Tag: photographing wildlife

Turning a photo into a story and then into a post

There are two questions here that I’m trying to answer. The first is the title of this post, and the second is an attempt at explaining why I call myself Severnsider – and I’ll tackle that one first.

I think these photos were taken some time around 2007, although I’d known the place for years prior to that. If you live nearby, or know the river Severn on the Gloucestershire side you’ll probably know where they were taken on the Gloucestershire riverside and along the Sharpness canal at Frampton on Severn. The Severn is, as you can see, a very wide river but dangerous for larger ships to navigate above Sharpness due to the ferocious tides, winds and sandbanks. There was also a problem in sailing around a sharp bend in Arlingham which is a good place to watch the Severn bore but a very bad place for a sailing ship. The canal, opened in 1827, could carry ships up to 600 tons and was once the largest and deepest (18 feet) canal in the world . It was a safe, non-tidal shortcut to Gloucester docks. Over the decades we’ve fished in the canal, walked its towpath and paddled up it in our kayak. There are many places I love and visit but in a strange way, the river Severn has my soul. One of my parishes bordered the bank and it’s always been a place of solace on difficult days – lonely, quite remote in places with huge skies and a tide so fierce you can hear it above the mournful cries of wintering curlew.

As the tide from the Bristol channel meets the river there’s the meeting of two distinct modes of being – each with its own smell; earthy, mountainous river and salt tide. Twice a day, the inbreathing and outbreathing flows change places and command the landscape. Springs and neaps cover and reveal the mudflats

The Severn has wonderful sunsets, and on special evenings you can hear migrating geese and swans flying noisily towards the tidal marshes at Slimbridge. It’s a sound so haunting that it will freeze your blood. On one occasion I was walking on the bank at Shepperdine when a hare raced up the field to my right, leaped over a broken wooden fence and crossed, feet in front of me in mid-air. I don’t know which of us was more surprised. It was there, at high tide in the middle of the river and just inside our parish, that I scattered the ashes of a Severn pilot, a man with a lifetime of experience of the twists and turns and shifting sandbanks of the river who would take charge of ships travelling upstream . One of the crew opened a steel door in the side of the Balmoral and to the accompaniment of long blasts on the steam whistle, we poured his ashes into the water just as the tide turned and the river stood still. The trippers on the deck above us had no idea what was happening below them. The two waterways, canal and river, run side by side; the contained and dredged canal -an industrial relic of a past age and its wild and untamable neighbour. A watery Cain and Abel in perpetual conflict like the two sides of a human soul.

Inevitably, as a parish priest, I became a kind of story keeper; privy to many secrets and at ease with the history of the landscape and the people who lived in it because – in a very important sense – they were one. I may well have seen the last ever trailer load of salmon putchers being taken down to the river. The village baker’s wife and her husband had roots in both sides of the river, and would often talk about elver fishing and elver omelette where the freshly caught baby eels were tipped alive into the egg mixture in the pan. He remembered delivering bread by horse and cart. The orchards along the river were protected from frosts by the thermal mass of the water and thousands of gallons of cider were once made on local farms to slake the thirst of the labourers. I got to know one or two of the surviving cider makers pretty well. I once asked one of them why he liked cider so much and he answered “because it gets I pissed!”. The local funeral director was another hefted man who began life as a builder and joiner and made coffins according to the custom of the day; graduating to funeral directing as a natural progression. The gravedigger would always discreetly press a jelly baby or some other sweet into my hand as we processed to the graveside. It was a surviving custom from when everyone was rewarded in cash after a funeral. We referred to one another as gentlemen and bowed as if we were born to it.

I was the story keeper because I took many of the village funerals, weddings and baptisms. I have never felt able to write about those years in any detail because so much of what I knew was told to me in confidence, but I learned the skill of discreet storytelling over three decades, slipping in a coded morsel known only to the closest friends when I could. Most of the old ways and those who followed them are gone now and the suburban villages empty of commuters and refill again in the evenings. The salmon have all-but disappeared and the churches are shrinking and falling into disuse.

Oh yes; the Severn is a very special place and having lived next to it for 25 years it’s the reason I use the name Severnsider. Although these days we live in Bath, the campervan is stored near the banks of the Severn, and the river Avon on whose bank we now live, is a tributary to the mother river which it joins at Avonmouth.

