thanks to Grigson I now know why Latin names are so important. There are such fields, known as ethnobotany, folk taxonomy, phytonomy or ethnoecology which is an academic way of recognising that plants have cultural meanings too. In our laser focused reductive way we might grudgingly accept that plants are useful for giving us clues to molecules which might be useful in medicine but fall way short of recognising herbal medicine as a legitimate pursuit. By the way, I had a text yesterday advertising a T shirt with the slogan “All plants are edible, some of them only once!” .

Anyway I hope you catch my drift. I was first fascinated by plants because they so beautiful, and the closer I looked the more beautiful they became. Several years ago when I was young (ho ho) there was a company in Kingswood which was quite a big supplier of medicinal herbs. A friend of mine once showed me a printed sheet of testimonials they sent out with their products (which included a specially formulated smoking mixture for asthmatics!) One of their big sellers was evidently a herb called Golden Seal and I mistakenly thought it referred to Goldenrod. One of the testimonial letters described how the patient, after only a couple of days of taking the remedy, claimed to have coughed up a substantial tumour. That’s not an easy to forget image. Today when I was mulling over this piece I had a look in Mrs Grieve’s 1931 “A Modern Herbal” and she, like Grigson, lists the alternative names of Golden Seal and among them she reveals that she’s actually writing about Turmeric root which these days is something of a supposed miracle cure, ‘though falling short of projectile tumour expulsion. Those sneaky scientists while all-along decrying herbal medicine, have been scouring the old herbals for patentable synthetics. Tomorrow I’m expecting a second hand copy of the almost unobtainable Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwestern Europe“. I get almost all my books secondhand these days. We’re soon off on another trip to the Bannau Brycheiniog and I’m hoping to persuade Madame to take a short drive to the village of Myddfai where I can breathe the same air as the famous physicians once breathed – hopefully without the addition of smoke particles from the fire around nearby Llangynidr Reservoir which we can even smell in Bath, fifty miles away. We have friends living just a few miles from there, and their smallholding narrowly escaped a previous very frightening wildfire.

There are a thousand extensions to plant hunting that can bring the plants alive for us. I’ve been recently mugging up on some of the science, having previously known nothing at all about DNA and molecular biology and it’s mind blowing and beautiful in the intellectual sense that scientists and mathematicians use. Reading the more controversial books of Stefano Mancuso, I didn’t know for instance that the animals – that’s all the animals amount to just under half of one percent of the total biomass of the earth, whilst plants amount to around 82% (90% before the industrial revolution), and we humans amount to …….. just 0.01%. We have seen the enemy, it is us!

I’ve been amazed at the lukewarm manner in which governments have brushed aside the statistics of global catastrophe. Now, here in Bath and in the midst of the fifth heatwave of this drought plagued summer we are advised to close our windows because of the health risks associated with PM 2.5 particles travelling in the wind from South Wales. Newspapers of a certain kind continue to write about the lovely summer weather while Madame and me, among thousands of other gardeners and farmers, have struggled to keep our plants alive, and the local media are filled with rage at the local authority whenever they try to reduce and control traffic pollution. I’m reminded of William Cobbett’s quip that “they demand change but without alteration”

God alone knows how many trips I’ve made backwards and forwards to the allotment water troughs with a two gallon watering can in each hand – that’s forty pounds weight – in the face of appeals to restrict our water consumption. The upside is that we’ve been feasting on the sweetest sweetcorn, the shiniest aubergines and the richest tomatoes not to mention all the other unobtainable herbs and vegetables. As the difficulties multiply, my admiration for the adaptability of our plants increases. Some of us have wondered in Sunday Schools what the biblical manna might have been, but the more I learn about it the more I understand that the plants which keep us and every other living thing on earth alive do it all by turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar. That beats Moses and his stick any day!

Let the plants speak!

Our kitchen in August 2018 – nothing changes much except we’ve now got two functioning extractor fans taking the fumes and cooking smells up the built-in flue. Only took 10 years of arguments with the landlord!

It’s early August and apart from being sweated alive by the fifth heatwave of the year there’s another sense in which it feels like Christmas every day. In these repeated heatwaves the only strategy we can follow is to keep as many of the plants alive as possible, and so life pretty well revolves around watering, cooking and preserving – and it’s worked wonderfully. Plants need water, food and sunlight, and the abundance of sunlight, although a curse through forcing us to water so much is marvellous in helping our crops to covert the water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. Just imagine what a miracle that is; but some plants like peas and broad beans will never thrive in these conditions however hard we try to help out because, like Madame, the heat makes them feel exhausted and they give up. But others take to it like ducks to water and each day, after watering, we bring the ripened produce into the kitchen and scratch our heads over what to do with it. Fresh vegetables are an order of magnitude more tasty than the impoverished lookalikes that taste of nothing after their long journeys. Every day is Christmas day.

Today it was the turn of the aubergines and after a test run in our youngest son’s commercial pizza oven I felt sure I could replicate the burn in our kitchen, with no danger of the smoke alarm going off due to the new extractors. And so it turned out to be – the fruits – still hot from the sun – blackened and smoked gently as the insides cooked at 275 C and, as they cooled, virtually peeled themselves leaving the pale, faintly smoky flesh waiting to be united with garlic and tahini. We’ve got more tomatoes, cucumbers, figs and new potatoes than you could shake a stick at, and it’s so exciting that I just put the apron on and relish every moment as the cupboards fill with winter stores.

