Tag: green spirituality

Our allotment just grew up

A wooden raised garden bed filled with dark soil, surrounded by plants and trees in a garden setting.
The final set of four raised beds

The ambiguity in that title was entirely deliberate. It was some time last year when we were standing on the allotment and I said to Madame – “It suddenly looks as if it has matured”. Whatever it is – possibly the fruit trees which have really got their roots down, but also the fact that all the wooden structures are greyed and in some cases needing replacing; the polytunnel is theoretically due a new skin which we can’t really afford, and somehow when you add it all up it looks as if it’s been around the block a few times and decided to settle down to middle-age.

Of course, looked at through the eyes of love (how else should you look at ten years of your gardening life?) – it’s what the scholars call a palimpsest. Back in the day when writing was an expensive luxury, the materials were used more than once and traces of a previous, older message, letter or even book could be discovered lurking faintly under the younger. It’s exactly the same for our grown-up allotment. Every bed, and almost every other structure is just the latest version of an older one; complete with previous soil level, old screws and joints betraying their previous history. Beds have been re-purposed and re-designated over the years and the soil improved with tons of compost and leaf mould. Where once there was a difficult mix of clay and loam, there’s a much more fertile, sweeter smelling and friable soil. Despite all our efforts to find the best place to grow strawberries they migrated without any intervention from us to a spot in the lee of the polytunnel where they’re completely happy. Who says that plants can’t talk!

The latest batch of four raised beds are actually the top of four deep compost bins that I sawed in half horizontally a few weeks ago because they’d become an unofficial dump. They’ll be replaced by a single California Cylinder made from two concentric rings of sheep wire filled with cardboard and with a rough and ready chimney driven through the middle. It’s an idea we got (I think) from Lawrence Hills and it works a treat and heats up fast with the help of what he called “human activator” and you can work that one out for yourselves. An alternative activator is comfrey liquid but be warned, it really stinks.

Recycling of old materials isn’t just virtuous, it’s cheap. The eight beds I’ve just finished cost the price of a few new screws and some additional topsoil and compost for the new growing layer. I saved all the original topsoil in bags – they were hellishly heavy – and filled the resulting holes with fresh vegetable waste, cardboard and wood chip, then I put the original topsoil back on top and augmented it. The good soil is now 18″ deep and will be perfect for growing show-off carrots and parsnips.

The only constant factor in an allotment seems to be the unexpected. Last year’s pepper plants bought from a garden centre turned out to be Scotch Bonnets. We now have a lifetime supply of dried chillies. Each season is spent in negotiation with the weather, and with climate change advancing rapidly the old certainties and folk rhythms are becoming redundant. This year, for instance May and June swapped places whilst April showers were in short supply, and all we can do is ride with the volatility of the weather.

And so we soldier on. The allotment is less tidy and yet more interesting as the years go on. Plants come and go – last autumn the Tayberry got a savage pruning and this year the blackberry has stopped sulking after two transplantings and is, at last, showing the will to live. When we first moved on to it as an unkempt field we thought of the plot as a blank canvas on which we could do as we pleased. In the fullness of time we’ve realized that we can only do as it pleases – which turns out to be a much happier experience. The asparagus bed went the way of all flesh and now hosts a crop of new potatoes. The approach we adopt is a form of informed imagining in which we propose an idea, dispose the place in which we want to grow it by preparing the ground and selecting the spot and then leave it to nature to say yea or nay. Some we win and some we lose and that’s OK too. Allotments, like their tenants have previous history. Ours was probably once part of a Roman vineyard and then a nursery and has probably been in some kind of cultivation for a couple of millennia. Going back even further the origin of our soil is alluvial clay and loam formed by the ebb and flow of the river as it cut its valley through the soft oolitic limestone. We dig up fragments of clay pipes abandoned by the Georgian gardeners and some time in the future some hapless archaeologist could puzzle over the multitude of sea shells that stowed away in the bags of seaweed we once brought back from Lleyn to feed the asparagus. We may think that we live in the moment but as gardeners we only thrive within and upon the past. Some of the plants we grow we choose, and some that grow just happened in on the wind, dropped by a bird or attached to a car tyre. All gardeners have to learn to rule kindly and lightly over their kingdoms. We may think of ourselves as owners of our plots but in truth they own us and we can do nothing except by their permission. As butterflies and migrant birds cross the channel sans passports and permits so too do seeds, insects, plant diseases and all of the thousand things that charm us and taunt us. Most of the troubles of the world are due to people who misguidedly believe in control. We bend with the wind if we want to grow crops while growing ourselves comes free but not cheap.

A few good things that gardening brings us without going full guru.

