Tag: spring

Our cunning plan to escape the storms falls at the first hurdle

It was, after all, slightly counterintuitive – to escape a yellow weather warning yesterday by driving towards the problem – but we figured that if we drove down to Cornwall early enough we’d arrive before the approaching warm front hit the coast and turned the cold air that’s been squatting like a toad over us for days, into snow and hail; giving us time to unload the car before the heavy stuff began. I was so excited about my plan that I woke up at 4.00am and couldn’t get back to sleep; so I got up at 4.30am and made tea. There was nothing we could do about the 7.00am grocery delivery except pack everything up and get the car ready to leave. It was -3C when we left and the temperature rose slowly as we headed towards Cornwall in the gathering dawn light.

And it should have worked if it weren’t for the caretaker at the cottage we were going to. The rules – she pointed out – were not to arrive before 4.00pm and we were far too early having almost beaten the storm’s landfall. It rained fairly hard for the last couple of miles and we had hoped for a less belligerent welcome. The temperature had collapsed again and Madame suggested (in the absence of anything resembling a warm fire) that we go for a walk.

Now we both love the Roseland peninsula – we’ve been coming here for decades – but yesterday didn’t feel like one of those old Great Western Railway posters; the blue skies, the seagulls and sandcastles on the beach. The sky was slate grey and mantled a freezing gale which carried sharpened slivers of ice that sliced away at our faces. Unbelievably there was a party of litter pickers working across the beach – I wondered if they were the Portscatho Bloods doing a bit of community payback. “What fun” said Madame as the rain ran down her trousers and into her boots – but I didn’t think she was being completely honest when I looked at the photo. The sea was – as they say around here just before the boat capsizes – “a bit lumpy!” and with a couple of hours to while away, I wandered off plant hunting and found the only thing on the beach with a smile on its face. In fact I couldn’t quite believe how healthy the Buckshorn Plantain looked, clinging to its crack in the shallow cliff. I had been hoping to find a Sea Spleenwort – I know they used to be here but after several years of hunting I’ve never found one, and nor has anyone else for the last 23 years according to the wonderful BSBI database, so I’m not going to beat myself up too much. By the time we got back I was so cold I couldn’t open the cottage door; we were both soaked to the skin and – if I’m completely honest – I was a tiny bit grumpy; warming my corpse fingers in a pair of heated gloves. When we finally got the kit inside we turned on so many heaters they probably had to start up a power station somewhere and ate ultra processed pizza (breaking several rules at once!). We don’t travel light when the Potwell Inn goes off on an expedition. Cameras, binoculars, books and computers; power units and leads and spare batteries, walking sticks and just the one tripod this time; oh and drawing equipment in case we run out of things to do.

We were in bed by 9.00pm and then this morning, Madame was reading aloud extracted best moments from the internet when she came across some excellent naughty bits which included a video interview with David Hockney where he was talking enthusiastically about spring – his favourite season. “It’s like an erection” he said. “Everything is upright, and primed to go – but it doesn’t last very long”. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Outside in the lane we could see the beginnings of the spring erections. Alexanders, Cow parsley and even Hogweed were already shouldering one another aside in the great competition for growing space. Pennywort has sprinted away from the blocks, and the Sea-radishes have reached their moment of ravishing beauty before it all goes wrong and they leave their rosettes aside to go for broke in the dune margins. There were even a couple of impoverished looking Red Campions in flower, like ragged beggars waiting for a hot meal.

So today it’s still raining and we’re resting. Madame is reading and as soon as this is finished I’ll go back to the soul-destroying boredom of converting my database dates from English to American format so that the software can list accurately by date. I’m sure there’s a way of automating the process but it would probably take longer to learn how to do it than to amend each (of 350) dates manually. I’ve almost finished sorting the wheat from the chaff in Google Photos so that just leaves all the photos I took in 2022, 23 and 24 to be identified and catalogued. This path is not lined with primroses!

Looking across Gerrans Bay in May 2023 on a sunnier day. This time we’re on the far side of the bay on the right hand edge of the photo. Invisible, sadly, because of the sea mist!

Aaaargh! Spring – please slow down, just a bit!

