Tag: green spirituality

A bit of a Marienbad moment in Gloucestershire.

The floow deer herd is back out in the park

After all the drama of repeated heatwaves, the weather has finally returned to relative normality and we’ve been rejoicing in the rain. We’ve had a few big thunderstorms but surprisingly in spite of very heavy rain, only the top few inches of the allotment were wetted adequately. We’d prepared the ground by emptying the waterbutts at the end of the last hot spell, hoping they’d refill – but then, when it was too late, I discovered that the gutter on the shed had come adrift of its mountings, leaving the water to travel uphill. Looking more closely I could see that an inexpensive redesign would capture rain much more successfully. The two butts on the greenhouse were working better but again the gutters are pitifully small and don’t cope with precisely the kind of downpours we most need to store.

This summer we came very close to giving up the allotment together. The hard work is OK but this year with Madame’s knee replacement and me visiting just about every department in the local hospital we ran into a wall. Happily, with just a couple of minor procedures still to do, we’ll be back firing on all cylinders by next spring, which just leaves the results of several months of neglect to sort out. The battle is 90% mental but for the first time in months it feels like we’re winning. It hasn’t all been bad on the allotment. The soft fruit didn’t do well at all but the fruit trees – apples, pears, damsons and plums have all yielded record returns. Even the poor old potatoes managed to give us a half-decent crop after the dry conditions, and the newly planted raspberry canes are thriving. Last night we ate our own potatoes, runner (string) beans and chard with stewed plums for pudding. Allotments are very friendly places, and it’s rare not to exchange surpluses with our neighbours. It seems to me that the allotment looks after our bodily and spiritual needs while certainly my intellectual (mind) needs are well catered for by plant hunting and studying their habitats and habits.

Anyway we decided to give ourselves a day off on Monday and we took ourselves over to Dyrham Park which we haven’t visited over the summer because it gets so overcrowded. Actually that’s not quite true because we made a couple of early visits to White Field to search for the orchids. At this time of year the pasture is cut for hay and normally we’d turn our attention to fungi, but apart from one fairy ring (Marasmius oriades) there was nothing much to see.

Black Worcester pears on a southwest Facing Versailles espalier

Anyway we wandered down through the terraces and visited the formal gardens which (sorry no photo) have matured brilliantly. We were a bit dubious when they were first laid out but now they look lovely. On the outside wall of the big house there is a fabulous example of espalier pruning which we were lucky to have explained to us by the head gardener a couple of years ago. This Versaille method is based on very short fruiting spurs, but by doing this he explained that you could take the espalier to a larger number of tiers. He’d spent some time actually learning the method in Versailles.

Crataegus orientalis

Below the formal garden we walked around the large pond which was choked with blanket weed and then onwards to the small pond surrounded by mown grass with its own waterfall. It was crystal clear, and we bagged one of the seats and sat quietly watching the other visitors. Then, inexplicably, we both said exactly the same word – “Marienbad”. Couples standing still, casting shadows, nor speaking – a kind of freeze frame – and I thought how I’d first climbed over the wall to the park something like 65 years ago, long before it was turned over to the National Trust. We’ve ridden horses there in the 1970’s and spent many hours cycling back and forth between Bristol and Dyrham to visit friends.

There’s a question that often gets asked.“What would you say if you met yourself at the age of 14; what questions would you ask?, what advice could you give?” and sitting there in the warm sun, I felt that there was no need for any kind of meeting. We were, in the deepest possible sense both there! connected in an almost surreal sense every version of “me” over the years, sharing the same moment. It was very beautiful.

Later, after a glass of apple juice and a shared sandwich, we wandered up the quieter back route to the top alongside Sands Hill, passing at the very bottom a rotten tree trunk which had been left available to house and feed every kind of wood boring insect. The photo shows the human palace lurking behind the insect paradise.

I was going to shrink this one down, but changed my mind

As we climbed steeply upwards I stopped to record a couple of everyday trees and soak up the view of a small stand of very tall pines. Then. right at the top we met a couple of volunteers who said that there was a group of deer just beyond us. The whole herd had to be slaughtered due to TB three years ago, and although we knew they were being replaced we’d looked in vain for them in their paddock. Then suddenly there they were; four larger stags and a young one which we could hardly see. We looked at one another silently, deer and humans, without fear or hostility. I think two magic moments in one walk is more than any of us have the right to expect.

Hefted

If you know Mendip at all well, you’ll know that this thatched building holds a stack of sheep hurdles on Priddy Green

Nostalgia can be a poisonous affectation. It’s all too easy to use the wistful, often wilful mis-remembrance of the past to reduce the past to a coddled egg; good to eat but with no future. Real history is troubling; often leads in two directions, and ambiguous to a fault. On the other hand, the sense of rootedness in a place, or in a community in which the two ideas often overlap, is foundational to our practise of being human. You’ll probably think I’ve lost the plot if I write about Cornbrash, Brandon Hill stone and Bath stone and yet the glimpse of a building made with any of these three will as good as a six figure OS grid reference. They would not just signify districts but the era they were built in and the likely social class of the people who lived in them. Add to that a dialect, a particular way of sounding a troubling “r” in Gloucestershire, or a single sentence in Bristolian would tie the speaker down to something like a parish. There’s a sawmill in Wick and when I go there, I could curl up on the counter like a cat – I feel so at home. This isn’t something you can fake. You’d have to live not just any lifetime, by my lifetime to pick up the resonances.

