Tag: field guides

The three graces – a rainy day job

Left to right –

  • Devil’s-bit Scabious, Succisa pratensis, Porthor beach, Lleyn.
  • Sheep’s-bit, Jasione montana, Martin’s Haven, Pembrokeshire.
  • Small Scabious, Scabiosa columbaria, Bannerdown Common. Bath.
  • At least I think so!

This little botanical odyssey began for me in July 2017, approaching seven years ago. I suppose a flora written by an extremely inexperienced botanist would find very few buyers, and sorting this group out has been a long job for me, foxed -as I’ve always been – by the similarity in colour. They all look a bit like the Scabious my mother loved and grew in the garden. Now; looking at them side by side on the page it’s obvious that they’re different but I’ve never seen even two, let alone three of them side by side in the same place. They were all separated by years and distance across a line between Bath and Snowdonia; each to its own preferred habitat.

Anyway it’s been raining for two days, limiting any outdoor attractions, and three big ideas came along like buses. The first idea was that I’m probably not going to die – at least not yet. This idea – call it the Black Dog if you like – has been haunting me for more than fifty years. The first and worst occasion nearly got me thrown out of art school for not showing up. We were living in an idyllic cottage above Bybrook and doing the things we were most passionate about, and yet I was tormented by the spectre of death – winter trees became veins and lungs, I felt permanently exhausted and without any hold on the future, no vision; no comfort at all in nature. In the end, and under threat of being expelled, I went to the doctor and, refusing to give me antidepressants, he prescribed regular trips to the pub.”You need people, not pills” he said. He was right, and soon afterwards a wonderful revelation was given to me. “Yes you are going to die, but not yet!” So bus number one came back this week and I realised that the phobic anxiety I was diagnosed with all those years ago had returned and then gone away again.

Bus number two was the annual discussion with Madame about whether we should sell the campervan. When she suggested it would be better to get it repaired and perhaps even take ourselves away for a whole month of walking, drawing, writing and botanising I felt my heart leap – for once in a good way.

Bus number three was the impulse buy I mentioned in my last post – “Frustrating Flowers and Puzzling Plants” by John M Warren and published by Pelagic Press. After a couple of months of being unable to do any serious botanical study, the book lit me up and I suddenly felt that spring and summer were truly on the way and calling me outside to meet all those precious plants again. Even better was the fact that the illustrations in the book were not only excellent but also looked very like a series of studies I once did of Hyacinth flowers. It suddenly occurred to me that what this little group of three – but could be half a dozen pale blue Scabious like flowers - needed, was a highly detailed set of drawings of their heads, including blowups of their reproductive bits, to help me – and perhaps others as well – get our heads around identifying them apart. I knew I could do it. A hand-holding guide to avoid being made to feel small by an expert. I once said to a very experienced botanist that I found grasses difficult. They simply said “Oh grasses are easy!” I was so incensed I spent months crawling around in fields trying to sort them out and three years later I’m nowhere near good, but improving.

So the oppressive cloud suddenly lifted and I felt a happy place opening up between now and the unavoidable fact that one day the wheels will fall off – but not yet! Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

All this led to a deep dive into my photos. My usual practice is to photograph plants – which is a skill in itself; knowing what you’ll most wish you’d noted when you’re back home with the books. However my enthusiasm for pressing the shutter – which takes moments – is countered by the time it takes to put names to the plants. It can take hours, days or even years to make a secure identification, and the more you practice the harder it seems to get. The photos are just the beginning of the process. The three graces at the top of the post involved a fascinating excursus around the sex life of the Devil’s-bit scabious when I realized that my photos were nowhere near good enough to make any visual sense of the meaning of gynodioecious, thrown at me by the Book of Stace (IV). That knowledge will go forward with me because I now have a plan to revisit all three plants, and any more cousins I can find – in order to become a bit of an expert at some perfectly ordinary and common plants. Naming things is the most tremendous fun. It turns nature into an old friend and makes every walk and adventure; and if I make a mistake – well, nobody dies and the worst that can happen is that I feel a bit silly for a moment: but then field botanists are some of the kindest and most helpful people you could hope to meet. Mostly.

I don’t joke about my old enemy the black dog. It can really mess you up, but if that’s you too, take heart in the truth of the moment. The beauty at hand will always drive out the dog on the horizon.

