Tag: green spirituality

One for sorrow two for joy ….

This is actually a photograph of some Sow Thistle flowerheads, I took it in June in Cornwall, but if you look carefully enough with the eye of imagination it might pass for an image of the two magpies squabbling over some nesting material that I once saw, squashed flat on the road joined beak to beak by the short length of dry grass they were fighting over. They were so utterly focused on their greedy rage that they failed to notice the oncoming (I like to think) bus. The image has never left me, and if I’d only managed to photograph it in those pre-mobile phone days I could have used it in a dozen ways. Think of the proverb He who goes out for revenge should first dig two graves – incidentally Confucius didn’t actually say it but it’s good advice in any case. Now, a couple of days on from the moment the memory popped uninvited into my mind, I honestly can’t remember the context. So much of what my mind throws up is like an out of context post-it note that’s been sitting on the fridge door for months. But there, a casual popup memory led to an equally casual flip though the photo files and suddenly I’m looking at the sow thistles and thinking about a literary character called Père Ubu, who was invented by Alfred Jarry in 1896, scandalized French theatregoers and launched Dadaism. Ubu is the kind of monstrous human who would casually take a life over a blade of dead grass. He is fat, ugly, stupid and psychopathic, which may remind you of a well known President but I couldn’t possibly comment. I wanted to write my compulsory thesis on Jarry when we were at Art school but the Principal, Clifford Ellis, who was blessed with a very linear imagination, told me that he knew everything there is to know about Jarry and there was nothing I could possibly write that would be of the least interest to him – and refused to let me write it. I went straight to the library and asked the librarian if she knew of any artist about whom there was only a single book and of whom I’d never heard. After a bit of bibliographical research she came up with Eugene Boudin. I had never seen any painting of his and the prospect of very little research combined with a surname that translated as blood pudding I was hooked. Sadly my Dadaist revenge passed unnoticed by the Great Man and even with a staggeringly silly deathbed scene I got an A grade. Some years later I finally saw Boudin’s paintings in the flesh and I loved them. All of which goes to demonstrate what a compost heap my mind is.

But to begin at the beginning (again), these two magpies managed to demonstrate that two does not always equate with joy and to stretch the elastic proverb even further Madame and I had three boys while I don’t recall ever seeing four magpies together. They’re such unpleasant birds – always ragging nests and killing fledglings. Their immaculate morning suits don’t fool me; they’re like right wing assassins dressed as gentlemen. Nature tells more than one story and some of them are very dark. The nursery rhyme who killed cock robin? fingers the sparrow but I reckon it was a hit by an anonymous magpie who fitted the sparrow up in order to start a riot in Cheltenham. It’s worth encouraging children to learn the nursery rhymes because they often love a bit of darkness, and in the process they’d learn the name of fourteen creatures not including one which is murderous but remains a shadowy behind the scenes wraith in my rendering. One for sorrow two for joy is a counting rhyme that might well appeal to a reluctant learner despite being slightly less accurate than Old Moore’s Almanac. Oranges and Lemons can give us a pigeons’ eye view of the parishes of central London – my granny was born near Bow and when I think of the rhyme I think of her, an orphan, and also the mysterious Bungalow Granny who lived in a wooden building behind the Crest, the cottage where my real granny lived. Could the solitary resident have been her adoptive mother or foster parent? There’s a story to be written even in a single name and location. The beechwood in which her shack stood is the mise en scène. Why were my sister and I never taken to meet her?

If my mind is a pinball machine it works in two ways. In flow moments I want the ball to blunder its way past every single coil generating thoughts and words as a tangible reward, but on bad days or in bad dreams I just want it do shimmy around every memory, lighting none and exciting no morbid connections. Consciousness is only suffering on the bad days. The Buddha was wrong. The good days are festival days where sweet apples fall into my hand and consciousness is joy.

I guess the world in which we live is as much made by memories, recollections and, above all, language, as it is by the processes of nature. The two processes, language and nature are indivisible. We can only understand the natural world by exploring it from the inside because we are human and therefore part of it. The disciplines we can use to find our way pay no attention to boundaries and no particular approach, whether scientific or creative, can claim squatters rights or legal tenure.

Isaac Newton was into alchemy, William Blake and JMW Turner seem to have got there through visionary gifts, Tracey Emin has gone deeper than most living artists in exploring what it’s like to be human, and what about Amsel Kiefer who walks the darker path? What is the nature of Nature? RS Thomas wrote memorably of finding a depression in the grass still warm from the body of an unseen hare. Perhaps the illumination always comes from the unexpected, from left-field, from stopping worrying, from putting aside ceaseless questions and waiting in silence. Sometimes it takes years.

I suddenly realized that this tree could be Granny Perrin’s Nest.

Looking out of the bedroom window yesterday morning I had a small scale revelation; nothing huge but more of a bicycle tyre lever, gently easing an old memory off the rim in search of a leak. There’s a tall tree, a couple of roads north of the flat, and which rises above the roof line. I’ve no idea what species it is; it could be a Lombardy poplar – but without ever hauling it into consciousness I’ve been using it for years as a weather forecaster. There’s a companion met office rival a bit further away; the church clock on Julian Road which you can only hear chiming in a northeasterly wind. But yesterday, and returning to the tree, I could see it being bent by a gusty southwesterly wind – and that simple observation is the gateway to a great deal of useful information to a gardener. In itself that’s a mundane thought but a moment later the phrase “Granny Perrin’s nest” popped into my mind and my memory dropped into time travel mode.

Granny Perrin’s nest is an expression my Mum used to use when my sister and I stayed in our grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns. Mum would look up at some unfathomable point in the sky and say – “there’s rain over Granny Perrin’s nest”. As a child with a seedling poetic imagination it was a phrase of great beauty; pregnant with incomprehensible meaning but clearly something I would need to understand if I was ever going to be a grown-up. Yesterday I looked it up on Google Gemini just in case – in my eightieth year – it might finally crack the code and print the admission ticket.