A close-up of a cluster of hollow plant stems, showcasing their circular openings and colourful outer layers, surrounded by green foliage and a garden backdrop.
This is a home made insect hotel made from Angelica stalks. No takers!

Instinctively; the statement that Being in Nature and gardening is good for us is a no-brainer. You’ll notice the grace bestowing capital B on Being. But that doesn’t stop me from asking “Where’s the evidence Dave? – especially since time in the bosom of nature is now available on prescription on the NHS. We can say that all too many new gardeners end up in A&E with fork through boot syndrome, or infected thorns; back trouble and even coronaries; so, like sleep remedies and strong painkillers, nature and gardening are probably approached cautiously being both addictive and potentially lethal.

However – and you knew that was coming – and speaking entirely for myself; controlled immersion seems to have some great side effects. I’m absolutely not trying to be an influencer here I’m simply saying how it works for me and if that’s an encouragement to anyone I’m delighted as long as you don’t overdo it. Thirty years ago I found a lovely and inspirational book about fitness for the over fifties and got my first gym subscription. I absolutely loved it, especially as I discovered that however sweaty and painful it got – it made me feel better. But our bodies and brains get older, slower and less reliable as time goes on and now, with 80 just a few months away Madame and I have a large allotment which involves a fair amount of lifting, carrying, digging and banging in posts all or any of which have exact equivalents in the gym. For what it’s worth, after a long fallow year with various complaints now fixed by the glorious NHS, the allotment has increased my strength and stamina and radically improved the arthritis – especially in my hands. The other unexpected side effect is that constantly negotiating narrow paths and beds whilst harvesting, hoeing and weeding have improved my balance. Gardening has made me feel well, and that soaks into my mood. Having plants to care for and particularly having agency in planning it, really is good for the soul – whatever that might be! And of course the allotment produces food; fresh lovely food uncontaminated by any chemicals at all and in all kinds of ways; once again the cooking and eating makes us feel good. So ten out of ten for doctor allotment. On a day like today with the sun on my back there’s no better medicine than preparing a patch of warm earth where we’ll grow winter squashes and a giant pumpkin for the grandchildren at hallowe’en .

The other work; reading, researching and recording the plants especially the waifs, strays and sturdy beggars that eke out an urban living between cracks in the pavement, keeps the brain active, curious and grateful for the sheer diversity of nature in cities. My childhood was spent playing on bombsites and derelict houses, old coalmines and abandoned brickworks so these plants were my first hefting. My second hefting took place in the very centre of this deindustrialized neighbourhood – on Rodway Hill, where I went to school and I explored an entirely different environment on the tiny cap of old red sandstone which, I now know, hosted a rare patch of lowland acid heath – the name of which I only discovered a few months ago. I was so delighted to discover that the harebells were diagnostic of habitats I grew to love in other places without ever knowing the reason they were related by an accident of geology. Yes, wild places are good for us as long as we allow ourselves time to wonder why they are as they are.

The key to it all is complete engagement with the wild and the reward is those flow moments when the world stands still and we escape our restless minds and let the earth do the talking. Whatever it is – this strange capacity of nature to bring us to our senses – it’s relational. Rather like falling in love we have to relinquish ourselves, step aside from our neediness and make space for the other. And that’s as far as I’m prepared to go down the narrow path to spirituality. True flourishing is so much deeper than simply doing well for ourselves. All of Aristotle’s virtues are learned and practiced through relationships and our biggest mistake is to believe that money and success can be a substitute for real happiness. That we can somehow shortcut around the messy and difficult business of relationships and avoid thinking at all about our place in nature. We are in nature, we are of nature and like the earth herself we are vulnerable and needy. If that thought troubles anyone I’n sorry; but if you find it comforting then you’re halfway there already!

25th May 2010

Scenic countryside with lush green fields, grazing cows, and rolling hills in the background.

So it’s sixteen years since Andrew and I reached the highest point on the Aubrac Hills in Southern France. We’d – well I’d – failed to realize during the planning, that following a river can be a bit of a nightmare because every tributary makes its own valley and the line on a map becomes a relentless combination of long downhill valley-sides and punishing climbs to the crest of the next. We’d also failed to realize that the Camino has been monetized like everything else and was crowded with trippers who filled the cafes restaurants and refuges while we were carrying our rucksacks and all our possessions and often struggled to find somewhere to sleep, We did a lot of trespassing!

A winding dirt path through green vegetation, leading to a panoramic view of rolling hills and valleys under a clear blue sky.