The Three Musketeers mount a reconnaissance

Clockwise – Peltigera, Dog Lichen; Scarlet Elf Cap, 2 views of Woodchester Lake at the bottom of a steep valley; a spring at Tinkley Gate about 500 feet above it, and a Musketeer at his lunch; plus a rear view of a fabulous borrowed Swarovski birding scope which another of us carried all day without complaining (or seeing anything except wood pigeons through it!)

Life is not always a primrose path, and these past weeks have not disappointed. We’ve (and I mean all of us, not just me), been suffocated by the evil miasma arising from truly shocking events. The continuing genocide in Gaza, the insanity of the forthcoming American elections, not to mention those here in the UK; the managerialist cruelty of the Post Office scandal and too many random instances of egregious evil, lying, fraud and misrepresentation in the government; not to mention breaking through the 1.5C barrier, licencing new oil wells and allowing millions of children to languish in poverty. It sucks all the air out of the room and makes me feel like a gaffed fish dumped on the deck of a boat steering into a maelstrom. To go out looking for plants or growing them on the allotment feels like a wilful betrayal. Like a grieving parent I feel guilty when a brief moment of sunshine brings a flash of pleasure. I shouldn’t be feeling this – I think – as I grimly return to the nightmare.

But needs must, and the past weeks have been filled with our annual debate about whether to sell or keep the campervan; and also prepare for a field trip which I’m co-leading. As for the campervan, it’s getting old now and so every year it needs some expensive TLC. This year it’s a new sink – the old one cracked and disintegrated; we’ve also decided to get the 3 way fridge repaired so the gas works again, and investigate the slow charge rate going to the batteries and then to remove the old satellite dish which had made a valiant attempt to tear itself off the roof coming back from Brecon one day. When I asked about replacing it I was told that they haven’t fitted a satellite dish for years, so now we’re having a new miFi which necessitates a new TV and a substantial chunk of our savings. That’s the downside. The upside is that the campervan is still a lot cheaper to run than renting cottages and in any case we love it, love the opportunities it brings to go botanizing and walking where we please.

As for the field trip in these days of elf and safety, there must be planning and risk assessment which needs to go further than a quick look at the OS Map. Just the kind of mission that the Musketeers love to undertake – even on a bitterly cold and windy day with intermittent rain. So to Woodchester, or rather to Tinkley Gate (Tickly Bottom as we decided to call it), and which is at the top of the steep sided valley. We three, being of mature years, decided to take the blue route which the notice board specifically admonished us not to take. It was, as advertised, wet and muddy, steep and slippery and also closed in part; denying us any possibility of an easier return to the car park. Of course it’s the wrong time of the year for bosky dells and wildflowers although we saw several seasonal fungi; and of birds there were almost none. A Mallard with two mates, Robins and Coal tits heard but not seen, a gang of depressed wood pigeons, a Raven, a pair of Cormorants – in fact a dark hue all round apart from a brief glimpse of what – by its chestnut wings and purposeful flight – could have been a Kestrel; but which appeared and disappeared in less than a second below us in the woods. Our trek back up the muddy path to the car park was a triumph of concealed athleticism – each stopping breathlessly every few yards to let the others catch up.

So this week’s task is to tabulate the risks and to access a few databases to see what could be there in late April. Funnily enough I was supposed to be doing a solo lecture on AI and the slew of phone apps and public databases that have taken out some of the sting of identifying wildlife. Unfortunately Cardinal Richelieu has decided that he needs to be on hand to correct every other sentence and spearhead a swift return to WADITW which is the guiding principle of all failing voluntary institutions. The acronym stands for we always do it this way, so I may withdraw and produce a version of the same talk on The Potwell Inn.

Coincidentally, a wonderful new book was published this month by Pelagic Press (I paid good cash for my copy, there are no sponsored pages on this blog!). The book is entitled “Frustrating Flowers & Puzzling Plants” by John M Warren, and it will be of most interest to UK and Irish readers. It’s not a flora as much as a compendium of ID tips for some of the most difficult plant families like Speedwells, or Dead Nettles, Mints and Woundworts for instance, which have baffled me for years with only transitory moments of illumination. It features some really excellent illustrations, and a new kind of tabular key that can take us from genus to species in some of the most complex families. All of this accompanied by a very dry sense of humour. Each section ends with a paragraph on how far should I go where he takes aim at some of the more obsessive corners of field botany and made me laugh out loud – occasionally at myself! There’s a whole chapter on one of the turning points in my botanical journey when I finally realized that not all Dandelions are, in fact, Dandelions at all. It’s called Yellow composites – things that look a bit like a dandelion. As I read it I realized, joyfully, how far I’ve come since that day sixty years ago, and yet how far there is still to go. I love this book. It’s going into my bag for a bit of a laser focused plant naming binge this summer along with Baby Stace (sorry, Concise Flora).