Clockwise from top left- the canalside view with Pen y Fan in the background; then Common Dog Violet, Wood Sorrel, Maidenhair Spleenwort, Ramsons, Greater Stitchwort, Reflexed Stonecrop and what I think must be bracken growing very close to the water. There were many more – too many to list without annoying Madame!

The rewards of Spring are everywhere at the moment, notwithstanding the cold nights which are keeping our tender plants blocking the hallway as they harden off. There’s so much going on I hardly know where to begin. On the allotment – after the usual despairing survey of the weeds, the waterlogged ground and the mounting sense that nothing good will ever come of it; we got our heads down two or three weeks ago and felt instantly better. I’m a bit suspicious of the received wisdom that gardening is good for the soul. Couch grass and Bindweed could test the patience of a saint and I’m certainly not one of them. At the weekend while Madame sowed, I finally cleared the asparagus bed which had been on probation for ages and we knew it had to go because it was too far down in the frost pocket on our sloping site plus the asparagus had been weakened by repeated invasions of Asparagus beetle and couch grass from the unattended plot next door. Four barrow loads of weeds and feeble/floppy/extinct roots later I had a backache worthy of a third rate wrestler but a decent empty raised bed much enriched by previous additions of seaweed, compost and sand and with around 18″ depth of topsoil. We’ll grow carrots there this season. We’ve thrown so much money at the asparagus bed over the years, we could probably afford to buy fifty bundles of Chinn’s finest English and still be in pocket.

I was greatly assisted by two almost hand tame Robins who were obviously feeding chicks. Between them they took away many dozens of larvae, centipedes and other insects. Interestingly they weren’t very interested in worms; certainly not as keen as a blackbird would be. I was dazzled by their capacity to hold two wriggling bugs in their beaks and still pick up a third without dropping the first two; they were far better pest controllers than any chemical insecticide.

Inside the polytunnel the experimental crop of broad beans is thriving in the absence of any really hot weather, and the strawberries, all taken from runners in late summer, are flowering and setting fruit. Of course this means we’re already watering inside the tunnel; but the 12V water pump we bought last summer has already showed its worth and helped us avoid carrying heavy watering cans back and forth.

The photos above were all taken on a short trip to the Monmouth and Brecon canal near Brecon during the week. It was here, many years ago, that I saw my first Kingfisher – so beautiful in the sunshine that I thought I was hallucinating. We had hoped to go for a pub lunch with our friends who keep a smallholding almost 100o feet up on the hill, but they were in the middle of lambing so we had a picnic lunch there while they went outside every twenty minutes or so to keep an eye on a ewe in the midst of a long and difficult lambing. Fortunately the ewe and her twin lambs all made it through, although I think that will be her last time. Farming can be heartbreaking as well as hard work.

“A difficulty is a light, an insurmountable difficulty is a sun” – Paul Valéry

Is it too perverse to say that I love naming plants? and the harder they are the greater the reward when I finally get there. I’m exhilarated by the explosion of plants in the spring and early summer, and it’s agony having go forego plant hunting for allotment duties, but there’s no alternative so we just get on with it. I was pondering where this love of plants came from, and during one of my regular 2.00am wakeful sessions – it happens a lot – it occurred to me that I owe a huge amount to Henry Williamson (I’ll come to the reservations in a moment). Of course I read Tarka the Otter and the other nature books, but I also ploughed my way through four volumes of “The Flax of Dream” and fifteen volumes of “The Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”. I was probably the only person who ever ordered them all up from Bristol Central Library in many years. Above all, I loved Williamson’s ability to describe wild plants in their landscapes; their names – English names – embedded themselves in my imagination and make the discovery of a plant in a hedgerow into a celebratory event, even fifty years later. Latin names and taxonomical exactitude; whilst essential for research, are feeble by comparison with the poetry of use and history.

But one of the greatest sadnesses of my life has been the discovery that so many of my literary and artistic heroes dabbled with and even collaborated in extreme right politics during the nineteen thirties and forties. TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis were all seduced by the big lie. Discovering that Williamson was an admirer of Adolph Hitler irrevocably shut down my relationship with him, and I’ve never read a page written by him since; but the influence of his natural history writing still remains – it’s just forever tainted by the association.