It hasn’t always been that easy. Something of a turning point in my life was the day (just before we had an extremely low-key wedding), when we picked 40 lbs of blackberries on Rodway Hill. There were a couple of outcomes from that day. The first was that we made a huge amount of completely horrible blackberry chutney – so bad we couldn’t even give it away. The second outcome for me was the overpowering feeling of gratitude which (being a fervent convert to extreme atheism) didn’t fit at all well because there seemed to be no-one or nothing I could thank for the generosity of those spiteful bushes. Sixty years later I’m still struggling with that conundrum having tasted some of the off-the-shelf options without being convinced by any of them.

But I can dimly see a way through the desert by repairing and joining up the broken fragments of our polarized and fragmented culture. Let’s take plants as a beginning. We casually divide them into arbitrary categories (food; wildflowers; weeds; rarities; orchids and ragwort etc.) often entirely based on usefulness to humans or potential for monetization. But all plants come from the same tree of life as we do. Some time, millions of years ago, humans, dinosaurs and plants took different paths and we’ve evolved to live very different lives but notwithstanding Darwin’s troubles for suggesting that we share a great deal of our history with the great apes, for instance, and regardless of the religious arguments about it, we all came from the same single celled organism which contained the first few chapters of the library of life which have evolved, adapted and now reside in each of us inside every cell of our body; our six feet of tightly coiled DNA. The library is the same library which mothered (each with its own chapters) the butterfly, the tiger (Tyger?) the earthworm, the edible mushroom, the lichen and last of all, you and me. It’s not necessary for us to strive to unite with nature because we are already one with her. Hugely diverse and adapted; a coat of many colours you might say but a single one and not the atomised billions of homo sapiens who dare to think of ourselves as individuals.

So after years of seeing my passion for field botany, for gardening, for writing and spirituality for anthropology and for ceramics, for science and for cooking as separate “interests” I can see that they’re all more like spokes on a wheel at the centre of which is the big question –“What’s it all for?” – and when I ask myself the big question that way I can answer with another question which, for me, removes the thorn of the first. “Why does it have to have a meaning or a purpose at all?” We could invent a multitude of possible answers to the big question but I can’t see what useful purpose it would offer.

Just out of interest I should say that this far from sudden insight was triggered by my instinctive dislike for any kind of Magisterium which almost always exists to promote its own version of an answer and to persecute in the most cruel and heartless manner anyone who offers an alternative or sometimes even a slight amendment. The lightbulb moment came from binge reading about molecular biology and the latest plant taxonomy research in order better to understand DNA and one or two obscure (to me) statistical methods. Once, however dimly, I began to understand the beauty and complexity of what goes on in both plant and human cells; I began in an almost religious way, to see all of my interests bonded together by their common structure.

The icing on the cake has been to read about the work of Stefano Mancuso who runs a research programme at the University in Florence which he provocatively calls “Plant Neurobiology”. He and his colleagues across the world have come in for a great deal of flak from the old guard because plants don’t have neurons and couldn’t possibly have brains like ours but they are able to sense problems and respond to them; communicate with and “listen” to other plants and synthesise astonishingly complex molecules. All this has brought it home to me that writing about plants as if they were part of a giant but insensitive stamp collection is doomed. Without plants there would be no trace of the human and yet plant life would go on – probably less destructive. Plants are worth so much more than being pressed into herbaria and to even begin to understand what they are, we need poets and visionary science; we need anthropologists, herbalists, first nation men and women, collectors cooks and artists. I fear that we will never find a sustainable space for humanity on the earth unless we accept that we owe it all to the plants.

Botany on the Damascus Road

We’ve just got back from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) and things are getting desperate. Our friends, 1000 feet up in the hills, have already seen one major fire come perilously close to their smallholding which has hundreds of trees that they’ve planted and a small patch of ancient woodland. Despite two large water cisterns, and a smaller tank they came close to running out of water for their allotment, for their house and for the sheep, pigs and hens they keep last year, and things are worse now. Back at the Potwell Inn the allotment is suffering. The legume crop was a write-off, although a climbing french bean is hanging on in there and the polytunnel tomatoes have stopped setting fruit after the first truss. We’re having to contemplate a complete reset of our crops in the face of the inevitable heatwaves and droughts to come. We’re all living fear of the water to the troughs being turned off because we’re a third of the way through our stored water and most allotments have no stores at all. What’s clear is that the heat loving plants – cucumbers, aubergines, courgettes and squashes are loving it but the cool temperate plants are suffering.

There’s talk of forest fires joining up in France, but this is really about global warming and economic and societal breakdown and the last deadly throes of neoliberal greed as exemplified by the brutal and illegal wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. There is a very disturbed young man in our street who will lean out of his first floor window and scream at the top of his voice “the earth is burning” for hours . Sometimes the dog walkers and picnic loungers on the green will join with the sunbathers and shout abuse at him. But he isn’t wrong and taking an ostrich attitude isn’t going to turn away the wrath of the damaged ecosystem.

So, it being too hot to do anything much more than keep the plants alive I’ve been forced into a big think. My lifelong passion for plants was really rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of their lovely forms and colours. Later on I got interested in identifying them, photographing, painting and writing about them and of course growing and eating them. But I’ve always had a particular love for the urban rogues and weeds; the plants that love to send their roots into places other plants just couldn’t tolerate. I love the survivors who cling to life by modifying their life-cycles and surviving as seeds and underground rhizomes during the hot and the frozen seasons.