If anything can lift my mood at the moment it’s the prospect of a trip in the campervan, laden with books, smartphone and laptop. Madame even suggested the other day that we could go for a whole month. I felt the sun rise inside me.

A little outdoor therapy goes a long way.

Regulars won’t need reminding that I find autumn difficult. Melancholia would be easy to dismiss as a middle class hybrid of self-pity and dark nights; feedstock for bad poems and self-help Guardian articles. It isn’t the same thing as depression – which is an illness you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. I suggest that melancholia is an attempt at a constructive relationship with the sadness that goes with shrinking days, cold, rain and the senescence of nature. In October and November I often feel that the allotment, instead of being a rewarding and inspiring place is a place where mockery reigns. Where overwintering thugweeds overwhelm the earth in order to gain a destructive head start in spring. The place of serenity, beauty and hope in Spring and early summer, grows old and dies back. Then a pause – the gap between the outbreathing of autumn and the inbreathing that powers early spring; the pause where we stand beside the beds and wonder – is that it? – will the sun ever return?

The green bag contains two fleeces for lining the hanging strawberry baskets.

Late autumn and early winter are the times when gardening becomes a test of will – for me at least. Madame is unaffected by all this; she just gets on with it and enjoys every moment and simply doesn’t understand what’s going on with me. So we haggle and negotiate an hour or two here and there and I clear one bed at a time and focus entirely on each limited job – excluding any thoughts of the mountain of other things that need to be done. And amazingly, I always feel better. Close up, I see the spring buds already there on the fruit trees. Each bucket full of the gut-like roots of bindweed removed from a patch of ground represents a tiny victory against the promiscuity of nature. I’ve now almost finished digging over the beds in the polytunnel ready to plant out and sow for the winter. The mood of the month is stolid resistance; spring song will follow.

Even more amazingly, my arthritic joints begin to unlock with the exercise – the bending and stretching and reaching across, the 50 yard and very uneven path to the top of the site feels less steep after a week or two of stopping to catch my breath. I can lift heavy bags of compost and enjoy the complex geometry of muscles and bone. My mood lifts and I catch myself gazing at the drifts of leaves scuttering down in a wind that even drowns out the traffic: gold and yellow and scarlet and brown. Who knows how this change happens? I think of the trees in their complex relationships with the soil and the fungi which we barely suspected thirty years ago and wonder what unsuspected relationships exist between the natural world and our own health. The arrogance of our modern materialistic worldview overlays millions of years of evolutionary history which our whole being expresses in the miraculous workings of our minds and bodies. Sourdough bread and live yoghurt don’t even begin to explain human flourishing.

So here’s the deal. I can’t thrive on a monoculture of allotmenteering; I also need texture in my life – time to think, time to walk, time to read and time to relax and do nothing. I need other subjects to focus my interests – field botany and fungus hunting for instance – both of them offer formidable intellectual challenges. This afternoon, for instance, Madame asked if I could identify a bag of seeds saved off the allotment. At first glance this is an insoluble problem, but knowing where to look made it absurdly simple. I didn’t know the answer but I knew where I could find it and bingo! it was Angelica – easily identified from the firework burst of its dead seed head and a quick look at the seeds. The Carrot family may all look the same in a field, but you don’t have to be particularly brilliant to tell them apart – just organised and systematic.

