Tag: garden butterfies

Being in a relationship (with nature)

A garden scene featuring a glass greenhouse and a plastic polytunnel, surrounded by various plants and greenery. Two large water containers are visible, along with wooden garden beds and a signpost.

In the recent BBC TV adaptation of the novel by Janice Hadlow, in which she constructs a plausible sequel to Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, the dreadful clergyman Mr Collins is found reading Aristotle; searching – as he says – for the way to be happy. Happiness is a fairly inadequate way of describing the best life as envisaged by Aristotle. In his view, happiness is not much more than a side effect; but the real deal, and the driving force towards it is eudaimonia usually translated as flourishing. We flourish when we practice the virtues – which can be expressed in a number of ways but to take just the foundational ones; courage, temperance, justice and prudence are some of the most important from a list that can be expanded to twelve or even more. If Mr Collins owned up to Aristotle that he was hoping to be happy as a result of reading a book, the philosopher might have made him write out 100 times – I must not be greedy, ambitious, hypocritical, grasping and in particular I must not render widows and their daughters homeless and dependent on the generosity of their rich relatives or hoping to be funded by marrying wealthy bachelors.

The virtues are not abstract bits of head knowledge but more akin to habits which – if we cultivate them – become embedded in our behaviour. We’re more likely to do the right thing without having to think it through each time. This all sounds a bit too intellectual but you’ll notice that all the virtues are relational; they’re to do with the way we relate to other people in our everyday actions. Kindness, loving, respectfulness, honesty, self control and courage, are not so much concerned with holding certain beliefs in our minds as with acting them out in the market-place of our lives.

Labore est orare

Sorry about the Latin, but it’s important. I first came across this saying – it means to work is to pray – many years ago in the context of Benedictine monasteries where, I discovered that in some of them the words labore est orare are inscribed above the chapel door as the monks leave and the opposite saying orare est labore –to pray is to work is written above the door as the monks enter. St Benedict wrote his rule of life centuries before the Greek text of Aristotle were translated but in a kind of wonderful evolutionary convergence, the Greek texts were translated by Benedictine monks centuries later and they became hugely influential largely through the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. I’ve only been to one Benedictine monastery and I very much regret not visiting the chapel to see if this suggestion is true. Anyway, it stuck in my mind as an almost perfect expression of the gardening life. Today I was on my hands and knees weeding (I’d also knackered my back digging out volunteer potatoes on one of the overwintered plots) – and I experience a prolonged contemplative moment when I lost myself even amid the intense noise of the building site across the road. I watched a holly blue butterfly, a small white, a brimstone and a red admiral all about their business in the warm sun. Yesterday I found a marbled white trapped in a greenhouse, and today small whites were about. An impudent jackdaw flew on and off the allotment stealing beaks full of sheep fleece from within five feet of us. The earth smelt beautiful as it always does around Easter time.

Black and white image of a rustic house with a garden, featuring wooden supports in the foreground and a stone wall in the background.
Our first real garden in Pickwick.
A quaint garden surrounding a cottage, featuring lush green plants, a small table and chairs, and a rustic wooden fence.
Here’s the same garden 55 years later

This connection with the natural world is a perfect example of the relational nature of the virtues. The reason we feel so content, so joyful when we’re gardening is because there is a kind of conversation going on between us and the soil and the plants. The seasons and the weather are all part of the great conversation that constitutes a season.

Our relationship with the earth is a lifelong conversation not a million miles from the great conversation of a long marriage. Kindness, loving, respectfulness, honesty, self control and courage are as applicable to the foundation and evolution of a garden, or a farm, or a nature reserve and SSSI as they are to human interpersonal relations. There’s always something to learn in a garden; a time to yield and a time to push forward. A time to bend every sinew and a time to rest.

And so it is, that labore est orare – to work is to pray – becomes the form of prayerful practice that leads to true, deep, inexpressible possibly even sacramental happiness rooted in commitment to one another -gardener and farmer with soil, human partnerships in all kinds of love. And the greatest thing about it is that it requires no dogma, no theology and no dressing up.

