Tag: green spirituality

Before your very eyes – Cheshire cat plants are the lost smiles of nature.

If you’re up to speed with the latin names you won’t need me to tell you what they are. I’m using the common English names because they’re the place most of us start our journey as well as expressing the poetry of nature.

Actually (so far) one of these plants – the one at the top left – hasn’t yet joined the ranks of the disappearing but it’s still early days in the crisis of species extinction that’s barrelling down on us. So on the left, top to bottom there are the Small Scabious, The Sheeps-bit, often called Scabious as well, and the Devil’s Bit; ditto. The one on the right is a Common Restharrow – which was the initial impetus to write this post. I’m writing about these plants, and the reason I think you should be interested too is that seeing them is like looking at the prelude to a slow motion car crash.

I wonder if there was a smidgeon of irony in choosing bonfire night to launch the latest Red List – or to give its full name “A new vascular plant red list for Great Britain”. I can hardly imagine the great British public queueing around the block to get a copy before the ink dries, and it is very technical (but over the years I’ve already put in the hard miles); however it’s a duplicitous ten quid’s worth of ebook masquerading as a scientific survey when it’s really a requiem for a disappearing earth. Every paragraph is damp with tears – it’s the saddest list of names you’ll ever find in a book about plants.

Here’s a Google Gemini summary of the findings:

Increased Threat Level: The proportion of species assessed as threatened (Critically Endangered, Endangered, or Vulnerable) has increased 26% (434 species) are now classified as threatened, up from 20% in the previous 2005 list. A further 140 species are listed as Near Threatened, suggesting their conservation status is of concern.Widespread Declines: Many plants that were once common and widespread in the countryside have continued to decline and are now assessed as threatened.

So let’s start with the larger picture at the top of the page, in a way that’s also a defense of English plant names. The name Common Restharrow at least paints a picture. Having driven a little grey Massey Ferguson 35 and towed a chain harrow to aerate and tear out the thatch of dead grass whilst flattening molehills I get the joke. If I’d been doing the same job a century ago and leading a horse-drawn harrow I might have called the plant “rest horse”, because this little plant in a typically tangled mass can stop a harrow in its tracks. I’m thinking of the rain soaked agricultural labourers in Peter Brooks’ film of Ronald Blythe’s book “Akenfield”. Ononis repens defines the plant’s place on the spreadsheet down to ten decimal points, but fails to tell the story. Of course, unlike my Fergie, a giant turbo charged tractor would pass over without noticing – but it wouldn’t need to notice any more because Restharrow is disappearing altogether. It’s been moved up the parade of shame from “least concern” to “vulnerable” under the onslaught of intensive farming. I can still take you to see it, but it’s mostly on the coastal headlands in west Wales and Cornwall at the field edges, beyond the reach of sprays and ploughs.

And that’s where the sadness comes. The loss isn’t just technical – an entry on a spreadsheet – but a loss of memory, of relatedness, of history; it’s personal. Sun, wind and rain; strolling and rolling together with Madame; hours, days and weeks of searching followed by the moment of joy in finding. These are not the simple pleasures of an ice-cream at the end of the day’s plant hunting; they’re the joys of complete focus and engagement; of falling in love. This is a big deal.

In a recent posting I was writing about human grief in a very allusive way (which I hinted at in the title), and in parallel, I can’t stop wondering whether the loss of meaning when we lose someone close to us isn’t just damaging when what’s lost is a part of the physical world in which all our memories are embedded. In Stoke Row on, the edge of the Chilterns, my grandparents had a smallholding. More even than remembering what they looked like I can’t escape from associating them with the Beech trees that surrounded their cottage; from the sight and smell of the paraffin stoves on which granny cooked, and of the rich oily smell of chicken meal. I remember that the first squirrel I saw was a red squirrel, and I remember the line of trees at the back which my Mum would examine and proclaim that there was rain over Granny Perrin’s nest. My Mum’s favourite flower, she would say, was Lady’s Slipper – but which – of about ten alternatives did she mean? The orchid is now extinct so that leaves nine. When she died my sister and I were trying to decide where we could bury her ashes and we did a bit of research to see if we could return her to her childhood home. It was a powerful blow to discover that the Crest smallholding is now covered with an industrial estate. In fact it was even more of a bereavement to discover that I would never see the tarmac road dressed with flint pea-gravel again, nor gather primroses nor help to gather prickly and itchy hay to be stacked in stooks and ricks.

