Tag: green spirituality

Meanwhile – back on the farm again

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing about Cornwall is it rains every day.

Greater Bird’s-foot trefoil

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

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

Heath Bedsraw

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

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

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

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

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

A rainy day in St Davids

Where’s Wally?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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