Beautiful Demoiselle on the Monmouth and Brecon canal
I was inspired to write to the Guardian letters page many years ago to take issue with Waldemar Januszczak over a piece he’d written loftily dismissing the worker writer movement (in which I was locally active at the time). He’d dismissed the whole idea of working class writing with a contemptuous wave of his silk scarf. The Guardian is one of those media outlets that has never understood that its constituency largely comprises that group of people who are totally unaware of life outside their bubble, and I return again and again to an idea I’ve carried for decades which says that it’s what you say when you’re not thinking that betrays your true personality. Not thinking led a colleague of Madame to pronounce on the situation in Russia during the Yeltsin era, saying there was no poverty there and cited as evidence that the local Starbucks in Moscow was usually crowded.
Recently, a Guardian piece described the people who go out with electronic devices searching for treasure hoards as “Hobbyists”. Had the writer paused even for a moment to consider the inappropriateness of that word “hobbyist”? In the writer’s defence they might argue that they were saying there’s a place for the aforementioned hobbyists to make a (tiny and supervised) contribution to professional archaeology. “Oh gosh – anyone for coffee? mine’s a macchiato Tracey” . Forty years ago I worked as a part-time instructor in a prison. One of my class members was a little and very volatile Welshman who was doing nine years for an affray in which a TV went through a window and one of the protagonists was dangled through the same one. The thing about him was that he was one of the greatest experts on Roman British settlements I ever met. People can be much more complicated than the parodies we invent when we’re not thinking. I remember saying to one particularly nauseating man who’d found more Jesus than me (or could it have been the tea and biscuits?) – “don’t patronise me; I’ve been patronised by much better Christians than you.”
Hobbyist, then, and how about amateur? another word that the insiders use to put the outsiders in their place. Did you instantly recognise the damselfly at the top of this post? Bob Talbot would have known instantly – another man who would never make it to the church Oyster Supper, but who ran a fishing tackle shop in Bedminster, tied flies for pleasure and took me under his wing when I was struggling with my work. I would take the ten o’clock communion in the Lady Chapel wearing my fishing gear and wellies under a long cassock, and dash straight through the house discarding my clericals and out through the back garden gate where Bob would be waiting in his three wheeler to take us out to a river or a lake somewhere. He said to me once “you can keep your god, Dave; this is all I need to be at peace.” On tough days I would go round to the shop and sit with him drinking coffee and setting the world to rights.
And as a beginner field botanist, (my retirement dream) ; although I was fortunate to find a very few highly skilled people who were willing to share their expertise, there were all too many – often retired professional academics – who consistently undervalued the contribution of thousands of unpaid volunteers who had no formal qualifications but were happy to put the hard miles in to record the ordinary and everyday plants without which we’d have no idea what is going on with climate change. You’ll never understand what rare is until you’ve mastered the common to contextualize it.
We’ve become sensitised to personal pronouns, the he and she, his and her bear-traps for careless talkers and that’s a good thing even if it does lead to some hilariously mangled conversations at times. If we must hurt people’s feelings and diminish them as human beings then at least let’s do it deliberately; be proper bastards and own our stupidity. Let’s banish the class-based hierarchies and accept that when the shit hits the fan we need an engineer not a colorectal consultant.
Words can encourage, inspire and move us but they can also belittle and demotivate us. I’m a writer and words, to me, are precious so I get angry with people who use them carelessly, thoughtlessly or untruthfully. A crime against language is a crime against our humanity. So let’s be clear – the only appropriate use of the word “amateur” should be when someone isn’t paid for what they’re doing and regardless of their level of expertise. As for “hobbyist” I can’t see it in any sense except for the purpose of belittling someone. In truth, if it weren’t for unpaid volunteers we’d barely know the extent of environmental damage and species depletion we’re causing. Yes, of course, the number crunching is a bit specialised and the drawing of subsequent conclusions from the data needs keen scientific antennae, but even those more rarified tasks are often being carried out by unpaid volunteers because the government and its ministries know that the best way to solve a problem is never to investigate it – just so that some smarmy politician can say (hand on heart) “there’s no evidence”. “Of course there’s no evidence you clown!“- I might reply – “because you refuse to look for it“.
