Tag: weeds

Botany on the Damascus Road

We’ve just got back from the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) and things are getting desperate. Our friends, 1000 feet up in the hills, have already seen one major fire come perilously close to their smallholding which has hundreds of trees that they’ve planted and a small patch of ancient woodland. Despite two large water cisterns, and a smaller tank they came close to running out of water for their allotment, for their house and for the sheep, pigs and hens they keep last year, and things are worse now. Back at the Potwell Inn the allotment is suffering. The legume crop was a write-off, although a climbing french bean is hanging on in there and the polytunnel tomatoes have stopped setting fruit after the first truss. We’re having to contemplate a complete reset of our crops in the face of the inevitable heatwaves and droughts to come. We’re all living fear of the water to the troughs being turned off because we’re a third of the way through our stored water and most allotments have no stores at all. What’s clear is that the heat loving plants – cucumbers, aubergines, courgettes and squashes are loving it but the cool temperate plants are suffering.

There’s talk of forest fires joining up in France, but this is really about global warming and economic and societal breakdown and the last deadly throes of neoliberal greed as exemplified by the brutal and illegal wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. There is a very disturbed young man in our street who will lean out of his first floor window and scream at the top of his voice “the earth is burning” for hours . Sometimes the dog walkers and picnic loungers on the green will join with the sunbathers and shout abuse at him. But he isn’t wrong and taking an ostrich attitude isn’t going to turn away the wrath of the damaged ecosystem.

So, it being too hot to do anything much more than keep the plants alive I’ve been forced into a big think. My lifelong passion for plants was really rooted in the aesthetic appreciation of their lovely forms and colours. Later on I got interested in identifying them, photographing, painting and writing about them and of course growing and eating them. But I’ve always had a particular love for the urban rogues and weeds; the plants that love to send their roots into places other plants just couldn’t tolerate. I love the survivors who cling to life by modifying their life-cycles and surviving as seeds and underground rhizomes during the hot and the frozen seasons.

So I’ve paid particular attention to the plants that grow outside our flat in the most hostile positions on and below a tall south facing wall. They survive not only drought and frost but inundation with weedkiller, vinegar and salt not to mention the attentions of the local council workers who scrape them up with metal tools; but still they grow back with almost heroic stoicism. The kind of stress that would send tender F1 Hybrid into seizure and death seems to be an accelerant to these guerilla weeds.

Over the years I’ve been so focused on the identity, form and appearance of wildflowers that I’ve barely thought about how they do their thing. I was aware that the study of plant DNA has driven any number of family changes as we realize that relatedness isn’t all about appearances and so many different species might share the same evolutionary outcome without actually being related at all. So a couple of weeks ago, and totally fed-up at my ignorance of anything to do with DNA or the difference between chromosomes and genes I resolved to find out more.

There were two slightly different results of my binge reading. Firstly there were proper eureka moments as I began dimly to understand how plants reproduce, grow, deal with attacks, weather and soil differences with the truly breathtaking assistance of their DNA. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it became impossible to see the life of plants in the same way, once I understood that they possess amazing powers of sentience with which they are able to negotiate with their broader environment, I could almost feel the tiny electrical charges flowing through the plants and triggering the needed response through a series of chemical, biological interactions initiated by a jigsaw like connection between the smallest molecular components of cells. If you think plants are wonderful to look at, knowing something about their invisible inner lives will blow your mind.

I talk about this almost as a kind of conversion experience – hence the Damascus Road of the title. All my spreadsheets and careful labelling of thousands of photographs suddenly feel like butterflies pinned to a board. If plants can sense what’s going on around them, anticipate and initiate an appropriate response, then they’re doing the kind of thing that we do but using a very different set of “plantish” properties which are bafflingly and beautifully complex. The western world’s so-called “tree of life” with diatoms at the bottom and us (and some kind of god) at the top sets us into a colonial earth. But there are some first nation cultures which see the plant world as part of the community. Without plants at least a couple of the drugs that keep me going are plant based or synthesized and that alone seems to make thankfulness appropriate. It doesn’t seem entirely bizarre to say thank-you to the cabbage you’re cutting or the carrot you’re pulling. This afternoon I made fig compote and that (the flavour, not my cooking!) deserves a round of applause. Plants give us so much; nutritionally, aesthetically, and for healing us because many cancer treatments are synthesized from plants. They’re amazingly clever at making the kind of molecules that we can use to our own benefit. The kind of attitudinal change we desperately need if we’re going to avoid being caught up and killed in another extinction event would be to treat our plants – and not just the delicate hybrids that feed us but all our plants with the respect that they deserve. Maybe those roguish and indestructible weeds have the exact secret we need to ensure the survival of the earth.

Spadgerland

Forget the vanilla perfume of a madelaine for one moment and think of a single sound that takes you right back to your childhood home. Mine would be the sound of the House Sparrow, or rather sparrows, because they’re such convivial birds it’s hard to imagine just the one on its own.

