Tag: genetics

It’s a good job I’ve got no badgers among my followers

Only someone who’s attempted to grow sweetcorn in the open will know that they need a high ring of steel around them to keep the badgers out, – because so acute is the badger’s sense of smell they can judge exactly when the corn is at its sweetest and ripest exactly 24 hours before you planned to pick it. We think we may have solved the conundrum this year by growing them in the polytunnel with an improvised half door to ventilate the tomatoes and by surrounding the entire tunnel inside and out with African Marigolds whose strong scent masks the rapturously tempting sweetcorn. The Marigolds were meant to be Mexican Marigolds ,Tagetes minuta, but we received a mislabeled packet of seed this year. Actually we receive mislabeled plants and seeds almost every year; last year the red peppers turned into Scotch Bonnet chillies and we now have a lifetime supply of them, dried and in a jar.

It’s been a tough season, much of the blame for which lies with weak government and the unregulated greed of the privatised utilities. Why are we forced, like Oliver Twist to ask – “Please Sir can I have some more?” when the oil companies continue to promote a global environmental catastrophe and the overseas owners of privatised water companies, trouser the proceeds of their monopoly and conceal them overseas. As always, we – the despised customers – get the blame and pay the price. It’s our profligacy; demanding to keep clean, flush the toilets, water the plants and make a cup of tea, that’s causing the water shortage. Heaven forfend that we should prevent a 10 gigawatt data centre from sucking the life out of a small town.

And so we were up at six this morning trying to keep the allotment alive. It’s too hot to weed during the day and so we’ve had to prioritise the crop and worry about the Rosebay Willowherb and Dandelions shedding their ever virile seed next season – and bang on cue the so-called neighbourhood rage website hots up its campaign against anything that makes life in our traffic choked city more tolerable. For any of its contributors who read this – I doubt if I’ll get much flack, I wouldn’t think many of them can read – the whole trashy enterprise is run by the Mirror Group who’ve taken over local journalism like a metastasizing tumour.

Anyway, let me revert to real life and offer the picture of a plant that shows how strong is the will to live in nature. I’ve given it a full sized picture as a kind of prize. We bought this blackberry in 2020 and planted it at the edge of the fruit cage. To say it failed to thrive there is something of an exaggeration. It wilted, the leaves fell off and I can’t tell you how many non religious prayers were said over it. For three years it survived as a barely living stump. until it was accidentally amputated by a wildly inaccurate bit of pruning. I’m not blaming anyone – but it wasn’t me. However I couldn’t give up on it so I moved it into another border (I had visions of making a living fence out of it. I have to be careful because anything that actually looks like a fence is explicitly forbidden in the rules. Another three years have passed and I tended it like a sickly child – much to Madame’s amusement, until it grew several leaves in year two and this year, six years later, it’s suddenly taken off. I can almost hear it growling “Feed me now!” I’m thrilled to report that it’s well on the way to becoming a blessed nuisance. You’ll notice the Field Bindweed underneath it. Field Bindweed never seems to have a bad year

Even in a difficult year, a couple of post-dawn hours on the allotment is a special joy even though carting 30 gallons of water down a tricky path is a test of the ankles. I was thinking about – well, feeling miserable about how complicated life is in a drought accompanied by a heatwave. Our crops have either perished or are romping away, ripening early and behaving as they’re back in their home countries. Deep in the plant genes there are expectations that may or may not be honoured in real life. Plants can adapt, but not that fast. It’s we the gardeners who must learn to adapt but the harvest rush seems to have arrived about three weeks early and we’re flooded with far more vegetables and fruits than we can eat. There’s a crop drop scheme on the allotment site and at this time of year it’s mainly populated by marrows – otherwise known as neglected courgettes. We’ve cleared the freezer(s) in anticipation, and the bottles and kilner jars are all assembled ready for jams pickles and chutneys which at least improve with age (unlike us). There will be less tomatoes to process into ketchup, sauces and passata this year because they hated the second or was it the third heatwave. They’ve just started flowering again on the fourth and fifth trusses so we might get a late crop. The biggest challenge is making substantial changes to our diet to accommodate all the fresh veg. Harvest and cooking go hand in hand but you soon discover that the passion for courgettes and aubergines doesn’t take you as far as eating them every day; almost to the exclusion of all the other veg. And so we muddle on and I occasionally wonder if I should be spending more time on the blog and I’m reminded of the Brother Lawrence saying which suggest that the best road to contentment begins exactly where you are. I also remember hearing my mother saying (on one of the rare occasions she actually stood still) “Well this won’t get the baby a new coat” turning again to the sewing machine where she worked as a dressmaker or measuring up the local ladies for new corsets. (So now you know just how old I am!). I am content, I really am! But I’m also knackered; longing for a couple of weeks continuous rain and hoping, (probably hoping against hope), that this shitstorm of weak government and corporate greed will end before I do.

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.

Is botany nothing more than a science?

The Pilgrim church of St Maelrhys Church, Llanfaelrhys, near Aberdaron, Lleyn.

Buried in this churchyard are Elsi Eldridge, who was the wife of the poet RS Thomas; with their son Gwydion. RS married again after Elsi died and is buried near the door of St John’s Church Porthmadog. Also buried here is the lovely radical priest Jim Cotter who wrote the most wonderful prayers and liturgies. Needless to say the church Authorities had no idea what to do with him but he was an inspiring teacher and marvellous company and the bureaucratic incompetence of the Church of England gave him (and me) space to breathe. And finally the Keating sisters, friends of the Thomas’s, gardeners of their house Plas yn Rhiw – now owned by the National Trust – and scourges of coastal caravan sites are buried here too. All of them were artists. This churchyard is a powerful place for quiet reflection.