So I’ve paid particular attention to the plants that grow outside our flat in the most hostile positions on and below a tall south facing wall. They survive not only drought and frost but inundation with weedkiller, vinegar and salt not to mention the attentions of the local council workers who scrape them up with metal tools; but still they grow back with almost heroic stoicism. The kind of stress that would send tender F1 Hybrid into seizure and death seems to be an accelerant to these guerilla weeds.

Over the years I’ve been so focused on the identity, form and appearance of wildflowers that I’ve barely thought about how they do their thing. I was aware that the study of plant DNA has driven any number of family changes as we realize that relatedness isn’t all about appearances and so many different species might share the same evolutionary outcome without actually being related at all. So a couple of weeks ago, and totally fed-up at my ignorance of anything to do with DNA or the difference between chromosomes and genes I resolved to find out more.

There were two slightly different results of my binge reading. Firstly there were proper eureka moments as I began dimly to understand how plants reproduce, grow, deal with attacks, weather and soil differences with the truly breathtaking assistance of their DNA. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it became impossible to see the life of plants in the same way, once I understood that they possess amazing powers of sentience with which they are able to negotiate with their broader environment, I could almost feel the tiny electrical charges flowing through the plants and triggering the needed response through a series of chemical, biological interactions initiated by a jigsaw like connection between the smallest molecular components of cells. If you think plants are wonderful to look at, knowing something about their invisible inner lives will blow your mind.

I talk about this almost as a kind of conversion experience – hence the Damascus Road of the title. All my spreadsheets and careful labelling of thousands of photographs suddenly feel like butterflies pinned to a board. If plants can sense what’s going on around them, anticipate and initiate an appropriate response, then they’re doing the kind of thing that we do but using a very different set of “plantish” properties which are bafflingly and beautifully complex. The western world’s so-called “tree of life” with diatoms at the bottom and us (and some kind of god) at the top sets us into a colonial earth. But there are some first nation cultures which see the plant world as part of the community. Without plants at least a couple of the drugs that keep me going are plant based or synthesized and that alone seems to make thankfulness appropriate. It doesn’t seem entirely bizarre to say thank-you to the cabbage you’re cutting or the carrot you’re pulling. This afternoon I made fig compote and that (the flavour, not my cooking!) deserves a round of applause. Plants give us so much; nutritionally, aesthetically, and for healing us because many cancer treatments are synthesized from plants. They’re amazingly clever at making the kind of molecules that we can use to our own benefit. The kind of attitudinal change we desperately need if we’re going to avoid being caught up and killed in another extinction event would be to treat our plants – and not just the delicate hybrids that feed us but all our plants with the respect that they deserve. Maybe those roguish and indestructible weeds have the exact secret we need to ensure the survival of the earth.

Spadgerland

Forget the vanilla perfume of a madelaine for one moment and think of a single sound that takes you right back to your childhood home. Mine would be the sound of the House Sparrow, or rather sparrows, because they’re such convivial birds it’s hard to imagine just the one on its own.

I’ve renamed this campsite for entirely selfish reasons. If you recognise the tin roofed reception building, the cider press and the orchard then you won’t need me to tell you. If you haven’t a clue where it is then Eldorado is waiting for you – provided you can find it. There are enough clues scattered through the ten years of the Potwell Inn that you stand a real chance of getting here if you can be bothered to wade through a million plus words. Years ago I saw my first kingfisher nearby. Today I heard and then saw a red Kite circling overhead; I’ve never seen the Ospreys that hunt across the area but hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful. What makes this place so much greater than the ornithological creme de la creme is the abundance of the peasant birds, the fish and chip birds; the ordinary everyday types that are rapidly becoming extraordinary as we continue to poison and disturb the environment. This paragraph is illustrated by a tall and slightly unkempt looking hedge. The campsite has taken all the best ideas from the French sites and there is a small enclave in which every pitch is a self-contained enclosure surrounded on three sides by tall hedges. The hedge at the top of this paragraph is barely ten feet from the campervan door. There are no dogs allowed to disturb the wildlife, and the customers self select after their first visit. The quiet campsite policies make every day feel like the Sunday afternoons of my childhood. In fact the sound of children playing outside every evening is an equally chilling reminder that children once played outside and had never seen a Playstation on a smartphone. Happiness doesn’t always need to come commodified and packaged like a supermarket turkey.

Running a pub, even an imaginary one called the Potwell Inn with its name stolen from an HG Wells comic novel is extremely hard work and – dare I say – very poorly paid or rather not paid at all. And so these little campervan breaks are an essential escape. I often call them adventures because with a seventeen year old campervan almost anything could go wrong. Yesterday, having packed everything, I turned on the ignition and there was a profound silence. It was a glum start but I had a cunning plan. If I could just get the engine running, I could get to the campsite running everything off the alternator; as long as I didn’t stall the engine, which could leave us blocking a narrow road until I could get it going again -because I’d already used the emergency NOCO jump lead battery twice. It all went swimmingly until we arrived at reception and I turned off the engine without thinking. Oh gloom, oh silence. Mercifully the NOCO delivered for a third time and we managed to park up and call the AA who came this morning with a new battery and fitted it in ten minutes. He was a cheerful South Walian. Yesterday’s groceries were delivered in the evening by another cheerful delivery driver who shared my surname. There followed a long and serpentine conversation as we tried to establish some connection between us but I’m afraid we Somerset Poles cannot claim any legitimate Welsh blood although according to the driver the other kind of illegitimate bloodline was just as likely.