But the hard work was redeemed by the wonderful scenery, the wildflowers (spring comes late in these high places) and a chance encounter with the transhumance – the seasonal festival that accompanies the movement of the cattle from their winter quarters in the valleys to the high pastures. If you look closely at the photograph you’ll see the cattle and their horns decorated with flags. We heard the clanging of bells and the sounds of celebration from miles away. Festivals in France have deep, deep roots and with many of the local villages quite isolated, the chance of a gigantic piss-up feels like all their market days in one. We watched from a distance and camped outside the towns where the riotous fun seemed to go on all night. The maximum height of the Aubracs in the Massif Central is around 3000 feet but I think we must have climbed it half a dozen times before we finally dropped down to Cahors. Somewhere up there I overheard a conversation between a couple of immaculately turned-out women from Nice when they spoke in tones of horror about a couple of elderly farmers we’d seen . “La France profonde!” one of them said.

As it happens I like La France profonde for exactly the same reason I love Wales. The culture is often a bit obscure to outsiders but its very isolation has protected it from withering away, and even ceaseless promotion by the tourist boards can’t seem to erode the central power with which it feeds a deep connection with the past, present and even the future. It ain’t cute, that’s for sure, but it’s the cultural matrix that frames life in a harsh place.

25th May 2026 – the same canicule, but a couple of decades later

Here in Bath we grow some, at least, of our own food in the centre of a Roman city which feels – today in the unseasonable heat- increasingly like Avignon. We shall call it Sulis en Provence and – like them – lay down our tools some time in July and spend the next six weeks in idling, chasing bulls down the streets trying to catch them by the tail, wearing white T shirts stained with red dye as a form of simulated bravery and getting very drunk whilst eyeing up the adoring girls and presumably boys as well. We should join the festivities and play football with the plentiful melons by the light of thousands of fireflies and breathe in the wine infused night air as if we might live forever whilst the gammon faced elders scream abuse into the internet because they couldn’t find anywhere to park their Range Rovers on the pavement. Ladies and gentlemen – at the risk of being thrown into prison by Sir Keir and the Brigade of Goons I’ll quote Eldridge Cleaver – “If you’re not part of the solution you must be part of the problem”. Interestingly when I verified that quotation on Google Gemini I got a little homily on the middle ground . Sadly the middle ground is on fire. The time for discussion, committees and forward planning seems to have passed us by.

In any case, we’re keeping a Provenĉal timetable here at the Potwell Inn. Rising at five followed by two or three hours on the allotment – mostly watering at the moment – and then breakfast followed by cooking, preserving and bottling as required and then writing; after which it’s eating and telly, avoiding the poisonous news and early to bed. Nil Carborundum is our motto. I’m celebrating my inner peasant.

Finally some photos of various places in France including a small chapel just beyond Le Puy en Velay, A park in Uzes near the Roman aqueduct to Nîmes, The Musketeers outside the cathedral in Albi and below that, the fortified Cathedral. Then there’s a scorpion that came to play, the bridge at Cahors, a street corner in Nîmes – that’s from memory; the beach at Collure, and a couple more from Uzès.

It’s said that figs prefer stony ground and produce more fruit when you prune their roots. Maybe that’s it. The aqueduct that crosses the Pont du Gard and goes through Uzès and on to Nîmes was sealed with the juice of figs. Maybe if I think of myself as a kind of fig, that story makes me feel better because some good comes out of the pain and – as Jung said – we’re most creative where we’re scarred. Perhaps spiritual energy really does flow like water in a thirsty place. I had my roots pruned on 20th June 2016. My European passport has since expired and I didn’t bother to renew it. I was rendered a stranger in a place I once felt at home and it was my own folk that did it.

It’s a mess – but a holy mess!

A small pond surrounded by tall green grass and clusters of yellow and white irises in a garden setting.
If you look closely enough you can see a tiny patch of pale blue painted plaster where St Francis keeps an eye out for frog spawn

I know there are all manner of gardening styles, from Gertrude Jekyll’s gingham and lace to Beth Chatto and all the way to the regimental ranks of RHS Wisley. Our allotment neighbour Pete is definitely Midlands in style and we are – frankly – untidy. Some plants blow in on a gardening wind and some settle down. We don’t have weeds but we certainly have some pestilential visitors like couch and bindweed, who outstay their welcome. Other visitors are harder to evict – we have a longstanding relationship with some Tall ramping Fumitory, Fumaria bastardii whose nearest relative seems to grow in a quarry thirty miles down the road and came over from Ireland at some time in the past. A proper traveller you might say. Ours is a polymorphous, polyglot and pollyanna plot with attitude.

