Tag: herbal remedies

My green age

Imperforate St John’s Wort – Hypericum maculatum – on the allotment and occasionally used to treat mild depression but interacts dangerously with several other prescription medicines.

My friend Charlie (Professor) Stirton – formerly Director of the National Botanical Garden of Wales – sent me yesterday a copy of a talk he’d given to the Church in Wales in 2002. As ever I got about four pages in and stopped because he’d just given me a big thought – you know, the kind of thought that forces you to stop and, well – think; really think. Charlie does big thoughts – which is probably why I enjoy talking to him so much. Anyway, in the course of his paper he raised the issue of the way in which the Church (and I think he had society in general in his sights) is not very good at celebrating the great turning points in life with ceremony; what we in the trade call liturgy. So far so obvious, you might think, but what he drew from that – the occasions demanding recognition – went beyond the usual births deaths and marriages and talked about growing old. The crises of life; being born; entering puberty; falling in love, and possibly dying too – (although as Wittgenstein pointed out – “death is not an event in life”) – are all catered for, but growing old certainly is an event in life and for the most part we turn away from it; refuse to think about it and regard it as if it might be contagious. Can you even imagine your friends and especially your children wanting to celebrate the “dying of the light“? And so it becomes the thing we can’t talk about and it becomes the one major life event we usually travel alone. Yes we have hospices and they do wonderful work, but I’m not writing here about dying I’m writing about the autumn that precedes it; the inexorable minor irritations that can make us grumpy; arthritic hands and knees, irregular heart rhythms, vivid nightmares and the memories of old hurts and failures, loss of vigour and suchlike. Wisdom, sagacity can be a poor reward for struggling breathlessly up a flight of stairs and in any case the last thing most younger people want is the benefit of your accumulated experience. Growing old; the period between retirement and senility can feel like the prologue to an ultimate redundancy without compensation. A mystery tour where you see immediately the driver is as drunk as a skunk and the satnav has broken. What – really what is there to build a celebration around in all this?

But first, here’s a phrase that sticks in my mind from a lecture I attended many years ago. I was working as an Art Therapist at an old fashioned mental hospital. This was in the early days before Art Therapy had been codified, given diagnostic references and its very own theology. We had a talk from a professor of gerontology (the study of old age) and his opening remarks have never left me.

“Remember this” he said “…. “miserable young people make miserable old people”.

In other words – don’t wait to sort your shit until it’s too late. Or as Aristotle and most of the great religious teachers might have said more philosophically – human flourishing depends on right habits. So if you’re in your mid thirties – let’s say – in the years of your pomp – but not really enjoying life as much as you thought you would when you went after all those promotions and bonuses; don’t fall into the trap of kicking happiness down the road because the road might not get you as far as bucket lists and dream retirements. Right habits can be acquired but also need to be practised day by day. For some odd reason our culture teaches us to denigrate habits (boring and repetitive) but glorify feelings. However – sincerely believing that a very stupid or immoral act is right because it feels right – however sincerely that belief is held – is profoundly misguided. Doing the right thing demands consistency and practice so it’s best to start as young as possible.

So once you have reached the age when your inbox is looking less crowded, I think one necessary thing is to absolutely refuse to play along with all the OAP stereotypes. We need to find a form of what the Roman Catholic church wisely renamed as reconciliation in the late 20th century, which doesn’t even think about absolving us from all the hurt and shitstorms we’ve created in our younger days, but reconciles us to ourselves, our victims and and our lost and abandoned lovers. The dying of the light can only be accomplished well with a mind at peace.

We must learn to live completely in the moment, opening our arms to the occasional joys that come our way. Yesterday we talked to a friend whose sister had re-found love after a fifty year marriage followed by bereavement, but even a returned smile can make the sun come out for us.

Today, on the allotment we harvested courgettes, apples, aubergines, tomatoes and basil and, as I write this Madame is in the kitchen preparing supper for us; but as any gardener knows, we also have to weather our failures as well as celebrate our successes. This has been a truly difficult season and there have been moments when we wondered whether it was worth all the disappointments. But coping with failure without going under is a tremendously important life-skill – especially when the wheels begin to drop off.