Speaking of which, I’ve just bought the first volume of Geoffrey Kibby’s marvellous “Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain and Europe”. There are three more volumes – so I’m going to have to save up; but this is everything you could wish for in a textbook. It’s far too big and heavy to fit in your pocket, so it’s a reference book. I’m not remotely qualified to comment on its scientific status – plenty of reviewers have done that and it’s definitely a five star purchase. The descriptions and the pictures – all hand painted by the author – are lovely. But what strikes me most is what a good teacher he is. Mycology can be awfully obscure and a bit sniffy at times, but this series manages to be completely thorough without being in the least intimidating. Like all the best teachers he knows that there are challenging conceptual difficulties to overcome but he gives a reader like me – who needs a permanent bookmark in the glossary section – the confidence to think that even I could surmount them with a bit of cheerful energy. There’s hardly a page where I think – Oh I couldn’t do that! The really great experts don’t wear their expertise on their sleeve.

I think this is Laccaria amethystina – Amethyst Deceiver; but I know it’s beautiful. Found near Brecon last year.

Heligan – the return

Crossing the jungle

Last time we camped here at Heligan the campervan leisure batteries – (and therefore almost everything else) -gave up and we spent best part of the week (it was February) freezing cold and huddling in the sleeping bags with only head torches to see by. This time we crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s and after a lot of maintenance work the van is restored to its full glory. Sadly the weather has been awful, with almost continuous rain, and so it’s been obligatory wet weather gear. Nothing daunted though, we’ve been out and about to see the spectacular beginnings of the magnolia and camellia blossom. The kitchen garden looks a bit like the allotment at home – all dressed up with nowhere to go. What we need, of course, is a bit of decent weather. It’s all very well the Met Office determining that March 1st is the first day of Spring, but for gardeners and astrologers, not to mention traditionalists, the equinox is the real deal. Someone should tell them that nature doesn’t read books – however well indexed. Those extra three weeks make a world of difference. Today as we walked the perimeter of the Heligan estate we could see all manner of leaves pushing upwards but relatively few flowers.

Gunnera plants.

For sheer horror you could do worse than film these Gunneras unfolding in time lapse mode. They might well have been part of the background research for Aliens and if we had the gift of standing completely still and watching for a month we’d probably need psychotherapy! So just to balance things out a little, here’s a Magnolia bloom representing the acceptable face of gardening.

Magnolia

Still it’s true that sometimes the most memorable finds are not the show stoppers, but the ones that nearly got away. I brought a new field guide down with me to try and I was anxious to give it a test run. Weather being weather it would have been hazardous to give it a first run in the rain – the Collins Wild Flower Guide is not for the faint hearted. Before we set out I weighed copies of the Rose “Wildflower Key” which came in at around 800 grammes. The Book of Stace was about 1500 grammes and the mighty Collins swaggered it at 1700 Grammes. You really need some thew to carry it around in your bag ……… so I didn’t!

Anyway, as we were wandering alongside the stream in the woods at the southern edge of the estate I spotted something odd, lurking amongst the vegetation, in this case mostly primroses in leaf. At first glance these tiny (3mm) flowers looked as if they belonged to a sickly Veronica; the leaves looked yellowish and chlorotic. But after I’d walked past a couple of clumps I could see that they were in full flower except the flowers seemed to have sepals but no petals – rather like tiny euphorbias. So lacking the book I took a couple of photos and did some research back at the van where I found that they were golden saxifrages – specifically the opposite leaved form – Chrysosplenium oppositifolium. After confirming it in the Collins WFG and checking the distribution on the BSBI online maps I felt brave enough to record it on iRecord. It’s not showy, it’s not in the least rare but I’d never noticed it before. Sitting in the van and uploading the record with the rain beating down on the roof, felt like a vindication of the day. There are very few activities where a complete amateur can make a difference, and when it comes to the destruction of the environment we need witnesses. Witnesses that can put hard, verifiable records up against the magical thinking of the climate change deniers.

And that’s also why it’s worth recording even the humblest and most common of the plants. If I have a beef with natural history films it’s their tendency to stress the spectacular over the mundane and wrap every living creature into a homesy narrative overwhelmed by overblown musical scores. Natural history as folk religion.

When you think about it, rarity and scarcity are not quite synonyms. Living organisms first become scarce and only then do they become rare. How will we know when an old familiar friend is becoming scarce if we don’t record them when they’re plentiful? Ten thousand records for lesser celandines seems about right, against one for the ghost orchid. But if no one ever recorded the ordinary everyday plants we wouldn’t notice until they almost disappeared – like the cuckoo! Today, standing in the woods, we heard a woodpecker drumming. As a child on my grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns, such a sound would have been commonplace; but today it made my spirits leap. In the 1950’s my squirrels were all red squirrels. My grandfather was doing his best to shoot the greys, for which he was paid a penny a tail, I think. It didn’t work, though, and now we have to travel afar to see them. After another rainy day here tomorrow, we’re off to a site on the Roseland Peninsula with a more promising weather forecast.