I’ve renamed this campsite for entirely selfish reasons. If you recognise the tin roofed reception building, the cider press and the orchard then you won’t need me to tell you. If you haven’t a clue where it is then Eldorado is waiting for you – provided you can find it. There are enough clues scattered through the ten years of the Potwell Inn that you stand a real chance of getting here if you can be bothered to wade through a million plus words. Years ago I saw my first kingfisher nearby. Today I heard and then saw a red Kite circling overhead; I’ve never seen the Ospreys that hunt across the area but hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful. What makes this place so much greater than the ornithological creme de la creme is the abundance of the peasant birds, the fish and chip birds; the ordinary everyday types that are rapidly becoming extraordinary as we continue to poison and disturb the environment. This paragraph is illustrated by a tall and slightly unkempt looking hedge. The campsite has taken all the best ideas from the French sites and there is a small enclave in which every pitch is a self-contained enclosure surrounded on three sides by tall hedges. The hedge at the top of this paragraph is barely ten feet from the campervan door. There are no dogs allowed to disturb the wildlife, and the customers self select after their first visit. The quiet campsite policies make every day feel like the Sunday afternoons of my childhood. In fact the sound of children playing outside every evening is an equally chilling reminder that children once played outside and had never seen a Playstation on a smartphone. Happiness doesn’t always need to come commodified and packaged like a supermarket turkey.

Running a pub, even an imaginary one called the Potwell Inn with its name stolen from an HG Wells comic novel is extremely hard work and – dare I say – very poorly paid or rather not paid at all. And so these little campervan breaks are an essential escape. I often call them adventures because with a seventeen year old campervan almost anything could go wrong. Yesterday, having packed everything, I turned on the ignition and there was a profound silence. It was a glum start but I had a cunning plan. If I could just get the engine running, I could get to the campsite running everything off the alternator; as long as I didn’t stall the engine, which could leave us blocking a narrow road until I could get it going again -because I’d already used the emergency NOCO jump lead battery twice. It all went swimmingly until we arrived at reception and I turned off the engine without thinking. Oh gloom, oh silence. Mercifully the NOCO delivered for a third time and we managed to park up and call the AA who came this morning with a new battery and fitted it in ten minutes. He was a cheerful South Walian. Yesterday’s groceries were delivered in the evening by another cheerful delivery driver who shared my surname. There followed a long and serpentine conversation as we tried to establish some connection between us but I’m afraid we Somerset Poles cannot claim any legitimate Welsh blood although according to the driver the other kind of illegitimate bloodline was just as likely.

Anyway back to the birds. The sparrow is known in some places as the spadger, also spuggie, or (inexplicably phillip!). They were constant companions and the soundtrack to my childhood in suburban east Bristol. In fact they’re a bit complicated to identify because there are three species that are what sometimes get called little brown numbers. House Sparrows, Hedge Sparrows and even Dunnock rarely stand in an ID parade for our benefit – and so to my untrained eye they will have to look similar until they don’t any more. Last night just before sunset a flock of sparrows prepared to nest in the hedge on our pitch. My goodness they’re a chatty lot. Chickens roost in much the same way, each of them competing for the warmest spot in the middle. They’re much safer from predators in a thick hedge so I can see why they do it but they make quite a hullabaloo while they greet each other, quarrel a bit, shove each other off their respective branches and settle for the night. We became fascinated by the range of sounds that they can make without ever producing anything in the least tuneful. As the sun set they stopped their fidgeting and as twilight came they were silent. It was surprisingly moving to share that moment.

Today, using the Merlin app, apart from the sparrows I recorded Woodpigeons, Swifts, the Red Kite, barn Swallows, Blackbirds, Robins and Collared Doves; bread and butter birds in terms of rarity but many of them declining in numbers. Coming here always reminds me of the sheer joy that the natural world brings to us if we just stand, watch and listen. There is an ancient bond between us and the wildlife that surrounds us and it’s not sentimental or gushing leftie nonsense to hold that thought close in a destructive culture fed by greed and division.

There isn’t a division between so-called forward looking and backward looking politics, or if there is it’s characterised by backwardness in the industrial and financial wilderness and forward looking amongst those of us who actually understand what’s worth saving when the earth is burning. I write the Potwell Inn, even on the rare sunny and dry Welsh days, not because I’m a politician with an A4 list of policies to mend the world, but because human flourishing depends on the much broader and complicated set of behaviours that we call a culture. I’m naming this campsite Spadgerland in honour of the rogues; vagabonds; weeds; fish and chip birds and vermin which collectively give our lives depth and meaning.

.

How to survive a heatwave

Taken over Alveston, sitting in Helen and Alan’s garden in July 2020

I think this was one Filton pilot’s attempt to cheer us all up by making smoke trails of smileys and hearts in the sky during the post-apocalyptic gloom of Covid, and it worked. This year we’ve sweated and grumbled our way through three heatwaves and by now we’re used to coping by completely changing our daily timetable. No more lingering in bed until 10.00am – I seem to have changed my body clock so much I wonder if I’ll still be waking up at 5.00am in the winter. There’s really no alternative but to reserve the very earliest part of the day for whatever hard physical work on the allotment needs to be done. It’s not that bad – I don’t set any alarms I just wake up, make a cup of strong tea and eat my regulation five fruit shortcake biscuits – that’s breakfast (sorry Doc!) . Today we cleared the failed pea crop away and hoed the plants off at the roots to gift any remaining nitrogen nodules to the purple sprouting broccoli which follows it. Then I sharpened up the hoe – always carry a sharpener when using hoes, scythes and secateurs and learn how to use it. A sharp hoe razors off the weeds with minimum effort. Two passes of the hoe and the spring tine rake is enough to clean the bed and then I spread compost or whatever on the bed and work it in with a three tined cultivator with a long handle. These are all simple hand tools and they’re worth their weight in gold. I once attempted to rotavate the bindweed and couch grass out of a new garden and it was a complete disaster. They both regenerate and spread from the tiniest fragment of their underground roots – but I didn’t know that at the time. My friend and mentor Don Streatfield once put a piece of bindweed root into the freezer for weeks and planted it again in a pot. It grew again with undiminished enthusiasm.