But so far as Charlie’s challenge to find the equivalent of a marriage or naming ceremony to mark and celebrate the onset of old age as a distinct and potentially rewarding stage in life – that demands an enormous cultural reset. When I retired from paid work, I had a sweater made with the words “I’m not old, I’m experienced!” but Madame thought it was provocative (as if!), and I’ve hardly worn it.

So thanks Charlie – for an excellent question, and now I’ll get back to reading the rest of your presentation.

He’s behind you!

Southern Hawker dragonfly

Oh I do love a traditional pantomime joke! I couldn’t resist taking this shot of a Southern Hawker Dragonfly on the allotment today, apparently stalking a Ladybird on the other side of the cane. We’d only just been talking about the absence of many of our familiar visitors during this very unseasonable summer, and then today we had 20C and sunshine, so they all came out to play. There were Damselflies in turquoise and ruby as well as this fierce but beautiful Dragonfly plus many other flying insects. We’ve even had our first newt in the pond.

The warm, wet weather has led to a plague of weeds and so since we got back from St David’s we’ve spent hours every day pulling them up. As it happens I really enjoy hand weeding so it’s not so much of a chore and – being a bit obsessive – I get a kick out of making a good job of it. The downside in the polytunnel today was that it was so very hot, approaching 30C with very little wind to stir the air. There was another find, as ever not in the least rare, but I’ve never seen it before. There are two members of the Galinsoga family in the UK – known by the English names “Shaggy Soldiers” and “Gallant Soldiers” this one was the hairier and scruffier version . The yellow flower also appeared out of nowhere – it’s one of the St John’s Worts this one the “imperforate” form, which is to say there are no little holes to be seen when you hold the leaf up to the sun. We think it must have come from a packet of wildflower mix that our son gave us. Madame remembers broadcasting the seed probably three years ago and it’s finally popped up in two places. Weeds are fun; very diverse and surprising, and Imperforate St John’s Wort is suitable (like Pot Marigolds) for making a very good antiseptic cream.

The other notable thing about the Dragonfly picture is how superior the focus, exposure and depth of field it is when compared with my phone camera. It’s a bit trickier to set up a shot than the point and press phone, but the reward is an altogether better and more useful picture. Sometimes the identity of a plant depends on a few glandular hairs that need really detailed shots.

After the tunnel was weeded I fed all the plants with liquid seaweed fertilizer and picked our first ripe tomato – delicious but only the one between us. Tonight we’ll be eating here with another of our sons – we’ve got three – and we’ve got our own home-grown peas, broad beans courgettes and potatoes plus home grown fresh herbs. Tayberries and strawberries for pud and a glass or two of wine I don’t doubt. We sometimes moan about the hard work and the bad backs; but the flavour of our own vegetables is outstanding – this is no place for modesty – and everyone should at least try to grow a few veg even if it’s just a few herbs and a tomato in a pot outside the front door. I promise you’ll want more. Last night we went over to Bristol to see our grandson in his year 6 leavers play – Robin Hood with some outstanding performances and lots of fart jokes. The fact that loads of dads turned up on the same night as the England v Holland match teaches something about love! Life can be very beautiful. Even the dreaded Chickweed – in the right place.

First Bluebell – but which one?

Overlooking the Kennet and Avon Canal on the footpath next to Cleveland House

A bit of a shaky start today because both of us had put an Extinction Rebellion procession in our diaries, but neither of us had written down the time or venue. I had a vague recollection that it began at the end of our street – it didn’t, and Madame thought it was at the Guildhall – and it wasn’t – which left us wandering around Bath listening for the sound of crowds or beating drums. We were just walking through Henrietta Park when we thought we heard some kind of rhythmic noise and some very loud shouting, so we sped out of the park towards Pulteney Street where we discovered that the whole of the noise was down to a single team of scaffolders. Aside from the veg market in Stall Street there’s no-one in Bath with voices half as loud as scaffolders who often need to communicate over five floors and heavy traffic. The trader with the huge voice in Stall street market can be heard half a block away “Free pounds of strawberries for a pahnd COME ON!” – with the rising and falling cadence reminiscent of a song – and come we do. It reminds me why barkers gained their nickname; he really does bark; but strangely when you hear him talking, his voice is perfectly normal. Sadly it isn’t quite posh enough to get the Town Crier’s job.