It’s been an additional pleasure to write this post because a couple of weeks ago we decided to lash out on a portable WiFi router that runs on a data SIM. It seems to be working very well with all our laptops and phones networked and able to stream video. I think it’s known as a MiFi system. Anyway it works for us – so no more standing out in the wet trying to get a signal. With campsite WiFi here costing £15 for three days and not even functioning very well, it’s goodbye to tethering and hello to happy days.

What’s your movie?

The heading at the top is the title of a very good Mose Allison song – “What’s your movie?” – which takes the mickey out of people who build their identities out of film characters. Although I love the song and laugh out loud at it, I’m also aware that none of us is able to escape the temptation to weave a narrative around our lives. The problem is that we don’t need to be even remotely out of the ordinary to be able to weave multiple narratives. So with that caveat, please welcome my first ever botany book – Warne’s Wildflowers of the wayside and woodlands”. I think I must have bought it in my late teens and – truth to tell – it was never that much use. The illustrations were miles away from the plants they depicted and the resolution was so poor that at best they gave an impression of the plant; and fatally – there were no keys at all apart from some line drawings sorted by the colour of the flowers. I had no technical knowledge of plant families and so the only means of naming one was to laboriously turn the pages until I found something that looked like – even vaguely like – the plant I had in front of me. Madame will testify that this made for very slow and exquisitely boring walks on her part. Consequently – much as I’d like to – I’m unable to construct a credible narrative around my career as an amateur field botanist. My movie is more like an inconclusive list of rough drafts and false starts that should never have seen the light of day.

However the passion for observing and naming plants never went away and over the years I’ve accumulated an unholy number of books, most of which were totally beyond my comprehension when I bought them. Over fifty years I sort of caught up with most of them whilst simultaneously throwing myself into the pit of incomprehension by buying yet more.

Yesterday I got lucky and found a copy of the out of print New Atlas of the British & Irish Flora, for £34 on the Oxfam website and it was while I was pondering where I was going to find a space for it that I found my battered old copy of “Wayside and Woodland” languishing behind a row of more prestigious looking volumes. When I opened it, I noticed the long dead vetch flower – brown and flattened – which I must have stuffed in there pending further investigation. In those days I hand no hand lens and no other way of taking it any further. It took several years longer to buy one, and I borrowed my first microscope only two years ago; and still the flower sits reproachfully in the book like a photo from a holiday romance, wagging its finger and asking what took me so long? I was utterly vexed by veronicas and distracted by dandelions and daisies. Any self-taught botanist will tell you it’s a prolonged agony of blind alleys and mazes.

And so I have passed the three consecutive Atlantic storms that squatted on our horizon and tormented us this past week- by mugging up on grasses, gathering my kit together, re-registering on iRecord and assembling my field guides ready for our first proper plant spotting trip down to Cornwall. Cornwall is early and later we’ll move up the West coat of the UK as far as North Wales hopefully catching the same plants several times. Suddenly I’m energised and better prepared than ever before. I watched three of the brilliant BSBI webinars on grasses and then ploughed through the introduction to the BSBI handbook on grasses, looking up all the terms I still don’t fully understand. This is a bit of a grudge match because during a field trip with the Bath Natural History Society, I mentioned to one of its luminaries that I found grasses difficult. “Oh” she said – “Grasses are easy!” She’s a brilliant and normally patient teacher and I’m pretty sure she’d intuited the fact that I can’t resist a direct challenge. Gradually, after three years – two of which were wrecked by COVID – I’ve made a small start – decades after I should have done.

Ironic isn’t it? Just as I’m beginning to get my act as a field botanist together, the proper botanists have retreated to white painted rooms, DNA analysis and electron microscopes. I can’t tell my haploid from my diploid and neither do I have the faintest idea what a palisade variant of non Kranz (C3) anatomy might be (actually I’ve an idea it’s to do with photosynthesis). My dearest wish is just to walk through a flower meadow and greet each of its inhabitants by name. My biggest fear is that I’ll be among the last people to be able to do so.