Anyway back to the birds. The sparrow is known in some places as the spadger, also spuggie, or (inexplicably phillip!). They were constant companions and the soundtrack to my childhood in suburban east Bristol. In fact they’re a bit complicated to identify because there are three species that are what sometimes get called little brown numbers. House Sparrows, Hedge Sparrows and even Dunnock rarely stand in an ID parade for our benefit – and so to my untrained eye they will have to look similar until they don’t any more. Last night just before sunset a flock of sparrows prepared to nest in the hedge on our pitch. My goodness they’re a chatty lot. Chickens roost in much the same way, each of them competing for the warmest spot in the middle. They’re much safer from predators in a thick hedge so I can see why they do it but they make quite a hullabaloo while they greet each other, quarrel a bit, shove each other off their respective branches and settle for the night. We became fascinated by the range of sounds that they can make without ever producing anything in the least tuneful. As the sun set they stopped their fidgeting and as twilight came they were silent. It was surprisingly moving to share that moment.

Today, using the Merlin app, apart from the sparrows I recorded Woodpigeons, Swifts, the Red Kite, barn Swallows, Blackbirds, Robins and Collared Doves; bread and butter birds in terms of rarity but many of them declining in numbers. Coming here always reminds me of the sheer joy that the natural world brings to us if we just stand, watch and listen. There is an ancient bond between us and the wildlife that surrounds us and it’s not sentimental or gushing leftie nonsense to hold that thought close in a destructive culture fed by greed and division.

There isn’t a division between so-called forward looking and backward looking politics, or if there is it’s characterised by backwardness in the industrial and financial wilderness and forward looking amongst those of us who actually understand what’s worth saving when the earth is burning. I write the Potwell Inn, even on the rare sunny and dry Welsh days, not because I’m a politician with an A4 list of policies to mend the world, but because human flourishing depends on the much broader and complicated set of behaviours that we call a culture. I’m naming this campsite Spadgerland in honour of the rogues; vagabonds; weeds; fish and chip birds and vermin which collectively give our lives depth and meaning.

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Foodie business

There’s a mirror in the lift and today I caught sight of myself as we came back from getting a few last bits of shopping before we revisit God’s Own Country (Wales of course) yet again; I just can’t keep away. I’m ashamed to say I looked completely raddled – red eyed, my hair which has turned curly makes me look like Medusa in the dim light, and a million miles from the picture of me that I keep safe in my head – like Dorian Gray without the excesses.

The red eyes are partly down to hay fever which has been shocking this year; but three heatwaves in quick succession have taken their toll on my body clock and I’m irrevocably awake every morning at around 5.00am – the same time as I can hear the allotment screaming for water in my fertile imagination. So today we were on the allotment soon after six – to give it a thorough soaking – and then we picked anything that looked edible to take with us to Wales; dug some early potatoes for lunch and came home by 7.30am. Then we cooked the aubergines we harvested a couple of days ago by roasting them and stuffing them with richly spiced lamb mince giving them a distinctly North African flavour. I cooked some stewed apple, made up two jars of fridge pickled cucumbers with our own cucumbers and dill; some fig compote and then finally sat down at 11.00 for a cup of tea. So perhaps the red-eye was also to do with being knackered.

Going away, for me at least, is extremely stressful because I’m terrified of leaving something behind. I’ve left our beds behind, even the complete set of tent poles on one occasion – so remembering to pack all our plentiful meds, every computer and charger lead we could conceivably use, not to mention two portable routers (you can’t be too careful) various laptops, phones and Madame’s tablet; books, cameras, maps, GPS unit and so on. One of our neighbours asked if we were moving out last time we took the campervan to Cornwall.

But tomorrow we’ll set out on the busiest day of the year on the M4 and M5 to travel by our much practiced secret route, on which – unless we meet a tractor, a school bus or a herd of cows gets us there in rather less time than queuing outside Newport for several hours in the blistering heat. We’ll be tired I’m sure, but nothing is better guaranteed to give me a long night’s sleep than the sound of sheep on the hill. I have a rather higher clock speed than most people which has impacted my life quite a bit. I piss people off – mostly managers and jobsworths – because I can’t keep my mouth shut when one of them says, or does something really stupid. Our sons have inherited this tendency from me and we all need these regular breaks to let ourselves slow down and cool the brains a bit. Naturally this won’t stop me from a bit of plant hunting when I think Madame isn’t looking.

This is an inherently busy time of the year because harvesting and cooking are joined at the hip, and since the harvesting always produces a surplus of something or other (courgettes?) the cooking extends into preserving, freezing and storing so yes, the days can be very long, but home grown and home prepared food is in a league of its own when it comes to nutrition and flavour. It’ll be another early start tomorrow but the other reason we need to go away is because the builders are coming back to repair and re-lay the bathroom floor after its flooding last year, and they’ll be taking out the seat of mercy for two days. Neither of us fancy trudging around Bath looking for a friendly shop or cafe several times a day. The campervan has a very serviceable loo and it’s only eight feet away! Meanwhile some photos taken on the allotment in the early morning coolness today. The sweet corn has thrown out its first silks – it’s self pollinating and the upper male flowers shower the lower female silks with pollen which is in itself a bit of a challenge for me in the confined space of the polytunnel. However it keeps the cobs out of the reach of the badgers which otherwise would eat the lot every year. It’s our own version of that old government slogan – Protect and Survive. Thank goodness ours works very well and theirs is best left untested.

