Tag: macro photography

It’s not so much the camera as knowing what to do with it.

Herbie was a drystone waller and he mainly built the regional styles from Gloucestershire – the ones in the photos above go from Cornwall to Cumbria and they’re often dependent on whatever local stone lay at the waller’s feet. The southern part of Gloucestershire provides several different kinds of stone; Brandon Hill Stone; Oolitic Limestone (a Bath and Cotswold speciality); Cornbrash, even some sandstone. The geology of the districts is written in drystone walls. I’d often see Herbie at work around the area, occasionally on churchyard walls – but for some reason he disliked going into churches and would never work inside them. As an amateur botanist I relish his work because drystone walls are a paradise for all manner of interesting plants, not to mention the invertebrates and vertebrates, the lichens the bacteria and fungi.

Someone told me a story about Herbie one day that not only made me laugh out loud, but also taught me an invaluable lesson. I’ll call it Herbie’s ratio and it applies in all manner of fields, not least hoping that a new, more expensive camera will always take better pictures. It seems that someone once pulled up in their expensive car and, after watching him work for a little while, asked how much he charged. “£100 a yard” he said. There was a pause and the man said “That’s a lot of money for a pile of stones”. Herbie also paused and then said – “well it’s £1 for the stone and £99 for knowing what to do with it”.

Single edged razor blade, steel ruler, ring flash adaptor, macro lens adaptor for phone, hand lens,TG-7 camera, Etrex GPX, Pixel 6a phone, waterproof notebook and space pen.

I use photographs – more than for any other purpose – for making notes. Mostly it’s my phone camera which is by no means state of the art because it’s a Google Pixel 6A which is rapidly approaching retirement (or obsolescence). But whenever we go for a walk I’ll take dozens of plant photos as a reminder of what we’ve seen. I recently found out I’d taken 22,000 photos over the past 10 years. For plants I know well, there’s no problem. But I’ve learned over that time that if you don’t identify, label them and get them on to a spreadsheet straight away, in a month you’ll have the photo of a plant that you can’t use to make an identification because it doesn’t have some key feature in focus or even visible at all.

The upside of phone pics is that there are some very good apps around which will suggest an identification with a percentage of certainty; but they’re by no means always right (the software designers claim upwards of 90%) and they can exude a false sense of certainty. The old manual way to ID plants is to narrow down the possibilities one question at a time with a list called a key. The difficulty for a beginner is that keys often use off-putting technical language – they have to of course; so there’s a steep learning curve. The great advantage of keys is that you can retrace your steps one at a time until you get back on to the right track. The great disadvantage of the AI apps is that you have no idea what steps they took to reach their conclusion; no idea which features of your photo were decisive and so you don’t accumulate the knowledge of what’s essential and what’s not. I should also mention that the more sophisticated phone cameras get, the more jiggery pokery goes on behind the scenes and I often land up fighting the phone over what it’s important to focus on or lamenting the brightening or colouration changes that it imposes.

The ideal compromise,then, is to use both apps and keys to hunt your plant down. I’d add one additional step which I find invaluable. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI finds it on Google) have a public access database called the Plant Atlas 2020 which gives a huge amount of information including photos, flowering times and distribution (ie where they grow). So phone camera + app (Flora Incognita is one of the best, and free) + field guide ( Collins Wildflower Guide; Francis Rose’ Wildflower Key are both reliable illustrated guides but there are many others) + Atlas 2020 on the internet will get you closer and faster than flicking through 10,000 illustrations.

Monarch’s Way trail, Stockhill woods

There’s another advantage of the phone, and that’s the fact that you can look alongside the image and find the EXIF data which records where and when the photo was taken. However the “where” bit – usually a latitude and longitude reference – needs to be treated with caution because it can be wildly out so I always make a note on the photos app of where it was taken in real life – “Stockhill Plantation Priddy, on Monarch’s way” – so a whole heap of contributory local information is immediately available.

You’ll have noticed, of course, that I’ve barely mentioned cameras so far. That’s because of Herbie’s Ratio. As I look around my study I can see four or five cameras and half a dozen lenses in their cases. The most expensive lens cost £1000 in New York (thank goodness I’m not a birder!) and it’s a Leica macro lens that fits my Panasonic Lumix camera. However, the closer you get to the subject the longer the exposure gets and in many cases the plant or my hands are waving around a bit so blurred photos are a regular curse. Carting all that equipment – including a hideously expensive carbon fibre tripod and lightweight magnesium ball head + flash gun etc – slows things down to divorce point since Madame is always with me. Of course you can uproot the plant and take it home to photograph in the warm, but in many cases that would be illegal and in my view it’s almost always unethical. So how often do I take the full big camera kit out on a plant hunt? – almost never, because the phone is light, always in my pocket, and is a perfect notebook, although there’s the question of locations in the EXIF data and I carry the cheapest ETREX GPS in my pocket in case something exceptionally rare turns up. It’s one of my least used bits of kit.

But, as always, there’s an alternative. I’ve also got a little Olympus TG-7 that totally fits the bill as lightweight, portable, waterproof and shockproof and with some eye watering capabilities such as built in focus stacking, macro settings and decent zoom. There are ring flash accessories and blah blah extras including wireless connection to my phone so I can mount the camera on a small tripod and control it using my phone as a remote viewer and trigger. It even downloads pictures to my phone so I can wander off into the AI apps wherever I am as long as there’s some kind of phone signal.

So marvellous! but does it help to identify plants? No it doesn’t; because as Herbie the stone-waller knew perfectly well, however expensive the camera, it’s knowing what to do with it that really counts. One important fact to bear in mind is that plants display considerable plasticity of shape and colour, depending on where and how they came to be where we find them. They change as they grow, flower and die back so the best photographs, illustrations and keys will always accept that there’s limit to what any description can achieve and sometimes that mysterious intangible quality called jizz will be the only show in town. We take the photographs and then we have to prove that what we say it is, is what it really is and the devil – as always – is in the detail.

So when I’m photographing an unknown plant I have to try to imagine what the questions in a key might be asking. because even if the AI app is 100% certain I still need to stand it up, as it were, in court. And so leaf shape, veins absent or present, if hairy is it hairy on one side or both? are the leaves opposite or arranged up the stem singly? What shape is the stem? how tall is the plant? if there are flowers can you see how many petals there are? what colour are they and are there lines and patterns? Are they daisy like or hooded like a foxglove?Are they all along one side of the stalk? What shape and colour are the anthers (the pollen parts)? What’s the overall shape of the plant – is it scrambling along the ground or climbing up another plant? Is it growing in deep, fertile loam or in a crack in a wall? There are more questions but I’ll stop there because I don’t want to put anyone off.

