For ages I’ve wanted to broaden my approach to plants when thinking and writing about them, and I’d very much like to move a bit closer to Geoffrey Grigson (whose brilliant book “An Englishman’s Flora” is about to be republished as “A British Flora”. I really love this book for its breadth and scope; escaping the stamp collector’s view of field botany (the rarer the better) and wandering in his usual provocative way through the countryside picking up fragments of folklore, old country names, culinary and medicinal properties. You can still pick up a second hand copy very reasonably although the reprint is only £25. I’ve got a worn out paperback and a large format hardback – both treasured possessions. He’s not the only natural history writer who’s spread his wings in this way, Richard Maybe is another and there are more. I should include the early works of Henry Williamson and in the same breath dare to mention my Mother who was brought up in the deepest Chilterns and who once told us about her first encounter with a flush toilet which so scared her she couldn’t use it. I would dearly love which ‘Lady’s Slipper’ she mentioned as her favourite flower – and which could have been a geographically unlikely appearance of the now extinct orchid or one of six other more common wildflowers with similar names. Robin Wall Kimmerer gives a fascinating account of the encounter of western botany with First Nation Canadian ethnobotany. Thanks to Grigson I now know why Latin names are so important. There are such fields, known as ethnobotany, folk taxonomy, phytonomy or ethnoecology which is an academic way of recognising that plants have cultural meanings too. In our laser focused reductive way we might grudgingly accept that plants are useful for giving us clues to molecules which might be useful in medicine but fall way short of recognising herbal medicine as a legitimate pursuit. By the way, I had a text yesterday advertising a T shirt with the slogan “All plants are edible, some of them only once!” .
Anyway I hope you catch my drift. I was first fascinated by plants because they so beautiful, and the closer I looked the more beautiful they became. Several years ago when I was young (ho ho) there was a company in Kingswood which was quite a big supplier of medicinal herbs. A friend of mine once showed me a printed sheet of testimonials they sent out with their products (which included a specially formulated smoking mixture for asthmatics!) One of their big sellers was evidently a herb called Golden Seal and I mistakenly thought it referred to Goldenrod. One of the testimonial letters described how the patient, after only a couple of days of taking the remedy, claimed to have coughed up a substantial tumour. That’s not an easy to forget image. Today when I was mulling over this piece I had a look in Mrs Grieve’s 1931 “A Modern Herbal” and she, like Grigson, lists the alternative names of Golden Seal and among them she reveals that she’s actually writing about Turmeric root which these days is something of a supposed miracle cure, ‘though falling short of projectile tumour expulsion. Those sneaky scientists while all-along decrying herbal medicine, have been scouring the old herbals for patentable synthetics. Tomorrow I’m expecting a second hand copy of the almost unobtainable Medicinal Flora of Britain and Northwestern Europe“. I get almost all my books secondhand these days. We’re soon off on another trip to the Bannau Brycheiniog and I’m hoping to persuade Madame to take a short drive to the village of Myddfai where I can breathe the same air as the famous physicians once breathed – hopefully without the addition of smoke particles from the fire around nearby Llangynidr Reservoir which we can even smell in Bath, fifty miles away. We have friends living just a few miles from there, and their smallholding narrowly escaped a previous very frightening wildfire.
There are a thousand extensions to plant hunting that can bring the plants alive for us. I’ve been recently mugging up on some of the science, having previously known nothing at all about DNA and molecular biology and it’s mind blowing and beautiful in the intellectual sense that scientists and mathematicians use. Reading the more controversial books of Stefano Mancuso, I didn’t know for instance that the animals – that’s all the animals amount to just under half of one percent of the total biomass of the earth, whilst plants amount to around 82% (90% before the industrial revolution), and we humans amount to …….. just 0.01%. We have seen the enemy, it is us!
I’ve been amazed at the lukewarm manner in which governments have brushed aside the statistics of global catastrophe. Now, here in Bath and in the midst of the fifth heatwave of this drought plagued summer we are advised to close our windows because of the health risks associated with PM 2.5 particles travelling in the wind from South Wales. Newspapers of a certain kind continue to write about the lovely summer weather while Madame and me, among thousands of other gardeners and farmers, have struggled to keep our plants alive, and the local media are filled with rage at the local authority whenever they try to reduce and control traffic pollution. I’m reminded of William Cobbett’s quip that “they demand change but without alteration”
God alone knows how many trips I’ve made backwards and forwards to the allotment water troughs with a two gallon watering can in each hand – that’s forty pounds weight – in the face of appeals to restrict our water consumption. The upside is that we’ve been feasting on the sweetest sweetcorn, the shiniest aubergines and the richest tomatoes not to mention all the other unobtainable herbs and vegetables. As the difficulties multiply, my admiration for the adaptability of our plants increases. Some of us have wondered in Sunday Schools what the biblical manna might have been, but the more I learn about it the more I understand that the plants which keep us and every other living thing on earth alive do it all by turning carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugar. That beats Moses and his stick any day!