Madame is the seed sower and nurturer and I am the surly under-gardener who nails things together muttering dark threats, and does all the heavy work; which is OK because I like the civil engineering bit. My present project is turning four underused compost bins into eight raised beds using as much free material as possible. When I sawed it horizontally in half – as you can imagine – it became a bit floppy and so old screws were removed with my worn-out driver set and new ones driven in with the wrong heads because the others were all worn out from previous bad choices. My arms were consequently purple with bruises due to the blood thinners I take. What with the constant dripping nose from hay-fever and the ugly arms and the cursing, our neighbours gave me a wide berth. They think, maybe, that old-age is something you catch from people like me. I say my language is a homage to my maternal grandfather who taught me almost everything I know about swearing. You’ve no idea how much pleasure I get from celebrating my disused vicar status by creative cursing.

The trick to recycling old topsoil into new beds is to work out a way of minimising the distance each shovelful has to travel – so bed one which can’t be lowered because of the damson tree roots – gets the soil from bed 2 with some composted manure for good luck. Bed 2 then stays empty until some wood chip can be sourced when it will be topped up with the soil from bed three which I stored in old compost bags. That leaves bed four to be filled with much more expensive nursery-bought topsoil and compost. The upside is that beds are much easier to work and much deeper so we can grow longer carrots and parsnips and we haven’t bought a single plank or post.

So its been a good week on the whole, without paying too much attention to the elections. The fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the artists’studios of which we’re almost the last surviving founder members were such fun we returned there for the May holiday open studios. I was having a rather difficult conversation with a disarmingly lovely young welcomer and fiddling with my pixel watch nervously when I managed somehow to turn on a podcast which was sent straight to my hearing aids. Our conversation became bewildering and she must have thought I was quite demented. Madame had another such conversation with a rather deaf man when she was talking about Vermeer who did many of his paintings in pairs and he mistakenly thought that she was saying something about him painting pears. As I’m sure Sam Weller says in Pickwick Papers – ‘collapse of stout party!‘ There’s nothing funnier than a cross-purpose conversation with a complete stranger.

On Sunday, after a family meal our youngest son – who’s a chef – brought around the experimental sourdough pizza dough he’s been working on with my 20 years old starter. As we chatted he said that he’s got three of my favourite family favourites onto the menu at the restaurant. I felt absurdly proud. They’re not really mine at all but dishes I picked up over sixty years and worked up for fun. Some I’d eaten on our travels, and some came from books, all inflected with the local availability of ingredients.

He’s being evicted by his landlord (a so-called Christian charity on a Section 21 no-fault notice. As the evictions deadline has approached over the last weeks we’ve seen any amount of furniture stacked on the pavement outside their empty flats. This so-called charity has turned out thirty people from their properties in order to sell them off, under the pretext of rediscovering their original charitable aims; so it’s all perfectly legal and they make it sound as if it’s some kind of moral obligation to turf people out of their homes. Isn’t it just a bit puzzling how much suffering is caused by ultra respectable people who wear suits to work and worship the gods of commerce and profit? I think of Dante’s vestibule of hell; the place where the uncommitted, those who refuse to take sides on moral issues, those who just don’t give a shit are sent to continue their pointless existence in an eternity of suffering.

But that’s enough. Let’s get back to the allotment and finish this rather anguished piece with a couple of photos that say something about our messy manifesto. We found our first ripe strawberry today, lurking under its water-cooler micro-greenhouse. The two water butts are going to be plumbed into a row of four and could even be purposed to circulate lukewarm water beneath the greenhouse in winter, powered by a solar panel and a recycled radiator in a system we say years ago in the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth. Until today, the latest frost we’d ever experienced on the plot was on May 6th but we had a frost yesterday, today and possibly tomorrow, so- 11th, 12th and 13th May. Luckily we’d covered anything tender with fleece, but our neighbours potatoes were all frost nipped and damaged. They’ll recover but it will take them a while.

Meet the Cranesbill Trio

I used to work as a community artist on a large satellite housing estate on the North West of Bristol. This wasn’t of those six month temporary contacts, I was there for ten years nd I got to know a lot of lovely people I’d never otherwise have met; like the stripper who caught the same late bus as me into Bristol to work, and often had to walk home alone, and told me she never felt safe until she’d re-entered the estate. I loved overhearing conversations on the buses because I learned so much – and one day I heard a comment on another community leader which has never left me. “That Jack B” said one passenger to her neighbour – “He can’t tell shit from pudding!” The estate was one of those places where everyone was related in some way to dozens of others. You quickly learned not to express any opinion about anyone without checking carefully whose cousin they were. Anyway, I’ve been profoundly glad of that phrase over the years and today I especially commend it to those of us who are feeling a bit down at the success of election candidates whose tastes and opinions are wildly weird. If you’re hoping for a tasty meal never order the pudding on the say-so of a waiter who might be called Jack B, because it will probably turn out to be – well, need I say it?