Meanwhile – back on the farm again

Well we arrived back in Bath on the Sunday before the heatwave struck, and after 2 weeks of rain in Cornwall we were just as trapped by the searing temperatures and – (ask any gardener) – under the cosh of constant watering. The only time to water in a heatwave is as early as you can bear to get up – in our case it was five am, because sleeping at all at 20C is a bit of a struggle. An early start gives you the very best of a fiercely hot summer’s day; much better than the evening when the earth is scorching. But nature doesn’t stand still just because you want a break. We left the allotment in good order but two weeks later the weeds were roaring and we had a battle on our hands.

There’s only one way to do this, and it’s to blitz the plot systematically from one bed to the next until it’s all as clear of weeds as it ever can be. If you’ve been watching Springwatch on the BBC and looking at the weary parents of fledgling birds endlessly feeding their ever more demanding family, you’ll have some idea what it feels like to clear an allotment that’s got above itself. The grass path that you should have strimmed before you went away is now three feet high in Cocksfoot, False Oat-grass, Couch and rough Meadow grass. I’m showing off a bit with the names there because Cornwall gave me a great deal of time to “do the grasses”

But doing the grasses involved a lot of work with the Olympus TG-7 camera because so much grass identification demands high quality macro photos which is far from simple in a windy situation when your subject is waving around. It’s a difficult skill to learn and demands that you step away from that comforting auto setting and get down and dirty with shutter speeds, flash values and f-numbers. Oh and I was also trying to develop a new step by step recording procedure – which I’ve bored you enough with already. Progress was slow. And that’s all I’m going to say. So with photographic experiments, learning new plants and weeding, the Potwell Inn has had to go on the back burner for a few days.

I said several weeks (weeds?) ago that the allotment had suddenly matured, and the top left photograph took me by surprise with an unexpectedly emotional reaction. I think I’d been strimming a weedy and grassy path, and it reminded me of my grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns where the garden paths always gave me a sense of delight; always verdant and closely mown. And then the photo looking along the plot and beyond the polytunnel seemed as if it expressed something of that childhood wonder – the chairs, the little pond and the sheer energy of the plants and running down the path to the greenhouse with my sister to see Charlie the toad. The trees we planted in Covid year are all in fruit now, and with the hungry gap over we’re eating our own produce. I think you have to treat allotmenteering as work -but not the grinding boredom of routine, but the utterly rewarding work of knowing what needs to be done and just getting on with it. It teaches you patience and resilience – we left the broad bean crop for a couple of weeks and when we got back the whole crop had been eaten and the plants were suffering from some kind of rust. Tomorrow we’ll pull them up. Cool weather plants don’t enjoy heatwaves any more than we do.

And in what counts as a pretty low-level flash of inspiration, I discovered (on my hands and knees but not praying) how important edges are to the appearance of an allotment. Add that to another feature that only comes with time – I mean scale here – the allotment looks grown up because it’s literally grown upwards and whichever way you turn and move, new vistas open up. Neither of us wants regimented rows in the way that some of our old 1940’s allotment books showed – all rows perfectly straight – and few of us can afford to imitate Gertrude Jekyll in her archly curated informality; but just a few delineating lines and paths along with a scattering of sheds, trees, texture and colour but never forgetting an offering of plants for the pollinators – that’s a living, breathing, tactile work of art. It’s a conversation with nature.

Speaking of which, the photo below shows the tough side of nature. I’m no entomologist but my ever available phone app thinks it’s a very deceased Southern Hawker dragonfly nymph which has been killed (and this is a guess) by a zombie fungus, (probably Cordyceps) which you can see growing out of its scales. With a twist worthy of Edgar Allan Poe the fungus takes over and consumes the living creature, leaving the brain until last, when the dying Dragonfly is induced to climb to a point high on a poolside plant and grip the leaf in its jaws in order better to spread its spores. Oh glory! That’s going to keep me awake!

The thing about Cornwall is it rains every day.

Greater Bird’s-foot trefoil

Rather like Wales but further south and therefore a bit warmer, Cornwall has its very own special kind of rain – like a tiny hole in a leaky hose it can soak you through in minutes and you never know where it’s coming from. When we woke up yesterday morning rain was beading up and running down the campervan windows, and just beyond was an impenetrable sea-mist. We turned as always to the Met Office to lift our mood but drew a blank. They referred to a “wobbly front” which is seemingly weaving a narrow band of misery across Roseland and northeast passing anywhere else we might think of escaping to. We made a cup of tea and sat in bed looking at the window. Driving home seemed, and remained a good option throughout the morning so we dried out the groundsheet, emptied the cludger, topped up the drinking water, blew up the tyres and packed away the table. Then we changed our minds (it was still drizzling) and I went down the field to take some macro photos of a plant that needed a closer look (see above) and suddenly for no reason at all we felt cheerful.

There’s an upside to rainy days in the campervan and that’s because it gives us an excuse to read books and do whatever we want without getting wet. So Madame read and I finally transformed my eccentric records into compliant form using AI and a staggering amount of memory and data. Then we ate pasta for the 73rd time this week and lived like students for a few hours. I absolutely love getting into a topic and hammering it. I can feel my brain straining and the synapses making novel networks until it feels like new life spreading through me; and no – apart from a syrupy and fiercely bitter espresso coffee first thing – (a holiday treat) – no recreational chemicals were involved.