So let’s go back to the three Scabious, only one of which (top right) is really a Scabious. The other two, united by their similar appearance and vibrant pale blue-violet colour, kept me bewildered for several years although, once you know how, they’re worlds apart. I was always dazzled by the name Devil’s-bit. Such a plant must be special, I thought – like Viper’s Bugloss and Deadly Nightshade; it’s the names that draw me in like a moth to a flame. But Devil’s Bit and Sheep’s-bit never seem to grow side by side so the moment of revelation is more likely to happen in front of a decent macro-photograph or, in my case looking at the illustrations in Collins Wild Flower Guide and seeing – actually noticing – for the first time that the stamens on Devil’s-bit are like little mallets and on the sheep’s-bit they’re tiny little trumpets. Oh floods of joy! except what I recall more than anything else is where they grow, and they grow there because they are perfectly suited to their homes; to the weather and climate, to the soil, and to the grazing or cutting regime under which they can thrive. Change any one of those things and they’ll likely dwindle and disappear – not waving you might say – but drowning. One blisteringly hot day in the midst of a drought we shall go back and they won’t be there any more.

Maybe the flowering plants are nature’s way of smiling at us. I used the metaphor of the disappearing Cheshire cat’s smile at the top. Perhaps it’s the canary in the mine; whatever – it’s nature sending us a message that when the flowers go they take the joy with them.

Thrift growing on a clifftop in St David’s Pembrokeshire

Somewhere between the recycling depot and the destructor bridge there’s a spirituality of hope – but I can’t find it.

The new Destructor Bridge

Bath is a city divided by the river. Walking west to east along the towpath between Windsor Bridge and Churchill Bridge you follow the northern half of the city which bears the postcode BA1. BA1 is posher than BA2 because it’s got most of the expensive and Georgian parts. Then, at Churchill Bridge – (I’m sensing a bit of a pattern here because you will already have passed beneath Victoria Bridge) – it all takes a bit of a dive on the northern side as you pass the bus station, the railway station and the Southgate shopping Mall and then Royal Mail sorting office before you approach the end of Pulteney bridge where (if you dare) you can pop into the public loos over Waitrose and change back into your Jane Austen inspired Emma costume or pretend you’re Knightly according to taste and preference.

In many cities they demolish the old and build the new on top but in Bath, given that the tourist money has come from the old, for several centuries, they built the heavy industry and the ugly/smelly bits across the river out of sight. The Destructor bridge linked the upper Bristol Road to a giant incinerator which was next door to the gasworks and just along from Stothert and Pitts where they specialized in heavy engineering; cranes; bridges and transport across the British Empire. As industry died, plans were hatched by friends of the developers to “improve” the city by demolishing older buildings in favour of concrete tower blocks. You can read about this in the excellent and angry book “The Sack of Bath” by Adam Fergusson. We bumped into his daughter once in a pub in Hay on Wye and immediately recognised one another as kindred spirits.

Sorghum? where the hell did that come from?

It just so happens that we live near the towpath – just far enough away to avoid the smell of sewage as long as you hurry past a couple of the outflows in the summer. The towpath is my plant hunting ground; the place which never fails to reward me with something new; often a squatter or a vagabond. I reckon I could easily account for 50 species in my records, probably more. On Friday I went for a walk along the path to clear my head. On the opposite bank they’re clearing the old gasworks site in order to build hundreds of new flats – the river view would increase the value of an old air-raid shelter into six figures. The noise was horrendous, with drilling, piling and lorries everywhere. The spirit of the old destructor bridge lives on with a twenty first century sound-track. On my side of the river I passed the recycling centre which is joined by the relatively new version of the destructor bridge which clung to its name but lived up to its reputation when they discovered it was a bit too long or maybe too short when they came to lift it into place and retreated bloody but unbowed for months as the designers licked their pencils and tried to find someone to blame. Fortunately it wasn’t called the Prince Andrew bridge because that would have taken nominative determinism to the level of farce.