So with the possibility of being arrested as green, woke, communist terrorists receding we wondered whether we should just beat each other up, or go for a walk along the canal. On balance the canal seemed the more attractive proposition. It’s been an interesting few days anyway. When we got back from Snowdonia we noticed that one of the cars in the car park was swathed in blankets and polythene. We also noticed that one of our neighbours had disappeared with her children, leaving husband behind. Later, we discovered that the car (his car) had both front and rear windscreens stoved in with a hammer or – more theatrically in my mind – a baseball bat. The irresistible urge to clothe the evidence in a story involving someone being caught in flagrante took hold, but none of our neighbours seem to have seen who did what and to who(m). Who says that city centre life is boring? The funniest event ever – shared by about 250 twitching curtains – was the incapably drunk couple doing a bit of dogging after a hard afternoon in the sun. Naturally it was never spoken of again.

But back to grim reality, I decided to do a bit more plant ID practicing and chanced upon the first bluebell we’ve seen this year. Bluebells are a great test of the software because (like the dogging couple) they’re promiscuous hybridisers, and most of the ones you see in towns are hybrids between the English and the more vigorous Spanish Bluebells which, some say, will eventually drive out all the natives. I think that’s a bit alarmist and I also think there’s a whiffy smell of botanical racism about it. Anyway, the software turned out to be rather sniffy about Bluebells in any case and refused to applaud our find without a photo of the leaves. You may notice that it was growing through a bed of nettles so for the second time today discretion trumped valour and the ID was left at taxon level. I remember driving past a church in Essex once and seeing the signboard with the words “Strict and Particular Baptist” printed there. I’ve always wondered what minor peccadilloes managed to split a church three ways. I also hope never to have to listen to the explanation!

Anyway, one further benefit of feeling well again is that my appetite is slowly coming back. Last night I cooked the first mushroom risotto in ages and one of our sons joined us for a jolly (and greedy) meal where we drank too much wine and fought for control of the sound system as we played through all our favourites. I find it intensely rewarding that even forty years apart, we share a taste for the same music. He’s a good bass player and we’re so pleased he’s back taking lessons again.

Below, some flowering Blackthorn and some Green Alkanet; both common garden escapes . We also see Lungwort – Pulmonaria officinalis which has a long history (fuelled by the medieval doctrine of signatures) and probably originating from narrowboat herb gardens. The boaters had little access to medical care apart from a few charities, and so herbal remedies were really important to them.

Back in paradise

We’re back in Cornwall; this time on the Roseland Peninsula and in the campervan. We were pretty knackered when we arrived but after an excellent 9 hours and 44 minutes sleep we felt rested and ready for Madame’s favourite walk ever. This is a campsite we’ve stayed in for years and between the site and the sea there’s a bridle way about 2.5Km long lined on both sides for the majority of the way by Cornish hedges. It’s a very special environment – partly at least because you rarely see anyone on it apart from the occasional walker or horse rider.

Today we saw Red Admiral, Small Blue, Small White and Orange Tip butterflies; we saw a buzzard hunting at a little distance and later we saw a Kestrel no more than 25 m away. It was a wonderful and inspiring sight with its capacity to keep its eyes completely still over the prey, whilst fluttering and gyring in the sky.