Heath Bedsraw

Anyway I’m sharing this next photo because it’s a lot more representative of the tiny details that I spend most of my campervan time looking for. It’s just a bit of a leaf, but if you look very closely (the leaf is barely 5 mm long), you’ll see a line of tiny spike-like hairs and whether they point forwards or backwards is a determining feature between two species. The thing is that close-up examination with a hand lens reveals a truly exciting new perspective. Things that once looked identical look a bit different under 10x magnification; even more different under 20x and under a microscope oh wow! When I enlarge a macro photograph on a big screen when I get home I can see details that until the invention of the lens in the thirteenth century had probably never been seen by a human being. Many people tend to assume that science is driven by numbers and rooted in solid facts. In fact it’s driven by wonder and curiosity. It’s people with neither of those faculties who give science a bad name. We’re bedevilled by binaries and especially the ones that divide science from art. Mathematicians will willingly admit that theorems and solutions to old conundrums tend to come in inspirational flashes leaving all of the work to be done in proving the insight. They talk about “knowing” that a theorem is true because it’s beautiful or elegant. Philosophers agonise about mind/brain binaries when that may be an artificial division. Maybe they’re one and the same thing; mind, body, spirit, brain, even – dare I say – male, female, human and non human, native and foreigner. Fragments of a whole waiting to be reunited in a kinder vision – the kind of vision that a child is gifted with and is taught to forget.

When we were at Falmouth Art School the Head of Sculpture was something of a reclusive genius. Without ever exchanging more than a nod with him – (Ray Exworth was pretty terrifying) – he taught me one of my most important life lessons. He worked every day except (it was rumoured) Christmas day. Even as fashions were changing and it was taken as read that creativity was like a special gland that only some people had – so whatever they did would be art on account of the secret gland – Ray Exworth just worked. I fell upon Samuel Beckett’s words when I first read them ;

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Sitting here in the campervan lost in a sea mist, the ghostly voices whisper words of discouragement and I tell them to piss off and go bother someone else. There’s a blackbird singing outside and soon the voluble family of crows will start their day-long group chat. The last few remaining campers are all lingering in bed like us, waiting for the sun to appear. It may take a couple of days yet, after all this is Cornwall where it rains every day. Hotter fiercer weather is on the way and this holiday will soon fade as the solstice takes us towards autumn. We’ll revert to our late summer heatwave timetable on the allotment and rise early to weed and water.

Life really is very simple if we allow it. Take out greed, petty disputes, ambition, pride and fearfulness and that leaves space for pondering, for growing, harvesting, cooking and eating, loving and allowing ourselves to be loved, and following our curiosity and wonder wherever it might take us and inviting those discoveries to share our lives and help us to fail better.

A rainy day in St Davids

Where’s Wally?

A vibrant patch of wildflowers and greenery by the seaside, featuring pink and white blossoms among lush foliage, with a calm sea in the background.
Coastal undergrowth on Roseland

We were sitting on a bench, resting after a bit of a hilly stretch on the coast path and I was squinting closely at a tiny fragment of leaf when a small group of walkers passed us. “What have you found?” one of them asked. “I’m just checking out this plant that I may have misidentified” “It’s Hedge Bedstraw”, one of them said. It was a friendly – we’re all in this together – kind of remark that instantly established a common bond. “I don’t think it is”- I replied – “I think it may be Heath Bedstraw because there are tiny forward-pointing prickles on the leaf. This is the kind of thin, acidic soil they grow on”. We were all set, then, for a long (and for Madame and the rest of the group) tedious hyper focused discussion when another walker standing at the back of the group said. “There’s a Hummingbird Hawkmoth!” – pointing behind us. We all stopped whatever we were thinking about and turned to where the the speaker was pointing. And there it was; I’ve never seen one before so it was a bit of a moment to see this oddly beautiful creature whose wings moved so fast they were not much more than a blur. Then there were five of us eagerly following the path of the moth as it foraged among the coastal plants, oblivious to us it seemed. Moths have had this capacity to evolve towards seemingly endless recklessly stunning forms and patterns. It’s hard not to think of some kind of artist lovingly creating them. Madame grabbed my phone from me and attempted to take some photographs but couldn’t get close; held back by thick brambles.

Our cheerful conversation continued and then we went our separate ways having – all of us – learned something new. Back at the campervan I just had to double check my already double checked identification and keyed out the piece of Bedstraw in my pocket (it’s a way of naming a plant by answering a series of either/or questions until the name pops out at the end). Yes it was Heath Bedstraw. Then I googled Hummingbird Hawkmoth and discovered that Hedge Bedstraw is one of its food plants; that’s to say it will lay its eggs on them for the hatching caterpillars to feed on. Interestingly it was hovering around clumps of the related Heath Bedstraw so maybe it’s not that fussy. One of the things I find most difficult to live with is the sheer provisionality of all wildlife records. It’s true until someone discovers that it’s not.

And that’s the trouble with this natural history malarky – it can get wildly out of control with those of us disposed towards intense attachments – let’s call them obsessions or addictions. Later, and wakeful in bed, I mentally rehearsed the various species of Bedstraw I’d seen, and where I saw them. That was fun, and there were five species spread across North Wales, Mid Wales, Pembrokeshire, Bath and Cornwall. Madame woke up and asked if I was OK? 3.00am is a bad time for those kinds of discussion – at least it wasn’t a nightmare, and we’d had a good day’s wandering about; pub lunch; a couple of excellent finds and a major step forward with the breakthrough discovery that I could load WAV audio recordings files of plant findings straight into Notebook LM which positively relishes English plant names and Latin binomials issuing gentle corrections and straightening out misunderstandings. All my previous doubts have been resolved, and I’ve got a functioning workflow at last.