I was completely taken aback by the result. This is a phrase that I’ve mentioned a number of times in this blog, and – here and there – I’ve mentioned childhood memories of The Crest – the cottage my grandfather built and the smallholding where I learned about nineteenth century farming at first hand. As I looked at the computer screen every word I’ve ever written about it had been scraped and stored by AI and, far more troubling, augmented by some local information and kneaded into a narrative with a completely spurious authority. My childhood memories refined and curated by a machine and spewed out as facts. I felt a bit violated to be honest; as if the AI had forensically scraped my childhood off the pavement and reconstructed an unwise night out at the pub. All the bits were there but they weren’t me. No lights lit up. I would never have joined those dots in the way that the machine did because there was none of the fuzzy logic of the mind. My Mum was missing; my grandfather with his unbuttoned shirt and jacket full of burn holes from the roll-ups that lived in the corner of his mouth; my Granny sweating and cursing over the paraffin stove; the chickens, Charlie the toad in the greenhouse. I suppose I should give credit to the suggestion that Granny Perrin’s nest referred to a tall elm, and support for my memory that there were still a few red squirrels but none of these were my memories. I only remember the grey squirrels which my grandfather would knock out of trees with a weighted stick so he could claim a bounty on the tails. I dread to think that some innocent enquirer might, one day, unleash these curated memories as if they were facts.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn? We worry about the power of AI but it seemed to me that it’s not behaving like an organised crime syndicate (at least at the information gathering level) but as a kleptomaniac or shoplifter criminally entering my mind and indiscriminately shoving everything into a bag marked swag, to be sold on in the dark web of plausible untruths.

Granny Perrin’s nest is, and always was a metaphor. My mum never for a moment thought that there was a real nest up there at the top of the tree, with an elderly lady living in it, issuing weather forecasts. It was a piece of folklore with a useful predictive truth about weather. The world of story and song is full of these instances and they can travel, even as far as a city like Bath so that I can listen out for the church bell which always brings cold winds, or the bending of the tree which tells me about atlantic weather approaching.

The great elm trees would have been used by the bodgers in the nearby woods who made the most wonderful Windsor chairs and other fancies using elm, which doesn’t split, for the seats and beech or some other locally available timber for the other parts. We would often walk through the woods to Margaret’s beer shop as our parents delicately named it, and eat crisps and drink cherryade. My grandfather was a carpenter whose family had lived in the same village since the 18th century. He made us rainbows with a stirrup pump and a bucket of water. My Granny was a cockney, brought up within earshot of the Bow Bells as an orphan. We never knew how she was brought up and cared for. Layer after layer of meaning that resonates for me, reduced to a handful of gradgrindian facts by heartless machine learning. And yet I often come across myself in some more or less caricatured form on the internet. My God I’ve lived an interesting life, I think as Madame and I lie in bed holding hands and dreaming. Our mother loved her plants and she would never visit a garden without indulging in a bit of harmless larceny; these memories gather around me like an incandescent ball of fireflies; immune to capture. Let’s not call it intelligence any more – it’s not spreadsheet knowledge it’s more of an address book for locked rooms which no AI agent will ever be able to enter. No one reading them off a screen in the future will be able fully to enter their world. All it will tell is where you might begin to look for your own story.

Is green spirituality just the same old same old – without the dressing up?

The moon in Lleyn – no really!

Forgive me for retracing my steps here, because I can anticipate a thousand toes available to be stepped on and I’ve often restrained myself when it comes to writing about spirituality because I’ve got previous, and you might think I’m trying to slip a bit of surreptitious religion into a post. I’m not. Mainly because I’ve moved on and I’d like to move an insight forward a bit. It always seemed to me that spirituality is akin to a flowing stream and if it stops flowing it becomes stagnant and sometimes even poisonous. Trust me, when you’ve seen how poisonous a religious bureaucracy can be when it refuses to countenance change, you’ll want to cross the road and walk on by. I can’t claim any particular philosophical expertise except for discovering that I could never fit what I might once have been called a religious experience into a religious framework. However hard I tried I found myself hacking some really important components off in order to force it to fit.

This was the moment

Curiously enough this feeling came to a moment of crisis as I stood next to the River Wye under a bridge in Hay one day when it was in full flood and huge branches were being swept downstream past me. What overwhelmed me that day and still moves me as I remember it was the sheer relentlessness and awe inspiring power of the flow. The river passed the spot where I was standing, oblivious to my presence, and onwards to the sea. Completely unexpectedly I “knew” that I no longer believed in any kind of supernatural extraterrestrial being. It wasn’t necessary; it added nothing to understanding; all it achieved was to force submission to the censor of difficult thoughts like an anti-heresy shrink wrap constricting the circulation. That odd experience opened the doors of a cage and a thousand WTF moments flew back out into the grey, stormy sky into the world of the ten thousand things.

But this doesn’t mean at all that the roots I had grown down into all those old religious texts had to be abandoned. I could still (loosely) meditate on them because they’d all been written by other beings just like me out of numerous experiences just like mine. But the writings could be validated perfectly well by experience, ordinary human experience, and claiming that they’ve been signed off in some mysterious way added nothing to them. Years before the bridge moment I’d realised that religion doesn’t, can’t, change the facts – the everyday phenomena that sometimes – like a bush – could burst into flames. Spirituality can’t change the facts; it can only change the way that we see and relate to them. Spirituality – to put it in a simple phrase – is a perspective changing phenomenon.

Of course I’m by no means the only person to travel this path: there are many others better qualified than me to elucidate the gritty detail and join the dots. But the transformation of my perspective came when I realized that nature isn’t about anything; not an explanatory metaphor or visual aid for the theologians or a demonstration of supernatural power; it simply is! There’s no destination; no culmination; no rapture; no sheep or goats; no judgement and no heaven or hell; no reward and no punishment.