But I was there clearing my head because the previous week we had attended the funeral of a young friend, just 40 years old from bowel cancer and I needed to find that kind of safety in numbers that lets me escape into a spreadsheet for a couple of hours. Walking past the destructor bridge and the recycling centre seemed to be hauntingly significant as I recorded and photographed the ordinary, everyday plants that most of us ignore as if they were strangers in the street. Ivy leaved toadflax, cocksfoot grass, alkanet, broad leaved dock, ribwort plantain, blackberry, ivy, herb robert, false oat grass, buddleia, marsh figwort, common ragwort; red valerian, groundsel, bilbao fleabane, gallant soldier, pellitory of the wall, mugwort, tansy, several kinds of dog rose and annual mercury. I fear I’m writing a book of remembrance for the weeds I pass in the street as the climate catastrophe intensifies.

We tend carelessly to describe grief as a kind of temporary and solvable disturbance of the mind. Time, we say, is the great healer. But it’s not, I want to scream. Bereavement. and the grief that explodes in us when it happens, more closely resembles a stroke. It destroys memory, reshapes the world in unfamiliar ways so we can’t recognise the places we once knew. The loss of a limb just as the loss of someone we love, can’t be mitigated by positive thinking and we don’t get over it – ever.

And I feel as if I’m suspended between the grim spirituality of destruction and the optimistic recycling of fading memories. The river becomes the Styx in this uninvited metaphor. The noise, the roar and pollution of the bulldozers and lorries on one bank and on the other the recycling centre where we take the things we no longer want – to be reprocessed into something else. On the one bank letting go completely and on the other, clinging to the hope that something may be retrieved while we rather desperately make records and take photographs, out of which – one day – it might be possible to build a spirituality of hope in a world where God – like Elvis seems to have left the building.

Creeping Thistle – Cirsium arvense

A little death – no not that kind

The gracious muddle that I prefer to write in

It’s not that I wasn’t warned – WordPress has been telling me for ages that something to do with Google apps was about to stop working but, being both lazy and unable to understand most of their technical information I ignored it and put it aside with letters from the bank and HMRC.

I ask this as a kind of rhetorical question: what could cause you most distress? …. a diagnosis of some rare but curable disease or losing your phone? Having been on three fast-track referrals for suspected cancers (none right) in as many months I can tell you that my world ended momentarily when I clicked on WordPress yesterday only to be told that “it” (no amplification) was no longer supported. It took a few minutes of intense meditation and heart-rate control to determine that the bereavement was far more limited than the extinction of ten years of work. The only thing that had happened was that a small shortcut app to the blog has been discontinued following a bit of a theological row between several behemoth sized companies about the number of blogger brains you can arrange on the head of a pin.

The remedy for this temporary extinction event was simple. I just had to search for the Potwell Inn and up popped my site with everything apparently working. However, my insatiable curiosity soon got the better of me and I ended up searching for my blog on Google Gemini, the AI app where I received a full report on the Potwell Inn which described all of my topics of interest in detail and (I thought) rather approvingly. There was a tendency to centre things on my more recent postings which gave the location of the Potwell Inn as Doynton – a small village near here where I once (maybe 50 years ago) did a talk for the young farmers but where we occasionally visit the local pub which I’m happy to give a shout-out to. The Cross House does some good food in a lovely atmosphere but it’s not the Potwell Inn, largely because the Potwell Inn – in the form that I write about – doesn’t exist anywhere except in my imagination and in my memories of HG Wells’ comic novel A History of Mr Polly from school days where it was a set book. The mere mention of the author and title should alert you to the archaeological nature of my affection for a short novel that, as a very shy and bewildered; possibly neuro-diverse teenager, built up as a safe space in my mind.

So the bad news for those of my readers who have wasted time searching for the Potwell Inn (one actually turned up on the allotment one day, and another wrote to me about one of the several imposters that actually exist in bricks and mortar) I’m sorry. The Potwell Inn is just a mental bolt-hole for an undiagnosed neuro-diverse old bloke, tumbling at speed towards his 80th year. On the other hand everything else, everything I’ve ever written about is real. Madame is my real partner of 60 years (we met when she was 15) we really have an allotment and all the plants, fungi, places and adventures are true, the campervan and it’s multiple vicissitudes is real too. So the really amusing fact is that Gemini got everything completely right about the Potwell Inn apart from one very important detail: it doesn’t exist.

Now I always thought that the power to confer existence on a being – and even the word being seems to confer some kind of existential reality – but stepping away from that whirlpool – the power to confer existence is reserved to God, or the Tao or some kind of immortal, invisible, ineffable superpower. If you look for Google Gemini in the scriptures you won’t find it lurking anywhere in the prehistory before Adam and Eve had to get their kit on in a hurry and Cain murdered Abel. I mean, seriously, Google doesn’t figure before sex and death (the subject of the only joke I can remember my lovely psychoanalytic psychotherapist Robin cracking. I’d told him about a dream I’d had of walking down Hotwells road being followed by two elephants. He replied with “I’m a Freudian, they must be sex and death!”)