Anyway, turning with relief to spring again, some flowers that you’d think were easy to identify – are more than a bit fiendish; not least the violet which comes with seven close cousins six of which you could easily bump into in the South West. No alternative, then, but to turn to the books or the apps. But when it comes to fiendishness, nothing comes close to ferns and for me, at the very beginning of this love affair, a chance encounter across a crowded room can lead to hours of agonising – just like the real thing (I’m told!).

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, I’m exploring the dizzy world of Artificial Intelligence in wildlife apps, and particularly in identifying plants. If you’re fortunate enough to know what a data point is – I wasn’t – it’s a single unit/dollop of data. If you’re still attached to pencils and paper, your notebook might contain a few hundred data points. A field guide could hold tens of thousands, but AI robots, though are voracious readers and can consume and store billions of them. Not only that, they can index and arrange them in pretty much any way you like.

So before we all get carried away by the idea of wildlife AI apps remember that the whole industry is based on text. I’ve been playing with Google Gemini but other flavours are available. These text engines can be based on anything up to (I believe) 8 billion data points – that’s a lot of text and a huge fund of examples to work from. The existing wildlife apps are still wallowing in the relative shallows and so they can be unreliable at the moment. I had three obviously wrong fern identifications (back to the books) while we were up on the Mon and Brec. They’ll get better very soon I’m sure. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland have access to over 50 million full records, and Kew Gardens are digitizing their entire herbarium records. iNaturalist also has something huge like 50 million although not all of them are verified, but even if all these records are verified and scanned in – which would be a huge volunteer operation – they would still be far fewer in number than the mighty text warehouses. Machine learning can achieve seemingly miraculous results but I don’t think we’ll be making human identification redundant any time soon, so don’t throw those field guides away!

Just to finish, though, I thought I’d wile away an hour asking Google Gemini to do some silly things for me. Question one – what are the distinguishing features of Dryopteris ferns? after ten seconds a very sensible answer. Then I asked it to write a sonnet on the subject of dust and once again a technically perfect but aesthetically clunky, sub Tennysonian sonnet emerged. Then finally I asked if it would re-write one of these posts in the style of Phillip Marlowe. The result was hilariously funny but quite unprintable here, being vulgar, deeply sexist and full of bad language.

Thank your lucky stars it’s just me writing this one!

850 feet up a hill, spring comes later

Cuckoo flower on the campsite

It wasn’t meant to be like this – the first proper campervan trip of the year with everything working properly; batteries charging, the gleaming new sink a stranger to leaks and the fridge roaring away on gas. However we hadn’t factored in the altitude difference or the gloomy weather forecast before we set off to High Mendip for a couple of days and last night we were freezing cold on account of forgetting to bring the duvet. On the plus side we had a surfeit of pillows that looked exactly like a duvet until we took them out of the bag. Back down in Bath the trees were leafing up nicely but up here with a scything WNW wind barrelling up the Bristol Channel they’re still stuck in November. Spring comes later when you’re almost 1000 ft up. As ever the dandelions and daisies were risking the weather and covering the grass, but all the same a solitary Cuckoo flower greeted us when we pulled on to our pitch. If ever you needed an example of the importance of environment, this was it. A lover of marshy ground setting up shop under the water tap.

After a week of pretty perfect camping weather with the high temperatures setting records- and during which we were sweating it out on the allotment – winter has regained the initiative and up here, the wind batters the van in gusts of almost 50 mph, howling in every less than perfect window seal. As the temperature falls to 3C. the buds are clenched tight on the trees, like coldwater swimmers’ naughty bits and we’re sitting in bed planning the best time to walk down to the village where the Queen Victoria pub does a life threateningly good old-style lunch; pies and chips and stuff like that. The route we take will depend on how much mud there is down the lane to Priddy Pool where there are some ferns I failed to identify last year. This time I’ve brought a list of possibilities – fifteen of them, because this is a place they love. No news yet on any improved access to the more detailed locations on the database – I hope I haven’t panicked them by asking!