So in order to escape from all that I was casting about for a cheerful story and as I wrote about the cousin challenge in the first paragraph, I remembered that yesterday whilst preoccupied about raised beds on the allotment, I spotted three botanical cousins just above our plot; Herb Robert, Geranium Robertianum, Hedgerow Crane’s-bill, Geranium pyrenaicum, and Cut-leaved Cranes-bill, Geranium dissectum all within ten feet of each other and – as far as it’s ever possible to know – growing wild. I wish I could say I’d stridden forth, vasculum across my shoulder and a copy of Stace IV in my poachers’ bag in search of them, but I was leaning on my spade gasping for breath after shovelling a mixture of compost, manure and topsoil into the four beds. Most good spots like that happen when – for whatever cause – I’m standing still. Please don’t run away with the idea that any of these geraniums are rare because they’re not. It’s just a lovely coincidence to see them together because the differences aren’t that great until you know what to look for and then it’s easy. Like the residents on the estate they are related but quite separate species and their antecedent connection, whether lawful or one-nighters are lost in the mists of thyme. Harm one and you offend them all.

Wooden raised garden beds filled with dark soil, positioned beside a greenhouse.
The cause of the pause – approximately 3000 kg of home-mixed topsoil.

It would be easy to mistake the total weight of four raised beds of soil. Once I’d added some strengthening posts, and mixed together the components it came to around 3 metric tonnes in weight and because I mixed them in situ it meant an awful lot of leaning and turning. Not to worry, though I’ve finished half of them now and the other four – which is to say the top sections of the dismantled compost bins – will have to wait until it’s time to plant up in the the autumn. My back will probably have recovered by then.

We’ve been very focused on the allotment this week because now is the time where – if you sit back and relax – you will discover the extraordinary energy of plants in the spring. Our plots are infested with bindweed, and we run a general (but not religious) policy of not deep digging but working just the top 3 or 4 inches of the soil with hoes and a three or four pronged cultivator. Bindweed spreads by way of underground rhizomes – thick and white and known as devils guts. It’s worth saying that, unlike those who spray them, they’re immune to glyphosate and other chemicals and so the only way to control them is to hoe the tops off regularly and pull out every bit of root as you find it in order to starve them. There are jobs you can leave for another day, but bindweed must be pulled up on sight! I’ll put some photos of the current state of the allotment on at the end.

Meanwhile I struggle but mostly succeed in finding time to read because things are changing so fast in our understanding of the earth and our role in its destruction. At the moment I’m reading Michael Pollan’s new book “A World Appears” in which he explores ways of understanding consciousness in plants and is absolutely fascinating, as are all of his other books. The parallel read is Mary Midgley’s philosophical book “Beast and Man” first published in 1978 which explores the roots of human nature and which overlaps slightly when it comes to the higher animals. She’s the most lucid philosopher I’ve read, and avoids technical language as a matter of principle. One stand-out insight from Pollan’s chapter on sentience is his sudden exclamation – “So that’s what a theory of consciousness is going to generate – Art!” Writing, reading, gardening, botanising, cooking are the key to flourishing for me. You can keep your profits and huge bonuses because I know better than most that there are no pockets in a shroud.

And so – a few more photos of our magical allotment that turns sunshine plus water into food and releases oxygen as it does so.

Beltane

A greenhouse interior showing rows of small tomato plants staked with bamboo canes, planted in rich brown soil with gardening tools and trays in the background.
Grafted, blight resistant tomatoes planted in the polytunnel today

I’m not a devoted follower of pagan festivals except for the neat way they divide the year into horticultural seasons that resonate with me. Checking back today increasing day length, frost free nights, warmth and sunshine which all shout summer’s coming – get the tomatoes in! and we’ve been doing just that for as long as I can check our records. Good Friday – the traditional day for potato planting is a lunar festival and varies by six dangerous weeks which means in some years we’d be coping with frosts and cold winds – so we compute the day from commonsense data. Today we also planted out ridge cucumbers, red peppers and aubergines in the warm soil of the tunnel – it was 22C this morning. The tomato plants and the others are all grafted onto vigorous rootstocks and although they’re expensive they repay the outlay with greatly enhanced crops. We harvest around 80 lbs of tomatoes every year and turn them into delicious sauces and passata which, like the home-made stock and home baked bread, are constant staples in the kitchen.

Sumer is icumen in,
Loude sing cuckou!
Groweth seed and bloweth meed,
And springth the wode now.
Sing cuckou!