Anyway enough history, because I want to move on to the more interesting question of storytelling with pictures, and the impact of computer technology enabling us to do things we could not have contemplated thirty years ago when I stood on the riverbank, looking at the long row of apparently abandoned barges, hauled up and left to rot. I know, of course that there was a story shouting to come out of the landscape. The melancholic look of rusting hulks and concrete tow barges sinking inexorably into the estuary mud suggested a catastrophic collapse in the market of some commodity. That was a wrong assumption as it turned out because they were deliberately scuttled there in an attempt to protect the river bank from erosion. The pictures haunted me.

I knew I had the raw materials of a new way of understanding landscape but there seemed to be no way of making it work. I wanted to find a way of telling stories with pictures and text but which you could enter at any point, and so read in any order – which is much closer to the way we actually apprehend landscape in real life. Then I discovered HTML but not being very computer literate, the learning curve defeated me. It was the arrival of journaling software and later blogging software that finally opened the door for me. I could utilise the thousands of photographs I’d taken over the years and write accompanying text that could illuminate any topic I was writing about. The photos weren’t eye catching snapshots but little visual haiku, working with the text to say what couldn’t easily be said in words. They became little essays, often exploring a single idea with no attempt for them to be amalgamated into a theory of everything. By now there are over a thousand of them, rapidly approaching a million words in a form that can be searched by date, by topic, by keyword or even just with a single search term.

All this because a single photograph can conjure up a whole habitat or environment; a whole history of the people who live and work in it and occasionally amount to a funeral sermon for something or someone lost forever. This photograph, for instance, taken on Thursday at Big Pit above Blaenavon suggests to me something that’s not telling the whole story; that needs unpacking. The bright red paint and hand lettering suggest that this truck does not, any longer, contain explosives at all. It’s there for effect, as part of an experience – which is what it is, of course. Possibly a film set.

But this one, taken moments later, is telling a more subtle story; of abandonment and dereliction. Present and past are expressed in the course of a few words on a screen. Now we know that something infinitely less fun is going on. There are two steam engines there, each of them deserving restoration but lacking the funds to do it. In a supreme irony, the high quality steam coal which was mined here and which is needed by every steam restoration project in the UK can no longer be mined because of the environmental damage caused by burning coal. We were told that the last two shipments of steam coal came by boat from Chile and Australia. So coal will still be burned but also thousands of tons of oil burned added to the total environmental cost. A third photograph has an entirely more melancholy feel because behind the abandoned winch gear, and in the distance, lies a town that feels as abandoned as the headworks of the pit. With the end of coal mining, thousands of jobs were lost and never replaced with skilled work. Coal was King and now unemployment drains the eviscerated community below. The museum is a marvellous and pointed reminder of yet another lost community.

Oh how miserable this is sounding! Let’s turn to nature. Many of the thousands of photographs I’ve taken are of plants, fungi and even insects. They’re the other part of landscape – the micro features that make it what it is. You’ll know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, that I’m pretty passionate about the waifs and strays of the plant world which find a place to settle in precisely the abandoned post industrial sites, marginal environments and polluted earth that – like the human communities that once lived and worked in them – have fallen silent as the dreams of the industrial revolution; of easy lives and plentiful housing and food for all come to dust. Things are unravelling and we all know it, in spite of the performative idiocy of politicians who think that having your photo taken with a hi-viz jacket, hard hat and sleeves rolled up is a substitute for having any idea or plan for the future.

Is it even possible to love a despoiled landscape and yet hate what caused it? I think I’m able to address that paradox in a way that might offer a way forward. Firstly the earth doesn’t need us nearly as much as we need the earth, and so in recording what’s there needn’t be a source of anger is much as an encouragement and inspiration to do better. To do better for human communities, to do better for the plants and insects and animals share the earth with us. On our walk in the Bannau Brycheiniog on Thursday we were looking at some slime moulds – a subject which I know almost nothing about. But I did a quick search in Merlin Sheldrake’s book “Entangled Life” and discovered that the humble slime mould can help to make a map to escape from an Ikea store with no more encouragement than a few bright lights and some oatmeal. We dismiss the strange intelligence of nature at our peril. We shall need to review, and experiment and rethink the way we do things around here – I mean our whole culture – in a way that no-one in living memory has had to do because the crisis is here. Even our short journey across the Severn was delayed by 24 hours by an unprecedented storm. Our memories of the past need not fall into the trap of sentimentality and nostalgia. We can be grown-up enough to see that the communities built up by mining had costs as well as benefits and we need not return to the whole package of riches extracted and suffering exacted. What nature demonstrates is the persistence that comes from environmental stability, and so to finish here’s a photograph taken on our friends’ smallholding of a small patch of ancient woodland which has been protected by the steepness of the field in which it stands.