On the way down to the sea I kept on seeing such a variety of wildflowers I decided to record them whilst walking back up the hill. There were way more than I recorded, but I made a list of forty species in the gathering rain. I was never more grateful for the waterproof pen and notebook. Many of them require further exploration but that’s half the fun. For instance I caught sight of a single Geum urbanum, that’s to say Wood Avens or Herb Bennet in the UK. The word “Bennet” caught my eye because Benedict was often shortened to Benet. So Herb Benet has a history in herbalism – probably because this ‘Blessed Herb’ found a use in herbal medicine, probably because of its aromatic root. There were also large numbers of Pellitory of the Wall – Parietaria judaica – used to treat urinary infections. Of my forty plants, twelve were either traditionally used as foods or medicines – excluding the Foxglove which will damage your heart!

They’re all common enough plants; for instance the Broadleaf Plantain travelled to the US in migrants’ boots and spread wherever they went – hence the First Nation name “White Man’s Foot”. It’s apparently a remedy for foot pain – you just wear a fat leaf inside your socks. I really should try it some time. A guide at the Lost Gardens of Heligan once showed us how you could peel off the outer skin of Navelwort – Umbilicus rupestris -with your thumbnail, and apply the sticky side of the leaf to your skin as a kind of natural plaster. I’ve often wondered whether Stitchwort is a cure for the kind of stitches you get when you run?

Anyway, on our return to the van, and when the real work began, I began to wonder whether my Fumaria could possibly be F. capreolata but, like the Polypody, that ID might demand a microscope.

I was especially pleased that my list of forty species was as long as my previous best but which took a fortnight to complete, but the price you pay for speed is a bent back and a compulsive swivelling of the eyes; not a good look.

Calendula cream, chef’s ass, the marriage service and a green spirituality

One of the best pub signs I’ve ever seen!

Yesterday was just one of those days that left me almost breathless with pleasure. We were five old friends whose various relationships reach back way over fifty years; five old friendships that have seen and survived all manner of triumphs and tragedies and five human beings sharing a walk (well, more of an amble) on a stunning spring day, while we followed the course of the remains of the Somerset Coal Canal which was built to carry coal from the North Somerset coalfield to the junction with the Kennet and Avon canal, near Dundas aqueduct. For me, a light bulb went on when I realized how much of the old stone structure had survived, but Madame also had it written down as a place to return to – a lot!

It wasn’t a long walk by any stretch but we gave it several hours anyway, soaking up the sun and exploring off the path from time to time, looking at plants and rusting iron lock gate nails with equal interest; catching glimpses of the equally abandoned railway line that forced the demise of the canal. For me it’s a paradise of post industrial relics and possible sites for interesting wildflowers, and by all accounts it has some very interesting geology, which is always good news for plant hunters. But it wasn’t all green wellies and Tilley hats. C and I had a friendly bird app competition with our phones and I realized that the absence of an in-phone database meant that hers identified a Black Cap Warbler much faster than mine which was still looking for a signal. Just for interest I was using Birdnerd and C had Merlin – hers was clearly better for off-grid id’s – mine’s always worked perfectly well but perhaps I’ve just been lucky with phone masts.

Weld – Reseda luteola

There were no rarities spotted, but it was just as reassuring and pleasurable to see Dandelions, Cuckoo Flowers, Cowslips, White Nettles and Ground Ivy all flowering in profusion. The only oddity was what I think must have been Weld – Reseda luteola, AKA Dyers Weed, Dyers Rocket or Yellow Weed. No prizes, then, for guessing what it was once used for. If it was Weld I suppose that would make it a post industrial plant relic from a much earlier historical moment. Lurking up and down these beautiful valleys are the ruins and remains of monastic communities with their medicinal herb gardens and watermills, grinding grain from local farms. Far from being enjoyable just for its remoteness and quietness, you could almost feel the presence of innumerable farm labourers, fishermen, monks, boaters, miners, navvies and railwaymen, all those faint echoes flowing towards the river Avon. The horizons are punctuated by the silhouettes of grand mansions and farms such that we were obliged to consider the source of all that wealth. One of our party had long dead ancestors who were in the cloth trade and who may have furnished the backs of navvies, slaves and workhouse inhabitants. with fustian – rough but hard wearing cloth that combined cotton weft on linen warps.