Before we left we had a discussion about whether to bring my super heavy Welsh Black raw sheep’s wool jumper which weighs about 2 Kg and even smells like a sheep. At that moment it seemed ridiculous but today I’m sitting in bed wearing it, along with its hideously itchy companion beanie and listening to the other van dwellers abandoning their holidays, mainly due to disgruntled teenage children. The wifi signal dropped to 0.50 megabits last night as family resentments boiled over, mobile phones went silent and televisions spurted out their entertainment in ten second packets. How we treasure our little Tardis of a campervan.

I first started coming up here when I was a teenager and spent a lot of time exploring the multitude of caves in the area with the help and guidance of the Bristol Exploration Club. I was never going to be an intrepid or even particularly courageous caver, but I loved the sensual and hard natural beauty of the underground, and the smell of the surrounding fields as we emerged from the dark and wetness has imprinted itself in my imagination. Today we will walk the fields above the underground passages, rough tracing their torturous progress from 400 feet above. Swildon’s stream will be roaring after the night of rain and we will be pausing to find early risers among the plants. Slow is also beautiful.

Looks, feels, smells like Spring

Celandines and friends in Henrietta Park

At last! a proper spring morning; one to get us out on our favourite circular walk along the river and back along the Kennet and Avon canal. I suppose I could lend it a bit of spurious significance by calling it a transect but today was about the sun on our faces, warming us right through. Of course we noticed the sheer dynamic of plant growth but my notebook stayed in my pocket as we paid more attention to the nest building swans on the canal and the birdsong everywhere. The power of spring is unstoppable and knowing the succession of plants in the same spot year after year only makes it more impressive – or should I say awe inspiring. Spring is so transient that it’s almost a spiritual exercise in non-attachment. We can wonder at its beauty whilst knowing all along that it all passes. No place here for bitter reflection or clinging to the moment – it comes, it lifts our spirits and it passes and we can give silent thanks for that little shared moment.

In Henrietta Park we passed a Birch tree that expressed something of the paradoxical nature of life. I can’t recall ever seeing a tree so knackered by galls and outgrowths and yet still possessed of a strange beauty. Just down the path a great tree stump which last year boasted a large crop of Oyster fungus, is being rapidly consumed by other fungal rotters.

So let’s not call the walk a transect although we do it twice or three times a week, and let’s call it a conversation over time between sentient beings of wholly different orders, and I have to confess that this morning I think we both identified more with the knackered tree and yet – reading Oliver Rackham’s extraordinary book “Woodlands” – (P. 38 in my paperback edition) trees have their own strategies for longevity, none of which require expensive creams or medications. I think this one caught my mournful meditation on the fragility of life and whispered to me “Get over yourself and enjoy the sun!” So that’s what we did!

Is Spring actually springing?

Snowdrops in Sidney Gardens

I checked on the Potwell Inn stats a couple of days ago and I found that my writing output took a real dive after August last year and has only just begun to pick up again in the last couple of weeks. I know exactly how this happened and a quick look at the diary confirmed it, because that was when I had all my heart medications changed after an echo scan, which kicked off a load of side effects that made me feel really – and I mean really under the weather, much more than the original reason for seeing the GP. I’d had what’s called Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation for years – it’s pretty common and as long as it’s managed properly it’s not especially dangerous. The Paroxysmal bit means that it doesn’t happen all the time and the GP had warned me that the usual course of the complaint means that the frequency slowly increases until the episodes pretty well join together and your heart is beating irregularly all the time – which can make you feel a bit odd; light headed and wobbly.

I’d always kidded myself that a heart rate of 190 while I was climbing, or in the gym, was a rather positive sign that I could really put my foot hard on the floor and get away with it. That’s until we watched a 24 hours in A&E episode in which a woman was taken off to hospital in an ambulance for having a heart rate of – I think -154. Cue, or should that be queue for an appointment with the GP.

Anyway, to cut a long story down a bit , it was all taken rather seriously and after some scans I was given some medication and told – for the very first time – not to overdo it. The penalty, I was told, was the high risk of a stroke or a heart attack. But hours on Google and in conversations at the gym and with a GP neighbour on the allotment who, when I asked him if I’d ever be able to stop the medication replied “only if you want to die!” ; no-one was prepared to specify what exactly overdoing it means. It all reminded me of a verse from a poem by ee cummings –

(let’s go said he
not too far said she
what’s too far said he
where you are said she)

ee cummings – May I feel said he

I largely managed to put the whole boring diagnosis out of my mind; but to be honest, working flat out on the rowing machine – my favourite activity in the gym – now always led to one anxious eye on the heart rate monitor which often obliged me with some randomly threatening results. Then came the COVID lockdown and the gym was closed for months so I took to weights and floor exercises at home.