I understand this better now than ever as I’ve learned about plants, where they grow and what they prefer to grow in. As I child I learned to love lying under beech trees growing on a moss covered bank on the boundary of our grandparents’ smallholding. My mother’s whole vocabulary of local names was learned amongst the winding lanes of the Chilterns. We looked in vain as children to see what Granny Perrin’s nest was, and why our mother could see it when we couldn’t. Even the roads had their own language of shiny flint pebbles, and hiding in the depths of woods once worked by bodgers who turned chair legs and wheel backs was Margaret’s Beer Shop where we could drink cherryade as a treat. I came to know what I now understand as acid heath, on Rodway Hill as slowly I came to understand how localities have their own unique floras.

Mendip is famous for its abandoned lead mines and again there are plants that can survive heavy metal pollution and environments which have their own special designation, Calaminarian, which is how the calamine lotion that our mother dabbed on our chicken pox spots brought zinc from the ore into Mr Ladd, the chemist’s armoury. Nowadays my old friends are the pavement scoundrels, constantly harried by the council’s strimmers. The poor council workers don’t seem to know about tap roots and seeds, or annuals and biennials and so they knock em all down like skittles and within a fortnight they’re up again. Then, of course there’s the riverbank with its own royal flush of perfectly adapted plants. Stones, dialects and plants store the local memory as certainly as books. Footpaths and shortcuts, streams, hiding places abandoned dramlines and climbing trees marked our territory and as we spread our wings, our bikes were the means by which we invaded and occupied other peoples’ places.

So much, then, for a rather lyrical take on the sense of place. The Greeks might have dignified it as the genius loci but we were unconscious of our hefting. It was just home as far as we were concerned.

A couple of nights ago we watched Peter Hall’s film “Akenfield” which I’d seen years ago but completely forgotten. I read the source and inspiration for the film , Ronald Blythe’s book “Akenfield” when I was in my twenties, along with Henry Williamson’s long cycles of novels, and I read J A Baker’s book “The Peregrine” a little later. In truth I consumed voraciously just about any scraps of natural history writing I could lay my hands on. Akenfield is a groundbreaking oral history of rural Sussex at the beginning of the 20th century and both a celebration of the skills of farmworkers and denunciation of the appalling conditions in which they worked. The extractive philosophy of modern agriculture was cultured in the minds of landowners centuries before the first tractor appeared on the land. I watched most of the film near to tears.

But one of the happier lessons of the film was that whatever happened to them, the farm workers had song. They sang in church, they sang on army service in the first world war, they sang in pubs and they sang as they took the harvest in on wagons loaded high, with the children riding on top as a treat. I suddenly remembered that my sister and I had shared that triumphal ride in Stoke Row one hot summer’s day, and how insecure and prickly our perch was. It was the strangest feeling to recall the stooks and ricks of the days before the chequerboard plastic wrapped fields we see today. That overarching sense of history is disappearing and, because of our failure, we’ll never be able to bring it back.

Some forms of nostalgia are a positive waste of energy except perhaps that we still, we always will have song. Barely fifteen years ago I sat in the kitchen of a farmhouse in one of my parishes and watched, through the window, as a procession of combines, trailers and tractors drove along the lane, headlights blazing, to come in for supper and then go back to harvesting the fodder maize that feeds the cattle. Today we went for a drink in the pub in Doynton. The village has changed beyond recognition but if the flow of traffic could be staunched for a while a couple of horses and their riders persuaded to pass by and a rookery installed to provide the music. If a sunset could be organised to bathe the cornbrash walls with evening light and if the conversation dropped just a tiny bit in volume and we stepped outside, I think we could almost see the ancestors in the shadows.

Yet we still have song. Those who believe that their mission in life is to make life harder for us should beware of our spiritual and revolutionary songs of resistance. They too have a long and deeply local history; often rooted in the sense of place, hidden in the DNA of songs and carols that still speak deeply to the most irreligious of us. Of all the things I miss about my ministry it’s the raucous Christmas carol services, packed to the gills with people who were drawn back year by year into the old ways; the funerals where for a fleeting moment we could believe that all would be well and all manner of things would be well as we sang Abide with me. But perhaps most of all on Easter Eve when I was able to sing the exultet; a long plainsong solo hymn of hope for the coming year.

Sunset through the campervan window at Priddy

Hello stranger!

I think I must have some kind of aura that encourages complete strangers to come and engage with me. I’m not claiming any supernatural powers here, just the very ordinary skills of getting alongside people. I’ve spent hours on empty railway stations listening to very troubled people (more often than not, other men) who just want to unburden themselves. Maybe it’s my general scruffiness or perhaps because I seem not to have my head stuck up my arse and so I represent the unthreatening type. I’m short and a bit overweight and only Madame could see my gleaming virtues – and that’s not all the time! Funnily enough I was just typing that sentence and the doorbell rang. It was a young delivery driver and as he helped unload our groceries he opened up at length about his sadness that his army career hadn’t worked out as he hoped.

But this gift – if you can call it that – seems to be extending itself to plants. This year I’ve spent hours and hours searching for different species of fleabane. I’m ashamed to admit that I was provoked by the sheer competence of our County Recorder – call it the positive side of envy – and decided that I needed to get my head down for some serious plant hunting. So far I’ve found five of them, four of which I’ve found the jizz for – that’s a term birders use to explain how they can identify a peregrine falcon diving at 60mph without thinking about it. But having done all that work; photographing, measuring (size matters) and even buying a couple of second hand books, blow me if one of them didn’t pop up on the allotment next to ours. We’ve had Peruvian apples, rare fumitories, stone parsley and bullwort all dropping in to say hello and this week after an eighteen month stalking of a Hungarian mullein on the canal, two of them popped up on other allotments on the site and I’ve no idea why, except for the absence of herbicides and a general aversion to tidiness. It feels as if they’re coming to me for a friendly welcome.