Small is beautiful – smaller still is ravishing.

This photograph is not of a twig but a moth; the Buff-tip moth, Phalera bucephala. I’m not showing it because I’d want anyone to think me an expert of any kind, but because its camouflage is so perfect at the same time as being very lovely. It’s eye-watering to think how many evolutionary twists and turns it’s gone through to arrive at this perfect twigness in order that it can rest up safely during the day. Our friend Kate uses a moth trap to identify record and release any number of moth species high up in the Bannau Brycheiniog; the Brecon Beacons in old money, and we took this photo, along with many others, early one morning when we were staying up there.

I’m often struck by the lack of attention we pay to the very small when we talk about the beauty of nature. We tend to look for swathes of flowers; forests; endless mountains and the most grandiose hills when we speak of beauty, but if we take a magnifying glass to, let’s say a weed like a dandelion, it’s like crossing a boundary into another world. A single seed under a low powered microscope can reveal such a complexity of pattern and structure that we’d be hard pressed to capture it in a drawing. Nature presents herself as an artist and many artists would admit to gaining inspiration from the almost reckless generosity of living forms. Moths are just one example. From the aerial view of a river basin or wetland marsh down to the double helix of DNA and the complex fibonacci sequence of seeds on a sunflower head or the seed flask of a poppy, there’s inspiration to be found. Speaking through my artist’s hat, as you might say, I’ve shared a lifetime exploring the colours and forms of living things through the medium of drawing, botanical illustration and ceramics. I’ve needed to embrace some of the science as well, but the wellspring of my explorations has been aesthetic rather than scientific. I’m far more excited by the earthy colours of rust and ochre than by shouty primaries, and a multitude of green hues relieved by occasional touches of scarlet can turn a humble lichen into an aesthetic feast.

Nature is beautiful, but not in the guide book sense. You can’t measure beauty by counting oohs and aaahs and you couldn’t propose a unit like the Milli-Helen which would be the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. It’s expressed perfectly in my mother’s distinction between perfume and scent. I should mention here that I’ve been trying out a new phone app to help identify moths – in anticipation of a Christmas present from our son. In fact it’s good with all kinds of UK insects and designed and promoted by the UK Wildlife Trusts. The app is called ID UK Insects and it’s good for bees, hoverflies, spiders, wasps – in fact for pretty well any insect you might encounter on a slow walk and is free for a basic 500 species or £18 a year for the full version. Well worth a free go! It won’t excuse you from any of the hard book work when you get home to identify your find, but like all the best AI it will save the horror of flicking through hundreds of pages in the vain hope you might run across it! For those old hands who would assert that it’s cheating I’d say – “so’s a cake mixer!”

It would be wrong to settle on the moth as a sole exemplar. As I suggested at the beginning of this post, nature should be regarded as everything on earth including us, and my friend Chris would make a strong claim for the whole universe to be included as well. In fact – and this would be a bold and almost spiritual claim – I’d argue that the default condition of a fully functioning human mind would be wonder.

I’ve never forgotten an exercise I did on a retreat years ago. We were a group of a dozen or so, all strangers to one another. We were divided into couples and asked to grasp both hands of our partners. Then we were invited not just to look at one another or chat about our journey there but silently to explore the possibilities of beholding. As you might expect, it was a deeply challenging thing to do but it was also very powerful; an intuitive exchange of our deep selves and a letting go of embarrassment and ego. I’d suggest that the default position of wonder at natural beauty is facilitated by its twin faculty, beholding.

With such a mindset even the destructive powers of nature which, for the most part are recycling the elements of existence, can lead to the sense of wonder. Nothing is ever wasted by the woodland rotters like the Sulphur-tuft fungus above. I can contemplate my own vulnerability and transience without being afraid.