So then I marked out the two beds using a line and a long builder’s tape. I know it’s a faff, and measuring the distance between plants might look over-generous today, but next winter you’ll see they needed every inch of legroom. Then we water the holes and drop the plants in, firming the soil around them and water them again, and then we net them to keep out the cabbage white butterflies whose caterpillars will strip the leaves down to the ribs if you let them.

The peas and the broad beans were a complete failure this year. The wet spring retarded their growth and then the succession of heatwaves pretty well finished them off. They’re typical temperate, cool loving plants and the failure isn’t just down to our poor gardening skills; farmers have lost millions of pounds worth of crops this year and I expect both will be hard even to find frozen in the supermarket. If you live in an air conditioned house and drive to an air conditioned workplace in an air conditioned car it would be hard to gain any understanding of environmental breakdown such as growers and gardeners have.

So we work until it’s too hot and then we come home. Sometimes we have a late breakfast, but our preferred timetable is to have a late lunch followed by a siesta and then just a sandwich in the evening. It’s a Spanish way of life that suits the weather perfectly and keeps the allotment going through the hard times. Today I cooked a sort of paella, flavoured with smoked paprika, chilli, garlic and tomatoes in a strong fish stock and topped with pieces of roasted pepper and monkfish fried in a hot pan. Tomorrow we’ll be making dill pickles with the miniature ridge cucumbers we gathered today. Before that I need to finish digging the bed where the broad beans came to nothing and removing the bindweed as early in the morning as possible. It’s hard work but bindweed just has to be dug out every few years. We’ve been powering through our seven water butts and the next bit of civil engineering will be to link four of them together and install much bigger guttering on the shed and the greenhouse so we don’t lose a single drop of rain.

Above is a view of Bath from the top of the hill at Sham Castle taken in July a few years ago during a very hot walk, and the balloon below has been a regular sight during fine weather spells in the past, although there are rather fewer this year , perhaps due to the cost of gas to power them. I once had a flight in a balloon that took off at exactly. the same place. There are houses all around and so we launched as fast as a high speed lift and then flew pretty well up-river for an hour or so enjoying long moments of uncanny silence punctuated by awesome roars from the burner. It was a day not unlike today and at one point we sailed above a fox crossing a field which clearly had no idea we were there. The landing was less eventful than I had been fearing the whole trip and I got home with no idea how to explain, let alone describe the experience I’d just had. Improbably, the company which owned the balloon ( I was a guest of the pilot) was based just fifty yards down the road from where we now live.

It’s an odd time we’re living through. We’re researching plants for the allotment to give ourselves the best chance of landing a decent crop, and it may turn out that broad (fava) beans and peas will have to come off the plan – something we’ll deeply regret because they’re so powerfully better than their frozen supermarket equivalents. The upside seems to be that the cucumbers, melons and squashes all love the heat and the sunshine.

Sometimes you wonder why you put yourself through it!

Astra inclinant, non necessitant

The Latin quotation under the photograph is translated as – “The stars dispose but do not compel”. Notwithstanding Amos Starkadder’s wonderfully funny sermon to the Quivering Brethren in the novel “Cold Comfort Farm” – “You’re all damned!” -(if you haven’t read it or seen John Schlesinger’s film you’re missing a treat); but there’s a great lesson for gardeners in the proverbial saying because the best we can ever do when we grow things is to dispose them to succeed. If you’re an organic grower then disposing your plants to grow well needs foresight, planning and patience plus a lot of compost. This morning we picked our first crop of Victoria plums from the tree we planted in 2020 the apples were quicker, but the pears are at least fattening up whilst the damsons seem to fall off too early. The pests are better at judging the moment than us. Badgers, for instance, always stole our sweetcorn the day before we were going to pick it. Nowadays we protect it by growing it in the polytunnel. The agrochemical industry wants us to believe that their products can predestine plants to succeed; that we can transcend thousands of years of human experience and spray the latest chemical (let’s call it Compel!) to dodge nature altogether. It’s a lie. There’s no other way to describe it.

I once spotted a book in an Oxfam shop called “The Half hour Gardener”, but it wasn’t so much the title as the author’s name which caught my eye. She is the daughter of a woman I once worked with and lost touch with back in the community arts days, and when we went to hear her daughter speak soon afterwards at an allotments association AGM she pretty much admitted the half-hour suggestion was a bit of a stretch. Even if it were possible you’d still fall foul of the weather regularly through a whole year of allotmenteering. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too busy, too knackered, too fed-up; the fact is, gardening is hard work. It may be true – in fact it is true – that gardening is deeply rewarding, but the reward is inevitably separated from the pain by a matter of months if not years.

Today, for instance, the temperature is in the mid twenties after weeks of dry weather punctuated by one, just a single but tremendous, thunderstorm and we’re about to enter our second heatwave in a month, and so we water. And when I say we water that means carrying dozens of watering cans each weighing twenty pounds down a rickety ankle busting path from the communal water trough to the dry beds. On a good day I could water the whole plot in about three hours but that presupposes that no-one else is watering at the same time, so on those occasions exquisitely delicate and silently mimed negotiations take place near the trough. The growls are never vocalized but we all understand the implications. Neighbours are neighbours after all and we don’t want water wars to break out.