Anyway, I think I’ve uncovered the Achilles’ heel of the whole AI bubble. It confers existence where it has no right. We avoid UPF’s – Ultra Processed Foods- but they only kill us one at a time. Ultra Processed Facts can kill whole families, cities, cultures; in fact there seems no limit to its potential for harm. Going back to the bible just for a moment (I promise) you might wonder why idolatry gets such a bad press; even making it to Moses’ ten most wicked things in the Guardian. The answer is that what idolatry does is worship the partial instead of the whole incomprehensible but beautiful thing. It takes the easy way around the mountain.

So to get back to the Potwell Inn, you’ll see one category that I never use – it’s the one entitled Uncle Jim. He is the violent drunkard brother of the licensee of the fictional Potwell Inn, known only as the fat lady. Gemini, by the way, can’t bring itself to use the word fat and substitutes plump thereby daring to change the text! Polly accidentally removes Uncle Jim from, well- life I suppose – in a farcically comical fight which accidentally gives him a new identity. I don’t use the Uncle Jim tag because in my version of the Potwell Inn he’s gone forever, vanquished and washed up on a beach wearing the wrong jacket. All other contenders for the Uncle Jim slot are automatically given life-bans from my pub. The little river runs gently by, unpolluted by agricultural runoff and raw sewage. Beavers build their dams upstream and wildlife flourishes on the banks. I just need one place in my head where the darkness has no dominion.

Not the Potwell Inn

Autumn continues to come good.

Well the last ten days were a bit of a challenge but at last the polyps (six more of them, including a real biggie) have been removed from my colon and my system is almost recovered from fasting followed by 24 hours drinking drain cleaner and a morning under sedation at the local hospital watching the job being done on a big screen. I found out later that they’d given me a combination of pethidine and midazolam which were the reason I was able to not wriggle/scream/ or change my mind. As is the nature of these drugs I can barely remember what went on and as for the bus ride home it’s blank. I can remember the exact moment they wore off, though, as if a curtain was lifted and when I read the consultant’s notes I had the usual post-operative WTF? moment. On the plus side the (award winning) team were lovely and kindness itself.

So …. the campervan was fixed on tuesday after being recovered for the second time with a non functioning clutch. On Sunday we checked out Morrison’s garage at the Mall and they still sell LPG, so we’ll be ready for the next adventure as soon as they re-open the road through Pilning, and today we had our flu and covid top-ups and pressed a big bag of apples for juice during the afternoon.

Having decided to carry on with the allotment we’ve been working hard every day getting beds cleared and prepped ready for planting up. There are over a hundred broad bean plants of different varieties growing steadily in the greenhouse in their root trainers and very gradually we’re getting back on track. It’s been a magnificent year for the apples, and all of the trees planted in 2021 have fruited this year, which has created a new challenge for us because in spite of my careful records, it looks as if the nursery had mislabeled some of the trees, and in one row of five the first and last had been wrongly labeled – so Winter Gem and Grenadier had been transposed. This was the first time we’d been able to see the problem. The red- skinned apple on the left was one we inherited and we’ve never known for sure what it is but have gone (provisionally) for Ribstone Pippin and the green one on the right is Winter Gem which, ‘though it doesn’t look all that nice is actually delicious and very fragrant. The red spots on the skin are caused by a reaction between oxygen and the skin as the apple ripens off the tree.

Apple identification is a difficult skill to learn because it includes consideration of the horizontal and vertical section of the fruit; its shape, whether conical or round; exact description of skin colour; streaking; degree of greasiness; flowering and ripening times, the colour of the exposed fruit and the degree of russeting and you have to do a lot of it before you can be proficient. We spend a lot of time on the National Fruit Collection website – it’s extremely thorough and well worth bookmarking.