The thing is, a thoughtful photo taking these questions into account is going to be a lot more useful next week than a hasty out of focus snapshot, whatever camera it’s taken on. More often than not the phone camera is fine, but sometimes the features you need to look at are tiny – these flowerheads from a Fleabane are only 3mm wide, but the anthers and the hairs are diagnostic. This photo was taken at home (there were thousands of them so taking one of them was not going to make them extinct). This photo has to be considered with several others taken on the river near where we live.

Taken on my Olympus TG-7 using a damped down flash ring and processed by focus stacking.

Some time ago I joined a botanical illustration class for a couple of years and apart from learning a great deal about watercolour painting I learned to look intensely at my subjects. That has been the most tremendous help as I struggled to understand plants. The practice of painting the same thing over and over gives insight into colour, texture and form, and rendering that into a different medium is invaluable for taking photographs.

Technique v creativity – a phony war?

At art school in the 1970’s there was a rather stupid fashion for fostering what was called creativity as opposed to technique, and I ran into trouble for insisting that creativity was strangled at birth without it. My obsessive experiments with glazes, firing technique and chemistry got me marked down when it came to the crunch, but as far as I was concerned, technique in any discipline, sets you creatively free. There is no battle between the two, not in ceramics or botanical illustration nor in photography. The more technique you’ve got, the more freedom you’ve got, regardless of how much your kit costs. Herbie was right all along. A trowel is a trowel and a stone is a stone but the bringing of the two together in a wall is a work of art rooted in technique.

An example of a photographic set with notes

Green Bristle Grass, Setaria Viridis, Found on pavement in New King Street Bath. Occasional, prob birdseed. Height 37 cm, panicle 5cm. Very loosely rooted in crack – came out entire when I tried to break off a seed head. Checked in Stace, Cope & Gray, Sell & Murrell + Ddb. Around in UK since mid 1666. It’s a theraphyte – completes its entire lifecycle in one season and survives through seeds. Perfect desert/pavement dweller. Listed p 579 in Stace & Crawley “Alien Plants”. Olympus TG-7

  • and an early attempt at rendering a grass in watercolour:

Dropping the mask – safety in numbers!

The database that didn’t know when to stop. On the monitor Tinder fungus in Henrietta Park

Yesterday, as I was typing the latest batch of plants into the database, it suddenly dawned on me that the Potwell Inn isn’t the only journal I keep. This is a long and rather meandering story, but after we retired and after a particularly stressful family Christmas, we took ourselves down to Cornwall and were leaning over the sea wall in St Ives watching the waders and gulls when I realized that I didn’t have a clue what any of them were called. With the inscrutable emptiness of any retirement plans lapping around in my mind, I made a ludicrous resolution that from then on I’d refuse to walk past anything I couldn’t name. Of course – like all resolutions – it was broken before we left the beach, but what followed was a trip to the local bookshop and our first bird book.

At that stage I’d been keeping a journal for some years but it was locked and private because much of it referred to my work and troubling family matters. Then technology intervened; my computer kit refused to communicate with the app I was using and in spite of a bit of helpline raging I was told that my kit was ancient rubbish and I should spend several thousand pounds on renewing it or piss off into outer darkness where there would be less gnashing of teeth. I’d reached the point in my church work where I could hardly cope with any more grief and felt my ability to empathise was slowly shrinking. With retirement imminent and following a great deal of group therapy and several years of one-to-one psychoanalytic psychotherapy I made the crucial decision to go public and start a blog in which I could pay more attention to celebrating life and being human. The Potwell Inn, the blog you’re reading now is approaching its tenth birthday. WordPress was more tolerant of heritage kit and in fact in the ensuing years I’ve moved across three platforms and four computers without a hitch. The pleasing irony is that WordPress eventually bought out the self-righteous and surly Day One and honour was satisfied.

The Potwell Inn was always intended to be a safe place for me to work in. After decades (my whole working life|) of negotiating dangerous places like public schools, prisons, youth centres and psychiatric hospitals to the Church of England (which was by far the most dangerous) I was pretty much burnt out and I needed to find somewhere to be truly myself without having to pretend I was the fearless and fun-loving extrovert I was generally taken to be. Here in the Potwell Inn, with a few notable exceptions, I have no idea who’s reading about me and for the most part I don’t need to mask or self-censor. I still need to guard against oversharing, and this is probably an appropriate moment to remind readers that the Potwell Inn is a virtual pub whose concept is borrowed from HG Wells’ comic novel “A history of Mr Polly” which was a set text from school but which provided me with an imaginary safe place as I day dreamed and gazed through the classroom window on airless summer days. Very few people I’ve known have really got past my armour so my cherished hope is that the customers – i.e. the readers of the Potwell Inn – find something in common here.

As a child my escape strategy was books. I became a completely promiscuous reader of biographies, the complete works of Dickens, Wells, later Henry Williamson, and up into much later writers. I consumed poetry, particularly the Black Mountain poets. My first involuntary tic involved moving the book past my eyes as opposed to moving my eyes across the page. I would begin a new line with the book held level with my ear. Mr Jablonski the ophthalmologist apparently thought it was just an odd habit and I’d soon get over it. Well I did and I didn’t, in that the tic just moved elsewhere; I lost the disturbing reading habit and started twisting my mouth and neck painfully. Much later I discovered that with an effort of will I could sometimes move it to less visible places, at about the same age- maybe ten or eleven, that I started to feel unable to breathe when things were sprung unexpectedly on me. My diaphragm would tighten like a drum and I could only partially fill my lungs. My Dad had a laudable thing about never making promises he couldn’t be sure of keeping but he sometimes applied it in upsetting ways, for instance by never telling my sister and I when we were going on holiday. We would go downstairs and see the suitcases standing near the door and I would be thrown into a panic – having no idea what was coming next.