This is the oldest secular song that we have; 13th century and still as vibrant as ever. I only dare quote it because this week we heard cuckoos calling in the Bannau Brycheiniog for the first time in years and they filled me with an inexplicable anxiety that we may never hear them again. Anyway I want to celebrate my mood of optimism and the return of my energy now that I’ve been given a new lease of life by our ultra observant GP who came up with the right diagnosis after all the consultants had tried and failed. Now I can prepare a 15 foot bed in one go, walk up hills without being breathless and carry bags of compost around the allotment. I sleep like a log, eat like a horse and read difficult books without losing my concentration. I go to sleep each night with a joyful idea of what needs doing on the allotment and still have the energy to write and cook when that’s done. So yes – Beltane’s a great festival this year even if green face paint would make me look a bit weird.

A close-up view of a raspberry plant featuring green and yellow leaves, set against a background of wood chips.

However, just to remind us that allotmenteering isn’t always a primrose path, the summer raspberries we planted last year are looking very chlorotic. We’ve seen it before and the cure is a foliar spray or a watering with Epsom Salt for the missing magnesium, and then just in case some chelated iron because the two deficiencies are strongly related. The long-term solution would include powdered dolomite rock but we’ll also give them a good feed with liquid seaweed stimulant and we should see an improvement within a week.

Canal Reflections

A tranquil scene featuring reflective water, with the sun illuminating the surface while green foliage and delicate plant stems are visible in the foreground.
Cow Parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris on the Monmouth and Brecon Canal
A close-up of a white flower with six petals, surrounded by green leaves and grass.

Maybe I’m being a bit evasive here. Obviously the photo is partly about reflections on the water – largely due to the inbuilt wizardry of phone cameras which make a photo with a huge tonal range like this so easy. However, as everybody knows, a stroll along a canalside towpath on a beautiful sunny day, is apt to promote a reflective frame of mind. This season of the year is especially beautiful because the emerging plants all look so pristine. I started taking a few photographs principally as notes for the blog, but within twenty minutes I was in full-on recording mode. One such photo was of the abundant Greater Stitchwort along the canalside. I can remember the first time I saw this plant; it was on Dartmoor on March 16th 2016, ten years ago. Yesterday they were everywhere, among many other favourites – 27 species in the end.

A cluster of small white flowers with purple accents, surrounded by green grass and leafy plants.

Another old friend that set off a chain of thoughts was the Cuckoo Flower, Cardamine pratensis which I’ve often seen but never once connected its flowering with the coming of the Cuckoo. “Why didn’t I notice?” I thought, metaphorically banging my head against a tree. The reason of course is that Cuckoos are becoming ever rarer, and it just so happens that we were lucky enough to hear them twice in the last two days. It may seem to us a bit like metaphysical poetry to yoke the two phenomena together but to my mother – born in a cottage in the Chilterns in 1915 – it was part of the the natural calendar that structured her days. The clouds over Granny Perrin’s nest foretold rain, and that was that.

A close-up of a person's hand holding a purple violet flower, with green grass and yellow flowers blurred in the background.

We wandered on, stopping to note a couple of dead Bream floating in the water. One had a deep nick in the side, suggesting a fatal encounter with a narrowboat propeller. There were more signs of the season’s perpetual motion; the Wood Anemones past their prime and ready to shed their petals, Lords and Ladies in their priapic stage but awaiting the big red berries; Herb Robert, Yellow Archangel below, Bird Cherries above our heads, Dog Violets nestling in the lower layer with the Primrose, Bluebells of course, and a single Barren Strawberry barely noticeable in the understory. With the canal on one side atop a bank, with a large marshy area below we spotted hosts of Ramsons undamaged so far by foragers and beside the canal the young leaves of Hemlock Water Dropwort, ready to administer a fatal punishment to those who gather incautiously.

I was lagging behind as always, when Madame waved me closer and told me to be quiet. She had spotted something interesting down on the edge of a marshy pool below us. We waited in silence until something moved, ran along a log and disappeared into the undergrowth. Too pale for a ferret, too large for a stoat, and unlike any squirrel we’d ever seen. Back in the campervan we searched diligently and decided it was a pale Polecat – possibly a hybrid ferret polecat cross – and it had obviously been stalking a mallard perching on the log. What a find!

We spent the afternoon (after dropping off at the pub) reading and cataloguing today’s finds. I’m reading David Elias’s book “Shaping the Wild” at the moment and in the chapter on moorland birds in a discussion of the present state of the Kestrel population, he quotes Mary Midgely who wrote in one of her books:

The world in which the Kestrel moves, the world that it sees is, and always will be entirely beyond us

Mary Midgley, “Beast and Man: the roots of human nature”

All of which brings to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Windhover” which fails to bridge the gulf magnificently.