We finished up – as all good walks do – in the pub where I photographed the hauntingly lovely sign at the top of this post; something I’ll come back to in a moment.

I’ve been struggling for a long time to find a way of expressing what seems to me to be a fundamental difficulty in this post-religious age. A few days ago I wrote this:

the intoxicating smell of the wet but warming earth – known as petrichor – carried the subliminal message of the season. Is there some kind of spirituality here? – something to do with being held by an embracing framework? 

The trouble with words like Spirituality and Love is that they’ve been so trampled upon by blowhards, bishops and pornographers they no longer have any meaning at all except for a vaguely felt inflammation of the imagination which could be anything from a vision to a mild virus, and so writing about such things becomes an exercise in frustration; altogether lacking the tools for the job.

For me, best and most creative ideas come when the parts of a solution finally come together for no discernable reason except the relaxed mindfulness of a walk. These ideas, quite often, are not the lofty analytics of a Holmesean three pipe problem. They can seem vulgar, irreverent and occupy worlds so different it’s almost like harvesting the energy of colliding comets.

So here’s the problem – how can we find a contemporary way of expressing the content of words like spirituality and love. What kind of love, from all of the available flavours, would best express our love for the Earth in this age of catastrophe? and secondly, what form of spirituality could provide a language accessible to the religious, the determinedly non-religious and that huge population in the middle who long for a structure, a framework for understanding a way of being human that isn’t part of what’s destroying us all?

And so what about these three components?

  • Chef’s Ass
  • Calendula officinalis
  • The marriage service

These three rather disparate ideas have at least one thing going for them because they include a painful (but not fatal) human condition, a plant that provides a useful remedy, and a form of words that might just provide the beginnings of a framework.

Let’s take Chef’s Ass first. If you’re working in very hot and humid sweaty conditions – for instance in a restaurant kitchen, polytunnel or just walking for long distances in inappropriate clothes you may contract a very uncomfortable form of abrasion rash known colloquially as chef’s ass in the trade. I consulted our son – who’s a chef – on a possible cure, and he said he’d once tried alcoholic hand gel which turned out to be effective but screamingly painful. I hoped I could find a less extreme cure for my similar gardening related problem and turned to our home made Calendula Cream which, to my great surprise and relief worked miraculously well. It’s so cheap and easy to make I wonder why anyone would pay £15 for a tube, or resort to potentially dangerous remedies like hydrocortisones.

Calendula flowers drying in August 2020

Forget God for a moment because there’s absolutely no reason to invoke any kind of higher level supernatural powers here. The earth provides us with a multitude of effective remedies for many unpleasant, painful but non-malignant diseases. Calendula is just one example. Now the application of the cream did the trick for me, but that left me with the odd sense that I should be able to say thank-you for that help. I get exactly the same feeling harvesting our produce, eating it and sharing it with friends. That unchannelled, unfocused gratitude needs somewhere to land but all too often, like a boomerang, it circles back on itself and manifests itself as pride.

I know I’m using a religious term here but bear with me just for a moment while I explain. Pride is a very dangerous thing not least because it blinds us to our own fallibility. But collective pride – for instance in our ability to solve every challenge, even catastrophic climate change, through our own cleverness is a form of idolatry. Our thank-you’s desperately need to be channelled into something less destructive than pride.

So with that in mind I’ll turn to to some words from the marriage service which once seized me so powerfully in the course of a wedding service I was taking, that I had to stop in my tracks and recover my wits before I could continue. Each of the couple (and I’m using this example in a completely secular and non gendered way) say to one another – “All that I am, I give to you, and all that I have I share with you”. From that moment onwards I almost invariably reminded my couples that the second half of the promise was the easy bit. “All that I have I share with you” is the kind of arrangement that any half witted solicitor could organise. It’s a kind of prenuptial clause. But the second half of the promise- “All that I am I give to you” is on a different plane. How many of us have even the faintest clue what “all that I am” means for ourselves, let alone our prospective partner?