But we, the great unwashed, will look for the evidence and teach ourselves the skills to do it well because there isn’t any other way.
Madame and I have exchanged words about whose idea it was to take this picture, but it was me that pressed the button. The resemblance to a Monet painting only occurred to us over breakfast this morning. The impressionist blobs of Hogweed and Nettles; the solitary clump of Reed canary grass and – if this were an ultra high definition photo – the little cloud of mating Mayflies; balanced by the streaks of cloud and the bright gaps between the leaves; even the composition leading your eye towards the horizon and the hills around Brecon.
If you look very carefully you might be able to see a low wall alongside the small road leading west towards Llanfrynach, and if you had walked up there last night you would certainly seen a farmer and tractor carrying large bales of hay back across the canal to his barn; he with a broad smile on his face as he sang (inwardly) a hymn of thanksgiving in Welsh for the harvest snatched from the jaws of global weather disruption. I gathered my watery eyes and snot soaked features into a smile as he passed, trailing clouds of pollen behind him. It’s been a tough week for plant hunting – hot, sweaty and malignantly pollen-rich, and necessitating my taking industrial quantities of asthma inhaler and paracetamol. This is the second time we’ve camped in Wales during haymaking, and the other one didn’t end well either!
Anyway, enough wheezing for now. I was particularly interested in the canalside wall because I’ve been reading the most marvellous book called “Urban Plants” by Trevor Dines, only published last week and I’m not on any kind of commission here! In it, there’s a chapter on walls and so my eye was drawn immediately to the one on the canal where to my great delight I found three more plants I’d not recorded before – by no means rare, but new to me – I’m not a twitcher. In addition to the grass I’ve already mentioned, there was a vetch and a couple of new stonecrops. Being a good (non-practising, lapsed) Protestant I still need to balance every moment of pleasure with a good deal of hard work which, yesterday, included several email conversations with other botanical friends who know a lot more about plants than I do. So welcome to my spreadsheet numbers 727-729, we all hope you’ll be very happy.
Anyway it was an idyllic and peaceful end to the day and a decent night’s sleep on top of the duvet. But this morning I celebrated the new day with the thickest, blackest, sweetest and bitterest cup of coffee ever made.
I’d forgotten, but we’ve been carrying this little mocha coffee maker in the campervan for so long that I only found it accidentally while I was clearing out the cupboard last week. Madame has always made fun of me because on one of our first ever camping trips to the Lizard, we struggled across the fields with a cafetiera and my portable typewriter. by now, sixty odd years later I can understand why the typewriter, but the coffee apparatus is some kind of transitional object. For goodness sake I don’t even like the life-threateningly sweet tar of its gurgling infusion, just the smell gives me palpitations – but that cup of coffee in the morning with its big spoonful of sugar somehow girds my loins (if you’ll forgive the imagery). A slice of toast and home-made bramble jelly, a very small cup of the distillate of hell and I’m ready to write. I feel like a writer.
Nine tenths of writing isn’t the perspiration bit, it seems to me, but in noticing. It’s an almost pathological interest in the tiniest things that cross your path – for instance …… what are those nettles and that hogweed doing there looking pretty in the photo? They’re both of them opportunist, thuggish colonisers of disturbed ground. At least half of the peaceful and lovely rural idyll probably looked like a mud-bath a year ago. Someone’s been doing some earth moving. Why does that plant on the wall look so like the rare one I found on a supermarket wall in St David’s several years ago? Because they’re closely related but not the same. What about this one with similar leaves but loads of dead stalks standing up? – same family, again different cousin. You have to be careful with cousins and families.
Anyway, we’ll be back home soon and then off to North Wales. Right now I’ll be putting on the kettle, filling the water tank and emptying the cludger – oh joy!
The database that didn’t know when to stop. On the monitor Tinder fungus in Henrietta Park
Yesterday, as I was typing the latest batch of plants into the database, it suddenly dawned on me that the Potwell Inn isn’t the only journal I keep. This is a long and rather meandering story, but after we retired and after a particularly stressful family Christmas, we took ourselves down to Cornwall and were leaning over the sea wall in St Ives watching the waders and gulls when I realized that I didn’t have a clue what any of them were called. With the inscrutable emptiness of any retirement plans lapping around in my mind, Imade a ludicrous resolution that from then on I’d refuse to walk past anything I couldn’t name. Of course – like all resolutions – it was broken before we left the beach, but what followed was a trip to the local bookshop and our first bird book.