Plants are surprisingly mobile and some – like my fleabanes betray something of that in their names; Canadian, Mexican, Argentine and Guernsey – usually referring to where they were first found. But some also are brought in by the plant trade and another one I saw this week – an Eastern Catnip – moved from Eastern America to a nursery near us and then strolled across the towpath to set up shop in a crack in the pavement. As I’ve recorded all these migrants it’s clear that words like “native” need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Even the sycamore is a bit of a boat tree, brought in from overseas, and the Sweet Chestnuts here and in the mountainous parts of France and Corsica were probably brought there by the Romans and have now embedded themselves in the “local” cuisine. Those who carp on about strangers and foreigners should obviously get a life and stop prowling suspiciously around the subject like a goat meeting an unfamiliar food for the first time. Looking back to some arcadian ideal time forgets that Britain (or if you really must – “Ingelland” could as easily be described as a desert, a sea or an ice sheet and the original inhabitants coming from almost anywhere in the world, east of Greenwich. We’re all more or less foreigners here; on this “septic isle” as William Connor of the Daily Mirror once described it back in the days when the Mirror was a proper newspaper.

Anyway that’s enough nostalgia for a bank holiday weekend. Things have been happening on the allotment at the dog end of one of the worst growing years we can remember, and after Madame staged a major rebellion when the idea of packing it in was mooted, we’ve been back on the job non-stop, clearing the ground ready for autumn and winter. I was watering the borlotti beans this evening when I realised that one of the key arguments in favour of gardening for improving mood is that caring for just about anything seems to release a flood of endorphins into the blood. The feeling of warm satisfaction I get when I’ve given some time to listen to someone is almost identical to the feeling I got tonight watering the beans which were looking a bit sorry for themselves. Today we filled the pond, weeded the fruit bushes and I fed and mulched the summer raspberries after giving them a good soak. We rarely talk while we work, but it’s always good to be there. There’s a lovely biblical image about being at peace that goes

Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid,

Micah 4:4

As it happens we have both a vine and a tall fig tree next to our plot and the heat this year has yielded a bumper crop. It’s been good and the good is invulnerable to the evil we see day by day on in the media.

Purple Loosestrife

Bye By Brook – finding the well

By brook at Slaughterford

We’re not done with you yet sir

Last Friday I got yet another message from the hospital requiring an urgent phone consultation on Tuesday regarding a test I’d failed miserably. I imagined a large number of health professionals rushing to the red phone. to deal with my case. I’ve soaked up an incredible amount of NHS time in the last six months and I’m so grateful for it. It’s an odd privilege to be fast tracked twice in a month on suspicion of completely different cancers but I’ve noticed that the doctors are constantly changing and often poorly prepared for our encounters, and so there’s never time for them to sit back and observe, chat, prod – all the things that I know from long experience are essential to drill down to the heart of the problem. But, being retired, have got time to explore and read the NICE guidance about the drugs which I’ve been prescribed and I know that some of the problems I experience are actually caused by them. They’re called iatrogenic symptoms – caused – if you like – by the very medications that are supposed to keep me well.

Time is possibly the greatest unused skill in the caring profession. I’ve never forgotten a pastoral conversation with an oncologist who was being broken by his workload, and who told me that at its worst his first thought when a patient came into the room was how can I get rid of this person? He wasn’t bad or lazy, just exhausted, burnt out and lost. There was never enough time to listen deeply to the person in front of him When I was running writers’ groups I got very used to the back pocket poet syndrome. Someone would sit silently in the class for an hour, too shy often to make a contribution and then they would produce a crumpled sheet of paper just as they were leaving. Such contributions were often very good.

Smiling, or being smiled at by strangers is a rare treat in a paranoid world.

David Isitt, one of my finest teachers would sometimes gather a group of us, all mature students on retreat, and on a fine day we would sit under a tree and he would run one of his CAT sessions. CAT stands for close attention to text and we could sometimes spend an hour pondering the multiple meanings of a single phrase. Close attention is a powerful tool for psychotherapists, doctors, partners and – as I proved to myself on Monday – for home bakers. On this the fourth or maybe the fifth heatwave of the summer, I had a sourdough loaf overprove and almost collapse. That one was turned into breadcrumbs, but then I needed to make bread urgently and so I did what I should have done all along, and I paid close attention to the rising dough. In the 25C heat, my usual 36 hour timetable easily condensed into a single working day and I came out with a good sourdough loaf. On another occasion and another retreat, a group of us – all strangers to one another – were invited to join hands in couples and behold one another. It was uncomfortable, challenging and revelatory to lock my gaze with a stranger and allow some sort of understanding to pass between us. The absolute opposite of hurrying down the street wearing headphones and looking at a mobile; avoiding any eye contact. Smiling, or being smiled at by strangers is a rare treat in a paranoid world.

Anyway, enough of all that; because the real point is that all this unsettling news has let the black dog back into the room and I spent a night that combined 3 hours sleep with about five of restless pondering which rewarded me with something of a vision. My mind drifted back to my early twenties when I had a long spell of what was diagnosed as phobic anxiety. I became convinced that I was about to die, and this actually changed the physical appearance of everything around me. Even the leafless winter trees looked like the bronchioles and alveoli of dying lungs. Eventually, under threat of being thrown out of art school I saw our GP and he told me that although he could give me some medication, it would be better for me – that’s to say Madame and me – to take ourselves off to the pub for some human company. His advice worked perfectly and within a few weeks I had a visionary moment and thought to myself – of course I’m going to die, but not yet! Ironically, some months later I was at a party, standing at the top of a rather grand Georgian flight of stairs holding a glass of wine and he came up and said to me “I see you took my advice” and promptly toppled cartwheel style back down the stairs, as drunk as a skunk.