The forecast is predicting even hotter weather on the way and I desperately need to dig over and prepare a large 5’x 12′ bed which has become infested with bindweed and we need to plant out purple sprouting broccoli there by the end of the week. We don’t generally dig, but occasionally the bindweed or couch grass migrating in from the paths need teaching a lesson and digging it out is the only way that works. The only plausible time to do it will be in the cool of the very early morning before the builders turn up to finish the work to eliminate black mould in the flat.

NB linen suit

Any dreams of shimmying through the allotment filled with delicious produce in weedless beds (wearing my linen suit and panama hat) seem to evaporate like the morning dew. Try as I will to look on the bright side at 5.00am, or mid morning when I need to walk up an icy hill to knock the snow off the nets before they break, takes a bucketful of optimism.

I’ll never forget the driving rain on the morning we dug holes to set the uprights in their anchors for the polytunnel. It was raining so hard I had to bolt the uprights in a foot of freezing muddy water which had filled the holes because they were below the water table that day. During COVID when everyone had time and energy the allotment site looked wonderful, but work and families had to come first when it ended, and it was sad to see their hard work so quickly overgrown with weeds. It demonstrated two important things about running an allotment; you might say two sides of a coin. On the one hand it takes time – quite a lot of time – to grow an allotment but on the other hand, COVID demonstrated that so many people were up for the challenge if only the time and opportunity were there.

The upside

I’m absolutely not trying to argue here that suffering is its own reward. We had enough of that in Sunday School; but that it’s worth a few wet days, tingling blue hands and cold feet to pick something delicious from a plant or tree that you nurtured through the droughts, the cold north-easterlies and the Azores highs to the day you cut it, warm from the sun, and take to the kitchen. Yesterday I sautéed the first batch of courgettes in butter and oil until they were just beginning to caramelize on the cut edges. No more than an hour from plot to pot. A few weeks ago we were scratching about for something fresh to eat on the allotment but now it’s in full flow, overflowing with gifts. The only response to it is sheer gratitude. I once thought I knew who to thank for it all, but these days I feel more comfortable offering my thanks to the Cloud of Unknowing; “the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” After all, what’s a few hours of enjoyable work compared with the brightness and depth of tomato sauce made at home in the kitchen, or corn whose milk is still sweet, or borlotti – the winter banker for soups. We may be hard-up and scruffy but we live like royalty.

Meanwhile – back on the farm again

Well we arrived back in Bath on the Sunday before the heatwave struck, and after 2 weeks of rain in Cornwall we were just as trapped by the searing temperatures and – (ask any gardener) – under the cosh of constant watering. The only time to water in a heatwave is as early as you can bear to get up – in our case it was five am, because sleeping at all at 20C is a bit of a struggle. An early start gives you the very best of a fiercely hot summer’s day; much better than the evening when the earth is scorching. But nature doesn’t stand still just because you want a break. We left the allotment in good order but two weeks later the weeds were roaring and we had a battle on our hands.

There’s only one way to do this, and it’s to blitz the plot systematically from one bed to the next until it’s all as clear of weeds as it ever can be. If you’ve been watching Springwatch on the BBC and looking at the weary parents of fledgling birds endlessly feeding their ever more demanding family, you’ll have some idea what it feels like to clear an allotment that’s got above itself. The grass path that you should have strimmed before you went away is now three feet high in Cocksfoot, False Oat-grass, Couch and rough Meadow grass. I’m showing off a bit with the names there because Cornwall gave me a great deal of time to “do the grasses”

But doing the grasses involved a lot of work with the Olympus TG-7 camera because so much grass identification demands high quality macro photos which is far from simple in a windy situation when your subject is waving around. It’s a difficult skill to learn and demands that you step away from that comforting auto setting and get down and dirty with shutter speeds, flash values and f-numbers. Oh and I was also trying to develop a new step by step recording procedure – which I’ve bored you enough with already. Progress was slow. And that’s all I’m going to say. So with photographic experiments, learning new plants and weeding, the Potwell Inn has had to go on the back burner for a few days.

I said several weeks (weeds?) ago that the allotment had suddenly matured, and the top left photograph took me by surprise with an unexpectedly emotional reaction. I think I’d been strimming a weedy and grassy path, and it reminded me of my grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns where the garden paths always gave me a sense of delight; always verdant and closely mown. And then the photo looking along the plot and beyond the polytunnel seemed as if it expressed something of that childhood wonder – the chairs, the little pond and the sheer energy of the plants and running down the path to the greenhouse with my sister to see Charlie the toad. The trees we planted in Covid year are all in fruit now, and with the hungry gap over we’re eating our own produce. I think you have to treat allotmenteering as work -but not the grinding boredom of routine, but the utterly rewarding work of knowing what needs to be done and just getting on with it. It teaches you patience and resilience – we left the broad bean crop for a couple of weeks and when we got back the whole crop had been eaten and the plants were suffering from some kind of rust. Tomorrow we’ll pull them up. Cool weather plants don’t enjoy heatwaves any more than we do.

And in what counts as a pretty low-level flash of inspiration, I discovered (on my hands and knees but not praying) how important edges are to the appearance of an allotment. Add that to another feature that only comes with time – I mean scale here – the allotment looks grown up because it’s literally grown upwards and whichever way you turn and move, new vistas open up. Neither of us wants regimented rows in the way that some of our old 1940’s allotment books showed – all rows perfectly straight – and few of us can afford to imitate Gertrude Jekyll in her archly curated informality; but just a few delineating lines and paths along with a scattering of sheds, trees, texture and colour but never forgetting an offering of plants for the pollinators – that’s a living, breathing, tactile work of art. It’s a conversation with nature.