The second thread of this post is a lifelong love of lists. The first book I remember was a picture dictionary, rapidly followed by i Spy books, Observer guides and a never ending sequence of obsessions that my Mother would disparage as “fads”. I became an expert on the rigging of sailing ships which led to a lifelong interest in knots – the cue for binge reading Patrick O’Brian. I could list the later (almost always non fiction) books that captured me – “The Foundations of Wireless” by M G Scroggie, way beyond my comfort zone; “Writing Illuminating and Lettering” by Edward Johnston – whose house in Putney we stumbled upon last year; and then after studying “A Potter’s Book” by Bernard Leach, I got into Parmelee on ceramic glazes and now over sixty years later I’m sitting next to the fourth edition of Clive Stace’s “New Flora of the British Isles”. Every one of these books involved the writing and testing of lists – endless lists which, all bar the last ten years or so, are lost forever. I even crack jokes about “feeling a list coming on”, which I think only Madame understands.

My first wildlife lists were handwritten in scruffy notebooks and also in about 17,000 photographs; many duplicated, two thirds of which didn’t even have basic EXIF data. The jumbled and unexamined sediment of a white knuckle life lived in fear of being “found out” – although I never knew what for. I’ve mentioned my melancholic temperament several times in this blog, but it occasionally tips over into what one doctor called “phobic anxiety” and even depression. In my twenties I knew I was ill when I started to see the winter trees as the bronchioles and alveoli of dead people. My mood was only lifted by absorbing, sinking myself in technical detail – the more complex the better and so I emerged from my ceramics degree with more knowledge of glazes and firing than was thought proper by the faculty members who believed that creativity did better when it was uncluttered by any technique at all. I recall a testy exchange with the Head of Department when he saw a drawing of an apple tree which I’d made which attempted to express its characteristic form. All living things have distinctive forms just as they have their individual variations. Close, even meditative attention is the prerequisite of all of art and science. He denied furiously that there was anything distinctive about tree forms and I may have given a sharp reply. That capacity to start fights also followed me through life. I never could defer to flawed or undeserved authority; neither could I tolerate pomposity, and in the end I got fairly used to being called ! “the rudest person I’ve ever met!” to which I would sometimes reply “Well you’ve been lucky then!” One of the best teachers who really stretched me – Sid Harris who taught Sociology – would challenge my flights of fancy by saying firmly “that’s all very well David – but where’s the evidence???” Evidence, honesty, clarity and truthfulness are foundational to civil society. Neglect them and you land up with fraudsters, liars, rapists insurrectionists and racists running the country. My principal defence at school became what must have seemed a frighteningly quick gift of sarcasm. By the end of first year sixth form I’d come within a whisker of getting myself into real trouble and left school with my collar being felt by the Head Teacher whose neurotypicality would have won awards, and my first job was as a junior photographic technician at the university where they handed me a Leica and a box of film; showed me where the darkroom was and said “go and learn to use them”. It didn’t last long but I managed to get a City and Guilds qualification. After that I tasted the joys of unskilled engineering work and welding before Madame and I met when she was 15 and I was 18 and she persuaded me to go back to college. I was astonished when they offered me a place.

I could go on but there’s no point except to say that at some point last year I decided to sort out my photos. I was interested to see whether I could recognize as many as 100 wild plants. I started off with a very elementary database but the more data I typed in, the more possibilities for extending my understanding popped into my mind and the more complex it became until it became a thing of beauty; a second Potwell Inn journal expressed in a different language. The photos, mostly taken on a phone over the past eleven years had enough attached EXIF data to reconstruct the past in diary form. I could find a photo and its date and location and it would evoke the whole complexity of the moment of discovery. Other details were embedded in my memory; of smells, of landscapes, of my companions (usually Madame). The database soon had over 350 entries, some of the plants I’d entirely forgotten ever encountering. The referencing and identification is quite intense work but after a few hours spending time – even with people I know and trust on, for instance, a field trip – I need a few hours of solitude to recover. I slip into my study, turn the computer on and open the Floras I’m using and an intense feeling of safety and relaxation floods through me. Memories of holidays, walks and random strolls along the river and canal banks can repair all those stressed out neurons.

There’s a deep historical, maybe spiritual significance in the naming of things. In the Old Testament as the creation is described (this isn’t a religious riff by the way, I’m just pointing out how fundamental the naming of things is). So in Genesis 1 – the first of 2 creation stories – and not many people notice that there are two – God creates and divides the higher orders – birds, sea monsters, every living creature that moves and then generalizes every green plant for food (does that make God 1 a vegetarian? a poisoner?) – and feels rather pleased. Then in chapter 2, a second and different account, God 2 makes everything in its higher order and then after a bit of dangerous cultural faladiddle in creating Eve, invites Adam to inspect and name all the living things – thereby making him the first taxonomist. Orders, families, genera, species and eventually sub-species. Put briefly, we’ve been naming and ordering things from the very beginnings of written culture.

A single flower is a single dollop of data – enjoy it while it lasts in a jam jar. A photograph with an added date and location makes it ten times as useful to our understanding. My 17,000 uncatalogued photos (not all of them flowers of course) is a personal scrap heap, of no use or interest to anyone except me and the ever patient Madame. But when I extract just half of a percent of them and tabulate them in a searchable database with “who, what, where and when” – all verified then they become seriously interesting and useful. But not only useful. I would insist that these living libraries of accumulated knowledge are beautiful.

At the New Year Madame and I went on our usual walk and found 22 plants in flower. Our Bath Natural History Society group went out a day later and recorded 66. A couple of days later again the lists were published nationally and I discovered that a plant which I’d recorded as Canadian Fleabane, which grew profusely outside our flat two years ago; was this year recorded as two different species – the Bilbao Fleabane and Guernsey Fleabane. I just had to go and check my apparent mistake and so I went out on Sunday in a freezing drizzle and gathered some samples of what looked like very dead material brought them home to take measurements and macro photographs and after a lot of head scratching and turning of pages came to the conclusion that they were right and I was wrong. Good news and bad news because I got an extra record. The trainspotter trap is never far from the surface.

There was more good news when we spotted (left – Right) the first Celandine of the year, Butcher’s Broom in flower and Cow Parsley in flower too as well as some Snowdrops. Spring is just around the corner.

But perhaps the tree walk we went to on Saturday yielded the nicest surprise, because we were shown something which was visually completely uninteresting and yet reminded me of a time when this part of the world was full of enormous Elm trees. On the left is an Elm sapling. It won’t get much bigger because it will soon be struck down by Dutch Elm disease, but I understand that resistant varieties are being sought out and grown on. I’d really love to see just one fully grown and magnificent Elm back in Wiltshire where we were students and fell in love with the landscape.