The GP was right of course and I finished up with constant AF and some noisy heart valves. Hence the new medication that didn’t stop the AF but slowed my pulse quite a bit, dropped my blood pressure and made me feel ill. That all started in August when the Potwell Inn work-rate fell. Our GP pharmacist was brilliant and we agreed that I’d put up with feeling absolutely rubbish and give the new medication time to bed in – which slowly made things better until we got COVID for the second time and then I really did take a dive. This new variant left me completely exhausted, often breathless, dizzy and with no appetite. “There goes Christmas”, I thought.

And then I slowly felt better. During our week in Cornwall I discovered that I could still walk up some pretty steep coastal paths without having to stop and catch my breath every 20 yards. It was all a matter of overcoming the anxiety and pacing myself. This week we reinstated the 10,000 step walk that we invented during the lockdown and it was OK. I could hardly believe, it but apart from a bit of understandable stiffness I felt back to normal. I even – and I haven’t even confessed this to Madame yet – I even thought about a gentle rowing session at the gym. After all, apart from killing myself what could go wrong? More seriously, after decades of refusing to act my age, I think I’ve cracked it. I should act my age, control the anxiety and not overdo it, after all death is God’s way of telling you to slow down, so I need to keep my feet off the throttle and not worry too much about being the oldest person in the place.

Being fit; being able to do things is a truly precious feeling and it makes me feel confident and happy. The hospital consultant cheerfully told me on my last visit that he could pass a minute soldering iron down one of my arteries and burn out some of the extra nerve endings whose random firings are the ultimate cause of all the bother; or they could still fit a pacemaker; so I’m not nearly done yet.

And has Spring sprung? and is the grass riz? As the ninth named storm crashes over us in the season since September, the plants seem determined not to let the wet winter, the frozen spring and now more torrential rain and wind get them down’ and neither shall I.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

Friedrich Nietzsche 1888.

Orion over Buckland Hill

This weekend we took the campervan to the Brecon Beacons for a couple of nights – just to test all the repairs we made over the winter. I know I write a lot about Snowdonia and Cornwall and if you follow this blog you’ll know that many of my favourite places are wild, lonely and close to the sea, but there’s another side to my landscape yearnings and it’s right here in Breconshire. I took the photograph from the campsite in Pencelli, just up the road from Buckland Hill. It was so clear I was completely foxed for a while as I tried to find my way around a sky unexpectedly full of thousands of visible and perhaps millions of invisible stars – so numerous and so beautiful they felt like a kind of blessing. I know it’s fanciful but sometimes I can almost hear them singing an ethereal Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis transposed many octaves upwards. I guess I hear them through my heart. You might think that’s all a load of spam in allium but this place has that kind of effect on me. It excites me to know that J R R Tolkien stayed for a time in the village of Talybont, immediately below Buckland Hill – while he was writing “Lord of the Rings”.

Top centre is Pen y Fan in mist

The (definitely non politically correct) smell of wood fires never smells sweeter and more homely than here between the river Usk and the hills and peaks like Pen y Fan. The Buckland of the saga jumps off the page in the narrow strip of small farms between the River and the accompanying Monmouth and Brecon Canal under the shadow of the misty mountain. The sounds of sheep, and the early spring birdsong all add to the music. I saw my first kingfisher here many years ago. The Mallard in their breeding plumage never looked more incandescent and for a few hours, instead of walking head down looking for plants I could have leaned on a gate and just gorged on the sounds. Even as we drove towards Abergavenny we spotted a Kestrel hunting the hedge alongside the road as well as a Buzzard and a red Kite. The three raptors were just a taster of the riches to come. This landscape is far closer to my personal psychogeography than all my other post industrial hotspots, roaring seas and austere mountains. Celandines in abundance announced that Spring really is here and we drank pints of magic to celebrate in the local pub.