Speaking of which, the photo below shows the tough side of nature. I’m no entomologist but my ever available phone app thinks it’s a very deceased Southern Hawker dragonfly nymph which has been killed (and this is a guess) by a zombie fungus, (probably Cordyceps) which you can see growing out of its scales. With a twist worthy of Edgar Allan Poe the fungus takes over and consumes the living creature, leaving the brain until last, when the dying Dragonfly is induced to climb to a point high on a poolside plant and grip the leaf in its jaws in order better to spread its spores. Oh glory! That’s going to keep me awake!

Where’s Wally?

A vibrant patch of wildflowers and greenery by the seaside, featuring pink and white blossoms among lush foliage, with a calm sea in the background.
Coastal undergrowth on Roseland

We were sitting on a bench, resting after a bit of a hilly stretch on the coast path and I was squinting closely at a tiny fragment of leaf when a small group of walkers passed us. “What have you found?” one of them asked. “I’m just checking out this plant that I may have misidentified” “It’s Hedge Bedstraw”, one of them said. It was a friendly – we’re all in this together – kind of remark that instantly established a common bond. “I don’t think it is”- I replied – “I think it may be Heath Bedstraw because there are tiny forward-pointing prickles on the leaf. This is the kind of thin, acidic soil they grow on”. We were all set, then, for a long (and for Madame and the rest of the group) tedious hyper focused discussion when another walker standing at the back of the group said. “There’s a Hummingbird Hawkmoth!” – pointing behind us. We all stopped whatever we were thinking about and turned to where the the speaker was pointing. And there it was; I’ve never seen one before so it was a bit of a moment to see this oddly beautiful creature whose wings moved so fast they were not much more than a blur. Then there were five of us eagerly following the path of the moth as it foraged among the coastal plants, oblivious to us it seemed. Moths have had this capacity to evolve towards seemingly endless recklessly stunning forms and patterns. It’s hard not to think of some kind of artist lovingly creating them. Madame grabbed my phone from me and attempted to take some photographs but couldn’t get close; held back by thick brambles.

Our cheerful conversation continued and then we went our separate ways having – all of us – learned something new. Back at the campervan I just had to double check my already double checked identification and keyed out the piece of Bedstraw in my pocket (it’s a way of naming a plant by answering a series of either/or questions until the name pops out at the end). Yes it was Heath Bedstraw. Then I googled Hummingbird Hawkmoth and discovered that Hedge Bedstraw is one of its food plants; that’s to say it will lay its eggs on them for the hatching caterpillars to feed on. Interestingly it was hovering around clumps of the related Heath Bedstraw so maybe it’s not that fussy. One of the things I find most difficult to live with is the sheer provisionality of all wildlife records. It’s true until someone discovers that it’s not.

And that’s the trouble with this natural history malarky – it can get wildly out of control with those of us disposed towards intense attachments – let’s call them obsessions or addictions. Later, and wakeful in bed, I mentally rehearsed the various species of Bedstraw I’d seen, and where I saw them. That was fun, and there were five species spread across North Wales, Mid Wales, Pembrokeshire, Bath and Cornwall. Madame woke up and asked if I was OK? 3.00am is a bad time for those kinds of discussion – at least it wasn’t a nightmare, and we’d had a good day’s wandering about; pub lunch; a couple of excellent finds and a major step forward with the breakthrough discovery that I could load WAV audio recordings files of plant findings straight into Notebook LM which positively relishes English plant names and Latin binomials issuing gentle corrections and straightening out misunderstandings. All my previous doubts have been resolved, and I’ve got a functioning workflow at last.

I know this is problematic for some, but Notebook LM is rapidly becoming my pocket tutor and data organiser. Oh, and I also made progress with identifying some new grasses and that meant getting to grips with identification keys – PLUS our youngest moved into his new flat after being evicted by a (barely Christian) charity under one of those noxious Section 21 orders, now abolished due to abuse. We also met some heartwarmingly nice people with whom we shared many interests and the Potwell Inn human kindness index leapt up three points, something of a record. We rarely listen to the news when we’re away.

What’s happening on the allotment while we’re here? Well we gave it a deep watering, especially in the polytunnel, before we left and there are a couple of allotment neighbours who have promised to keep an eye on things. Every day we scan the weather forecast and wonder what will be happening on our patch of earth. Bath is situated in the steep sided valley of the River Avon and surrounded by the outliers of the Cotswolds, which means that rain tends to fall on the hills rather than in the valley. But then, we’ve also often had heavy showers at home and discovered that the allotment – only 800 yards away – is still dry. The most accurate forecast amounts to looking through the window. Madame retains a passion for isobars, warm and cold fronts and all the rest which she gained at the research station where it really mattered, and thousands of trees could lose their blossoms to a sudden frost.

We even have some allotment planning software on my laptop and we’ve spent one rainy morning here bringing it up to date. Does that make us into a couple of old saddo’s ? Ask us that when we’re eating just-picked peas that make the frozen ones taste like bin waste; and ask us again when you taste one of our tomatoes just harvested and hot from the sun, or sweetcorn from the polytunnel that would make a badger faint with pleasure. As with every other human pursuit, the more we practice, the harder we work, the happier we get; so thanks for asking ….. we’re not saddo’s!