Dropping the mask has been quite a challenge – just as coming to terms with my own occasional oddness has been equally challenging. Possibly, my friends might say, the effort has been entirely theirs but diversity is the very essence of nature. Every living being, every plant, animal, insect or fungus is largely the same as every other of its kind – and yet different somewhere deep in its recesses. I wouldn’t swap with anyone else for the world. As a lesson from nature it’s irreplaceable and, for me, so are the lists which offer the safety in numbers that I mentioned in the title. Almost every wildlife programme we watch wants to suggest that nature is healing – that going for a walk in nature somehow fills us with an invisible miasma that makes us whole again. Well that may be partly true but I’d love to see it tested in some scientific way because my own thought is that it’s not just walking through it that does the trick but engaging deeply with it. It’s the engagement that makes us well – and the deeper the better!

Upsides and backsides of camping

If you look carefully at the right hand photograph you’ll see a little jet of water, reminiscent of a Brussels fountain, exiting a split in a plastic pressure vessel used – so the blurb says – to equalise the water flow at the taps in the campervan. It’s OK, I suppose, but it means keeping the pump turned off unless you want to fill a kettle because it will make loud pumping noises all day and night if you don’t, and it will also empty the main tank very quickly; not a disaster but a bit irritating. Not nearly as irritating, though, as the almost complete absence of internet signal down here near St Anthony’s Head in Cornwall.

Turning to the good bit, we’ve managed to get out into the weather nearly every day and we’ve eaten well and finished up all the sweetcorn, runner beans and tomatoes that we brought with us. We’ve also carried on our exploration of a lane that goes down to the beach from our campsite and turns, about halfway, into a sunken lane which has got a delightful array of unusual and even rare plants – so I’ve been practicing using the new camera to which I’ve added a flash diffuser ring which makes a huge difference to extreme close-ups and macro photos. I’ve also been using a new, cheapest money can buy, GPS, which is actually very good for recording accurate grid references and saves me recording plants in the middle of the sea. Both the camera and my phone boast that they give grid references in the EXIF data but they can be hopelessly unreliable.

The yellow flower at the top is of the unaccountably named Dark Mullein that we found growing on what must be a collapsed Cornish wall. In the same short stretch we’ve found Red Bartsia, Hedge Woundwort and Babington’s Leeks alongside all the usual suspects, and just up the lane we found a single flower among hundreds of Yellow Flowered Strawberries, known as Yard Strawberries in the US and which I’ve been assuming were common wild strawberries for years. We followed a man accompanied by half a dozen female fans, down the lane on a foraging walk. I hope he didn’t make the same mistake as I have for years. Apparently they’re inedible if not poisonous. I’d never have discovered that from tasting them because I’m very suspicious of the impact of foraging when it goes too far. Down here whole lanes of Wild Garlic have been stripped and sold off to posh restaurants. As if you could gain any esoteric knowledge or benefit of the wild by eating it?

The rest of the time has been spent revisiting some old (plant) friends, now in seed, to tie down their exact names. I’ve been looking at a clump of wild Radish for three or four years, trying to distinguish them from Sea Radish and yesterday I got the evidence I was looking for; an unmistakable string of beads seed capsule and a single yellow flower to seal the deal. I made some progress with the same problem of Wild Carrot/Sea Carrot and comparing the seed heads I’m nearer to understanding which is which.

If you can seriously enlarge the right hand picture you’ll see the exquisite spiked seeds of the clifftop carrot – a sculptor’s gift! As for the wild Leeks, the seed heads have now become balls of fully formed bulblets, like tiny onion sets. I picked up a few and we’ll see if we can grow them on the allotment.

Apart from all that, reading, and ten hours of sleep most nights, I’ve been working on my database of plants, their locations and photos – hence the frustration with the internet. Yes I’m aware this all sounds a bit eccentric but it’s my happy place and that’s not up for negotiation!

Ivy in flower – a late treat for the Ivy bees on our allotment or, in this case a pair of Drone Flies – Eristalis tenax

Seeing and beholding

A rather neglected apple tree on the allotments. I’m thinking of Samuel Palmer.

Hardly anyone was drawing in the 70’s, when we were at art school. A few tutors paid lip service to it but basically it had fallen out of fashion in favour of a rather woolly notion of creativity. Observational drawing; life drawing; were so last year and the now was all about being. Stony ground, then, for those of us who persisted in the archaic study of form and structure. I remember a bit of a row with my Head of Department when I showed him a monochrome painting I’d made of an apple tree and suggested that apple trees had a particular structure that you could see through the distortions of wind, weather and pruning. He said that this was ridiculous and that all the trees were pretty much alike. He, of course, lived in an entirely uniform conceptual world whereas I was drawing the phenomenal. I felt puzzled and deflated by his negative response and yet -decades later – I can see that not only was I in the right, but that an understanding and recognition of these subtle structures would turn out to be absolutely essential when I began to love plants.

*On reading this back to myself the next day it seems I should at least try to explain what I mean about the structure of the apple tree.

All trees, of course, need light and soil and so they have evolved to make the best use of what light there is available which in turn suggests that branches and leaves are always arranged in the most efficient way to catch the sun in order to ripen their fruit/seeds for the continuation of the species. That’s undoubtedly true, but they all seem to do it in different ways and those different ways seem to be remarkably consistent from species to species. The apple, being a domestic fruit, grown for the benefit of humans, gets mucked about a fair bit by pruning for the best possible crop. The one in the photo has been very neglected and in a commercial orchard it would have had the central tangle of overlapping branches pruned out to allow light and air to the tree. But even amidst the mess I can see something of the familiar structure. The apple is a bit of a ballerina. I always think of a dancer on points, arms extended , curving slightly upwards and then downwards towards the lowered fingertips. The fruits, in the autumn, are like fairy lights; golden and streaked with red. They don’t need any notices to suggest “eat me” like Alice’s mushroom although too much cider from those same apples might have something of the same effect – and due to their propensity to cross breed promiscuously, every tree and every fruit – unless it’s been grafted – will be different. Some might be so full of tannin they’ll put your face into a rictus like pucker for the next hour and some so sweet you’ll fetch your penknife back from your pocket and peel another, and then another. While some trees sit solidly on their roots like cathedral pillars, the apple dances for the sun. It’s almost impossible to describe it in words but from winter buds to spring flowers and then ripening fruit it’s pure joy. It’s just a plant, you might say, but we truly know plants through all of our senses. We don’t just see plants we behold them. There’s aesthetic joy in seeing. We smell their perfume; we (when we’re sure of them), listen to them – shake a ripe Cox and you may hear the seeds rattling inside; taste them, dry them for the store and cook them. We can even turn them into alcohol and medicine.