Anyway, while I was feeling sorry for myself a very divisive philosophical issue came up on the allotments when a member wrote a rather cross Facebook message about “rubbish” being “dumped” along the fence line at the bottom of the site. Madame absolutely forbade me to respond, but I feel safe here to write that there has been a growing problem, and distance, between those allotmenteers who believe you are only closer to God in a garden as long as you’ve slaughtered every blade and leaf of plants which you didn’t grow for food or aesthetic pleasure. Wild animals too, but especially badgers rats and foxes, oh and squirrels and mice – oh alright then – cats too are not permitted either. As for insects and above all caterpillars, need I say more?! At the greener end are those who, like us, keep a trail cam to enjoy the nocturnal visitors (which also include deer); we control the rats by never chucking the remains of Friday night’s takeaway on the compost heap because we know that rats originally came from India and love a curry. We have a scuzzy looking pond in which rat-tailed maggots can grow into hoverflies, and we allow lots of weeds to stay – especially nettles – because some rarish butterflies love them, and some lovely seed-setting grasses for the birds to chomp on. We obviously don’t want the Whites to eat our brassicas and so we net them carefully. Sweetcorn needs fortifications to keep the badgers out and so it goes on. Our allotment is, by the standards of the evangelicals and fundamentalists of tidyness, messy; but here’s the point. Nature just loves messy, and over ten years we’ve been visited by a dozen relatively rare plants which stay for a year or two and then move on. There was Peruvian apple, Stone-parsley, Bullwort, A rarish form of Fumitory, and others too. All-comers are welcome to come and raise a family over a couple of seasons and if some people think they’re just weeds it’s their loss.

Our relationship with nature is a conversation in which (for instance – like the apple trees) no-one speaks for four years and then something important happens. We accept that the plot we rent is not ours, but belongs to two of us (two legged creatures) and all of the other creatures from deer down in size but not importance to amoeba and thence to pollens and yeasts. We cannot compel but, as the astrologers say of the stars, we can only dispose, and if you don’t talk to the plants how will you know what they need?

So if we empty our buckets of trimmings, prunings and nuisance weeds like couch and bindweed along the fence we’re not dumping them (with all the negative connotations of that word, we’re putting them there because as they rot down to return their nutrients to the earth they provide a place of safety for dozens of species like woodlice, spiders, ladybirds, all kinds of pupae, field mice, hedgehogs and slow worms whose contributions to pollination, clearing up infestations of blackfly and suchlike, eating rotting leaves and aerating the soil – we rely on. We are part of a vast interdependent food chain. We do not dump plastic waste, old pushchairs and mattresses crisp packets or discarded drinks bottles and cans.

But we do process and store all sorts of delicious food that would otherwise be wasted. These tomatoes were picked green from dying vines after the drought, and ripened in the dark so they could be reduced to a roasted passata which keeps for at least a couple of years and is as good as pixie dust for bringing a pasta dish to life.

The return of the Red Headed League – who says nature has no sense of humour?

Sycamore moth caterpillar – Acronicta aceris

I wrote this post 13 months ago and then, for some reason, never published it and it’s been sitting in the drafts folder ever since. I used to have a producer on the radio who would say -“I know what you’re trying to say, and I know that you do too – but you haven’t actually said it!” – and re-reading it yesterday I think it fell into that category; so I’ve tweaked it a bit and added a couple of paragraphs to say what I was actually trying to say and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it worked.

Rather an arresting sight on the pavement outside the flat today. I wondered for a moment whether caterpillars have hen parties but obviously this one wasn’t wearing a tiara so I didn’t bother to look and see if there were any tipsy bridesmaids about. I don’t think the Sycamore moth is particularly rare but I would have noticed had it crossed my path. Anyway, it must have fallen from the tree outside and was making its way across the road to the relative safety of the Green – relative safety because it would surely make a tasty snack for a gull – or a magpie, what with the ginger wig and all.

I frequently have trouble trying to figure out what my real vocation is; I’ve done so many things – but there’s always been writing somewhere in it. I fell in love with the natural world as a child and now I’m a passable amateur field botanist but when I sit down to think about it, what really gets my juices flowing is the beauty of plants; their histories, traditional names and uses for food and medicine and their journeys around the railway yards of Europe. DNA and microscopic identification skills are no more exciting to me than completing a hard crossword; fun but not significant. I get as much thrill from the Biting Stonecrop outside the door as I would from finding a ghost orchid (unless it was in the pavement outside!), and I don’t have a tidy mind so I like to root around on my hands and knees to find plants rather than see them displayed like zoo specimens in wire cages and bare earth. If it came to a choice between writer and botanist it would have to be a writer – a no brainer. Latin binomials have their uses of course, and when it comes to the correct naming of plants they’re essential, but where’s the romance in it?