It rains every day in Cornwall and today is no exception and so I’m writing and Madame is reading a biography of the artist Gustav Klimt and reading aloud to me the bits she finds most interesting. I’m a man, so that’s the closest I can get to multi-tasking.

Bird’s foot truffle oil and other disasters

Close-up of a small flower with orange and yellow petals surrounded by green grass.
Lotus corniculatus

These past two days have been a revelation – although not a good one. and I’ve been left with just the embers of my project and on my knees, eyes streaming, trying to blow some life into them. The bright new day is yet to dawn.

Just to recap, I’ve been designing and now testing a new workflow for my botanical recording – attempting to make it faster, more accurate and less of a square peg when it comes to uploading into the round holed national databases; but rather like the time I rebuilt the engine of our Morris 1000 and left out the rotor in the oil pump, the flaws soon made themselves apparent when I road tested my bright new idea down here in Cornwall.

There’s a lane outside the campsite which begins as the metalled road down to a large house, presumably once part of a home farm at the centre of the big estate. It then continues as a footpath above what’s now a hay meadow for a couple of hundred yards, across a stile into a patch of scrubby woodland for a little way until it joins a very pretty deep sided sunken track which leads to the beach via another track heavily decorated with dog poo bags making the exploration of its botanical residents a bit hazardous. The fact that it’s Madame’s favourite walk makes it easier to smuggle in a bit of road resting. Sometimes. Although I’ve never formally surveyed the plants along with its several micro-environments, it’s the perfect place to learn. So here it is; the method …..

Step one attach the microphone and receiver ready to record all the details for later, and when the plant is spotted, record them in one continuous packet of data – Problem – I talk too much and instead of recording just the details, the recording features too many oohs aahs and miscellaneous grunts and strange noises. Worse still comes later when I load the recording into the transcription software.

Step two – take a quick photo on Flora Incognita to get a reference picture with a provisional name. Problem – no internet signal. But I do get a time and unreliable location so as to link the data together later

Step three – take any measurements that I might need later and note them for the audio

Step four – take more reference photos on the Olympus camera which can do macro and has better resolution. Problem – stiff winds make focusing on grasses a complete nightmare. I either need to take a small piece of board as a background or uproot specimens to photograph later – not ideal and sometimes illegal.

Step five– take GPS reading and photograph it on the phone or note it. This ties it all together. Problem – remember to figure out how to reset the GPS to gather the current location and write it down (data separation hazard) or record it. Need to write a short script and stick to it.

Step six – record all the data; names, grid reference and measurements etc in a standardised form that AI can understand.

Step seven– back at the ranch, run the audio through the transcription software and edit if necessary. This is where the system totally collapsed because I was using the free Google Record app which handles ordinary conversation pretty well, but went to bed with a headache at the sound of plant names and just fainted at Latin binomials. I tried to edit the result but it was terribly time consuming so I recorded a page from John Wright’s “Grasslands” to give it another chance. This was a great laugh, with Bird’s foot Trefoil being rendered as Bird’s foot truffle oil, and the blameless little Eyebright – “Euphrasia nemorosa, the commonest form” unaccountably branded as the communist form. Obviously this level of inaccuracy is beyond the editing powers of any AI programme. The plan was to feed these pre-digested dollops of data into Notebook LM and ask it to sort them into a spreadsheet in correct order to pass through the pearly gates of head office; every single entry checked against the great canonical parchments.

Step eight – this was meant to be the bit where I closed the reference books and where I modestly admitted that the new workflow was a triumph, instead of which there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. When I remonstrated with Google Gemini it almost cracked a robotic joke and said the bird’s foot truffle oil sounded like the salad dressing from hell! (now that is scary – it’s cracking jokes already).

However – I’m an eternal optimist – there are some tweaks I can see which fall short of carrying a mobile router around with an aerial tied to my bandana. It’s helped me see how to improve my photographs to get better results – especially with grasses and I’ve learned a lot about identifying grasses – which was one of my targets. I’m pleased to say that I’ve added five more grass species to my total. We also met a Swedish woman and talked about the yellow flowered strawberries that grow down the lane. We thought they were probably poisonous but she said they used to eat them in Sweden but they were insipid and not that sweet. She doesn’t eat them here because of the dog poo that gets everywhere. After a few days of wind and rain the sun has now come out and Madame is cooking a dish of ratatouille as a punishment for my distraction. Over the twenty years we’ve been coming here the village has become more and more gentrified. The local spar shop now sells curated wines, amalfi lemons and “pain de campagne” and an ice cream next door sells for £4.50 a scoop. Here are a few pictures from the entirely un-gentrified lane. They’re all weeds, but nonetheless rather charming in their blunt honesty. It’s a very under-recorded little paradise and one day I’ll bite the bullet and do a proper survey.

A short message from paradise

Close-up of a cluster of flowering plants with pinkish buds and delicate green leaves in a natural setting.
Wild Carrot, Daucus carota ssp carota

I could as easily have subtitled this post “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” so as to join together our being in one of our favourite places in the country – the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall – and linking it with AI. One half of the couplet represents all that’s good and the other the spawn of satan.

We arrived here completely knackered after days of work on the allotment getting it ready for our temporary absence and a couple more days of readying the campervan for its inaugural long drive after the troubles (new engine, clutch, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Up at five am only to discover that the roof had leaked in a place it had never leaked before – we quickly sorted it and set off in gathering sunshine for a long drive at a stately sixty in honour of the engine; “she being brand new and consequently a little stiff “. That last bit was a quote from a poem by ee cummings which a musty old critic once described as only fit for adolescents. I haven’t aged a day!