Around 1970/71 I had a long period of what was diagnosed as phobic anxiety, and not being able to face going into art school, they put me on probation for a couple of terms. I took to visiting the valley behind our cottage through which By Brook flowed, and drawing there. My memory ever since is that I only made one drawing – very laborious and forensic pencil rendering of a twisted tree trunk growing at the edge of the river. The drawing went into a folder and it’s travelled around from house to house ever since. I’ve looked for it from time to time but never found it among the hoardings; until last night I dreamed that I was able to thank all the people who loved me over the years – beginning of course with Madame – even when I didn’t love myself at all. I was awake at 5.00am and got up after a couple of hours musing on what Robin, my one time psychoanalytic psychotherapist would have called a significant dream and went into my study and found the drawing almost immediately in a heap of unsorted papers.

But it wasn’t just the one drawing; I found four of them – and each of them would have taken several days. Here they are seeing the light of day for over five decades.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that these are great drawings, but rather that they articulate a theme that had been at the back of my mind for going on twenty years after I walked to primary school through a lane bordered on one side by a hawthorn hedge which, in hindsight must have been laid in previous years. I was enchanted, almost literally, by the twisted and intertwined branches and it became a treasured part of my walk to school, a memory which returns joyfully whenever I see a similar hedge today. After I’d photographed the drawings this morning I realised that there was another subconscious link in the twisting and curling water of the brook and which I’d tried unsuccessfully to capture in drawings of the sea when we lived in Cornwall. Drawing – to pack a huge proposition into a very short sentence – has been a way back into a transient moment. A mill-race; the Devonshire leat on Dartmoor; any kind of fast flowing water especially if, like a canal, it was the outcome of human intervention. No surprise then, to recall that my favourite winter job as a groundsperson was hedge laying. The spot where I drew By Brook was downstream from a paper mill where the mill race joined the brook. The mill is now disused and abandoned, and the brook itself is milky and eutrophic; quite unsuitable for papermaking.

If there is any kind of takeaway from this biographical fragment it’s that I didn’t get this ecstatic, aesthetic response to nature from a guru or a book. It was always there and all I had to do was channel it into tangible form. So the next great adventure was in ceramics. I’ve already written about this and I won’t go over it again, except to say that the making of ceramics feels like participation in creation itself. All the essential elements; earth, air, fire and water are there. The transformation of clay into fired ware is a geological process, The colours are made with elemental minerals and ores – cobalt, iron, lead, melted and rendered transparent in the kiln and transformed by the control of the available oxygen. English iron-based slipware glazes, mixed with lead rich galena and fired in an abundance of oxygen emerged the colour of honey and in China, a similar iron based glazed fluxed with wood ash and and starved of oxygen in the final stage of firing emerged as celedon, a muted and lovely green the colour of lichen.. The making of ceramics is an exhausting creative process which is affected by so many variables that if the potter doesn’t learn both intense focus and how to survive failure they will soon give up.

Nowadays I use photography to try to capture nature. I don’t edit or enhance anything and if it doesn’t work I delete it and try again. I remember once having a battle with my art school Head of Department over the characteristic form of an apple tree. I contended that trees are hard to draw well because by forensically rendering their internal structure and the form of the whole tree, its colours and its leaves it would be easier to identify its species. To prove my point I’d knocked up a black and white sketch of an apple tree on a piece of cardboard with a wide brush and some house paint. He dismissed the drawing and the idea with a lofty wave of the hand. It was rubbish and all trees looked pretty much the same. This week I’ve mentioned an apple tree called Arkansas Black several times already and today I returned to that discussion by photographing the tree on the allotment. I hope I won’t offend anyone by saying that the form of the tree is completely distinctive. Pears plums and (at the time) English elms are incontestably different.

My old music teacher A F Woodman used to to shout at me if I was particularly inattentive and say “I know you can hear it Pole, but are you listening?”

Wonder; the capacity to behold and not just gawp; inexhaustible curiosity; focus; listening; some measure of humility; the capacity to fail, try again as Samuel Beckett said, and fail better – all these are the portals through which we must pass. To adopt a religious idea, we must approach nature as penitents – not least because we, collectively, have done so much damage. The technical understanding, the skills, the science need essentially to be led by the revelatory moment. Most truly great scientists and mathematicians would agree that the revelatory moment is the beginning of the process of understanding rather than the end.

Which brings me to a penultimate point. If there is ever to be a real green spirituality it will need to begin in the same place. I remember Ken Leach preaching that orthodoxy is closer to its Greek roots when translated as “right glory” and certainly not the slavish following of some ancient canonical text. I’m not sure what we could call theology without Theos, but I treasure Wittgenstein’s joke that “wherof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent” except that it’s never yet stopped a daft or cruel idea from being broadcast.