However, apart from reminding myself how much a state of mind can even change the appearance of the world, I remembered how I began tentatively drawing again sitting on the side of By Brook, the small river that rises in Gloucestershire, runs through the Castle Combe valley, and below the farm where we were living; eventually joining the river Avon outside Bath. I made a laborious drawing (using hard pencils) of the knotted roots of a tree on the opposite bank – a drawing that sadly I can’t find anywhere- so I had to settle for a photo I took in Slaughterford last year. It was the drawing that unblocked me. Back in the day there were wild trout in abundance but nowadays it’s a shadow of its former self – milky, polluted and desperately in need of recovery. Fortunately there’s a group of volunteers improving water quality by improving the flow with rills and riffles, but I imagine many of the problems are caused by excessive abstraction.

Old bull looking at the sunset – Llyn peninsula this July

So in my mind’s eye, during my sleepless night, I was back there on the bank, and the clearest notion came to me that whatever my state of health, my creative wellsprings are still intact. My body ages – as it must – but creatively I’m still young, still capable of being inspired and driven by the sight of an unknown plant, still able to write to the best of my ability and, to use a phrase I overheard on a bus many years ago, to tell shit from pudding. Of course it’s a bit harder to get back to that place than it once was but real creativity has always been the combination of inspiration with technical understanding. Without technical understanding, inspiration is a mess of unresolved thoughts. Without inspiration, technique is dull and dead. I think of myself as being profoundly fortunate to have (at last) both – and now I know where to find the well.

The road-bridge at Slaughterford

So where is my existence inscribed?

It’s been a very strange few weeks. I remember vividly from back probably twenty years ago, sitting in a white painted consultant’s room and waiting for him to give me the results of my endoscopy, wondering is this how it always finishes up …… being given the bad news by someone half my age and who barely knows me ? and yet – as it almost always does- leaving with good news that might yet be bad news. Endlessly left processing the words of others for hints of what they know about me but choose not to say out loud. Ironically, it’s always harder to process good news than bad. I left the hospital yesterday after being seen by five doctors and two consultants over the last three months all of whom pored over my arms and my back with their cameras and magnifying glasses and – after I’d signed the consent forms and had the risks explained to me in kindly detail – pronounced the lesions benign and put their scalpels away for another day. I’d prepared myself for the worst and then suddenly I was back on the bus stop with a reprieve. Those youthful months, driving a tractor in full sun with not so much as a smear of sun cream and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts had written themselves on my skin. I am inscribed with the follies of my days of vigour.

So after a ridiculous lunch of favourite things we drove across to the lake at Newton Park and walked together in something approaching silence as I processed the good news; unpacking the bits of the future I’d stowed away in case I wasn’t going to need them. It’s not over yet, of course. I’m still waiting for the results of blood tests, poo tests, urine tests and other tests as yet not invented as the doctors figure out why I’m anaemic and exhausted. I want to throw the word iatrogenic in their faces. “You’re crushing my heart with your beta blockers and extract of foxglove and blood thinners and all the other speculative miracle cures and all I’m suffering from is the casual and unthinking cruelty of the powerful!” I’d like to get my hearing back but the NHS can’t afford the technicians to fit the hearing aids they’ve already prescribed. I’d like to get my glaucoma laser-fixed as promised and I’d like it if the NHS dentist it took ten years to find would use something less dangerous than mercury amalgam to fill my teeth when she wouldn’t dream of treating any private patients that way. But I can’t say any of that to them because any sense of grievance is so dangerous; so poisonous. I’ve seen peoples lives destroyed by the sense of grievance – it seeps through the bloodstream and damages every relationship; sucking the joy out of life and crushing any residue of the lyrical, any feeling of connectedness.

So we go to the lake and sit there quietly watching the swans and moorhens and soaking up the intense late summer light sparkling on the leaves, the grass and the water. The bleached trunks of the dead oaks lining the path never looked brighter or more lovely. And I’m taking photographs of the plants we find – another part of me inscribed with something better than the abbreviated AI notes on my NHS records. The trace of my life divides into two further streams. There’s this blog and then there’s the record of plants seen, loved, identified recorded and photographed. One stream of words and another of data.

Then this morning I went into the kitchen and to my great delight discovered that the sourdough starter I’d completely neglected during these last months has come back to life, greedily digesting the breakfast of dark rye flour that I gave it when I got back from hospital. The future begins with cooking, eating, and sharing. Every saucepan, casserole and bread tin beckons the way forward. I will bake bread, I think, taking a small step forward.

I like the west – if ever I think about going somewhere it’s always west of where I am, and I like water, although I struggle with the notion that nature is somehow beneficial. How does that work? But being in nature is an active process, never passive. Water is where we begin our lives; swimming in an ocean of amniotic fluid. Birth is hard and I wonder if our attachment to water, to waves is a kind of yearning for the way back to that primal, protective warmth. Being born is irreversible and so water and the earth, being closest are the next best thing. Could it be that our first memories are inscribed in water and earth? Could it be that the water and the earth remind us of the before and beyond of our existence and that – surprisingly – we find it comforting?

It’s late summer so there are berries. We passed (and I photographed) spindle berries, hawthorn berries, sloes, damsons falling across a garden wall, blackberries and of course elderberries, which I forgot to photograph because stupidly I neglect the things I know best. There’s no better investment in the future than making jams, preserves, pickles, sauces and ketchups. Somehow they throw a line of engagement into the unknown, an investment in the likelihood of our being around to eat them. Hiding amongst them all are the darker natural notes – deadly nightshade, enchanters’ nightshade, woundwort, bittersweet which all prefer the shade and which it pays to know well. Your liver will thank you for your diligence.

But above all, we are inscribed in the people we love and who have loved us, occasionally for almost a lifetime. Parents, grandparents and (sometimes) children too, our partners of course who carry the bad and good of us because they love us, and the multitude of people we encountered and paused to be close to – to take their load if only for a while; to share a life giving thought or to dare to challenge. Our teachers, mentors and friends are inscribed in us as we are in them and it’s good!