Finding some botanical competency has been a long and pretty arduous journey through small errors and real howlers but just as we once learned to draw the human form by understanding how it articulates and holds together; the process of identifying plants involves genuine and deep contemplation of the tiniest details and the elimination of each false trail one by one until a family and then a species finally emerges. Often I’m defeated and I have to appeal to a higher authority – someone with more experience.

The upside of the experience is that – like the spokes of a wheel – explorations can take you off into all sorts of different disciplines, relationships and histories. Ecology, environment, global heating, folklore, cooking and medicine are just a few of the fields that can help to determine not just the name, but the meaning of a plant within human culture.

Autumn has slammed down the shutters on the prospect of long and warm days and tomorrow is offering a day of driving rain. At this time of year we turn towards the lovely world of fungi but darker nights and shorter days also provide the chance to go back over the hundreds of photographs I’ve taken during the season. This year I’ve been learning to use a new and very lightweight camera which offers in-camera focus stacking and eliminates the biggest bugbear of macro photography – very shallow depth of field. Now, for the first time, I can photograph a leaf and then, later, examine it at around x20 magnification; even down to the tiniest star shaped bunches of hairs. It’s all evidence when it comes to ID.

We’re soon off to Cornwall again in the campervan and so I’ve been hard at it in the kitchen preserving and bottling. Luckily our son has got a half-empty freezer and so some of the work can wait until we’re back. Later on we’re looking forward to a short trip up the canal in a narrow boat. The polytunnel is now clear apart from a couple of lunches worth of sweetcorn. I suppose it’s no surprise that we get so knackered. I’m massively disappointed with the Labour government but I never really expected anything more from them. Deacon Starmer and the Prophets of Gloom would make a great album for a funeral.

A hot day in the kitchen

Every year the processing of tomatoes comes around; always surprising, always rewarding but always knackering. The polytunnel is a tremendous asset on the allotment, but the crops inside it seem always to ripen almost simultaneously, leaving us with a challenging glut. Our small flat has limited storage space so the more reduced the crop is, the easier it is for us. This year, fortunately, we need to make tomato ketchup which reduces 2 Kg of tomatoes to three small bottles. The ketchup is intense and – dare I say – much better than the commercial ones and tomatoes are the only crop in which we’re almost completely self-sufficient. I could write volumes on the sheer impossibility of total self-sufficiency which could only ever function well in a close community with a tradition of barter – the kind of community that only a small handful of us now live in. Having lived in a couple of comunes we would say that they’re no kind of primrose path to happiness and contentment. There’s always at least one person who refuses to work!

That said, before we could get going in the kitchen there was heavy work to be done on the allotment because we have decided to remove the fruit cage which has become a climbing frame for bindweed and serves no useful purpose except choking and shading our soft fruit. The forecast had the temperature rising to the low 20’s by mid day, so we went out early to break the back of the job. Two hours later we’d removed the roof and three of the four mesh walls and rolled them into giant builder’s bags to take down to the tip. This should open up the space and make watering, picking and pruning much easier. We were pleased to find, once we’d fought through the jungle, that our mulch of sheeps’ fleece and wood chip has completely suppressed the weeds around the plants, but of course bindweed travels aloft and laughs at mulches.

Back at the Potwell Inn; hot and sweaty, I popped shallots, chopped garlic and sliced tomatoes, sprinkled them with herbs from our little pot garden on the pavement, drizzled olive oil and shoved them in the oven to roast. As I’m writing they’re cooling down and later I’ll put them through the passasta machine – which is the most useful piece of kit for anyone who needs to process a lot of tomatoes. Honestly I’ve spent so many hours trying to push tomatoes through a sieve doing a job that now takes minutes. Later again I’ll unite the passata with some cider vinegar, sugar and all the spices, reduce it down and bottle it.

With later harvestings we’ll make straight passata and two kinds of readymade pasta sauce which we use as a base for anything else that needs a shot of tomato umami. It looks likely to be a punishingly hot week so we’ll have our work cut out with watering and finishing the fruit cage. Early starts are the only way to get it all done before the energy sapping city heat takes charge.

Next on the tomato agenda is one of our favourite Italian recipes panzanella made to the recipe in Anna Del Conte’s wonderful “Gastronomy of Italy”. I’ve never been fond of raw onion, but her suggestion of steeping thinly sliced red onion in iced brine for an hour in the fridge transforms the sulphurous heat into something altogether more lovely.

While all that cooking was going on, I’d brought home a small piece of the (inedible) Stone Parsley I found next to the shed door so I could take some macro photos of it using the focus stacking facility on the new camera and the big tripod arranged over the dining table (my desk). The tiny compact camera, only 50g heavier than my phone looks a bit ridiculous on top of the full sized tripod, but camera shake would ruin the macro focus stacking. I was really pleased with the results – especially when I used some sharpening to clean them up. The photo is below and, for reference, the flowers are only about 2 mm diameter – so we’re almost in microscope territory. Not necessary for identifying this plant because one of the diagnostics is a strong – some say unpleasant – smell of petrol when you bruise the stem. I can certainly vouch for that.

Last night I slept for nine hours and woke up dreaming I was paddling the kayak down a small river. What a glorious start to the day!

Stone Parsley, Sison amomum photographed with an Olympus TG-7 using in-camera focus stacking and a bit of sharpening applied later.

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.

Dancing in the bog!

Ragged Robin – Silene flos-cuculi

Ragged Robin is one of my favourite wildflowers; it’s so exuberant, so punky and so unnecessarily lacking in any evolutionary credentials for the disorganised petals of its flower that seems to be a message from nature to remind us that plants have never been there to massage our aesthetic sensibilities. Close-up like this, the petals suggest the dancing fingers of a group of witches. I’m reminded of Matisse’s Dancers but perhaps more by Roger Hilton’s famous 1964 painting “Oi Yoi Yoi”; so in-your-face and so Dionysian in its darker sense. This one was growing on the far side of a ditch and I was so keen to get the photo that I had to be rescued by Madame when I lost my balance and feared a muddy, and probably smelly, dive. I’ve fallen in a few rhynes (that’s a Somerset word for a drainage ditch, pronounced reen) in my time and wouldn’t recommend it for the faint hearted.