The abundant Mexican Fleabane here could be and often is seen as a weed. I just don’t get it. Last week the official council weed scraper laboriously removed nearly all the plants along the bottom of our retaining wall but then stopped when he came to a glorious waterfall of the daisy lookalikes at the corner and put his scraper away. The bottom of the wall is now alive with the resurgent leaves of Nipplewort, Dandelions and Hemp agrimony which simply shrug off the insult. The whole object of a plant, I suppose, is to be visible and visited by pollinators. You’d think that for caterpillars the opposite would be the case; that they’d make themselves as invisible as possible until they’d pupated and emerged in their final forms. Not so, though. The ginger Sycamore Moth caterpillar, like so many of its cousins, doesn’t even try to be cryptic in its appearance. Does it actually taste filthy or does it just look as if it will. There’s an extravagance in nature which breaks all the bounds of decency and order – especially if you happened to be a Victorian philosopher like John Ruskin who once wrote of Selfheal:

It is not the normal characteristic of a flower petal to have a cluster of bristles growing out of the middle of it, or to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish’s jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal’s throat.

John Ruskin, Proserpina – quoted by Richard Mabey in his book “Weeds”

Richard Mabey’s book, cited above, is an erudite source of wisdom about weeds that deserves a place on any bookshelf. In his description of Self Heal he mentions the visual effect of swathes of the plant as akin to “brazed copper”. Ruskin seems to have had a bit of a thing about the colour of copper. One account of the reason for his inability to consummate his marriage to the red headed Effie Gray was given by her years after their marriage was annulled – “the reason he did not make me his Wife is that he was disgusted with my person the first evening.”

I can only assume that Ruskin found much to disapprove of in the disorderly and occasionally ginger world of nature. Sometimes anarchy is just a way of describing something whose connectedness and complexity is utterly beyond us. Science is the scalpel to the butterfly net of the poet’s work. Reductive or expansive – that’s the challenge. Are the tools we use to engage with nature intuitive and imaginative, or laser focused, seeing nothing beyond the quarry?

Well, I’m for the butterfly net approach every time. Of course, in this critical age of triple breakdown; environmental, climate and economic, we need science as never before, but just as I’ve always taught, myths are the way we tell the truth about mysteries – and the intuitive, expansive and imaginative tools of the poet are every bit as important as the scanning electron microscope and the DNA printout. To choose just one approach to nature wilfully limits our understanding. Slippery and indefinable as it may be, to exclude beauty from our calculus is to take us into Gradgrind’s miserable world. Ruskin’s failure to appreciate Effie Gray’s sensuous beauty was a failure of his humanity. He pursued her, courted her and married her so he could push a pin through her heart as if she were a trophy butterfly.

But enough! I bet you didn’t know that John Masefield liked to keep a box of rotting apples under his desk to fire up his imagination. Stanley Spencer kept something entirely more unpleasant near him but you’ll have to google for that. We have a neighbour on the allotments who has a tree laden with quinces which have the most lovely perfume, enough to fill the whole flat, and every year we put a bowl of them on the table. I’ve made quince jelly in the past and believe me they’re as tough as old boots and need a lot of cooking. When you cut through the fruits the black pips have a positively satanic look and they also contain hydrocyanic acid.

Of all the virtues of nature we mustn’t ever forget its sensual pleasures. For us, it’s more than just the necessity of eating, or growing or intellectual understanding because every one of the senses is engaged in a merry dance. Autumn is not merely mists and mellow fruitfulness, it’s celebration, festival, recollection and thanksgiving, singing, dancing and feasting. Oh and it’s also available in copper coloured.