Follow the raggle-taggle gypsies O!

29th July 2025

Gypsywort on the Monmouth and Brecon canal

Contrary to the opinions of those who know nothing and prefer to rise above the facts, Gypsies, Romanies as they prefer to be called are a good deal more sophisticated than most people imagine and have an enviably long oral history and tradition that can’t easily be researched by outsiders because it’s not written down. As one of those outsiders what little I know comes from my association with them whilst I was a parish priest. I got to know one family very well and we liked and respected one another. One young woman joined the congregation and despite having been taken out of school as soon as she reached puberty, she had a razor sharp mind; clever, thoughtful and highly intelligent. I won’t go any further, we’re still in touch.

Anyway, my object here is not just to write about the Romany traditions because, being on the outside, I know next to nothing about them. What I do know is that there is a folk medicine associated with travelling people, similar possibly to the Welsh traditions associated with the Physicians of Myddfai and based on streams of human knowledge and experience that could even be traced back to Greece and India.

Look through any list of British plant names and you’ll see lots of plant names ending in “wort”. It’s not the case that every plant with the same “wort” name ending had medicinal uses, some were used in foods and as flavourings; but it’s safe to assume that these plants were singled out for some usefulness which we occasionally no longer know. The herbal medicines of travelling people to which I want to add the owners and crews of narrow boats working the canal system must have been centred on what was “to hand” as they moved about the country. It wouldn’t be impossible to imagine that, as they travelled, they scattered seeds and useful plants on the roadsides and towpaths either in throwing out waste or providing later for their own use when they needed them.

There’s a well recognised problem that maps of plant distribution are liable to reflect the distribution of field botanists as much as the distribution of plants, and so I have to confess that our own records feature large numbers of canal and riverside plants because that’s where we most often walk. On the other hand, the kind of plants we most often record are specialists for that kind of environment so with that in mind I can say that I’ve only ever seen Gypsywort on the canalside towpaths, and it does have some interesting medicinal properties still being exploited for the treatment of breast complaints, thyroid problems and as a sedative. Later on in our walk yesterday we found Water Figwort –

  • another plant used to treat skin complaints including haemorrhoids, hence the name figwort, because this complaint was so common and piles were known colloquially as “figs”. Then there was Purple loosestrife, which was used to treat diarrhoea with its (unproven) antibacterial properties but I can’t find any reference to sedative properties so the strife was probably at the other end, so to speak.
Imperforate St John’s wort.

Imperforate wasn’t, it seems, used to treat melancholy but it was part of a treatment for TB and kidney complaints – very common ailments of poverty. Of course like drystone walling and unicycling it’s all very well having the kit but you really need the expertise as well – but travellers and bargees didn’t have much choice and so were necessarily using these herbal remedies because there was no other show in town. I wonder if anyone ever took a companionable stroll down a riverbank and recorded what a bargee and a Romany had to say about the plants they found. Sadly mutual distrust would have made such a conversation impossible and now it’s probably too late; but I’d really be up for that walk! These days plants are spread around today by cars and boots, not to mention nurseries and “wildflower meadow” seed mixes, much as they were spread in wool shoddy, ships’ ballast and manure in the past and so it’s getting harder to track how things get to where we find them, and so we’ll probably never know whether there’s a significant correlation between canal flora and bargee medicine. As for Romany medicine there’s still a small chance of uncovering some of the lore – in fact I’d be surprised if big pharma hadn’t skulked around the margins looking for something new to patent, but for now it’s more the sense of history that engages me. Our regular 5 mile stroll around the riverbank and the canal towpath is – in Alan Rayner’s neat distinction – a walk in nature rather than a walk through it, and is also a walk in history in the very same sense. “If these stones could talk” we sometimes say without thinking that indeed these stones, these plants do talk in their own quiet stoneish and plantish ways. I’m seized with the desire to understand more deeply how these plants were used, when they were used and whether they worked beyond the placebo effect. What’s certain is that when a plant is steeped in wine or boiled in water, all manner of active ingredients apart from the target property are released and mingled into the dose. Our reductionist ideology wants to reduce everything to one solitary potency but that’s never the way plants work. I caught my GP scanning through his computer during a consultation when suddenly the Gemini AI symbol appeared. I challenged him gently over it and he confessed immediately that he often uses AI as an aid. That’s only OK as long as you can absolutely trust the veracity of the data it’s working with.

AI can accomplish in seconds what folk traditions take decades or even centuries to establish and prove – and that’s a good thing. What’s lost is the sense of connection to the sources and the loss of deep experience in building connections.

How old is old?

Madame and New King Street, Bath, 21st July 2025

Madame and me were sitting companionably on a bench in Henrietta Park when I suddenly blurted out “maybe this is what we’re meant to do“. I’m having real trouble adjusting to getting old and I think I must have been doing a bit of subconscious bargaining with the grim reaper – “Look I’ll just sit around staring at the wallpaper and shouting at the telly if you’ll leave me alone and go away!” Madame – not surprisingly – gave me a funny look and the subject was dropped. There is nothing more remote from my ambitions than giving up and staring at the wall, and yet it’s all too easy to accept the general view that old people should shut up, stop moaning and step aside from the industriously youthful as they go about their important business at 100mph. “Oh dear”- I’m inclined to brood – ” I’m getting progressively deaf and without nightly eyedrops I’d probably get irreversible glaucoma, my asthma’s getting worse and the medication maintains its iron grip on my heartrate; oh and there’s the skin cancer and the oesophageal problems waiting like hungry dogs on the threshold and my knees hurt. Actually that’s the core of another argument against assisted euthanasia viewed as a form of equity release by helpful relatives. The next morning, with nothing further said on the subject, we both woke up with the same plan. Let’s renew our gym subscriptions! And so we did.