Anyway that was all a slow intro to the theme of this campervan trip to the far west of Wales overlooking Ramsey Island. I’ve brought a new camera with me – it’s an Olympus TG-7, the latest of six previous iterations, the first of which I took on the Camino. This isn’t a review; I paid for the camera myself and bought it on the back of many other reviews by people who know what they’re doing. It’s shockproof, waterproof to about 30 feet, and fully featured when it comes to aperture, shutter speed and ISO setting so very much a technical step up from the Pixel 6A phone I’ve been using for nearly everything on this blog. In fact it’s only 50g heavier than the phone so it’s supercompact, with built in geotag and GPS unit and for me the most important feature of all, it has inbuilt macro facility and offers in-camera focus stacking. On paper this is a serious piece of kit for a very clumsy person who falls into ditches trying to photograph perfectly common wildflowers and fungi. Of course other cameras are available – I’ve got a Panasonic G2 with a Leica macro lens but it weighs a ton, doesn’t do muddy ditches and takes ages to set up for a shot.

My first discovery on trying out the macro/focus stacking is that it really does need a tripod, but mine – a Manfrotto carbon fibre job with a magnesium ball head looks impressive but is just too heavy and vulnerable to life outside a studio so I’m looking around for something light and bombproof that can get the camera down to 1 cm above the ground facing directly downwards. I took this photograph of the seed head of a Rough Chervil plant in the van with the big tripod and it gives some indication of what macro + focus stacking will bring to the table.

We’re camping at the far end of the peninsula and the weather has been – let’s say – very Welsh; but when the sun shines all day, as it did yesterday and the sky is China blue, as you might see on the best porcelain; and the wind gives a brief respite from the storm the previous night (which pretty much emptied the campsite) then this place is as close to heaven as we’ll ever get. Yesterday we did one of our favourite walks across the fields to Whitesands Bay and dropped in on many of the plants which specialize in this kind of environment because we now know where to find them after many visits. There are numerous bogs and marshes hereabouts and one of the most important botanical lessons I ever learned centred on the importance of understanding the ecology of the place we were searching. We find Ragged Robin and Yellow Bartsia here because of the wet ground. Bogs and dunes – our cup was full! Yesterday we found Dwarf Mallow, thriving on a dry and sandy footpath along with Sand Spurry, both in their happy place. There were Southern Marsh and Pyramidal Orchids – although it was difficult to be sure of the first without entering the marsh; Purple Loosestrife, Kidney Vetch, Lady’s Bedstraw, Sea Carrot, Navelwort and the ever elusive Scarlet Pimpernel which has changed its family name from Anagallis to Lysimachia to avoid detection – but we were ahead of that knavish game.

But perhaps the most exciting find was the Stoat that crossed the patch immediately in front of us. Madame didn’t see it, and just as I was getting excited and pointing to where it disappeared, to my great surprise it came out and crossed the path again; a tiny cigar sized assassin – not about to be deterred from its business by two huge inedible shadows with the sun at their backs.

Is that the reason we love nature so much? Its capacity to redefine beauty? Like a beetle flying past, flashing iridescent green like a flying emerald, or the powder blue abdomen of a Broad Bodied Chaser dragonfly – hunting the shallows of a pond? or a Stoat in pursuit of its prey?

As we waited for the bus home, we watched groups of long limbed teenagers learning to surf and playing football; falling in and out of love thirty times a day and trying to figure out what exactly being a grown-up entails. My heart says “it’s not what you think!” but I’m ill-inclined to march along the beach spoiling their best ever day with my old-man truths. When the bus finally arrived our driver took a minute interest in our various destinations and ignoring such minor inconveniences as bus stops he dropped us all off exactly where we wanted to go, (anyone for the supermarket?) He stopped for a pee in one of the caravan sites – because the council have closed all the public toilets in the town – a major problem for drivers on a ten hour shift – and then made an unscheduled diversion to pick up some passengers at St Non’s Well, whilst passing a free dog sweet to some walkers on the side of the road.

Goodness knows we have our own human parasites, predators and Dionysians; controllers and exploiters – many of them wolves pretending to be grannies – Red Riding Hood is, after all a story about humans not wolves; and the present election has been sheer torture as they strut their stuff – it’s been good to escape for a while.

Google Photos as a natural history resource.

Most of these photographs were taken on what turned out to be a life changing trip to Dartmoor in March 2016. The Potwell Inn didn’t exist; we’d been through retirement and a major family crisis when our second grandchild was born with a still undiagnosed genetic disorder; we’d moved from a large vicarage to a small flat in Bath and the allotment was yet to come. Christmas had been a write-off and we had taken ourselves off to St Ives in the campervan in search of some respite – in the dog days of the old year just as a major Atlantic storm reached the south west.

January 1st 2016 – a stupidly hubristic resolution

The key photograph here is the one of the (at the time) unidentified little seagull. We were leaning on the railings above the harbour just down from St Ives lifeboat station and watching the gulls when I realized that this gull was very different from some of the other gulls and I had no idea what species it was. I remember feeling faintly annoyed with myself and later that day we went into the bookshop and bought the first bird guide we’d ever owned. It was about then that quite the stupidest resolution I’ve ever made began to form in my head. I would not – I resolved – pass by any plant or animal, without naming it. The picture I took that day was completely hopeless in terms of identification, even with an 80mm lens there was no detail that had any significance so far as I could see. Just for the record I now know perfectly well that the dark smudge behind the bird’s ear is all that remains of the Black Headed Gulls’ distinctive summer plumage on December 29th.

Before we retired (i.e when we had a bit more money), I bought an iPhone and a Macbook. Madame had already settled into the Apple ecosystem because she was teaching photography at the time and it made sense for us to share resources. For the first time I owned a mobile that would add location data to the EXIF file. At roughly the same time I started keeping a private journal using Day One software and this integrated seamlessly between the iPhone, the Macbook and a big desktop. But it wasn’t so long before we came up against Apple’s policy of abandoning their products by making it impossible to upgrade the software. Day One suddenly stopped talking to my Macbook and when I complained I was told that it was my fault for not upgrading. We struggled on for several years, but applications like Photoshop and Lightroom were less and less easy to run on our aging machines and in any case their memory hogging features were far beyond my own needs. I was using Microsoft Windows for work and so we landed up in the worst of all worlds, moving photographs between incompatible software. Heaven knows how much data was lost; but in the end I began a long process of ditching Apple and moved as much data as I could find into Dropbox as a security for the future.