“In short, non-theistic spirituality is about experiencing the sacredness of reality as it is, grounded in human experience and the observable universe.”

“a commitment to investigating the nature of one’s own mind, and experiencing states of consciousness that are transformative, without accepting unfounded claims about the nature of reality.”

Sam Harris

Here’s a cobbled together list from a Gemini AI search on a non-theistic “Green Spirituality which spells out a number of human attributes and dispositions that don’t need any theological scaffolding to hold them up. States we can all experience without validation from an invisible God. I find this list a bit abstract but it means well as long as we don’t have to take it too seriously. For me the truest joys are in the awkward and chameleon everyday when a bush suddenly seems to burn without being consumed or a blackbird seems to be singing just to me or when the moon rises over the sea on the Lleyn peninsula. Here’s the faintly anaemic list:

  • Awe and Cosmic Connection:
  • Mindfulness and Presence:
  • Ethical Interconnectedness:
  • Meaning-Making:
  • Transcendence:

In moments of flow, of ecstasy, of vision; but also in the more mundane moments on the allotment; out foraging for blackberries and as the unexpected beneficiary of a glorious smile from a stranger. No dressing up required but we could use more storytellers, artists, poets, troupes of actors and dancers and more time to slow down and take it all in.

The sun breaks through storm clouds on the Lizard in Cornwall

Castle Class 4-6-0 No 4079 – if you can name it you probably need professional help.

In the plant world there are the exact equivalents of famous railway engines worth hanging around at the end of a windy and wet platform for hours, and then, of course, there are the weeds. Steam engines still give me the shivers even seven decades after my first illicit cigarettes on the Pines junction waiting for the Cornish Riviera express to fly past. There’s a Castle Class plant in this gallery of rogues; in fact it may even be a Pacific Class but of course, because it was expressing no clouds of steam or haunting whistle I must have walked past it and failed to notice it for nearly fifty years before I finally put the time in and found it, sharing the moment with Madame – windswept and even eager to find it so we could go down to the cafe and get warm. It’s a very rare Quillwort so if you’re a fellow trainspotter you’ll know exactly where we were.

Sometimes these excitements just happen. I’ve had to stop any work that involves bending over (so no weeding or watering) while my cataract procedure heals, and so I was watching Madame weed a raised bed of carrots as she pointed to a tall but familiar looking plant poking through the crop. We both knew it was a nightshade of some sort, but there was something odd about the flower. Putting all doubts aside, I chucked it in the bucket with all the other weeds (mostly Fat Hen) and consequently there is no photo for the record and I have to consign myself to never being able to prove its identity. * but see postscript below

Later I realized that what was odd about it was that the flower wasn’t purple and yellow like its cousin Woody or its great aunt Thorn Apple, always blowing her own trumpet or Henbane with her lace collar and Deadly whose name exaggerates her gifts a bit with dull brown flowers but still as murderous a family as you could ever hope to avoid. This shy little assassin was a Black Nightshade with white flowers who hides her poison in shiny green berries which, joking aside, are a bit safer to eat when they’ve actually turned black, and I’m furious that I failed to take a photograph because it would have been (still is I suppose) a first for me.

Before I wrote this I thought I might try to work in the metaphor of trophies and tramps but it seemed a bit of a forced image and I’ve already been rude enough about the militant trainspotting tendency. (It takes one to know one)! But the whole idea for this little piece sprang precisely from my wilful failure to notice something growing on the allotment that we couldn’t eat; threw away without a thought and yet – given a bit of a reverse ferret – turned out to be really very interesting. How many other plants live and die under the radar because they have no immediate value to us. Just for starters, many of these little treasures have had a long and valuable life as herbal remedies – phytomedicines – if you must – before they were overtaken by big pharma who may have done us all a disservice by eliminating every molecule that wasn’t on their power list. And never think that herbal remedies should be eliminated because they can be poisonous. Just think of Paracetamol; and while we’re on the subject, don’t assume that herbal remedies strip the planet of protected species because I ran a check comparing the British list of rare and protected plants with the plants listed in the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia and there was just one single species listed as appearing in both lists. We are talking for the most part about what we now call weeds. It correlates well with being old (like me) which some younger people seem to believe is contagious; crossing the road to avoid the possibility of an outbreak of wrinkles and boring stories.

There’s a whole layer of cultural history down there at our feet, and ripping it all up or poisoning it because there’s no profit in it is ecological vandalism. As we consider this growing season just ending, and the five heatwaves that turned our legumes into lectin factories making them inedible and dangerous to eat raw, it’s a moment to consider our relationship with the earth. Is it purely instrumental? or is it something more. A history; a culture recorded in remedies and songs, times of plenty and times of starvation? are we too clever by half assuming that the shelves in Sainsbury’s will always be full? What does it say about us that we’re so content to destroy the lives of plants whose names we don’t even know and whose gifts we will never be able to benefit from; new cancer treatments, undiscovered strengths and properties that might give us some understanding of plant stress and how we can overcome it?

We live as if our allotment has just two layers – food at the top and dirt at the bottom. But what about that third layer that we simply ignore. Even the earth layer has its own lively presence, teeming with microscopic life and miles and miles of fungal threads, and the surface between earth and profit deserves better than being treated as if it were a plague of squatters. Nature hates bare earth and will always fill the bare patches with plants from across the world that have names and histories and gifts to give. Even dogs know that Couch Grass has valuable uses, and Ground Elder isn’t just a pest if you’ve got gout. We have to think that in tolerating weeds we may be entertaining angels unawares.

  • Postscript

So today we went up to the allotment to do a bit of harvesting and I made sure I took my phone so I could at least photograph the wilted remains of the Black Nightshade and now it will eventually reach the official database.