Later we watched (part of) David Attenborough’s latest TV series “Secret Garden”. I say part of it because we both found its anthropomorphism both saccharine and misleading, and turned it off. I spend a lot of time and words here on the Potwell Inn trying to say something sensible about our connection with the natural world. There’s no doubt we are dangerously detached from nature.

Last night our son recounted a truly worrying account of a difficult conversation with his neighbours in Birmingham. He overheard them discussing the lovely mature oak that overlooks his, and their garden and it was clear that, for them it was nothing but a nuisance. They complained that it blocked out the sun and the birds made an intolerable noise. The tree had probably been there for a century before their terraced houses were even built and yet they were trying to enlist him in a neighbourhood campaign to have it felled. Yes we’re dangerously if not fatally detached from the natural world.

However the manner in which we re-attach ourselves is questionable, and here’s my beef with Attenborough and the BBC version of wildlife. It’s all too cuddly, and smooths over the immense difficulties with a commentary that reduces everything to winsome little human stories, as if animals were simply miniature and cute versions of ourselves. Attempting to engage with nature on those terms reflects an almost colonial attitude.

Yesterday’s encounter with the Polecat, as David Elias’s and GM Hopkins with a Kestrel is a form of engagement that takes seriously the otherness of the species we share the earth with. As long as we think that we can batter the natural world into the shape we invented we’re lost. If our love of nature, or if the idea of green spirituality strays too far into the religious mindset we’ll repopulate the horrors of religious extremism with an equally dangerous set of ideas taken from misunderstandings of nature with all the witch trials and heresy hunting thrown in.

If we can confine ourselves, in these occasional and wonderful encounters, to behold the inscrutable strangeness of the creatures, plants, insects, mammals, fishes, birds, moulds and fungi in silence then maybe we could begin to rediscover our own creatureliness which could be the foundation of a true green spirituality.

Close-up of two butterflies resting on a green leaf with a blurred background featuring water.
Crane flies mating

The moon and the weather – their effect on the shed door and me.

Exterior view of a potting shed with a wooden sign labeled 'POTTING SHED' in a window framed with wire mesh.

Our shed goes up and down – not in a major way but enough to make opening the door quite difficult at times. When we first put it up we’d seen enough tottering sheds to know that if you just stand them on the ground – sooner or later the footings will rot and they’ll fall over – and so our shed has foundations – a thick layer of gravel topped with sand and then capped with level paving stones. What we couldn’t have known is that our clay subsoil seems to rise and fall in harmony with the water table, thereby twisting the frame and jamming the door.

I share this entirely uninteresting fact because in my earlier reflections on the way in which gardening is the kind of practice that leads to flourishing, I left out some threads which can be woven into a bigger picture. The rising and falling of the shed always seemed to me to be down to the rising and falling of the water table. The allotment is close to the river and we have at least one small underground stream running below it. In flood conditions it occasionally breaks out from under the apple trees and runs across the surface. The piece of pipe that secures the polytunnel door is driven into the earth and you can see the water level at the bottom of it. There’s no serious hydrological kit involved at all, if the door is hard to open the foundations have dried out and QED the allotment will need watering.

I once visited a pottery factory in Wrecclesham near Farnham where they used the local clay to make traditional pots of all shapes and sizes. Their kiln, a large brick built bottle kiln had no obvious pyrometers to measure temperature and when I asked, our guide said that they didn’t use seger cones or any other indicator. They packed the kiln the same way as they’d always done, and when the pots at the top had shrunk to the same height as a corbel that you could see through a spyhole in the intense heat they knew – along with a great deal of practice – that the firing was done. It was a kind of organic knowledge rooted in history and experience.

Where’s this all going then? and what’s the moon got to do with it? Well the missing thread from the previous post was the concept of seasonality. We live in a world a world dominated by constant artificial light, supermarkets which (just for the moment) seem to be immune to the seasons and sell the same food the year round and fly it in, or drive it up from southern Spain in convoys of heavy lorries. If we want sunshine we can just travel towards it and with the benefit of air conditioning, warmth and cold only affect us on the walk from the car park.

The allotment necessarily puts us in the midst of a constantly changing seasonal world and we live in a subtly different seasonal timetable. The weather forecast becomes as important for us as it would to a farmer or a fisherman. Sunrise and sunset are as important once again to us as they were to our distant ancestors, spring, summer, autumn and winter aren’t just words any more, and anyone who reads books on gardening or farming will encounter the esoteric theories of Rudolph Steiner who wrote a great deal about horticulture and who thought that the moon emitted some sort of invisible and undetectable force that influenced the growth of plants. These days the Biodynamic method has crept in at the edges of the mainstream and the moon certainly has an effect on the tides. Our campervan is parked within 100 yards of the river Severn and we get flood warnings from the Government whenever winds, river level and tides combine to make a possible flood. As gardener I’ve always wondered whether the passing moon has any effect on groundwater and a little bit of research suggests that the moon has a greater effect on groundwater levels if you’re very close to the sea but that it also has a much lesser effect on groundwater – measured in a few millimeters at most and that the probable cause is the gravitational pull on the earth being sufficient to cause these tiny distortions.