A grassy garden area featuring sparse vegetation, a small shed in the background, and a few scattered tools and materials. A section of black tarpaulin is laid on the ground with twigs and dried plants on top.
The allotment on the day we took it over, ten years ago

Going green – ish

Back on the Potwell Inn allotment, we’ve reached peak runner bean and courgette mountain time; not that I particularly mind because there’s no finer meal than a bowl of runner beans with a bit of grated cheese on top – Gruyere turns it into a gourmet meal but Cheddar works perfectly well. The courgette mountain can be very challenging because they have the gift of hiding under the foliage until they’re a foot long and almost unusable. We have several of them and I’m trying to figure out a suitable stuffing – vegetarian for preference because I’ve never seen what the point of putting sausage meat into a marrow might be. A strongly flavoured herby rice would work I think. But it’s miles better to harvest them young and full of flavour, before the seeds develop. I love them sautéd with a splash of lemon juice instead of salt. I’ve never liked the sprinkle of chopped parsley on top, it’s a herb and its place is in a side salad. Neither do I bother with all that salting and washing lark. Clearly there was a time (in the olden days?) when courgettes and aubergines were inclined to be bitter but not now, they’re much too well bred. If you want to stop them from turning into a mush, sauté them fast in blazingly hot oil and you get the brown edges as well as the full flavour and texture plus the excitement of setting off the smoke alarms – it’s a win-win.

So we are slowly turning green in several senses of the word. This is the time to become a vegetarian because you can eat a huge range of fresh, locally sourced and organically grown fruit and veg, and a lot less industrially produced meat. Good for us and good for the environment too. We’re not doctrinaire vegetarians here at all, but we eat less and less meat, and I can see a day coming soon when the minuses add up to a tipping point, but going a step further into veganism would be a much greater challenge, and intensive vegetable farming has its own ethical and ecological difficulties of a different kind and so we’re plodding down a middle path and hoping that sustainable, organic, high welfare mixed farming can provide milk, eggs and cheese alongside arable crops. But if the environmental crisis continues unabated then we may not have the luxury of that option any more and then my biggest fear is that the industrial food processing industry will seize the opportunity to flood the market with more expensive junk food.

Also on the allotment we’ve had loads of invertebrate visitors, two of them were butterflies, a gatekeeper and a speckled wood, that flew by yesterday and posed for me along with the whites, the red admirals and a tiny little shy one that flew away every time I got close – which didn’t. Previously I’d written about the suspected Jersey tiger (moth) that took a break on the kitchen window. I posted it on the Bath Natural History Society Facebook (Nature Watch) site and attracted a cluster of comments about whether I’d got the i/d right. It’s a bit rare in this part of the world, but it seems that as global heating increases it’s moving northwards.

However I’d underestimated the competitive instincts of (some) lepidopterists and was quite surprised at how hard I had to fight for my record. In the end, after a couple of heavyweights took my part it was allowed – or at least I’ll feel brave enough to send it to the County Recorder for verification and a puff of smoke up the gabled chimney. There’s no moral virtue in accidentally bumping into a rarity but somehow I felt as if I didn’t deserve to spot it! In the end, though, it was a very beautiful moth and after our discussion of minute details I reckon if it ever comes across my path again I’ll be able to identify it at twenty paces, and since I thoroughly enjoyed the scrap too, a good time was had by all.

Today we added another part of the Skyline walk, which involved yet another stiff climb up the hill to the south of us. As ever the access to the route allowed us to shortcut along the canal, avoiding the city centre which is more crowded than it has been for months. We spotted the resident heron perched opposite – too far away for a decent picture but I took one anyway. Later we dropped in at Sham Castle, with fabulous views over the City and then looped around the top of the hill, through the University and down Widcombe hill – about seven and a half miles in all; a decent walk.