There must be a story here but I don’t know where to start

So here we are back in the Bannau Brycheiniog, thirteen hundred feet up the side of Mynydd Bychan on a hill farm which is emphatically shouting “history, history” in my ear. There’s an odd feeling that this place is peculiar; not quite right by the culture of the surrounding hills. We were in desperate need of a bit of peace after months of building work on the flat during which we’d had to move out several times and equally tough times on the allotment with the heatwaves and drought which I’ve already written about; not to mention the continuing saga of the campervan engine. That’s a very inelegant sentence but it perfectly shows how stress gets inside our heads and muddles them.

I brought four books with me apart from the usual Potwell Inn clutter of cameras and notebooks, and they are respectively “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold; “The Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwest Europe” by Julian Barker and, “A History of Wales” by John Davies which is a real 750 page clonker; also “Joseph Banks” – the biography by Patrick O’Brian. I grabbed the first one, the Sand County Almanac off the bookshelf as we left the flat to drive here and I’m so glad I did. The Flora was a chance find of the out of print volume which hardly ever comes on to the market second hand so I jumped on the only available copy on the internet. The history of Wales isn’t the most up to date or indeed the most radical; less fun than Jan Morris’ – “The Matter of Wales”, less political than Carwen Graves’ “Tŷr” and less focused on hill farming than David Elias’ “Shaping the Wild”. I’ve left out William Condry’s New Naturalist volume “The Natural History of Wales because I haven’t read it yet but I’d recommend the first five without reservation, and you need to read all of them plus the poems of RS Thomas too even to catch the flavour of the debates that still burn underground like peat fires. The Banks biography is the sole English representative because I wanted to get a feel for the plant hunters of his era.

Normally I’d be out there on my hands and knees searching for plants to record; I’ve even printed off lists of possible sightings but I seem to have hit a bit of a parting of the ways – I want to explore not just the names but the science, the habitats, the uses and the whole culture. In fact it increasingly seems to me that I need to focus on the meaning – in the broadest possible sense – the meaning of plants in our culture. Hence the disparate choice of reading for our break: Davies for historical context, Banks for the beginnings of scientific botany; Barker for the many uses of plants and Leopold who – even almost eighty years ago – was asking the most profound philosophical questions about conservation in a world where even back then species were disappearing and humans were becoming increasingly detached from the natural world under the cover of progress.

….. each [professional]n his own way is a hunter. And why does each call himself a conservationist? Because the wild things he hunts for have eluded his grasp, and he hopes by some necromancy of laws, appropriations, regional plans, reorganization of departments, or other forms of mass-wishing to make them stay put.

A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold 1947

So let’s be clear. Without plants we’re all dead. No oxygen to breathe, no food to eat and an empty windswept desert instead of a green and pleasant land. The glossy prospectus of life support under a big tech dome is a fraud; there is no white coated Seventh Cavalry hiding behind the hill, and without nature we would cease to exist; without meaning or purpose.

We were children, my sister and me, walking back along the road to Pucklechurch from the Rose and Crown in Parkfield with our parents. We were replete with red lemonade and crisps. Jenny was picking dandelions and we came across an old man, possibly a farm worker or miner who could have come direct from a casting agency as a typical peasant. He stopped us with a wave and asked her if she knew what the flowers were called and she told him dandelions. He tittered and leaned in conspiratorially -“we calls em piss the beds!” Our parents made conventional end of conversation noises, gathered us up into a safe huddle and we walked on towards the bus stop. I might have been eight years old and that experience felt as if a gap had opened in the evening sky and another world revealed.

Plants and memories have a powerful aggregating force between them; they’re sticky and accumulative. Only yesterday we were walking along a narrow lane towards an area of boggy heath called Rhos Fach which I’d read about and seen on the OS map when I spotted a harebell and some lesser Hawkbit among strangely familiar grasses beneath a bank on which, fifty years ago there could have been a hedge of hawthorn; now just a few elderly horizontal branches surviving from the last laying. Somewhere deep in my brain the neurons made instant connections and I was the same child just a couple of years after Pucklechurch, lying on the same grasses on Rodway Hill, gazing at the sky and feeling, well, ecstatic. The two experiences connected by a powerful force with no name other than memory in which every sense is stored and released – colours, smells sounds; every subtlety every nuance encoded like messenger RNA searching out its target and – once found – springing into life.

We don’t any longer know how to love

Needless to say, back at the cottage I turned to the AI and quickly discovered soil type, bedrock conformation, a series of predicted NVC classifications and a list of plants recorded there; oh and the national grid reference finally to drive the pin through the thorax. I was reminded of the fictional artist Gully Jimson’s priceless comment in Joyce Carey’s “The Horses Mouth” – “It’s like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?”

In the clash between the instrumental and the aesthetic there lies our culture’s dirty secret: we don’t any longer know how to love. It’s too nebulous, too fragile, too open ended, and like apomixis (that’s the way blackberries do it), just too bloody complicated.

This isn’t an attack on botany or botanists, but it is a serious warning about the dangers of idolatry (which should never be consigned to arguments about religion). Idolatry worships the part rather than the whole; in fact you might characterise it as the all too human root of reductive thinking which in turn is the cause of so many human tragedies. A form of ethnobotany could be a way around the mountain.

And so, back to the troubling garden

It seems that there is a real story behind the uneasy feelings that the surrounds of the cottage evoked. Walking around yesterday we found sheds, a couple of abandoned rotavators, a steel shoe tree, a lead model of a horse next to a horseshoe; any number of bird boxes and seats wrapped around out of place trees, a broken beehive, empty bird cages, and an overgrown vegetable garden; walkways mown through the site but with little sign of walkers. There is a strong sense of something abandoned. It didn’t take much research to find that this was once the site of a much loved Edwardian guest house run by a woman called Rita who was also a formidable gardener. She created an arboretum, dug a lake, planted an orchard and made a gathering place for walkers drawn to the Bannau. We are among the tail enders. Everything has a lifespan, even (or perhaps especially) gardens. They’re our attempt to bring nature close and under control on our own terms which is, sadly, both beautiful and fruitless. The circus moves on; the power and beauty of the hills is stronger than our dreams of upstaging them.