Set like a spinnaker in a south-westerly, here’s our drought-beating chard

From this autumnal end of the telescope, the past growing season – which we’d written off as disastrous – needs a more nuanced description. Yes the bindweed had a marvellous time, and the couch grass invaded from the abandoned allotment below us; the tomatoes in the polytunnel suffered in the unbearable heat and so it goes on. We were very discouraged and even considered packing it in; but Madame held firm and, in the light of our late harvests, things don’t look so bad after all. Once we’d decided to carry on, the obvious starting point was to clear the beds and prepare them for next spring. We made the decision to leave the borlotti and the runner beans on their teepees for a week or so to see if the scattered blossoms would bear any late fruit, and that was a wise choice because both crops came to life after the rain and gave us a smaller than usual but welcome crop. The late tomatoes set a big crop of unripened green fruits which we picked as we cleared the tunnel and stored in the warmth but covered in some black plastic. It seems they don’t need light as much as they need warmth and we’ve been able to replenish most of our stores of passata. When I came to clear the potato beds they too had bided their time and although the skins were a bit tough, (a common problem across the allotment this year), we’ll have plenty for the winter. Our apples, pears and plums gave us their biggest ever pickings – they were only planted in 2021 – and the strawberries which failed miserably have come back to life and are producing many strong runners which we’ll use to make a new bed over the winter. Today, fired up with energy, I set to repairing some rotting edgings and tending to a commercial blackberry that’s repaid a great deal of TLC with some new growth. The rhubarb too has thrived so – all in all – and supplemented by our stores of frozen, pickled and bottled food we shall look forward to the winter with confidence.

But every silver lining has its cloud and two days ago we had another break-in on the site and this time they came equipped with bolt-croppers and cut through the tension wires on the fence, making it easier to pass things into the lane. However they weren’t very bright, and neither were they very lucky it seems. None of us keeps anything except mostly old hand tools in our sheds and in our case they sheared off the padlock and then went away empty handed when they discovered a second mortice lock. They may, of course have noticed the trail-cam pointing in their direction and had a moment of enlightenment before they scarpered. Over the years we’ve lost hundreds of pounds worth of equipment, had the toughened glass in the greenhouse smashed and the polytunnel slashed. Our other problem is what we call ‘shopping’. Unknown people enter the site and steal fruit on an industrial scale. Trees are stripped bare. If we see people who shouldn’t be there we ask them to leave, but I caught a well dressed local restaurateur one sunday morning with several bags stuffed with stolen figs from our neighbour’s tree. Contrary to common sense – which is all too common but not in a nice way, and not the least sensible – there’s not a shred of evidence to support the idea that lawlessness is confined to hoodie wearers, rough sleepers and foreigners. How much carbon do they emit compared with the besuited occupants of huge child killing SUV’s which ignore the 20mph speed limit outside the allotments because rules, like taxes, are for the little people. Lawlessness is a societal and cultural problem, and so is homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse and it spreads its tentacles throughout the whole of society. The malignant spread of selfishness and greed has been given free reign for fifty years and it could take fifty years to repair the damage. Criminalising environmental protest, locking up pensioners for demonstrating against genocide and extracting millions of litres of water from the Thames and replacing it by pumping (poorly) treated sewage effluent back into the river is most certainly not the answer. Jobs, education, youth clubs, training for decent jobs, proper healthcare and housing for all, the fear and financial stress of the elderly taken seriously and adequate mental health provision for the casualties of blighted childhoods all these are the vital signs of effective governance, not more Big Brother nonsense from out of touch politicians. Do I sound cross ???

Q: Which of us would dream of letting our families starve because we wanted keep all our money for ourselves?

A: The kind of person who has utterly lost any moral sense of direction.

Mending the nets

Anyway, we bought a new padlock for the shed and spent a few hours in the sunshine working on the warm earth. It was lovely and as we worked I pondered the reason why so many of our crops survived the drought and heat waves. Last week Joe (our supplier) carried half a ton of manure down to our plot at the bottom. That’s been the minimum amount every year for ten years and my guess – what with all the other compost we’ve made and scrounged – is that approaching ten tons of organic matter has been added and worked into the beds which, when we took the plot on, were nothing but couch, bindweed, old carpets (don’t even think about it!!) clay and starved looking earth. Digging the potatoes before it rained, the earth was black and crumbly, smelt like earth should and was still a bit moist six inches down. Soil regeneration by increasing organic matter is slow, expensive and hard, but it works – and with climate change increasing its grip year on year (sorry, but think SUV’s again) it’s the only show in town if we hope to grow healthy crops to feed ourselves. I’ll finish with a photo of one of the cleared bed awaiting its food for the year, a layer of cardboard from our recycling area and a cover of weed-control mat. “Tomorrow shall be our dancing day”

Délicieux

Délicieux – “delicious” in English apart from its normal usage is also the title of a 2021 French/Belgian comedy-drama film directed by Éric Besnard, which charts the rise of the first restaurants in France just before the French revolution. We watched it a couple of nights ago and allowing for the odd historical inaccuracy, like moving the action from Paris to the Auvergne region, charts the fall of the aristocratic elite of the day and the subsequent redeployment of hundreds of highly trained chefs into parts of France that had no tradition of eating other than at home in the family setting. It’s a great film, up there with my other foodie favourites because sometimes when we’re sick to death of the murderous and cynical events on the news we need a couple of hours of relief. And it’s always good in any case to see the ruling classes humiliated and shamed even if it’s only in a film. Well worth watching and under a fiver.