So our understanding of the earth as an immutable lump of solid ground isn’t quite right. Times, tides, seasons, and weather systems are in constant motion around us whether or not we stop racing about and consider them in relation to our gardens and farms. When Copernicus used his mathematics to suggest the theory and later Galileo used his telescope to prove it, they risked their necks to describe the rhythmic motions of the solar system, because it upset the static view of of a universe with the earth at the centre, and bit by bit our view of the earth and our position in it began to change. Today just a few flat earthers tie their hopes to the idea of an immutable earth but all the signs point to its fragility. It’s a massively depressing thought unless we learn to live in this new dynamic which more closely resembles a complex dance or a multiverse orrery such as was invented by Phillip Pullman whose alethiometer discerns the truth in his novels. But that’s a beautiful fiction; a mythical object that tells the truth about mysteries.

So our choice is whether to retreat to the bunkers in bafflement or to see this immense mutability as a source of wonder – and here’s the link back to flourishing or if you prefer Aristotle’s word, eudaimonia . If human fulfilment can be found through the cultivation and practice of virtues until they become benign habits, then they need to be practiced in the real world, and not the wobbly stage set of “the good life”. Here’s another, longer list of the virtues:

Courage, Temperance, Generosity, Magnificence, Magnanimity, Proper Ambition, Patience, Truthfulness, Wittiness, Friendliness, Modesty, and Justice.

I hope to unpick some more threads from the delightful fleece in the coming weeks.

Two figures walking along a rocky beach with crashing waves and a misty landscape in the background.
Hell’s Mouth bay on Lleyn if you look carefully at that wave you can see how it got its English name

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

Not a bee then? a Furry Dronefly!

Four consecutive days of wall-to-wall sunshine should have reminded me that the spring equinox – not the boring Met Office one but the proper mobile one – isn’t always on the same day. So we missed it entirely while we worked on the allotment. When I was a schoolboy I was invariably referred to by one teacher as “rod pole or perch” – an ancient system of length measurement which lingered on the back of our exercise books along with acres, chains and gills. Equinox is at least based on an observable measure – the day nearest to offering an equality of time between night and day. Easter, of course does its thing based on a 13 month moon cycle defying all logic and creating great hazard for those who always plant their potatoes on Good Friday. I love it: the sheer irrationality of it all defying the tidiers-up makes me smile.

Anyway we were so busy on the allotment that the equinox passed us by and bang on time I’m driven back to the same old question – why is nature so good for us that it distracts us even from marking the (old) beginning of spring? After the winter we’ve had, I can’t begin to say how lovely it’s been to feel the sun on our backs at last. Coming back home every day with our muscles aching and fingers creaking you might think a bit counterintuitive to make a fuss about it. But the allotment offers one small part of our lives over which we have almost complete agency. In an existence filled with expectations from every quarter; bills; health problems and you name it – the allotment is an oasis in which we get to choose what to do without having to bend to the cold winds of authority. There are rules of course but they’re mostly common sense and neighbourliness. Nobody pays any attention to the daft rules about the permitted colour of sheds and the precise percentage of flowers to veg that must be adhered to, and as any Welsh poet will say; rules are the primrose path to creativity.

Anyway, the business of agency is a key concept for achieving eudaimonia – true, deep, happiness. We spent a lot of time this week planning how to move the compost bins and turn them into raised beds, how to move two water butts from one optimal position to another even optimal-er one. We ordered our seeds, decided our priorities and prepared beds for sowing and planting out in the next few weeks. Each day we felt that little bit stronger and we thanked the weather gods for their generosity as we always must.

Being perpetually hard-up we are free from fantasising about machinery and fencing to keep out badgers and people. Every bit of mulch has to be planned and transported down the bumpy path and, expecting the weather to be unexpected much of the time, we develop a kind of radical patience thanking nature for her unexpectedly generous lessons. The bee at the top for instance is not a bee at all but a fly; a dronefly- in fact a Furry Dronefly. I’m not an entomologist but a handy app on my phone helps me to sound cleverer than I really am. “Shame on you” cry the gathered deacons with their withered knowledge and multiple imagination-sucking certainties. But I’ve got other things, better things to do – like learning Welsh and cooking lovely meals and so I’m content to make an assisted guess now and again.