This new database of mine is already driving me crazy. I’ve got thousands of photos of unidentified plants and hundreds of plant records – the ones I know I’ve seen in the past – easy ones like Elderberry – without any photographs. I try to keep a list of the photos I need to take in my head, but in reality I spot something I might need to photograph for the database and then go back to the laptop to check. It’s never too soon to get organised!
The love of nature is very peculiar. I’ve been vocal in my suspicion of the endlessly asserted factoid that nature is good for you and cures more human ills than the finest snake oil – but that’s just my sceptical nature. When I stop to think I can recall the first time I experienced what I later discovered was called an oceanic experience. The phrase was coined by Romain Rolland in a letter to Sigmund Freud.
“a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded”, a “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”
Which is a bit grand for my unforgettable experience but it was real enough for me – aged maybe 11 – lying in the grass on Rodway hill, listening to the wind fingering the fine grass while I watched a group of Harebells swaying in unison. These days I understand the geology of the Old Red Sandstone and the acidity of the thin soil, but none of that grown-up knowledge comes close to explaining the experience. I’d just want to say that it’s the memory that sustains and inspires me and it’s vanishingly rare in my experience – it doesn’t happen every time I go out botanizing and it doesn’t cure my anxieties but rests there in my mind as a permanent reminder that it’s not all confusing and bad. There’s something indescribable but good under the chaos of events.
Two weeks in Cornwall with an average internet speed of around forty kilobits per second – really! – has tested my saintly patience! Anyway, I took the Old Man’s Beard photo on our last holiday walk and it suited my wicked purposes very well today as I started to write this, because the two words -“traveller” and “joy” were never more inappropriately joined together as we drove back from Cornwall. Our holiday had to be curtailed by two days because one of the components of the campervan water system had failed and we needed to stop off at MURVI headquarters in Ivybridge where it could be repaired. That entailed a considerable detour across-country from Roseland to the edge of Dartmoor via Plymouth; a pleasant drive avoiding any rush hour towns. We arrived on time and the job was done in half an hour by a brilliant fitter called (I think) Chris, who made it all look easy. Thereafter we were on the A38 and later the M5 travelling at about 20 mph all the way. This wasn’t due to flooding, accidents or even roadworks but sheer traffic overload. There was a long queue beyond every single slip road and we chugged along in a pall of pollution and bad tempered driving. It’s my proud boast that we kept up with a Ferrari all the way. Not bad for a 2009 campervan eh? By Saturday the motorway was flooded and the road surface of the new Severn Bridge had lifted so the bridge was closed. More huge queues. Is anyone planning for the impact of a global climate catastrophe? Peaceful demonstrators can get 5 years for protests which may be annoying, while children develop lung disease from pollution.
There are a number of familiar walks from the campsite we’ve been staying at for years. But our familiarity with the resident plants is always challenged by new finds – I wrote about some of them in the most recent post – and so we walk with our eyes wide, scanning the verges waiting for something to stand out. These lanes have plants you’d never see anywhere else and some of them are so shy and retiring we’ve walked past them for years without spotting them. Luckily in the past couple of weeks we’ve spotted something new almost every day. Alongside the Percuil river where we found orchids in spring, we stood and listened to the heartbreakingly lovely call of the Curlews.
We live in Bath which is also continually choked with traffic. Not only that but the size of cars (and therefore engines) seems to be increasing exponentially; driving behaviour is moving close to fairground dodgems – and speed limits? – don’t even ask. All this whilst lobby groups supported by deluded “locals” (they’re often not) are fighting tooth and nail for the human right to drive down narrow residential streets at whatever speed pleases them. It seems to have escaped their tiny thinking parts that the outcome of unrestricted and unregulated traffic is – wait for it – traffic jams. I once took this up with a campaigner waving a placard near to our flat and he admitted that he didn’t even live in Bath. And don’t come back at me about our campervan because it’s only done 52,000 miles in the past 15 years and we keep it in a compound way outside the Bath LTZ which is a price we’re prepared to pay for not clogging the streets or the air.
Of course autumn has its own unique pleasures, not least to look at plants that are more easily identified by their seeds and seed heads – this applies particularly to the large and confusing carrot family. I don’t know how you could distinguish wild carrots from sea carrots if it weren’t for the fact that senescent wild carrot flowers shrink and bend into tiny old fashioned wicker lobster pots or perhaps bird cages, whereas sea carrots remain fairly open. Then the scarlet fruits in the hedgerows could be Black Bryony, or Woody Nightshade, or Honeysuckle – it’s fun to know the difference.
Coming back home to the crowds and the drug dealers outside on the green was a painful reminder that all is not well in our country. Part of the A36 has fallen down the hill in Limpley Stoke and is closed and on Saturday the students all moved back into their accommodation which effectively closed the lower Bristol road all day. The new Labour government is already weakening environmental regulations and abandoning their election manifesto commitments at the behest of lobbyists and shady donors. Am I cross? Hell yes!!
But I’m desperately sad for the young woman and two young men who sat on the bench outside on the green, smoking crack, slumped over; their hopes of better lives draining slowly away.