Finding any kind of lyrical inspiration these days, demands we mine it from granite with our bare hands. Every dark hole has a poet at the bottom of it.

Royal Oak at Pencelli – highly recommended for paroled melancholics

Velvet Bottom again

Hazel catkins in Longwood Valley – spring is on the way!!!

After a couple of weeks when we spent half our time catching up with old friends face to face – at last – and most of the rest preparing the campervan for a new season; we finally got out for a decent walk today on the Mendips, beginning at Charterhouse and walking down Velvet Bottom and then following the West Mendip way up and along the top of the Longwood valley – passing several nature reserves before completing the circuit back at Charterhouse.

It’s a bit early for any of the flowering plants to show themselves – there are some really quite rare plants up there – but we left the flat thinking about the implications of a recently published paper by Belgian scientists that demonstrated how dogs – and more particularly their faeces and urine – add potentially dangerous amounts of phosphates and nitrates which would be illegal if produced by farms. We’re very used to notices imploring dog owners to keep their animals on leads on farms, and it’s true that some careful owners pick up the poo and dispose of it properly, but the urine stays put. The point is that the finest shows of rare wildflowers need poor soil to flourish – that’s why we sow yellow rattle, a parasitic plant on grasses, on potential wildflower meadows, and remove the hay when they’re cut. The Mendips are rich in these sorts of habitats, and you have to wonder whether the sheer quantities of dog poo alongside and on the tracks, presents a threat to rare plants.

Apart from all that pooch flop (I thank the late Richard Boston for that one!) the absence of flowers focuses the eyes on much smaller targets; the bryophytes – mosses and liverworts and the lichens – none of which I know a great deal about. I did lash out on the ultimate field guide, published by the British Bryological Society a couple of years ago; but it’s so densely packed with identical looking plants, my heart sank and today it still smelt like a new book. We have a couple of real experts in the Bath Nats, and it’s always a pleasure to go on field trips with them, but bryophytes demand a bit of an apprenticeship. I should really try harder because unlike wildflowers, most of them are available for head scratching and book banging the year round. Occasionally the Google Lens app on my phone gives a useful steer for identifying all sorts of plants, but that’s my secret vice! I slipped in the wild thyme on the right because there’s a lot growing here and it’s a food plant, in a complicated sort of way, for the large blue butterfly which has been reintroduced in Somerset. The association is down to the fact that the larva are parasitic on the grubs of a species of red ant that associates with wild thyme. Who knows? the large blue may be breeding here already! The other photos show common polypody on the left, a thick mat of unidentified bryophytes in second place, and a lovely maidenhair spleenwort in third place. Honestly, the walk was brimming with interest

Lonk sheep? I’m no expert – does anyone know?

Further walking found a field full of what I think were either pure Lonk sheep or a crossbred variety; perfectly suited to this high country. They looked as if they were all in lamb, but there were a couple of tups still in the field and glowing with a liberal coating of luminous green spray. Later as we walked towards the road down away from Tynings Farm we saw someone making a lovely job of laying a hedge. Further along the way we saw he’d been busy in other places as well. I took several photographs of his work because hedge laying was one of my favourite jobs when I was working as a groundman and it’s a highly skilled and rewarding job; it’s brilliant for wildlife and it could provide work for many people who’d much rather lay hedges than work in call centres! Just to emphasise my point I also photographed a typical stretch of mechanically flailed hedge which offers none of those benefits; looks horrible and barely functions in keeping stock in the right place.

Here we go!

It’s always the same. The seed order goes in some time in December – that’s the sensible list. At that point we congratulate ourselves on being supremely organised whilst during the next weeks we order one or two extras. Then a sunny day in February offers a tantalizing glimpse of spring and we consult the diaries and decide that Valentine’s day is perfect for sowing the tomatoes and chillies; spark up the propagators, sow seeds and then comes a flurry of doubt in case we’ve missed something out – a chink opens in the flimsy armour and voila! we seem to have ordered some outrageous outliers. Melon? ….. why not? A few more lavender plants – not just ordinary ones, the scour the catalogue types, oh and bee plants – we can never have too many bee plants. In the mind’s eye the allotment must resemble Chatsworth by now because there’s not a chance of finding enough space to plant them all out.