And yet the point here is that the earth has made precisely that promise to us. The earth says – “all that I am I give to you” and means it utterly, to the end. But we, in our infinite pride, forget that in this imagined marriage relationship with the earth we secretly and covetously hope to get our hands on the money and say that sentence with our fingers crossed behind our backs. There’s no more destructive relationship than a one sided and selfish marriage. This is not a religious point!

So at last I come back to the pub sign. I’m a sucker for naive paintings and a complete fool for the ones that express in paint something that the painter could never have articulated in words. Our angel, with a look of considerable doubt on her face is taking an anchor from the heavenly (that’s the hope bit) to the earthly ( that’s the anchor). When the rope breaks there’s no guide to the way back and we are lost. So to recap from the top; all those ancient voices flowing down to the river and onward to the sea were the hopes of our ancestors, lived out in the world of nature that provided food and health as best the earth could offer. It was greed and selfishness that fouled things up and because of that idolatrous worship of our own powers we now face an existential crisis.

Ironically (or maybe not), we five walkers all agreed that it wasn’t just the complete ineptitude of our politicians or the continuing impact of lockdown; the war in Ukraine, or even the cost of living that was making us depressed and unhappy. There is something deeper that wrecks our sleep and furnishes our worst dreams. Without finding a new relationship with the earth and all living things we’ll remain delusional, lonely and ultimately doomed.

All tooled up!

Gosh we’ve been busy getting ready for the next trip. I think I’ve finally got the courage to start officially recording some of the plants we hope to find and so it’s been a rush to gather together all the tools and to figure out how to use them. So I hope you’ll forgive me for failing to find a ghost orchid or anything remotely rare but settling on an ubiquitous weed like couch grass simply to check on some ID keys and test out the macro extension lens on the phone; and I’m feeling ever so pleased.

There’s a bit of a knack to taking photographs for plant ID’s because they need to capture as much as possible of the kind of technical information you’ll definitely wish you’d recorded when you get back to base; things like grid references and what kind of soil and light conditions not to mention – in the case of grasses – all manner of obscurities concerning ligules, auricles, lemmas glumes, stolons, rhizomes and spikelets. So while we took a break from planting out broad beans I pulled a lump of the revolting weed out of one of the allotment beds and tried to remember all this stuff as I took the photos. I know it’s all a bit technical but there’s something very lovely about grasses because they hide their differences so completely. Half a millimetre can be important. This reminds me of one of my theology tutors who used to run what he called CAT sessions – close attention to text. We discovered that the really important understandings demanded time, attention and focus. Drill down hard enough and what appears to be a uniform field of grass can become a garden of delights. Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it!

The other bit of plant recording I’ve had to learn is the software. There’s a mountain of data out there in databases which must have taken millions of voluntary hours of recording and checking. OK I’m a complete nerd but I think I’m happier growing and examining plants than I am frothing at the mouth while I scream at the television. So couch grass became a rehearsal for the really good stuff which I’m so looking forward to finding this season.

Later, just for fun, I dug into the herbals and discovered that however much we gardeners loathe the stuff there are people out their who are prepared to pay £10 for 100 grammes of the offending roots. By all accounts (and lacking any scientific proof as far as I could find out) couch roots have some healing properties. By my reckoning there must be many thousands of pounds worth of herbal remedy underground at the allotment site but the sheer agony of digging it up would need the price to go a lot higher than that. It is, however, the most tremendously vigorous plant. I read later about an experiment where 20 week old couch tillers grew 5 metres – 15 feet in a few weeks while throwing up over 200 buds. Oh to think that it’s an incomer brought in centuries ago. My mum was an inveterate smuggler of purloined cuttings from every garden she ever visited – perhaps it was an ancestor of hers that brought the wretched weed here.

Anyway, the kit is assembled, tested – and we’re ready to rock and roll this season. Fortunately while I crawl around in the dirt in lovely places, Madame will be bingeing on drawing with ink and bamboo pens; inspired by David Hockney’s latest book. In the background I can hear our waterproofs taking an interminable time to dry in low heat after being re-proofed. We’re optimistic but not reckless.