Musty old critics have had their field day over AI as well – marching en mass under the banner of the goose quill pen and denouncing AI vehemently, claiming to protect the masses from evolving technology. Good luck with that then, although Google seems to have messed up their latest software update on my watch which insists that I only slept for three hours last night. It was ten hours and I felt all the better for it.

So part of the purpose of this trip is to field test a new plant recording system and that’s where the AI comes in. Knowing a place like this really well has its advantages for rehearsing a new way of plant recording; not least that I’ve already put in the hard miles for most of the species. But anyone who gets interested in plants and wildflowers will know that there are some very common species that are extremely hard to tell apart. So part of the aim is to revisit the difficult ones and see whether I can distinguish the trees from the wood. In preparation I picked three brain teasers and posed a question on Google Gemini. “How do I distinguish A from B” . The first one sounds easier than it is in practice. How do I distinguish between a wild Carrot and a sea carrot? In a few seconds the AI answer dealt with two things – the hows and the whys of wild carrots v sea carrots. The how is demonstrated in the photo at the top. It’s a wild carrot growing on a clifftop near here and that’s because the flower head is in the process of forming a basket/ lobster pot shape. But then you might well ask – what’s an ordinary wild carrot doing on a sea cliff? and the answer is that wild carrots normally grow in and around arable fields and sea carrots grow near the sea. BUT, growing close together, they readily hybridize and so in Cornwall where the arable fields often come to the clifftop with only a footpath between and so there are a lot of what we might call cousins that look somewhere between the two. My mind is at ease because the hybrid plants can be assigned to the (very large) category of WOB’s the walk on by’s.

The other two questions were necessarily more general – what specific details should I record with photographs and all the other tools – hand lens, ruler etc in order to distinguish and identify the other big families grasses (Poaceae) and the huge family of Dandelion/ daisy lookalikes. In a few moments Gemini gave me a brilliant crib sheet to take out on my adventures. Traditionalists may take a couple of minutes here to rearrange their scowls in case the wind changes and they get stuck with lemon faces. Each and every record will be taken home to my study and interrogated with the books.

Until the plant apps bed in – which they soon certainly will, the old way is still the final arbiter; but I can foresee a day when taxonomy will be a matter of taking a clipping from a specimen with a hand-held DNA analyser. How you might challenge an identification after it’s been deified by its genes by a person in a white coat who’s never as much as sniffed a rose is not one I’ll live long enough to worry about.

The thing about AI is that we have to make the cultural move from knowing everything by rote towards asking better and better questions. The skills of the future will lie in knowing how to extract the maximum good science through a question that’s as sharp as a samurai sword.

We’re having a recovery day first and apart from lazing around and snoozing I’ve been looking at photos of the allotment plants as if they were our children, and reading John Wright’s excellent new book Grasslands. A further search with AI revealed that grasses are by far the most numerous species if you exclude the 57 varieties (OK thousands, then) of the apomicts which have dispensed with messy sex and just clone themselves; Dandelions and Blackberries are two of the other culprits here in the UK. The following two species in numerical order are the daisy (dandelion) family, then the Sedges and the roses. I can’t see myself getting bored anytime soon.

There’s not a great difference between learning to live a virtuous life, reaping the benefits of eudaimonia (flourishing) and learning to make better plant records. They both require constant practice – which is one of two reasons that we’re here. The other reason is the joy of walks near the sea. There is – I suppose – a third reason which is far less virtuous. The botanical societies tend to cling to traditional ways, and getting records through the minefields and the heavily guarded portals into the universe of scientific data can be a tortuous and Kafkaesque experience. I should know. I worked inside a conservative organisation (the C of E) for 30 years and I learned that these organizations will never abandon a regulation without a decade of bloodshed. I’m trying to develop a personal recording method that will shortcut the traffic jams by providing exactly what the gatekeepers are asking for. I’m not trying to change anything, I’m plotting a path through the maze.

A few good things that gardening brings us without going full guru.

A close-up of a cluster of hollow plant stems, showcasing their circular openings and colourful outer layers, surrounded by green foliage and a garden backdrop.
This is a home made insect hotel made from Angelica stalks. No takers!

Instinctively; the statement that Being in Nature and gardening is good for us is a no-brainer. You’ll notice the grace bestowing capital B on Being. But that doesn’t stop me from asking “Where’s the evidence Dave? – especially since time in the bosom of nature is now available on prescription on the NHS. We can say that all too many new gardeners end up in A&E with fork through boot syndrome, or infected thorns; back trouble and even coronaries; so, like sleep remedies and strong painkillers, nature and gardening are probably approached cautiously being both addictive and potentially lethal.