It’s been a harsh winter for all sorts of non allotment reasons with record breaking rainfall as well, but suddenly we notice an extra hour of daylight – a precious gift. The first tomatoes have germinated, there are daffodils about to blossom on the allotment hedge and some lovely miniature irises in the spring window boxes. There’s a barely contained excitement in the air fuelled by the tiniest glimpse of the sun.

So when’s the last frost date? the little voice in my head asks. I whisper May 14th. What! May 14th …. Are you completely crazy? That’s two months away!

The mere thought of spring is intoxicating and we’re ready to drink a full crate of it. It’s a year today since we last spent a day on the Malverns with our son from Birmingham – the photos came up today and made me feel sad. We haven’t seen our grandchildren face to face since the summer and our other two boys have had to socially distance, so the closest we’ve been to them is in the car park. We’re not allowed to walk in the Mendips, go on field trips or take the campervan out, so the allotment is having to fill the empty emotional spaces in our lives.

And it does more or less do the job. We get up in the morning full of plans and with things to do, and we decorate the gaps with imaginary melons. In our heads the allotment will be the Garden of Eden come July – and although it won’t quite get there, it won’t be far off.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ….

Yesterday being taken up with working on the campervan, when the sun shone today – well, glowed a bit  – we set off for the allotment to plant some of the early veg that have been sitting out the winter in the greenhouse. So we planted out winter hardy peas and spinach which had been growing on in coir modules.  We’ve had mixed experience with the Jiffy 7 modules, because although the coir seems as good as peat for germination, the outer mesh looks to be virtually indestructible in the soil and can cramp crops like beetroot. Many plants just grow straight through so we’re happy on the whole, but today Madame removed the nets on half of the peas to see if there is any difference in subsequent growth. We love peas, but so do hungry mice, and our first sowing in the autumn disappeared completely until we found the seeds heaped up under the large pot protecting the rhubarb.  Growing them in modules has meant there were no losses to rodents at all. The shallots and garlic are all thriving and a peep under the cloche protecting the herbs was encouraging.  Even the tarragon seems to be alive and well. Until we started to grow it ourselves we rarely used it but I  wouldn’t be without it now.

Because we’re in a frost trap, we tend to protect most of our plants with cloches of one sort or another.  For some reason spinach – especially in the early summer – does much better under the open mesh cloches, probably because it likes a bit of shade.  The other reason for covering up is the abundance of hungry pigeons on the site. Unwary allotmenteers can find a whole crop of broccoli or kale stripped to the ribs in a night.

This time of year can look a bit desolate on the plot, and so today I planted an early flowering clematis in the sheltered spot between the shed and the greenhouse.  We’ve decided to plant more flowers, not just to attract insects but to encourage us humans when we’re tired of rain and early sunsets. The window box daffodils at the flat are just about to burst into flower – it really does feel like spring is on the way.  We’ve even got the potatoes chitting in the cool hall outside the flat, and it won’t be long before the propagators are full with tomatoes, aubergines and chillies again. Last year we were a bit too early so we’ll leave them for a week or two yet.

We rarely talk much when we’re gardening except, perhaps, about where to put things – always contentious in my experience – and so I drop into a meditative frame of mind very easily.  Hours can pass because, in essence, the work is simple and repetitive – but that adds to the potential for fruitful thinking. I don’t think I ever come back from the allotment without feeling better than when we arrived.

Natural – Wild – Ordinary

I photographed these lovely spring wildflowers today, all within a few yards of one another in the bottom of a hedgerow. So clockwise from the top there are Red Campion, Alexanders, Daisies and a Dandelion, a Lesser Celandine most of whose leaves are obscured by young shoots of Cleavers and probably Hedge Parsley, and finally some flowering Gorse. It seems a bit daft to talk about plants being happy, but these are definitely very happy indeed. Through long naturalisation in a setting and climate that suits them perfectly, they thrive in a way that most of us gardeners can ony dream of for our own produce.  Further up the same lane and outside a house there were Daffodils that stood out- I should say shouted out  as unnatural additions to the landscape.