Anyway, it made me sit up and remember how and why I started cooking in the first place. Mum was a decent cook with a small repertoire of favourites. By the time Madame and I got together I’d never tasted garlic, green peppers or any of what the supermarkets still describe as exotic vegetables. So when we moved into our first flat; I was 21 and Madame was 18, neither of us had considered how we were going to feed ourselves. I’d hovered in the kitchen and watched my mum cook; she showed me how to judge the thickness of Yorkshire pudding batter by the sound it makes, and I could make a passable bacon sandwich. My dad literally could not make a cup of instant coffee! Madame still can’t recall her mother ever cooking a meal and so confronted with starvation we agreed to take it in turns to cook and that’s never changed.

At the same time we were exposed for the first time to a different cuisine as soon as we went to college and started to meet new people from different social backgrounds who invited us to their homes and whose parents (who probably thought of us as amusing waifs and strays) invited us to eat with them. I fell in love with the whole thing but we could never have afforded to eat out, so the only way we could eat like our better off friends was to learn to cook. I bought books, slowly accumulated a few pans and after walking miles looking for ingredients, practiced. It never occurred to me to train as a chef; my whole ambition was to be a good cook. There was a shop around the corner that sold cookware and I would spend hours looking through the window at the Le Creuset pots. I bought my first ever carbon steel knife there and resolved never to make-do with inferior equipment – which meant that my skills and equipment were glacially slow to improve. It was decades before we could afford to travel and see continental food at first hand.

Our problem was that so many ingredients were simply unobtainable. We learned the location of bay trees, rosemary bushes and other herbs. Sage and thyme were only available in bunches as Christmas approached so we foraged for what we needed in the leafy streets and gardens and eventually got ourselves our first allotment. It’s a well rehearsed truth that olive oil could only be obtained in tiny bottles at the chemist. Luckily we had a deli nearby, run by a Hungarian refugee who imported foods we’d never seen or even dreamed of. We learned to grow some food and we were lucky enough to find neighbours who could show us how to dress the chickens, pheasants and rabbits that found their way to our door. The local butcher showed me how to humanely kill and pluck a chicken. When I was a community arts worker I learned to be careful about expressing any food preferences, because some of the young men I worked with would go poaching to order.

Today we were sitting at the table shelling the borlotti beans to store for the winter. At lunchtime we had a tasting of several varieties of apple that we grow and ate chunky bread. After a dreadfully tough summer we were on the point of giving up the allotment but Madame kept the faith and we’re back on track once again preparing the ground for next season. Against all expectations the fruit crop; sweet apples, pears, plums, damsons and cookers has been the best ever. The borlotti crop was the largest yet and even the potatoes held fast in the ground right through the drought. Chard, spinach and most of the herbs survived too, with minimal watering. The tomatoes and peppers suffered in the polytunnel but now at last the rain has come and the water butts are slowly filling. Storage is easy but harvesting water is a bit more tricky. The greenhouse roof faces east and west, taking most of the weather pretty well. The water butts there fill quickest, but the shed roof slopes to the north and its three barrels are much slower to fill. So the trick is to pump water from the full barrels to the empty ones so that every drop is captured. I can see that the dramatic climate change we’re experiencing is not going to reverse any time soon and so droughts, extreme weather and storms need to be factored into our planning.

So now we ache in places we didn’t know existed, but we grow closer each time we go to the allotment. The shared physical work renders the gym subscription redundant and the mental challenge of planning it all is rewarded at this time of year in the kitchen and at the table, and there really is some kind of spiritual dimension to it. The news is terribly unsettling, and the uncaring viciousness of so many people provokes paranoia and despair; but somehow the simple act of plunging your hands into the soil, or sowing and harvesting your own food have the strange capacity to heal those hurts. Our friendships among the other allotmenteers brings us together in a shared interest with a huge range of people and skills. Doctors; nurses; teachers and professors muck in with many others with quite different life experiences. The allotments are, in the truest sense, a university.

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