At that stage I’d been keeping a journal for some years but it was locked and private because much of it referred to my work and troubling family matters. Then technology intervened; my computer kit refused to communicate with the app I was using and in spite of a bit of helpline raging I was told that my kit was ancient rubbish and I should spend several thousand pounds on renewing it or piss off into outer darkness where there would be less gnashing of teeth. I’d reached the point in my church work where I could hardly cope with any more grief and felt my ability to empathise was slowly shrinking. With retirement imminent and following a great deal of group therapy and several years of one-to-one psychoanalytic psychotherapy I made the crucial decision to go public and start a blog in which I could pay more attention to celebrating life and being human. The Potwell Inn, the blog you’re reading now is approaching its tenth birthday. WordPress was more tolerant of heritage kit and in fact in the ensuing years I’ve moved across three platforms and four computers without a hitch. The pleasing irony is that WordPress eventually bought out the self-righteous and surly Day One and honour was satisfied.
The Potwell Inn was always intended to be a safe place for me to work in. After decades (my whole working life|) of negotiating dangerous places like public schools, prisons, youth centres and psychiatric hospitals to the Church of England (which was by far the most dangerous) I was pretty much burnt out and I needed to find somewhere to be truly myself without having to pretend I was the fearless and fun-loving extrovert I was generally taken to be. Here in the Potwell Inn, with a few notable exceptions, I have no idea who’s reading about me and for the most part I don’t need to mask or self-censor. I still need to guard against oversharing, and this is probably an appropriate moment to remind readers that the Potwell Inn is a virtual pub whose concept is borrowed from HG Wells’ comic novel “A history of Mr Polly” which was a set text from school but which provided me with an imaginary safe place as I day dreamed and gazed through the classroom window on airless summer days. Very few people I’ve known have really got past my armour so my cherished hope is that the customers – i.e. the readers of the Potwell Inn – find something in common here.
As a child my escape strategy was books. I became a completely promiscuous reader of biographies, the complete works of Dickens, Wells, later Henry Williamson, and up into much later writers. I consumed poetry, particularly the Black Mountain poets. My first involuntary tic involved moving the book past my eyes as opposed to moving my eyes across the page. I would begin a new line with the book held level with my ear. Mr Jablonski the ophthalmologist apparently thought it was just an odd habit and I’d soon get over it. Well I did and I didn’t, in that the tic just moved elsewhere; I lost the disturbing reading habit and started twisting my mouth and neck painfully. Much later I discovered that with an effort of will I could sometimes move it to less visible places, at about the same age- maybe ten or eleven, that I started to feel unable to breathe when things were sprung unexpectedly on me. My diaphragm would tighten like a drum and I could only partially fill my lungs. My Dad had a laudable thing about never making promises he couldn’t be sure of keeping but he sometimes applied it in upsetting ways, for instance by never telling my sister and I when we were going on holiday. We would go downstairs and see the suitcases standing near the door and I would be thrown into a panic – having no idea what was coming next.
The second thread of this post is a lifelong love of lists. The first book I remember was a picture dictionary, rapidly followed by i Spy books, Observer guides and a never ending sequence of obsessions that my Mother would disparage as “fads”. I became an expert on the rigging of sailing ships which led to a lifelong interest in knots – the cue for binge reading Patrick O’Brian. I could list the later (almost always non fiction) books that captured me – “The Foundations of Wireless” by M G Scroggie, way beyond my comfort zone; “Writing Illuminating and Lettering” by Edward Johnston – whose house in Putney we stumbled upon last year; and then after studying “A Potter’s Book” by Bernard Leach, I got into Parmelee on ceramic glazes and now over sixty years later I’m sitting next to the fourth edition of Clive Stace’s “New Flora of the British Isles”. Every one of these books involved the writing and testing of lists – endless lists which, all bar the last ten years or so, are lost forever. I even crack jokes about “feeling a list coming on”, which I think only Madame understands.