I know this is problematic for some, but Notebook LM is rapidly becoming my pocket tutor and data organiser. Oh, and I also made progress with identifying some new grasses and that meant getting to grips with identification keys – PLUS our youngest moved into his new flat after being evicted by a (barely Christian) charity under one of those noxious Section 21 orders, now abolished due to abuse. We also met some heartwarmingly nice people with whom we shared many interests and the Potwell Inn human kindness index leapt up three points, something of a record. We rarely listen to the news when we’re away.

What’s happening on the allotment while we’re here? Well we gave it a deep watering, especially in the polytunnel, before we left and there are a couple of allotment neighbours who have promised to keep an eye on things. Every day we scan the weather forecast and wonder what will be happening on our patch of earth. Bath is situated in the steep sided valley of the River Avon and surrounded by the outliers of the Cotswolds, which means that rain tends to fall on the hills rather than in the valley. But then, we’ve also often had heavy showers at home and discovered that the allotment – only 800 yards away – is still dry. The most accurate forecast amounts to looking through the window. Madame retains a passion for isobars, warm and cold fronts and all the rest which she gained at the research station where it really mattered, and thousands of trees could lose their blossoms to a sudden frost.

We even have some allotment planning software on my laptop and we’ve spent one rainy morning here bringing it up to date. Does that make us into a couple of old saddo’s ? Ask us that when we’re eating just-picked peas that make the frozen ones taste like bin waste; and ask us again when you taste one of our tomatoes just harvested and hot from the sun, or sweetcorn from the polytunnel that would make a badger faint with pleasure. As with every other human pursuit, the more we practice, the harder we work, the happier we get; so thanks for asking ….. we’re not saddo’s!

It rains every day in Cornwall and today is no exception and so I’m writing and Madame is reading a biography of the artist Gustav Klimt and reading aloud to me the bits she finds most interesting. I’m a man, so that’s the closest I can get to multi-tasking.

Bird’s foot truffle oil and other disasters

Close-up of a small flower with orange and yellow petals surrounded by green grass.
Lotus corniculatus

These past two days have been a revelation – although not a good one. and I’ve been left with just the embers of my project and on my knees, eyes streaming, trying to blow some life into them. The bright new day is yet to dawn.

Just to recap, I’ve been designing and now testing a new workflow for my botanical recording – attempting to make it faster, more accurate and less of a square peg when it comes to uploading into the round holed national databases; but rather like the time I rebuilt the engine of our Morris 1000 and left out the rotor in the oil pump, the flaws soon made themselves apparent when I road tested my bright new idea down here in Cornwall.

There’s a lane outside the campsite which begins as the metalled road down to a large house, presumably once part of a home farm at the centre of the big estate. It then continues as a footpath above what’s now a hay meadow for a couple of hundred yards, across a stile into a patch of scrubby woodland for a little way until it joins a very pretty deep sided sunken track which leads to the beach via another track heavily decorated with dog poo bags making the exploration of its botanical residents a bit hazardous. The fact that it’s Madame’s favourite walk makes it easier to smuggle in a bit of road resting. Sometimes. Although I’ve never formally surveyed the plants along with its several micro-environments, it’s the perfect place to learn. So here it is; the method …..

Step one attach the microphone and receiver ready to record all the details for later, and when the plant is spotted, record them in one continuous packet of data – Problem – I talk too much and instead of recording just the details, the recording features too many oohs aahs and miscellaneous grunts and strange noises. Worse still comes later when I load the recording into the transcription software.

Step two – take a quick photo on Flora Incognita to get a reference picture with a provisional name. Problem – no internet signal. But I do get a time and unreliable location so as to link the data together later

Step three – take any measurements that I might need later and note them for the audio

Step four – take more reference photos on the Olympus camera which can do macro and has better resolution. Problem – stiff winds make focusing on grasses a complete nightmare. I either need to take a small piece of board as a background or uproot specimens to photograph later – not ideal and sometimes illegal.

Step five– take GPS reading and photograph it on the phone or note it. This ties it all together. Problem – remember to figure out how to reset the GPS to gather the current location and write it down (data separation hazard) or record it. Need to write a short script and stick to it.

Step six – record all the data; names, grid reference and measurements etc in a standardised form that AI can understand.

Step seven– back at the ranch, run the audio through the transcription software and edit if necessary. This is where the system totally collapsed because I was using the free Google Record app which handles ordinary conversation pretty well, but went to bed with a headache at the sound of plant names and just fainted at Latin binomials. I tried to edit the result but it was terribly time consuming so I recorded a page from John Wright’s “Grasslands” to give it another chance. This was a great laugh, with Bird’s foot Trefoil being rendered as Bird’s foot truffle oil, and the blameless little Eyebright – “Euphrasia nemorosa, the commonest form” unaccountably branded as the communist form. Obviously this level of inaccuracy is beyond the editing powers of any AI programme. The plan was to feed these pre-digested dollops of data into Notebook LM and ask it to sort them into a spreadsheet in correct order to pass through the pearly gates of head office; every single entry checked against the great canonical parchments.

Step eight – this was meant to be the bit where I closed the reference books and where I modestly admitted that the new workflow was a triumph, instead of which there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. When I remonstrated with Google Gemini it almost cracked a robotic joke and said the bird’s foot truffle oil sounded like the salad dressing from hell! (now that is scary – it’s cracking jokes already).