Three kinds of silence

We’ve been watching the beards on these sweetcorn for a week now and this morning we harvested the first three cobs. They’re a supersweet variety and bred to succeed in the polytunnel and like so many home grown vegetables their flavour is so intense they quite different from the shop bought ones. Any allotmenteer will tell you that they are the badger’s favourite snack and we all go to great lengths to keep them out. Badgers have poor eyesight but a very fine sense of smell and if they find them they batter them to the ground and feast on the cobs. Of course sweetcorn and fodder maize grown by dairy farmers to feed their cattle are different varieties of exactly the same species, Zea mays, so just as badgers love our half a dozen plants they’ll relish a whole field of sweet treats and I’ve always suspected that the association between bovine tuberculosis and the badger is one of those home brewed problems in which you place the suspected disease vector (the badger) right next to fields of their favourite food and right next also to the cattle and then wonder how they got infected.

Whether it’s maize or sweet corn it’s a kind of grass which, like wheat and barley, has been bred over centuries into a plant that’s very unlike its original ancestor. In fact almost any cereal plant goes under the generic name “corn” which is an umbrella term that tells us nothing much about which species we’re thinking of. Like all cereal crops its greatest gift is its quality as a food and the fact that it can be stored for long periods. The maize silks are still used in herbal medicine – and it’s become a food staple of many human communities. Wheat, barley rye. rice and oats are still fundamental even to our western diets. We had our first taste today and they were as delicious as ever, smothered with butter and black pepper.

Meanwhile, on heatwave number five, we were watering the allotment yesterday morning when there was an almighty crashing sound on the building site opposite. There was a single cry of alarm and then that special silence which falls like snow as we all – allotmenteers and builders alike stood and waited fearfully . Next a car alarm was triggered and all we could see were the chains swinging gently beneath a tall tower crane. It seemed as if all work was stopped. But was anyone injured or even killed? we waited for ambulances or police to arrive but there was nothing and we turned back to watering after an unspoken prayer. Enquiring this morning it seems likely that no-one was hurt when the load, whatever it was, fell from the crane and that the site followed legal protocols in stopping all work until an inspection had taken place. It was the eerie silence that followed the crash which marked the moment more eloquently than any subsequent commentary.

And it was commentary that marked the second silence of the day and – in my view – absolutely ruined it. A near total eclipse is a big deal – I’ve seen two of them; the first as a child peering through an overexposed negative from our old Brownie 127 camera, and the second on a beach in Marloes, Pembrokeshire where a large group of us with our children were camping. I’ve no real memories of the first eclipse but the second was magnificent and very moving because although during the build-up we’d been picnicking on the beach and drinking wine from paper cups; as the darkness fell so we fell silent; each of us absorbed in the inexplicably powerful moment. Eclipse isn’t at all a spectacle to be consumed like a new episode of Star Wars; it’s a moment in which we can contemplate the universe and our place within it and yet, as we watched yesterday’s television news and the subsequent live coverage, the event was trivialised and buried alive by torrents of commentary by highly paid “personalities” who seemed to think we are so stupid we need to have the event explained to us. Nobody shut up long enough for the eclipse to speak for itself. It was mostly what Martin Heidegger (philosopher) characterised as “gerede” – idle gossip – and while we’re on a philosophical streak I may as well mention Ludwig Wittgenstein who also said famously “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”. Sadly, idle gossip is the lingua franca both of the media and the internet, whose commentators can never shut up for fear of losing clicks and I don’t exempt religious leaders from that criticism. We’d probably learn much more from these great natural events by taking ourselves apart from the crowds and contemplating them in silence.

And so to the type three silence this week. On Tuesday I was invited (as a founder member) to take part in a 50th anniversary podcast celebrating Spike Island – nowadays a much bigger creative community than the one that we, and a bunch of friends, founded in the old MacArthur warehouse on Bristol Docks. Originally three of us – the survivors – were all going to travel to record the piece in a Bristol studio but real life got in the way and we eventually decided on a zoom meeting uniting the Forest of Dean, Bath, the Quantock Hills and Bristol. I was surprisingly nervous about the whole thing – although I self opped on local radio and often used remote studios on network radio back in the day. But in spite of all the previous I’d never done a zoom call, and anxiously prepared my laptop for the occasion. Luckily I discovered before the event that my laptop camera wasn’t (may never have) worked and so I swapped over to Madame’s tablet but unfamiliar with the operating system couldn’t turn on the video. Eventually as the start time passed and went, I received an anguished call from one of the participants who said “we’re all waiting, where are you?”. So I propped up my phone in front of the impregnable tablet and the broken laptop and after a bit of even more anguished button pressing managed to connect to communion in both kinds. I have to say that once we’d got going it all went reasonably well and the producer even said thank you afterwards – perhaps she was just being kind. That signal failure completes my trilogy of silences this week. Reflecting on it; for all too many of us the world won’t end with a giant skip falling on our head, or the moon crashing into the sun but with the internet going down. Isn’t that a bit disappointing?

Let the plants speak!

Our kitchen in August 2018 – nothing changes much except we’ve now got two functioning extractor fans taking the fumes and cooking smells up the built-in flue. Only took 10 years of arguments with the landlord!

It’s early August and apart from being sweated alive by the fifth heatwave of the year there’s another sense in which it feels like Christmas every day. In these repeated heatwaves the only strategy we can follow is to keep as many of the plants alive as possible, and so life pretty well revolves around watering, cooking and preserving – and it’s worked wonderfully. Plants need water, food and sunlight, and the abundance of sunlight, although a curse through forcing us to water so much is marvellous in helping our crops to covert the water and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. Just imagine what a miracle that is; but some plants like peas and broad beans will never thrive in these conditions however hard we try to help out because, like Madame, the heat makes them feel exhausted and they give up. But others take to it like ducks to water and each day, after watering, we bring the ripened produce into the kitchen and scratch our heads over what to do with it. Fresh vegetables are an order of magnitude more tasty than the impoverished lookalikes that taste of nothing after their long journeys. Every day is Christmas day.