My first wildlife lists were handwritten in scruffy notebooks and also in about 17,000 photographs; many duplicated, two thirds of which didn’t even have basic EXIF data. The jumbled and unexamined sediment of a white knuckle life lived in fear of being “found out” – although I never knew what for. I’ve mentioned my melancholic temperament several times in this blog, but it occasionally tips over into what one doctor called “phobic anxiety” and even depression. In my twenties I knew I was ill when I started to see the winter trees as the bronchioles and alveoli of dead people. My mood was only lifted by absorbing, sinking myself in technical detail – the more complex the better and so I emerged from my ceramics degree with more knowledge of glazes and firing than was thought proper by the faculty members who believed that creativity did better when it was uncluttered by any technique at all. I recall a testy exchange with the Head of Department when he saw a drawing of an apple tree which I’d made which attempted to express its characteristic form. All living things have distinctive forms just as they have their individual variations. Close, even meditative attention is the prerequisite of all of art and science. He denied furiously that there was anything distinctive about tree forms and I may have given a sharp reply. That capacity to start fights also followed me through life. I never could defer to flawed or undeserved authority; neither could I tolerate pomposity, and in the end I got fairly used to being called ! “the rudest person I’ve ever met!” to which I would sometimes reply “Well you’ve been lucky then!” One of the best teachers who really stretched me – Sid Harris who taught Sociology – would challenge my flights of fancy by saying firmly “that’s all very well David – but where’s the evidence???” Evidence, honesty, clarity and truthfulness are foundational to civil society. Neglect them and you land up with fraudsters, liars, rapists insurrectionists and racists running the country. My principal defence at school became what must have seemed a frighteningly quick gift of sarcasm. By the end of first year sixth form I’d come within a whisker of getting myself into real trouble and left school with my collar being felt by the Head Teacher whose neurotypicality would have won awards, and my first job was as a junior photographic technician at the university where they handed me a Leica and a box of film; showed me where the darkroom was and said “go and learn to use them”. It didn’t last long but I managed to get a City and Guilds qualification. After that I tasted the joys of unskilled engineering work and welding before Madame and I met when she was 15 and I was 18 and she persuaded me to go back to college. I was astonished when they offered me a place.
I could go on but there’s no point except to say that at some point last year I decided to sort out my photos. I was interested to see whether I could recognize as many as 100 wild plants. I started off with a very elementary database but the more data I typed in, the more possibilities for extending my understanding popped into my mind and the more complex it became until it became a thing of beauty; a second Potwell Inn journal expressed in a different language. The photos, mostly taken on a phone over the past eleven years had enough attached EXIF data to reconstruct the past in diary form. I could find a photo and its date and location and it would evoke the whole complexity of the moment of discovery. Other details were embedded in my memory; of smells, of landscapes, of my companions (usually Madame). The database soon had over 350 entries, some of the plants I’d entirely forgotten ever encountering. The referencing and identification is quite intense work but after a few hours spending time – even with people I know and trust on, for instance, a field trip – I need a few hours of solitude to recover. I slip into my study, turn the computer on and open the Floras I’m using and an intense feeling of safety and relaxation floods through me. Memories of holidays, walks and random strolls along the river and canal banks can repair all those stressed out neurons.
There’s a deep historical, maybe spiritual significance in the naming of things. In the Old Testament as the creation is described (this isn’t a religious riff by the way, I’m just pointing out how fundamental the naming of things is). So in Genesis 1 – the first of 2 creation stories – and not many people notice that there are two – God creates and divides the higher orders – birds, sea monsters, every living creature that moves and then generalizes every green plant for food (does that make God 1 a vegetarian? a poisoner?) – and feels rather pleased. Then in chapter 2, a second and different account, God 2 makes everything in its higher order and then after a bit of dangerous cultural faladiddle in creating Eve, invites Adam to inspect and name all the living things – thereby making him the first taxonomist. Orders, families, genera, species and eventually sub-species. Put briefly, we’ve been naming and ordering things from the very beginnings of written culture.