However – I’m an eternal optimist – there are some tweaks I can see which fall short of carrying a mobile router around with an aerial tied to my bandana. It’s helped me see how to improve my photographs to get better results – especially with grasses and I’ve learned a lot about identifying grasses – which was one of my targets. I’m pleased to say that I’ve added five more grass species to my total. We also met a Swedish woman and talked about the yellow flowered strawberries that grow down the lane. We thought they were probably poisonous but she said they used to eat them in Sweden but they were insipid and not that sweet. She doesn’t eat them here because of the dog poo that gets everywhere. After a few days of wind and rain the sun has now come out and Madame is cooking a dish of ratatouille as a punishment for my distraction. Over the twenty years we’ve been coming here the village has become more and more gentrified. The local spar shop now sells curated wines, amalfi lemons and “pain de campagne” and an ice cream next door sells for £4.50 a scoop. Here are a few pictures from the entirely un-gentrified lane. They’re all weeds, but nonetheless rather charming in their blunt honesty. It’s a very under-recorded little paradise and one day I’ll bite the bullet and do a proper survey.

A short message from paradise

Close-up of a cluster of flowering plants with pinkish buds and delicate green leaves in a natural setting.
Wild Carrot, Daucus carota ssp carota

I could as easily have subtitled this post “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” so as to join together our being in one of our favourite places in the country – the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall – and linking it with AI. One half of the couplet represents all that’s good and the other the spawn of satan.

We arrived here completely knackered after days of work on the allotment getting it ready for our temporary absence and a couple more days of readying the campervan for its inaugural long drive after the troubles (new engine, clutch, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Up at five am only to discover that the roof had leaked in a place it had never leaked before – we quickly sorted it and set off in gathering sunshine for a long drive at a stately sixty in honour of the engine; “she being brand new and consequently a little stiff “. That last bit was a quote from a poem by ee cummings which a musty old critic once described as only fit for adolescents. I haven’t aged a day!

Musty old critics have had their field day over AI as well – marching en mass under the banner of the goose quill pen and denouncing AI vehemently, claiming to protect the masses from evolving technology. Good luck with that then, although Google seems to have messed up their latest software update on my watch which insists that I only slept for three hours last night. It was ten hours and I felt all the better for it.

So part of the purpose of this trip is to field test a new plant recording system and that’s where the AI comes in. Knowing a place like this really well has its advantages for rehearsing a new way of plant recording; not least that I’ve already put in the hard miles for most of the species. But anyone who gets interested in plants and wildflowers will know that there are some very common species that are extremely hard to tell apart. So part of the aim is to revisit the difficult ones and see whether I can distinguish the trees from the wood. In preparation I picked three brain teasers and posed a question on Google Gemini. “How do I distinguish A from B” . The first one sounds easier than it is in practice. How do I distinguish between a wild Carrot and a sea carrot? In a few seconds the AI answer dealt with two things – the hows and the whys of wild carrots v sea carrots. The how is demonstrated in the photo at the top. It’s a wild carrot growing on a clifftop near here and that’s because the flower head is in the process of forming a basket/ lobster pot shape. But then you might well ask – what’s an ordinary wild carrot doing on a sea cliff? and the answer is that wild carrots normally grow in and around arable fields and sea carrots grow near the sea. BUT, growing close together, they readily hybridize and so in Cornwall where the arable fields often come to the clifftop with only a footpath between and so there are a lot of what we might call cousins that look somewhere between the two. My mind is at ease because the hybrid plants can be assigned to the (very large) category of WOB’s the walk on by’s.

The other two questions were necessarily more general – what specific details should I record with photographs and all the other tools – hand lens, ruler etc in order to distinguish and identify the other big families grasses (Poaceae) and the huge family of Dandelion/ daisy lookalikes. In a few moments Gemini gave me a brilliant crib sheet to take out on my adventures. Traditionalists may take a couple of minutes here to rearrange their scowls in case the wind changes and they get stuck with lemon faces. Each and every record will be taken home to my study and interrogated with the books.

Until the plant apps bed in – which they soon certainly will, the old way is still the final arbiter; but I can foresee a day when taxonomy will be a matter of taking a clipping from a specimen with a hand-held DNA analyser. How you might challenge an identification after it’s been deified by its genes by a person in a white coat who’s never as much as sniffed a rose is not one I’ll live long enough to worry about.

The thing about AI is that we have to make the cultural move from knowing everything by rote towards asking better and better questions. The skills of the future will lie in knowing how to extract the maximum good science through a question that’s as sharp as a samurai sword.

We’re having a recovery day first and apart from lazing around and snoozing I’ve been looking at photos of the allotment plants as if they were our children, and reading John Wright’s excellent new book Grasslands. A further search with AI revealed that grasses are by far the most numerous species if you exclude the 57 varieties (OK thousands, then) of the apomicts which have dispensed with messy sex and just clone themselves; Dandelions and Blackberries are two of the other culprits here in the UK. The following two species in numerical order are the daisy (dandelion) family, then the Sedges and the roses. I can’t see myself getting bored anytime soon.

There’s not a great difference between learning to live a virtuous life, reaping the benefits of eudaimonia (flourishing) and learning to make better plant records. They both require constant practice – which is one of two reasons that we’re here. The other reason is the joy of walks near the sea. There is – I suppose – a third reason which is far less virtuous. The botanical societies tend to cling to traditional ways, and getting records through the minefields and the heavily guarded portals into the universe of scientific data can be a tortuous and Kafkaesque experience. I should know. I worked inside a conservative organisation (the C of E) for 30 years and I learned that these organizations will never abandon a regulation without a decade of bloodshed. I’m trying to develop a personal recording method that will shortcut the traffic jams by providing exactly what the gatekeepers are asking for. I’m not trying to change anything, I’m plotting a path through the maze.