So to conclude this rather long post, I have to write briefly about education because it seems that these core skills – “Wonder; the capacity to behold and not just gawp; inexhaustible curiosity; focus; listening; some measure of humility; the capacity to fail, try again as Samuel Beckett said, and fail better” all these are being expunged from the curriculum of both school and university. If we don’t bring our children up to allow wonder and curiosity into their lives they will be stunted like wind deformed trees .

Hell is heaven designed by venture capitalists

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:

In my happy place

Just a brief piece, but I wanted to celebrate the couple of days I’ve been able to spend identifying and cataloguing some of the hundreds of fungus photos that I’ve taken over the past couple of decades. The weather here has been continuously wet and windy – not so much as in the South which has been hammered – but enough to make staying and working indoors a guilt free pleasure.

Fungi can be surprisingly difficult to pin a name to. As time goes by you do get a bit better, but as I’ve sorted through some of the ones I’d already named I’ve found some real bloopers. Somehow I often seem to take the wrong photo; missing out a crucial detail so some will remain un-nameable; but gradually as I’ve gone through them all several times, the list and its attached photos gets satisfyingly longer and more reliable, and I sit in bliss; surrounded by my books, and checking the minutest details. I’ve found that phone apps are far less reliable than manual checking with fungi, but the exercise of close attention is just the habit I need to cultivate if I’m ever going to be any good at leading a fungus foray.

It was a slow start to the season but I’m off with a couple of friends on another recce tomorrow near a place that I’ve known since I was about 12 years old; a holy well dedicated to St Anne that’s now so diminished and overgrown I doubt that even local people know it’s there. I was once chased by an angry cow there and I accomplished one of the most extreme long jumps over a barbed wire fence and a stream that I ever did. I had spotted a newborn calf lying apparently dead in the field. At the time I had no idea that cows often momentarily leave their calves immediately after giving birth. Of course as soon as I came close she chased me with murderous intent and I had to run for my life.

But I’ve had the most lovely day. I know that my passion for cataloguing and lists; keys and databases makes me a borderline wingnut but there we are. My first book was a children’s dictionary and I haven’t looked back. Anyway there are plenty of people in our Natural History Society just like me. I feel almost normal occasionally when I’m at meetings.

Mirror mirror on the wall …

 

In the case of the five spot burnet moth versus spear thistles I’m not sure I could choose. The first sight of the moths was a carmine red blur of wings supporting the black body. I’d love to know how they make such large wing structures move so fast – that’s two moths in succession with this mesmerising and exceptional gift. but the sheer structural beauty of the spear thistles is pretty mind blowing as well.

The common blue butterfly was obligingly still for me. 90% of the time I take photos with my phone, and that means stalking and getting well within my quarry’s comfort zone. Most butterflies will take exception even to a shadow, let alone my clumsy great body looming over them, and so you have to do a rapid mental list of the attributes to fill in the gaps left by a poor photo.

This, of course, is why my photos are so biased towards the more cooperative subjects like plants – because they stay still. As I reviewed the pictures I was thinking, why on earth spend all that energy and money on safaris when you can find all this right where you are?

Both burnets and common blues feed (we’re told) on birds foot trefoil and its close relatives. The field we spotted both in was full of trefoils and yet both were feeding (don’t like the word ‘nectaring’ it sounds a bit red lipped and over-excited) so both were feeding on the spear thistles. Just goes to show that creatures don’t read textbooks. That’s twice recently I’ve found things where they’re not meant to be and discovered that there’s no such thing as never in the natural world. ‘Normally’ is much less authoritarian but allows amateurs like me to think in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes.

img_5644Being slightly obsessive I caught myself naming plants – with their Latin names if I knew them – as we walked down to the village today. Thank goodness no-one can hear the conversation in my head – if they could I’d have been locked up years ago!

Just to finish, here’s why a bit of botanising can be such fun. If you’re out for a walk on an earth or grass track and you spot this plant – Matricaria discoidea – like Plantain it doesn’t seem to mind being regularly trodden on – pick one of the yellow flowers and rub it between your fingers and then smell it. Now you know why the English common name is pineapple weed – one for the children! Field botany is such a multi sensory activity.