Good ageing seems to be far more about what we think of ourselves than what other people think about us. I’ve got some big plans, all of which involve getting about and thinking straight. For instance I’ve written almost a million words on this blog without the slightest financial support of my loyal readers who have more sense than that. I’ve built a database approaching 1000 plant records and later this year I’ll have identified 500 species of wildflowers – all of which gives me immense joy. I recently read a newspaper article suggesting that age is just a number and – well – it is a number in one sense, but more importantly it’s a usefully predictive number whose predations can be ameliorated, softened and reduced when you realize they’re not a script. The key to a happy life is having some agency and the nerve to use it when the need arises. Most of the things I can’t do any more are also things that I’ve had the privilege of doing and enjoying in the past.

And so to the photograph and its five subjects which include four plants and a building. Even in a small patch of weeds there’s a question to be pondered and the question with this photo is “how old is old?” , and it turns out that I’m by far and away the youngest participant in this little tableau. Once upon a time I used to think of wildflowers as universally ancient species – like first nation people; pristine examples of the way things were intended – (not sure by whom or what!) – and to be the enduring model for the future and end-point of environmental restoration. But that turns out to be nonsense. Here’s the batting order for our arrival in this country, leaving aside the little brown clump of annual meadow-grass which has died of drought but will be back next year as sure as eggs is eggs, and pretty well anywhere in the world with a temperate climate.

  • Photographer (me) 1946
  • Mexican fleabane 1895
  • New King Street, Bath 1764 – 1770
  • Ivy-leaved toadflax 1617
  • Green bristle grass 1666
  • Sun Spurge pre-1500.

However there’s a huge flaw, a kind of category error in my reasoning here because my six objects are all (including me) both species – types – of plant, building, human – and at the same time instances; unique, one-off and temporary. However much I’d like to imagine that I’m the single permanence in a world of impressions in reality I’m just another fleeting instance . The great fire of London may have ravaged our distant ancestors but neither me or the green bristle grass were there to witness it; nor were we there in the 2nd World War to witness the bombing of the neighbourhood or the drunkenness, the brothels and the stinking dye-works of the Georgian period. All that happened was that we passed one another in a quiet and sunny street and I took a photograph because I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at. My greedy ego wants to erect a monument to perpetuate the big moment, but the street that day was a river of un-noticed instances in full spate and all I took to the party was my temporary existence and my momentary consciousness of an unrecognised plant that isn’t even particularly rare.

So it turns out that firstly I’m not really a spring chicken and secondly the idea of a consistent unchanging natural world is a load of cobblers. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it more elegantly than I could ever manage – “Nature is a Heraclitian fire”; turning, evolving, climbing and coiling and occasionally flashing a blinding glimpse of an ungraspable truth. Even in my senescence I’m still a part of it; still in the dance albeit rather slower these days.

I’d never seen a specimen of Green bristle-grass, and I even thought for a moment it was some kind of meadow foxtail coming in from the cold. I just love the way that plants travel around the world, recognizing no borders and setting up home wherever they find a congenial place- even if that’s just a crack in the pavement. Looking at my little timeline I realize that we’re all boat people when push comes to shove. None of us have any right to puff out our chests and declare that we’re indigenous as if that carried some kind of mysterious moral weight. On my desk in front of me, four tiny (1mm) seeds have fallen out of the plant. I can take them and sprinkle them in the pots outside the door and see if they grow because they’re the plant’s message and investment in the future, although some would argue that would be an unwarranted interference in nature. I’ve had a couple of days of pure fun, photographing, measuring and recording something of a rare event.

The earth will get along with or without me and I’ve always hated self-pity in others, but meanwhile there’s work to be done. Every day’s an adventure if you get your head into the right space and stick to the things you can do rather than those you can’t.

Just bants mate, no offence intended.

Part of the Lleyn Pilgrim’s Way near Rhiw

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

GK Chesterton “The rolling English road” 1913

I suppose it was just what might be called light hearted banter, but Chesterton’s suggestion that ancient roads and tracks are the result of drunkenness is so way off beam. It’s also evidence of a mindset that’s at least one of the underlying causes of the state we’re in. The truth is, our forerunners and ancestors had an utterly different relationship with the landscape and there’s a far more important reason for winding roads than the suggestion that they were too pissed to make them straight.

We just got back from north Wales where the second half of our stay was in a rather inaccessible cottage on the steeply sloped side of Mynydd Rhiw below the hamlet itself. We were also on the footpath that’s been designated as part of a Pilgrims’ Way. Let’s not get too carried away by that designation because pilgrimage is becoming big business for pubs, cafés and anyone with an empty transit van willing to shuttle pilgrims and their luggage between sections. However Bardsey has been a pilgrim destination for centuries and these miles of track intersect with any number of sacred places. Since Chaucer’s days pilgrims have been a grand mixture of the pious, the curious, the culpable and lost souls looking for some spiritual treasure.

By reason of age, infirmity and knee replacements, the steep path became – for five days – the only way back to the car, and the best available nature reserve. I completely fell in love with 400 metres of stone wall and its associated plants. Breathless and a bit arthritic I had to stop every ten or fifteen paces in any case on the extremely steep slope and so a bit of botanising was inevitable. I even made a list, and I was necessarily directed into a thoughtful appreciation of the people who built the accompanying wall. Five feet high in most of its length and huge boulders- the largest at the base. Some of the stones were so large they would have needed the combined strength of half a dozen strong men. Some were obviously there already.

These walls are quite different from the many other regional styles, and the reason of course is that walls were built with whatever was immediately available and to-hand. In Wiltshire and Gloucestershire there’s a lot of flat brash; and in other parts there are flat slabs of slate. An experienced stonewaller could probably tell you where a particular wall could be found – just from a photo.