Today it was the turn of the aubergines and after a test run in our youngest son’s commercial pizza oven I felt sure I could replicate the burn in our kitchen, with no danger of the smoke alarm going off due to the new extractors. And so it turned out to be – the fruits – still hot from the sun – blackened and smoked gently as the insides cooked at 275 C and, as they cooled, virtually peeled themselves leaving the pale, faintly smoky flesh waiting to be united with garlic and tahini. We’ve got more tomatoes, cucumbers, figs and new potatoes than you could shake a stick at, and it’s so exciting that I just put the apron on and relish every moment as the cupboards fill with winter stores.

It hasn’t always been that easy. Something of a turning point in my life was the day (just before we had an extremely low-key wedding), when we picked 40 lbs of blackberries on Rodway Hill. There were a couple of outcomes from that day. The first was that we made a huge amount of completely horrible blackberry chutney – so bad we couldn’t even give it away. The second outcome for me was the overpowering feeling of gratitude which (being a fervent convert to extreme atheism) didn’t fit at all well because there seemed to be no-one or nothing I could thank for the generosity of those spiteful bushes. Sixty years later I’m still struggling with that conundrum having tasted some of the off-the-shelf options without being convinced by any of them.

But I can dimly see a way through the desert by repairing and joining up the broken fragments of our polarized and fragmented culture. Let’s take plants as a beginning. We casually divide them into arbitrary categories (food; wildflowers; weeds; rarities; orchids and ragwort etc.) often entirely based on usefulness to humans or potential for monetization. But all plants come from the same tree of life as we do. Some time, millions of years ago, humans, dinosaurs and plants took different paths and we’ve evolved to live very different lives but notwithstanding Darwin’s troubles for suggesting that we share a great deal of our history with the great apes, for instance, and regardless of the religious arguments about it, we all came from the same single celled organism which contained the first few chapters of the library of life which have evolved, adapted and now reside in each of us inside every cell of our body; our six feet of tightly coiled DNA. The library is the same library which mothered (each with its own chapters) the butterfly, the tiger (Tyger?) the earthworm, the edible mushroom, the lichen and last of all, you and me. It’s not necessary for us to strive to unite with nature because we are already one with her. Hugely diverse and adapted; a coat of many colours you might say but a single one and not the atomised billions of homo sapiens who dare to think of ourselves as individuals.

So after years of seeing my passion for field botany, for gardening, for writing and spirituality for anthropology and for ceramics, for science and for cooking as separate “interests” I can see that they’re all more like spokes on a wheel at the centre of which is the big question –“What’s it all for?” – and when I ask myself the big question that way I can answer with another question which, for me, removes the thorn of the first. “Why does it have to have a meaning or a purpose at all?” We could invent a multitude of possible answers to the big question but I can’t see what useful purpose it would offer.

Just out of interest I should say that this far from sudden insight was triggered by my instinctive dislike for any kind of Magisterium which almost always exists to promote its own version of an answer and to persecute in the most cruel and heartless manner anyone who offers an alternative or sometimes even a slight amendment. The lightbulb moment came from binge reading about molecular biology and the latest plant taxonomy research in order better to understand DNA and one or two obscure (to me) statistical methods. Once, however dimly, I began to understand the beauty and complexity of what goes on in both plant and human cells; I began in an almost religious way, to see all of my interests bonded together by their common structure.

The icing on the cake has been to read about the work of Stefano Mancuso who runs a research programme at the University in Florence which he provocatively calls “Plant Neurobiology”. He and his colleagues across the world have come in for a great deal of flak from the old guard because plants don’t have neurons and couldn’t possibly have brains like ours but they are able to sense problems and respond to them; communicate with and “listen” to other plants and synthesise astonishingly complex molecules. All this has brought it home to me that writing about plants as if they were part of a giant but insensitive stamp collection is doomed. Without plants there would be no trace of the human and yet plant life would go on – probably less destructive. Plants are worth so much more than being pressed into herbaria and to even begin to understand what they are, we need poets and visionary science; we need anthropologists, herbalists, first nation men and women, collectors cooks and artists. I fear that we will never find a sustainable space for humanity on the earth unless we accept that we owe it all to the plants.

Hard questions of the third kind

I have eaten 
the plums 
that were in 
the icebox

and which 
you were probably 
saving 
for breakfast

Forgive me 
they were delicious 
so sweet 
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

Following on from the previous post; I have no doubt that we can occasionally understand when someone – usually an artist – has produced a work in a deep way; I’m thinking of this kind of work in terms of beholding or revealing their experience as opposed to just explaining it; It’s ferociously hard to explain how such a thing can happen and yet William Carlos Williams’ poem “This is just to say” takes an utterly banal idea and transforms it into a shared moment. “I have eaten the plums” Is surely a love letter to an unseen lover (the assured “forgive me“) who’s not yet awake; about a liberty taken – stealing their breakfast – and then almost a haiku (delicious, so sweet and so cold) .

William Blake could venture the possibility that we might see “the world in a grain of sand” in what feels like a poetic manifesto. It’s the expression of “The hard question”. How are the sense impressions we all experience every day – cold plums from the fridge; running sand through our fingers and idly watching them fall – how are these turned into “qualia” – or as Thomas Nagel puts it “what they feel like”. The hardest question of all is how can we communicate those feelings to another person – ever? Think of the struggle we have to explain a pain, for instance, to someone else.

I used to take our oldest son, then just a toddler, up Hope Chapel Hill in his pushchair when we lived at the bottom of this tremendously steep road. Often I’d let him walk up and he was always drawn to the cobblestone gutter where he would find treasures. The tops of ring-pull tins, cigarette ends, sweet papers, leaves, pebbles and grains of sand. It could take hours and yet he was completely absorbed by them.