It was our oldest son who broke the impasse by giving me an old Pixel 3 phone after an upgrade and I started using Google Photos. To be honest there was nothing about the iPhone that I particularly missed, and when – a couple of years later – he gave me a basic HP Chromebook that he’d acquired during another upgrade, and after he helped me with a fast and pretty seamless setup and data transfer, I put my agonisingly slow Macbook on a shelf and started enjoying an entirely new and fast cloud-based ecosystem.

Anyway, to get back to the photographs at the top of this post, they represent something of a sea change. My ludicrous resolution to try to name things brought about a move towards much more purposeful photography. As my interest in plants moved up a step, I discovered that well composed photographs of plants I didn’t recognise, meant I didn’t have to dig them up and take them home which is at best inconsiderate and at worst illegal. It’s taken ever since to refine the technique so that I remember to photograph the sometimes apparently insignificant details that make the difference between a correct and a wrong identification.

None of this particularly mattered, of course, as long as I was the only person ever to see the record. But then, as I wrote in a post last week, I began sending them for verification by the local BSBI East Cornwall recorder – which is when it dawned on me that my photographs were more akin to archaeological compost than a filing system. Looking for old photos meant trawling through thousands of them in the hope of alighting upon the right one.

By now I’d got myself a powerful little Pixelbook and I was beginning to understand that the originally utilitarian Google Photos has a few new tricks up its sleeve. One of Google’s most useful – although much feared – attributes is its formidable artificial intelligence software. If you’ve ever used Google Lens on the phone you’ll know that. It can be a curse as well as a blessing – this morning I had an email from someone asking what was the launching fee at Percuil. We were on holiday for the last two weeks and I mentioned Percuil several times in the blog and the odd request must have flowed from a bit of AI that was too clever for its own good.

Google Photos uses AI to do a lot of basic sorting and indexing of photos behind the scenes; so I can search on months and years, faces and places. But last week I wanted to start indexing keywords like genera, species, English and Latin names and various other bits of searchable data. I’d contemplated using some third party software but after hours of searching I couldn’t find anything I liked better. Any records I’d submitted or had accepted would be somewhere in one of a number of vast external databases, but I wouldn’t be able to access them in a simple personal list.

So here’s the exciting thing. After a bit of experimentation it seems that contrary to what I read on the internet, I can do keyword searches on terms that I type into the “details” column at the head of all the EXIF data. The only downside is that the AI facilities remain in play, so a keyword search on primrose might yield a few lookalikes as well – not the end of the world in my view. My guess is that some of the AI used in Google Lens is already being built into Google Photos. The software connects seamlessly to WordPress, so I can use my photographs in this blog; and I can easily forward diagnostic photographs to the referees for acceptance.

When we go out plant hunting I take the phone with a macro lens so I can take the necessary photos. I’ve got stacks of useful apps on the phone as well, including OS mapping, accurate National Grid references, altitude, and shortcuts to the BSBI plant distribution database. I’ve also got iRecord, I Naturalist and a link to the local list of plants which I download as a PDF before leaving home. Google Lens is surprisingly helpful in steering me in the right direction but it’s not infallible. Of course I will take a book along with me but I always take photographs because I can use them with my library of plant books at leisure when I get home. It doesn’t always work, and I often have to go back, look more closely and take more photos in order to do a full ID.

The upshot is that the more of this kind of intense work I do, the more my plant ID skills improve. Typing details into the software drills the English and Latin names into my memory very effectively too. I think the take-home point is that while for some people, staggering across a bog with a large camera and tripod, an expensive GPS unit and a copy of Stace 4 weighing in at well over a kilogramme is the only way forward. But for my purposes I can get it all into a pocket without my trousers falling down. I take a 6″ ruler, I use my walking pole as a 1.5 metre measuring stick. I take a plastic zip bag, just in case; a Rite in the Rain waterproof notebook and a pen that writes on it underwater and upside down – who knows when that might be needed! a scalpel and a couple of hand lenses. Total weight around 500g.

Maybe I’ll be forced to eat my words one day, but this seems to me to be the simplest and cheapest way – it’s free – of creating a searchable, automatically backed up photographic database for plant recording. No good at all, of course for insects, mammals and birds because they all race around too far away for a phone camera. But my subjects stand still – unless it’s very windy – and best of all the photos escape the dangers of being lost forever in my fallible memory. What’s not to like?

A rainy day brings me face to face with my chaotic records.

Until quite recently I’ve been rather dismissive of record keeping. I’ve seen so many people sitting hunched in front of screens, entering data for hour after hour, and thinking to myself that such ant-like industry was a bit tame compared with having the wind in your face in some wild and remote corner of the countryside. However I had a sort of Damascus Road conversion this week when I realized how much I rely on my fallible memory.

So, for instance I recently came across a single Corn Marigold growing at the edge of the coast path. It’s one of those species that’s slowly disappearing because it contaminates grain crops and can make them go mouldy; and so farmers can get exemptions to spray them with weedkiller. OK I recognised it because I’d seen it before and took all the photos necessary to send it to the local Vice County Recorder for verification. All very laborious but the record was accepted and I was extremely pleased with myself.

Pleased, that is, until I tried to find the photos I’d taken of the same plant in Pembrokeshire, which was where the farmer explained to me the paradox of needing to spray off a vulnerable plant in order to make a living. I’m pleased I didn’t have to adjudicate in that case, but it was – he insisted – a very involved process. He was no cowboy; he played his farming by the book. This all took place in 2016, and in spite of a lengthy and time consuming search through thousands of photos I couldn’t find them. In fact, of the thousands of photos I’ve taken of plants, I’ve always relied on memory to find them again. There are no grid references, just dates – and no notes or I/D’s. So to verify a ten year old photo I just have to hope that the photo was good enough to convey the essential details, and with some plants that might mean a 3mm long seed. Usually they aren’t that good. I’ve tried using a very expensive Panasonic camera with an even more expensive Leica macro lens but it weighs a ton and slows down our walks to divorce speed. It’s been a steep learning curve to make the best of my Pixel 6 phone with an add-on macro lens.