But look again more closely, and what you see is the most marvellous habitat for insects and small mammals. One highlight of our time there was to find a couple of bits of scat – poo – that possibly came from a stoat; black, and rich with the blood and bones of its prey and pointed at the ends as we discovered is the sign of a carnivore.

In the lee of the wall a pilgrim might have sheltered from the storms that regularly blow in from Hell’s Mouth bay below, and of course a large number of plant species were enjoying the comfort and warmth that a wall brings. But more important to my argument here was the sinuous course of the wall as it descended the hill. The reason wasn’t hard to imagine. The builders obviously took their stones from next to the proposed course of the wall, thereby creating a pronounced hollow, the grass punctuated by protruding clints waiting to turn an unprepared ankle. These builders must have had the strength of oxen. It’s all well and good to lift 200 lbs a couple of times in the gym, but to lift similarly heavy, muddy and irregular stones all day; time after time must have shown awesome stamina. However now and again they must have encountered rocks weighing far beyond their capacity. I’ve seen it suggested that they could have shattered stones using fires and water but here on the side of a mountain there were none of the makings for such technology, and so they just went around them. They read the landscape and bowed to the facts on the ground.

There’s a whole spirituality in that obedience to the landscape; a kind of Tai Chi approach to building a wall; bending and turning to the superior force of nature. When the Romans came they used their technology to dominate the landscape, building straight roads across the country. It’s a habit we’ve never shaken off in spite of it being so wasteful of human energy. We waste our strength and precious resources by demanding that the earth bends to our will, when the ancients accepted that as a part of the whole of nature we’re limited in what we can demand. So here are some of the perfectly ordinary plants that lived under the shelter of the wall, only occasionally observed by pilgrims in search of the meanings that have always just slipped away. As RS Thomas described it in one of his poems, it was like putting your hand into a hare’s form and feeling the warmth although the hare has always just fled.

The long view

The Snowdon range from Rhiw

We’ve moved just over ten miles to a very small cottage on the side of the hill above Porth Neigwl which, in English is rendered as Hell’s Mouth on account of the number of ships wrecked there in South Westerly storms. We’ve been down to the long dune fringed beach in severe storms, and seen how the sea can be almost overwhelmingly dangerous. The Welsh name might also be translated into gateway for the clouds – a name we can also vouch for. This part of the peninsula, with Mynydd Rhiw on one side and Mynydd (mountain) Cilan on the other, seems to attract and embrace banks of low cloud and sea mist in its long arms, mist that, with luck, will burn off during the day. There’s an irony in the photo because we struggled without success to make the telly work last night and it wasn’t until we looked at the photo that we realized there was a satellite dish on the wall. Wrong socket error!

A third quarter moon above Aberdaron last night

We’re looking down from the garden towards Sarn y Plas below us; the cottage owned by the Keating sisters who allowed R S Thomas, priest and poet to live there after his retirement from Aberdaron. The church authorities refused to allow him to remain in the vicarage next door in spite of their having no use for it. Madame noticed some days ago that it was in disrepair, and a drive around it today confirmed the very poor state of the roof. I find it very hard to believe that the church had so little understanding of how celebrated he was as a poet, even though they must have known that his eccentricities led many village people to dismiss him as a “miserable bugger” . The church on the beach in Aberdaron does its best to give pilgrims somewhere to see and hear the reality of his poem “The Moon in Lleyn” , and there’s a small upper room in Llanfaelrhys church with a peaceful feeling and a fine view of Bardsey. In the churchyard his wife Elsi, his son Gwydion, the Keating sisters and the poet and acquaintance, Jim Cotter are all buried. It’s a windy and often cold place for visitors to meditate. Even Sarn y Plas, his old retirement home is under plans to open it to the public, but there is no sense that the church authorities or the village itself is prepared to treat him and his work as much more than a side-hustle. The old vicarage could be redeemed with some restoration and a permanent exhibition. The Keating sisters, who lived almost next door at Plas yn Rhiw, on the remote estate where we’re staying, were equally disliked by many for their opposition to potential caravan sites in the area and even bought up land and gifted it to the National Trust to prevent any further development of tourism. They united in opposition with RS and many others to a nuclear power station being built in Edern up the road, and to military development down on the dunes where bombing practice took place during the war. RS was rumoured to have supported the arson of second homes in the area but no evidence was ever presented. He was a fierce Welsh Nationalist without doubt, leaving ample evidence, sadly, for the the fact that those with most to gain from the destruction of this beautiful place wanted him and his campaigns gone for good. The church, as chaplains to the status quo, wrung its hands and hid the bibles in case anyone ever read them properly.

So, inspired as I’ve been by his brutally honest poetry, it’s pretty cool to be here in the midst of it. I’ve already mentioned his poem “The Moon in Lleyn” which shares a kind of melancholy tempered by hope with Matthew Arnold’s poem “On Dover Beach” which could as easily have referred to Porth Neigwl. But before we get too carried away by the melancholic solitude of this extreme Westerly point, it’s sensible to remember that beneath the hillside where I’m typing this, lies a lode of manganese ore that led to one of the biggest manganese mines in Europe for a while. For all I know this cottage could have been built for a quarryman and his family who would have lived here many decades before RS came to minister here. I could walk across the top of the mountain, which isn’t very high at all, and in ten minutes drop down into the valley beyond, where there are abundant signs of the old industry. I suspect RS would have hated the clanking of the overhead cable lift down to the waiting ships below; the pollution and the whole bleak rust-belt atmosphere of it. However passionate a priest he was, he would never have regarded himself as a missionary; more of a Jeremiah perhaps!