When we were at Art School I became equally absorbed with By Brook which is the little river that runs through Castle Combe and on through Slaughterford until it reaches the River Avon. It runs through a very lovely steep sided valley and there used to be a little pumping station – ruined by the time we found it; sitting in a clearing of boggy ground, and further upstream a disused paper mill. In those days the river ran gin clear and there were small brown trout that, once or twice, we tried (unsuccessfully) to fish for. The whole area was keepered for a pheasant shoot and there was a water bailiff that we made sure never saw. I was having a hard time and this empty spot had a healing effect on me.

I was particularly fascinated by the contorted and interlocking roots of the trees on the sides of By Brook, and made many drawings of them (bottom left above). The top left photo was taken almost sixty years later and you can see that the water is now milky and probably eutrophic from farmland runoff.

I’ve never forgotten the experience of being there but I’ve never found a way of expressing it; the sound of the breeze in the Hazel bushes, the occasional staccato alarm call of a pheasant, the rich smell of the grass and the water and my struggles to make pencils and heavyweight paper speak it all. I’ve returned there in my memory so many times and although for me it’s an effortless transition in time to revisit the memories, the expression of them in whatever form always seems to slip through my fingers. On Tuesday our visit to the Victoria Gallery to see Norman Ackroyd’s exhibition The transience of light was both deeply moving and extremely challenging. How did he pull it off?

So after a great deal of huffing and puffing and moody introspection we went up to the allotment to tend our thirsty plants today and I came upon a whole collection of squashes and pumpkins which had been fattening up relentlessly, hidden by leaves and just out of sight the whole time, and then a kind of resolution to my challenge was staring me in the face. The poems and the photos seemed to arrange themselves and the whole argument is there in cryptic form at the top of the page. It says ‘stop trying so hard!’

It all reminds me of a time when against all odds I threw a large raku pot – nearly a foot high, using crank mixture – a clay that’s so full of grog (fired clay sand) that it takes the tips off your fingers. I can remember every moment of that experience, and what seemed most miraculous to me was that I just instinctively stepped aside from it and let it form itself. These were still my own fingers but they were not moving at my behest but that of the clay itself. I can remember the sense of wonder as it grew taller and thinner. It seemed to me on reflection that the harder I tried the less likely it was that I would succeed and so I discovered how stepping aside could be the final flowering of technique.

The idea of never ceasing to try but never trying seems more like a Zen koan than a piece of serious advice and yet there’s much wisdom in it. It’s like St Augustine’s much misunderstood saying “love, and do what you will” which, when it’s properly unpacked actually means that if you love – I mean really love – then you will always want to do the right thing. What it categorically doesn’t mean is do whatever you want in pursuit of love. Whether it’s eating a cold plum, throwing a pot, growing a pumpkin or drawing a river sometimes – no, almost always – it’s best to get over yourself and let the experience speak for itself without you feeling you need to explain it or help it along. Maybe, and this is just a wild thought, what sometimes happens is that “what it feels like” can pass between us through the work of ghostly resonances where we are more often content with mouthfuls of dust.

It’s alright!

Dunno why this random group of plants caught my eye yesterday, but there they were minding their own business on top of the little freezer and they seemed lovely, I mean really beautiful. A bunch of Basil leaves- they’re for a panzanella; the remains of the Dill we used in making dill pickles this week and two South African plant cuttings from our neighbour Charlie. Madame’s an avid collector of house plants.

Just a kitchen snapshot

There’s a strongly aesthetic side to growing and cooking. We do both, and the uniting of the plants we grow with some jiggery pokery on the stove always feels like alchemy. Something emerges which is even more than the sum of its parts. Our neighbour on the allotment grows figs, and we exchange successes – like her lovely figs in return for our shining aubergines. Knives, pans and chopping boards occupy the same place in a culture as the brushes and palette knives of the artist or the laptop and camera of the writer or the secateurs and the spade on the allotment. Technique (and I’ve paid a price for this principle) is the invisible foundation of all creative work. The whole point is that technique should never be sufficiently in focus to be noticeable. It should be obvious that grandstanding around the world like a carpenter, wearing a belt filled with tools for all to see is not necessarily a sign of giftedness.

I’ve had a few days off to do some intense reading which is easy(ish) to do up to 25 C but if the heatwave gets any worse my brain just gives up at 26 C. I was studying DNA in a modest sort of way because I never had the faintest idea how it worked or what it did. I was curious to address the vacancy, but the books I was reading all seemed to mention, or even to major on the thorny subject of plant intelligence. I’ll spare you the technicalities but during my searches, I came up against a word, a conceptual word – “Qualia” which is the quality of experiences which are just so difficult to express to another person. As for plants and their feelings the jury looks set to die of old age! I’ve stolen the word from the Magisterium but they’ll never know because they think I’m the cleaner. When I talk about eating a crab for instance, I’m filled with the memory of a day we ate a crab on the beach at West Bay; breaking it up with a couple of heavy pebbles and washing it down with a bottle of wine we’d floated in the sea on a length of string. Or up in North Wales the memory of a long conversation with an old lady who patiently explained to me why crabs are seasonal and how to tell the difference between a cock crab and a hen crab. Or of the time when Madame (being pregnant) was suffering from pica – in this case instanced by crab meat, and my efforts to meet her needs with hardly any money. Would 2 oz do the trick I wondered . Mercifully it did.

So when I talk about eating crab; my side of the conversation is filled with happy memories which I don’t explain because you might die of boredom. You on the other hand might have eaten a wrong’un years ago and can think of nothing except a long night of retching. Short of a game of verbal ping-pong there’s no way in a normal conversation to convey the “quale” – pronounced kwaalay – in anything like a satisfactory manner. But that, of course, is precisely what the poet, the artist or the writer is attempting to do every day whilst always knowing that the dice are loaded against success.