Anyway, enough technical talk. The nub of the problem is that I don’t take the necessary notes on the spot, and I’ve never made my photos searchable by using keywords. Even worse, now I’ve started successfully submitting records to the BSBI I don’t have a personal copy of the plants I’ve recorded, along with all the other useful information. If it takes an optimistic one minute to make a record, it’ll take somewhere in the region of 200 hours to enter the data; and realistically it could take twice or three times that because many of the records would need identifying all over again. My respect for those industrious ants hunched over their laptops has soared.

Of course I’ve got handwritten notebooks going back fifty and more years; but they’re spasmodic, unsearchable and without photos. Worse still they contain stacks of shopping lists and phone numbers and references to books – you know the kind of thing. The only sensible option is digital and after a lot of searching through applications that monitor your mood, send you inspiring messages and increase your productivity I came back to the beginning and Google Photos where they’re all stored already with their EXIF data which in the case of the Pixel 5 stores location, although in an incomprehensible and difficult to convert form. Phew.

Hedge Woundwort

I think the heart of the problem is that I’m a bit of a Tigger; always on to the next thing, and because I’m a writer I use photographs as much to record feelings as for raw data. I love writing; I love writing this blog – but behind the scenes there are two almost conflicting aims. The writerly aim is to capture and hopefully convey the inspirational beauty of the earth. The scientific aim is to understand and to record the things I see in a way that can add to our knowledge and understanding of the earth. The conflict is expressed neatly in the names of flowers. Will it be the English names; imprecise and sometimes downright misleading, but often poetic and expressive of historical uses and ancient magic; or will it be the Latin? Will it be Hedge Woundwort or Stachys sylvatica? I would never want to choose because both English and Latin names are indispensable to me. The poetry and beauty of Eyebright, with its intimation of ancient usage carries so much metaphorical freight, we’d be all the poorer if it were shoved aside by the pedantic application of its scientific name – unless – that is, you’re trying to figure out whether it’s thriving or failing when getting the name exactly right for the species is a matter of real importance.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

There are literally millions of records of British and Irish wildflowers, all searchable and nearly all down to the ant-like industry of thousands of volunteers recording and entering the data and the handful of poorly paid professionals who struggle to keep the whole show on the road. Why is it important? Mostly because the only weapon we have left to oppose the destruction of the earth or the gifting of our land to extractive industrial agriculture is strong and reliable evidence of the biological diversity of the land they covet. There’s no credible argument against this. The future is either green or it’s Goodnight Irene for all of us and our putative descendants. Governments will argue in bad faith that there is no evidence for X or Y, knowing full well that there is no evidence because they starved these essential scientific bodies of the funding they needed to gather the evidence.

My chaotic records, I’m ashamed to say, are of no use at all in this threatened world unless I get them organised. I get it. This blog is just one thread of my fascination with what makes us human. It’s the visible conversation about the relationship between the Potwell Inn and being fully human; our lived experience in all its partiality and confusion. The other thread is the urge to identify, record and understand what is here in order that we can make a reliable inventory of what we have, what we are losing and what we have lost. Hard nosed and factual, industrious and perhaps a bit dull; except that I spent a couple of hours yesterday dissecting and photographing some Cow Parsley and comparing it with some Rough Chervil. I can’t begin to tell you how enjoyable it was!

How to change the world

If only it were so easy. I was originally going to call this post “The morning after”, if only because, having done a fair bit of research and finding several target species I wanted to emphasise the fact that as sure as night follows day, there’s always a stack of work to do. I was feeling mightily pleased with myself and I envisaged myself cantering towards the finishing line and pressing the send button on the reporting software. Pleased, that is, until I started to look more closely at the photos.

I’m very used to the dead hand of confirmation bias when I’m out and about looking for a particular plant. I find something that looks a bit like it and instantly every nerve strains towards putting the tick in the box; even – or perhaps especially when there’s something that doesn’t quite fit the frame. As I was writing that sentence I thought of one of my most forensic, and therefore valuable tutors at theological college who would seize on the slightest mention of any hard work that had gone into the draft sermon I’d just delivered and say – “really Dave; no-one wants to listen to you pissing from the pulpit!”

Bugle – Ajuga reptans

Indeed not, but I hope I’m making a point of general interest here. Point one is that there are an awful lot of little white flowers around at this time of the year. They’re often quite tiny and inconspicuous and I usually have to prostrate myself with a hand lens and take a closer look. Point two is that a phone camera with a decent zoom capability is the most useful gadget in the world for recording a pile of information you didn’t notice at the time you were squinting at the specimen, but discover you desperately need when you start leafing through the 1266 pages of Stace 4 (no pictures) at home. Macro photos are so immensely useful for identification that I even bought a little clip-on macro lens which makes life even easier.

Nonetheless, the morning after feeling creeps in like mental wet rot as you stare at the photos and realize that in the cold light of day, Hairy Bittercress; Alpine Pennycress, Dwarf Mouse Ear, Common Whitlow Grass and even Barren Strawberry look like – how shall I put this delicately? – cousins, and my report if I ever send it will be seasoned with doubts. Today at a Bath Nats meeting I shared some of those doubts with a really ace botanist; so good he can enlarge at any length you like on the 275 plus subspecies of Blackberry. I say I shared, but as soon as he discerned the drift of the conversation he paled visibly and offered to look at my emails in the same tone of voice you might use to say ‘you must come round for supper some time’ – with not the least intention of specifying an actual date.

So maybe it would be better to have walked on by and enjoyed the lovely skies last week; but here’s the point. After you’ve sat and struggled with an ID for a while, the world becomes an infinitely richer place. Instead of noticing the little white flower and passing by, you now understand that it could be one of … who knows; it could be hundreds! Suddenly the world needs to expand to accommodate this new piece of knowledge because now there are five new friends where there was once only one.

Changing the world, especially at the moment, seems like a fruitless and depressing waste of emotional energy but changing it just by making it bigger, more diverse and more beautiful than it was before, is achievable. These little white flowers aren’t especially rare, although they can sometimes survive in a place that no other living thing could survive in. However they are under threat and whilst I’ve no pretensions about my own modest abilities, we footsoldiers; the botanical infantry if you like, can record them so that they can’t become rare or even extinct without someone noticing.