And today, sitting in the pub opposite the church with the smell of hot cooking oil drifting past and hundreds of tourists looking for something to do, I know he would have hated it just as much. The environment has recovered from the mining and could recover perhaps from mass tourism and caravan sites, although there’s talk of another nuclear power station on Anglesey. Despite the best efforts of RS, the Keating sisters, the National Trust and thousands of Welsh Nationalists, his world was a temporary one. The other night we were driving down to Porth Oer for a walk and we even surprised a hare which ran down the road in front of us and bolted into a field. Another poem brought to life. The soil here is slightly acidic and I’ve been finding Heath Bedstraw and Harebells, not to mention orchids on one of the dune lined beaches. It’s still awesome but overhead the bombers still make training flights

It would be easy to put on a pessimistic air and claim that – therefore there’s no point in resisting change – and our local (but thankfully no longer) MP Jacob Rees Mogg was dubbed minister for the 18th century by one journalist for wanting to reintroduce imperial weights and measures. But battles such as engaged RS can last for a generation or even a century, outliving our own disappointments but ultimately vindicating our campaigns. There’s no need to accept the judgements of our contemporaries who will, soon enough join Dante’s bishops in the circle of hell especially reserved for those who didn’t give a shit. All we can do is hold on to the good we can still find and keep the hope alive for the turn of the soft withdrawing roar of the sea.

Oh and this – one farmer’s investment in the future:

You in your small corner and I in mine

The Mud Cliffs of Aberdaron

This is one of my favourite beaches and it’s also one of the most complicated in geological terms. I looked it up on the British Geological Society website which I often find very useful, but this one had my eyes glazing over in a paragraph. It’s very much like looking at the side of a closed book and knowing that the hundreds of pages all contain important writing, but being unable to open it. You can see the stratified pages and even work out that some are made of different paper but other than that it remains as comprehensible as the Dead Sea Scrolls (unless you’re an expert, you’re delusional or you’re in some kind of counselling. All I know is that it’s eroding at a rate of knots and that it appears to be mainly mud with boulders which range from car crushing to the things so pretty you put them into your pocket and then wonder later why you ever picked them up. Here there are topaz and serpentine and bits of manganese ore, but mostly mud. When I saw the bright yellow flowers growing there I just had to go and look, but I also had to pick my way through great heavy lumps of the stuff. It’s a hard-hat area for sure!

I ask myself what kind of plant would pick a completely unstable seawashed near-vertical cliff to set up a family home? The answer, of course is in two parts. Firstly the plant didn’t actually choose to live there, the clifftop where it was previously growing happily just collapsed on to the beach. Part two suggests that possibly dozens of species fell over and most of them died. The survivors – so far as I can work out – are all perennials, and they are all able to spread vegetatively – so they take a packed lunch with them if a lump of cliff soil comes down with them: and here’s the rogue’s gallery:

Clockwise from top left, kidney vetch, field sow thistle, sea mayweed,sea plantain and coltsfoot.

You may think this is a pretty pathetic way to spend an afternoon on the beach and, in the light of a brilliant book I’m reading at the moment, at least I’m not straining medieval latrine waste through a sieve to see what grains the deceased were eating. Each to his own, I say. I’ll be writing about all this again no doubt. but for the moment I’ll just say that plant hunting is much more than ticking species records like so many steam engines. The plants on the cliff are perfect examples of what I mean because I (maybe you too) just have to ask myself- how did you get here? There’s always a story and I’m a storyteller so I always want to know why? and how?

Last week, walking down past the site of the old riverbank gasworks I started to record the plants I was seeing. I won’t bore you with another list, although you might be interested to know that Figwort is so-called because its fruit looks rather like a small haemorrhoid and fig was one of its folk names for reasons you won’t want to think about. Anyway the riverbank was lined with plants and among them were a very pretty hybrid dog-rose and some lemon balm – oh and tansy as well as weld. I can see how the weld got there because Kingsmead had a dyeworks and weld provides a yellow dye – a very smelly process I read. Tansy was used in folk medicine, lemon balm is reputed to keep flies away and lady’s bedstraw smells lovely and was apparently used to stuff mattresses back in the day; possibly with an addition of fleabane. All seemed to have a history but I was puzzled by the lemon balm and the rose, so I got going on Google Gemini because I had a story in my head about a young couple scratching together the money to buy a tiny cottage between the river which flooded regularly and the gasworks which must have smelt horrible and produced foul air twenty four hours a day. My couple were making the best of a bad job by cultivating a little garden on the riverside. Sadly my fantasy collapsed at the first hurdle because there never were any houses on that stretch of the riverbank. So my next narrative is of fly tipping bargemen either chucking their waste over the side on to the riverbank or growing their medicines wherever they could find a suitable spot to plant them. Naturally there’s no way of telling what the real back-story is but there is a more prosaic explanation because the site is now very close to the council recycling depot. Who knows??

But there’s another aspect to this that we need to pay attention to, which is that the whole issue of how plants wind up where we find them is fascinating and complicated. A few weeks ago I finally recorded a Hungarian mullein flowering on the canal miles and miles from any other similar plant. It’s not a bit of use telling it that it shouldn’t be there because it’s an event comparable to spotting a white tailed eagle over Bristol. These things shouldn’t happen but they do – very occasionally.

The title of this piece is “You in your small corner and I in mine” and it comes from a children’s’ hymn I was obliged to sing many times in Sunday school. I quote it because looking back it seems that one of the more sinister purposes of the whole cultural apparatus of church and sunday school is to ensure that we each stay in our own small corner. You don’t want to be too big for your boots, a smartass, all fur coat and no knickers, or jumped up. Best stay where you are; no past and no future because there’s nowhere better than home sweet home, nowhere more comfortable than your own small corner. Fortunately they didn’t send the plants to Sunday school and when things got tough they moved on somewhere else – with nothing more than the mud in their roots. “Weeds, we call them”, says the Telegraph in thundering denunciation. I beg to disagree!