However today we went to an exhibition of Norman Ackroyd etchings and drawings in the Victoria Gallery in Bath, and I was quite overwhelmed by his work. Let the phenomenologists, the philosophers and the brain scientists tug each others beards like their counterparts did at the Council of Nicea as they argued fiercely about the exact wording of the Christian creed before they agreed on a solution that nobody understood which completely resolved the issue. For my part I believe that Ackroyd had worked the magic in spite of being dead for two years and I was able -for an hour or so – fully to engage with his experience of the light, the sea and the rocks around the Scottish isles. These wonderful etchings are not “about the sea, the sky and the rocks”, neither are they two dimensional renderings of the landscape; they are accounts of the artist’s inner experiences, the “Qualia” of those journeys which by some miracle I was able to access. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it always leaves me tearful. Being human – and that’s what this blog is all about – is difficult and at times incredibly lonely. More often than not our conversations are hit and miss – mostly miss – approximations in which, on reflection, we say too much and too little at the same time. His was the skill we’re all reaching for; the skilful act of communicating the qualia, the boring everyday moments on which a sharp ray of sun suddenly falls and illuminates a vision that lingers forever in the memory. Great art isn’t ever about anything its raison d’etre isn’t teaching us anything new, it’s about the certainty which comes mysteriously in music, in art, in poetry and song; in cookery and gardening and in walking that in spite of all the evidence it’s alright.

Botany on the Damascus Road

We’ve just got back from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) and things are getting desperate. Our friends, 1000 feet up in the hills, have already seen one major fire come perilously close to their smallholding which has hundreds of trees that they’ve planted and a small patch of ancient woodland. Despite two large water cisterns, and a smaller tank they came close to running out of water for their allotment, for their house and for the sheep, pigs and hens they keep last year, and things are worse now. Back at the Potwell Inn the allotment is suffering. The legume crop was a write-off, although a climbing french bean is hanging on in there and the polytunnel tomatoes have stopped setting fruit after the first truss. We’re having to contemplate a complete reset of our crops in the face of the inevitable heatwaves and droughts to come. We’re all living fear of the water to the troughs being turned off because we’re a third of the way through our stored water and most allotments have no stores at all. What’s clear is that the heat loving plants – cucumbers, aubergines, courgettes and squashes are loving it but the cool temperate plants are suffering.

There’s talk of forest fires joining up in France, but this is really about global warming and economic and societal breakdown and the last deadly throes of neoliberal greed as exemplified by the brutal and illegal wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. There is a very disturbed young man in our street who will lean out of his first floor window and scream at the top of his voice “the earth is burning” for hours . Sometimes the dog walkers and picnic loungers on the green will join with the sunbathers and shout abuse at him. But he isn’t wrong and taking an ostrich attitude isn’t going to turn away the wrath of the damaged ecosystem.

So, it being too hot to do anything much more than keep the plants alive I’ve been forced into a big think. My lifelong passion for plants was really rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of their lovely forms and colours. Later on I got interested in identifying them, photographing, painting and writing about them and of course growing and eating them. But I’ve always had a particular love for the urban rogues and weeds; the plants that love to send their roots into places other plants just couldn’t tolerate. I love the survivors who cling to life by modifying their life-cycles and surviving as seeds and underground rhizomes during the hot and the frozen seasons.

So I’ve paid particular attention to the plants that grow outside our flat in the most hostile positions on and below a tall south facing wall. They survive not only drought and frost but inundation with weedkiller, vinegar and salt not to mention the attentions of the local council workers who scrape them up with metal tools; but still they grow back with almost heroic stoicism. The kind of stress that would send tender F1 Hybrid into seizure and death seems to be an accelerant to these guerilla weeds.

Over the years I’ve been so focused on the identity, form and appearance of wildflowers that I’ve barely thought about how they do their thing. I was aware that the study of plant DNA has driven any number of family changes as we realize that relatedness isn’t all about appearances and so many different species might share the same evolutionary outcome without actually being related at all. So a couple of weeks ago, and totally fed-up at my ignorance of anything to do with DNA or the difference between chromosomes and genes I resolved to find out more.

There were two slightly different results of my binge reading. Firstly there were proper eureka moments as I began dimly to understand how plants reproduce, grow, deal with attacks, weather and soil differences with the truly breathtaking assistance of their DNA. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it became impossible to see the life of plants in the same way, once I understood that they possess amazing powers of sentience with which they are able to negotiate with their broader environment, I could almost feel the tiny electrical charges flowing through the plants and triggering the needed response through a series of chemical, biological interactions initiated by a jigsaw like connection between the smallest molecular components of cells. If you think plants are wonderful to look at, knowing something about their invisible inner lives will blow your mind.

I talk about this almost as a kind of conversion experience – hence the Damascus Road of the title. All my spreadsheets and careful labelling of thousands of photographs suddenly feel like butterflies pinned to a board. If plants can sense what’s going on around them, anticipate and initiate an appropriate response, then they’re doing the kind of thing that we do but using a very different set of “plantish” properties which are bafflingly and beautifully complex. The western world’s so-called “tree of life” with diatoms at the bottom and us (and some kind of god) at the top sets us into a colonial earth. But there are some first nation cultures which see the plant world as part of the community. Without plants at least a couple of the drugs that keep me going are plant based or synthesized and that alone seems to make thankfulness appropriate. It doesn’t seem entirely bizarre to say thank-you to the cabbage you’re cutting or the carrot you’re pulling. This afternoon I made fig compote and that (the flavour, not my cooking!) deserves a round of applause. Plants give us so much; nutritionally, aesthetically, and for healing us because many cancer treatments are synthesized from plants. They’re amazingly clever at making the kind of molecules that we can use to our own benefit. The kind of attitudinal change we desperately need if we’re going to avoid being caught up and killed in another extinction event would be to treat our plants – and not just the delicate hybrids that feed us but all our plants with the respect that they deserve. Maybe those roguish and indestructible weeds have the exact secret we need to ensure the survival of the earth.