However – and you knew that was coming – and speaking entirely for myself; controlled immersion seems to have some great side effects. I’m absolutely not trying to be an influencer here I’m simply saying how it works for me and if that’s an encouragement to anyone I’m delighted as long as you don’t overdo it. Thirty years ago I found a lovely and inspirational book about fitness for the over fifties and got my first gym subscription. I absolutely loved it, especially as I discovered that however sweaty and painful it got – it made me feel better. But our bodies and brains get older, slower and less reliable as time goes on and now, with 80 just a few months away Madame and I have a large allotment which involves a fair amount of lifting, carrying, digging and banging in posts all or any of which have exact equivalents in the gym. For what it’s worth, after a long fallow year with various complaints now fixed by the glorious NHS, the allotment has increased my strength and stamina and radically improved the arthritis – especially in my hands. The other unexpected side effect is that constantly negotiating narrow paths and beds whilst harvesting, hoeing and weeding have improved my balance. Gardening has made me feel well, and that soaks into my mood. Having plants to care for and particularly having agency in planning it, really is good for the soul – whatever that might be! And of course the allotment produces food; fresh lovely food uncontaminated by any chemicals at all and in all kinds of ways; once again the cooking and eating makes us feel good. So ten out of ten for doctor allotment. On a day like today with the sun on my back there’s no better medicine than preparing a patch of warm earth where we’ll grow winter squashes and a giant pumpkin for the grandchildren at hallowe’en .

The other work; reading, researching and recording the plants especially the waifs, strays and sturdy beggars that eke out an urban living between cracks in the pavement, keeps the brain active, curious and grateful for the sheer diversity of nature in cities. My childhood was spent playing on bombsites and derelict houses, old coalmines and abandoned brickworks so these plants were my first hefting. My second hefting took place in the very centre of this deindustrialized neighbourhood – on Rodway Hill, where I went to school and I explored an entirely different environment on the tiny cap of old red sandstone which, I now know, hosted a rare patch of lowland acid heath – the name of which I only discovered a few months ago. I was so delighted to discover that the harebells were diagnostic of habitats I grew to love in other places without ever knowing the reason they were related by an accident of geology. Yes, wild places are good for us as long as we allow ourselves time to wonder why they are as they are.

The key to it all is complete engagement with the wild and the reward is those flow moments when the world stands still and we escape our restless minds and let the earth do the talking. Whatever it is – this strange capacity of nature to bring us to our senses – it’s relational. Rather like falling in love we have to relinquish ourselves, step aside from our neediness and make space for the other. And that’s as far as I’m prepared to go down the narrow path to spirituality. True flourishing is so much deeper than simply doing well for ourselves. All of Aristotle’s virtues are learned and practiced through relationships and our biggest mistake is to believe that money and success can be a substitute for real happiness. That we can somehow shortcut around the messy and difficult business of relationships and avoid thinking at all about our place in nature. We are in nature, we are of nature and like the earth herself we are vulnerable and needy. If that thought troubles anyone I’n sorry; but if you find it comforting then you’re halfway there already!

The question is … Can I tell my Asteraceae from my elbow?

A community garden with raised wooden beds, featuring a variety of vegetables, including potatoes and herbs, alongside a greenhouse in the background.
This was the left hand half of the allotment yesterday – the other half is the same size

Sorry Mr Eliot but April isn’t the cruellest month for gardeners; its May, when nature moves from the subjunctive to the indicative and blesses all our hopes with the sheer thereness of weeds, frosts and withering droughts. Four seasons in the month when dreams can disappear in a night and the fragments of bindweed we left behind in the autumn come back roaring back at us like belligerent teenagers. Nights spent staring at seed packets and saying shall we or shan’t we sow them? as if we were a couple of lonely souls contemplating a bit of adultery. But in May, no-one knows what will happen next.

So we plod on as always, fearing the worst and hoping for the best. Gardening is an excellent training for the virtues. Patience, courage, temperance, and modesty are all as useful in on an allotment as in public life; in fact if we refused to vote for anyone who was not a true gardener the world might become a better place.

So in the midst of this all too predictable heatwave we’ve been up at 5.00am some days, to do a few hours on the plot before it gets too hot to work . In May we have an abundance of small and vulnerable plants which need constant watering until they get their roots down. You can hear the bindweed muttering dark thoughts of strangulation below ground and even repeated watering, waiting and hoeing fails to diminish wave after wave of germinating dandelions, cresses and willowherbs which just love a bit of bare ground.

In addition we’ve both been waiting for minor operations (that’s in the eyes of the NHS) for which the queues reach all around the block and back to the crematorium. The boys (all approaching their forties) still keep us awake at night worrying about how they’re coping with jobs and flats in the midst of Section 21 evictions being handed out by the thousand.

Last but not least, I’ve been designing a new workflow for recording plants which will be much faster and more accurate with the use of some AI – which turns out not to be in the identification department but in sorting out my dispersed data and separating plants from shopping lists. If it works it’ll be a life-saver and will reduce the weight of the kit that I need to carry around with me, moving from rucksack to pockets. To celebrate all this we’re just booking a holiday in Marloes where I made my first ever plant list many years ago and we’ll be staying in a cottage we’d seen a thousand times but lacked the means to rent. All this to celebrate my 80th birthday and our 6oth wedding anniversary. I had my first botany lesson from a delightful scotswoman who found me lying on the sandy footpath around St Bride’s bay and trying to identify Hemlock Water Dropwort. She told me she was a botany teacher and that she always recommended Francis Rose’s flora to beginners. I took her advice and never regretted it – in fact I’d love to see her again and thank her personally but I fear it may be too late.

All of which will (I hope) explain why I’ve been a bit remiss recently in writing regularly. Life is just so exhilarating that I find acting my age a more and more ridiculous idea. I’m off now to make Elderflower cordial – the flower heads which were steeped in boiled water overnight, smell lovely – and it will only tale an hour to bottle enough cordial to last the summer.

A rocky formation emerges from a calm sea under a clear blue sky, with gentle waves lapping against the shore and pebbles scattered on the beach.
Marloes beach