Well it’s a pound for the stone and thirty nine pounds for knowing what to do with it!

The quote came from a Gloucestershire stonemason I knew who was once asked how much he charged for a yard of drystone walling. When he gave the price the enquirer reacted with some scorn. “Forty pounds for a load of old stone?” – he replied. “well it’s a pound for the stone and thirty nine pounds for knowing what to do with it!”

Another secondhand book arrived in the post today. It’s called “Welsh Fare” and it was written by the anthropologist and researcher of tradition Welsh life, S. Minwel Tibbott who worked in the Welsh Folk Museum gathering and curating oral traditions. I found it in the bibliography of Carwyn Graves book, “Welsh Food Stories” which I mentioned last week. As soon as I opened the book and started to read through the recipes, the memory of the stonemason’s reply flooded into my mind, and it wasn’t so very long before the image of the churchyard on Lleyn joined him. Why so? well it was because the recipes list the very simplest ingredients without giving the slightest clue what to do with them, and knowing what to do with them has largely disappeared. Here’s a recipe for

Teisen Ddim – buttermilk scones

  • One pound plain flour
  • Quarter pound lard
  • A little salt
  • buttermilk

Rub the lard into the flour, and work in the other dry ingredients. Mix with buttermilk and knead to a soft dough. Roll out on a floured board and cut into small rounds, approximately a quarter of an inch thick. Bake on a moderately hot bakestone spread with butter and serve warm.

Llandeilo’r-fân and Heol Senni, Breconshire.

It’s all perfectly clear – except that unless you keep cows and make butter in the traditional manner by allowing the milk to separate overnight when it begins to ferment naturally, and then churn the butter in the traditional manner to separate butter from buttermilk; and unless you have a traditional bakestone and have learned what “moderately hot” feels like even assuming you have the means of heating it – well you’re not going to be able to bake the buttermilk scone.

Of course you can buy buttermilk from Tesco – except it’s not proper buttermilk but a factory made imitation – and the butter if it’s like the farmstead butter actually produced in old Welsh farmstead dairies, won’t be nearly as salty; like 3.5% salty – keeps better! And as for the lard you’d probably keep a large pot of pork lard which you could add to as you cooked joints from the fattened pig. Coincidentally it was Madame’s birthday yesterday so we had an extended family gathering and I slow cooked a whole shoulder of pork to make pulled pork for the boys and their partners. Even from a free range Gloucester Old Spot pig, shoulder is remarkably cheap and when you cook it very very (12 – 14 hours) slowly overnight it releases a huge amount of fat – dripping – which is ten times as rich and tasty as the bleached and purified block you slip into your shopping basket when you think no-one’s looking on disapprovingly. Finally the locally milled flour would have been rather darker and much more flavoursome than supermarket white. I used to bake with a marvellous 81% extraction white(ish) flour milled by Bacheldre Mill, now sadly no longer made. I hope I’ve made my point here. The simple list of ingredients tells us almost nothing if it’s become detached from its culture; and so – finally – I can leave the churchyard whose occupants once embodied a culture that’s largely disappeared, buried under second homers and Airbnb lets, and switch the topic to the so-called science of botany.

TV programmes on botany are as rare as hens’ teeth these days so we were filled with hope and excitement as we watched the first two episodes. The pleasure didn’t last. The unspoken assumption that ran through it like the writing in a stick of rock was the faintly smug and self congratulatory thought that traditional knowledge of plants was mostly held by deficient traditions which only needed some solid reductive science to reveal the truth. It reminds me of a story told to me about Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Orombi – who according to legend, reproached a tour guide near to the Victoria Falls who had foolishly asserted that the Victoria Falls were discovered by the explorer David Livingstone. ” I think” – he said – “You’ll find that we knew about them long before Livingstone got there!” Bishop Henry visited us once when one of the boys was in peak teenage rebellion, and he so charmed the angry rebel (I just love your green hair) he almost curled up in his lap and purred like a cat.

So the programme rambled on in a more or less predictable way through the history of scientific botany without so much as a mention of traditional herbal medicinal wisdom and without any sense of the vast contribution of the ancients from Dioscorides onwards. The plant kingdom was just treated as another exploitable resource to be catalogued, analysed and turned into a profitable enterprise. No sense of wonder, no mention of the inter-relatedness of all living things, no mention of the profoundly important role of plants in synthesising complex compounds beyond the reach of organic chemistry (which is by far the more interesting thing about photosynthesis and fungal networks). The last programme comes out tonight and I’m dreading the triumphal moment when the presenter announced that we’ve cracked some sort of code – probably gene editing – and finally we can exploit the poor old plants in any way that turns a profit. Wheat berries as big as pineapples or some such nonsense.

It rather reminds me of a line from Peter Shaffer’s play “Equus” – “Without worship you shrink”. To approach nature without humility, armed with scanning electron microscopes and DNA analysis misses a large part of the point. Of course I’m pleased when science discovers a new cure for malaria, or breast cancer or whatever else by understanding plants better. But plants aren’t just there for us to exploit – and misunderstanding that essential point is leading us towards extinction.

*** I just watched the last programme – it exceeded my misgivings so now I’m really scared.