Of the plants I photographed, Red Campion doesn’t seem to be edible but was once used to cure snake bites, and the roots contain saponin which has soap like qualities. Alexanders really is edible, especially when young, but I’ve never eaten it so I couldn’t say whether it tastes good. Daisies – not really, Dandelions make good salad leaves and the flowers make really good wine but I’d beware of collecting any flowers at dog level for obvious reasons, and I should point out that the local name from my part of the world used to be “pissabeds” – you can draw your own conclusions.  Dandelion roots were dried and toasted and used as a coffee subsitute during times of hardship and they’re probably best when only used in desperation. Lesser Celandine is also known as Pilewort due to the acrid sap which was used to shrink hemorrhoids and although I did read somewhere that the leaves are edible I think they look prettier and safer in the ground. Gorse smells heavenly, especially when it’s got the sun on it and the flower buds are reputely good to eat. So I guess if I had been foraging today I could easily have picked a few leaves and flowers and enjoyed eating them, but I’m pretty sure I’d have still been hungry when I got home.  Nature is not our servant and does not exist completely to furnish our needs and so it has always been a basic aim of agriculture and horticulture to improve, encourage and refine those essentials offered to us by the truly wild.

It’s hardly a pearl of wisdom to say that the farming landscape is far from  natural. Here in the UK – excluding the National Parks and wilderness areas – there is hardly any natural landscape left.  The total overuse of the word in advertising gives a clue to its power through appealing to our emotions. My usual retort to those who abuse it is to say foxgloves and arsenic are natural, as is oil and coal, but that doesn’t give them a free pass into general use. The word “wild” isn’t used nearly as much in advertising because its connotations are not so good at shifting product, and shifting product is what our greedy culture is all about.  The only exception to that is when the word can inflate the value of the product beyond measure.  One of my sons – a chef – once had to deal with a whole box of Pignuts, probably dug up from a pristine site and sold at ludicrous prices. Wild sells truffles but probably not dogs or cats; salmon and Ramsons but not Blackberries (unless you’re a highly specialized plant hunter who can distinguish between over 250 hybrids.

In fact farming, horticulture, and even allotmenteering are all attempts to improve on the natural and, in the case of extractive farming, to bludgeon nature into conforming to our greedy desires. The Potwell Inn and the allotment have heated propagators under electric daylight lamps. We have a greenhouse, a hotbed, cloches and fleece – all of which we use to persuade tender plants that the weather is better and the days are longer than they really are – and so we are able to grow tropical and subtropical crops, the like of which you would never encounter in any wild setting in this country. Some we win and some we lose, but I don’t think anyone would argue that aubergines, chillies, peppers, even the humble potato and runner bean, belong in the Flora Britannica.

Organic gardening (and farming) are a wise and timely attempt to mitigate the worst effects of industral farming – and I’m bound to say, of industrial overeating as well.  Permaculture goes a step further and tries to rely more heavily on perennials and, in essence, returning to a foraging lifestyle. Vegetarianism and veganism focus on achieving something of the same ends by focusing on and changing what we consume. Even the most traditional farmers are beginning to see the benefits and opportunities of locally sourced and sustainably produced foods. It’s crazy for those of us who care about the natural world to pick fights with one another and – rather like Brexit – spend our lives in pointless posturing and squabbling about minor doctrinal differences while industrial farming, environmental degradation and climate change go unchallenged.

A friend of mine was in a hospital visiting her uncle when she heard a commotion on the opposite side of the ward. A fierce family row had broken out across the bed, and my friend noticed to her dismay that the occupant had actually died. It was she who called for a nurse to attend to the deceased person, not the squabbling family.

I don’t need to labour the point of telling that story here, the parallels are all too painfully clear. But to finish on a brighter note, I know that many natural historians love to go after the rare specimens, but I want to put in a word for the ordinary. The ordinary is the bit we don’t notice because it’s there all the time – at least it used to be there all the time but now it’s disappearing because of our abusive relationship with the environment. So I want to campaign for the ordinary because that way it can’t disappear without anyone noticing. Recognising, naming and treasuring our wildflowers and native fauna is the most powerful way of energising the fightback against extinctions. The ordinary is special.