A single flower is a single dollop of data – enjoy it while it lasts in a jam jar. A photograph with an added date and location makes it ten times as useful to our understanding. My 17,000 uncatalogued photos (not all of them flowers of course) is a personal scrap heap, of no use or interest to anyone except me and the ever patient Madame. But when I extract just half of a percent of them and tabulate them in a searchable database with “who, what, where and when” – all verified then they become seriously interesting and useful. But not only useful. I would insist that these living libraries of accumulated knowledge are beautiful.
At the New Year Madame and I went on our usual walk and found 22 plants in flower. Our Bath Natural History Society group went out a day later and recorded 66. A couple of days later again the lists were published nationally and I discovered that a plant which I’d recorded as Canadian Fleabane, which grew profusely outside our flat two years ago; was this year recorded as two different species – the Bilbao Fleabane and Guernsey Fleabane. I just had to go and check my apparent mistake and so I went out on Sunday in a freezing drizzle and gathered some samples of what looked like very dead material brought them home to take measurements and macro photographs and after a lot of head scratching and turning of pages came to the conclusion that they were right and I was wrong. Good news and bad news because I got an extra record. The trainspotter trap is never far from the surface.
There was more good news when we spotted (left – Right) the first Celandine of the year, Butcher’s Broom in flower and Cow Parsley in flower too as well as some Snowdrops. Spring is just around the corner.
But perhaps the tree walk we went to on Saturday yielded the nicest surprise, because we were shown something which was visually completely uninteresting and yet reminded me of a time when this part of the world was full of enormous Elm trees. On the left is an Elm sapling. It won’t get much bigger because it will soon be struck down by Dutch Elm disease, but I understand that resistant varieties are being sought out and grown on. I’d really love to see just one fully grown and magnificent Elm back in Wiltshire where we were students and fell in love with the landscape.
Dropping the mask has been quite a challenge – just as coming to terms with my own occasional oddness has been equally challenging. Possibly, my friends might say, the effort has been entirely theirs but diversity is the very essence of nature. Every living being, every plant, animal, insect or fungus is largely the same as every other of its kind – and yet different somewhere deep in its recesses. I wouldn’t swap with anyone else for the world. As a lesson from nature it’s irreplaceable and, for me, so are the lists which offer the safety in numbers that I mentioned in the title. Almost every wildlife programme we watch wants to suggest that nature is healing – that going for a walk in nature somehow fills us with an invisible miasma that makes us whole again. Well that may be partly true but I’d love to see it tested in some scientific way because my own thought is that it’s not just walking through it that does the trick but engaging deeply with it. It’s the engagement that makes us well – and the deeper the better!
While we didn’t exactly come down to Cornwall to search for spring – after all it’s barely January – what you certainly notice is that everything’s at least a couple of weeks ahead of Bath. I listed a few early starters yesterday; none of them in flower but all putting in an appearance. So, in the depths of this grey and dreary weather I thought it would be nice to show a couple of plants from today that cheered me up no end. On the left Allium triquetrum, three cornered garlic, and on the right Poa annua annual meadow grass; both cheap as chips, common as muck and mutton dressed as lamb if you like, but lovely. I must have a slut’s eye for the local weeds.
Sea Spleenwort in Bath city centre!
My mind was actually set on higher things because I set out with a grid reference that I hoped would lead me to some Sea Spleenwort. We’ve walked miles along this bit of coastline looking for it but if it’s there it’s no more than a millimetre tall (which I know isn’t true because I’ve seen it growing in Bath). I know it was here years ago because it was recorded by an impeccably qualified botanist, so I guess it may just have died out – like so many species in these times of climate and wildlife destruction.
It’s been freezing cold and wet here since we arrived and I was thinking that if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) should change direction (which is a real possibility with global climate change) we shall have to stop pretending we live in a warm and temperate climate and put up with living at the same latitude as St Petersburg. At the moment we’re in denial about the effects of climate change. We dream of uninvented, uninventable technologies coming over the hill to save us, like the Seventh Cavalry in an old cowboy movie but the bad news is that they’re not there.
Maybe we focus too much on the loss to science with species destruction. OK there are a million reasons why we might need to learn from life-forms we haven’t yet even discovered; powerful drugs to be discovered and so forth, but the sheer loss of beauty that comes with species destruction is a loss to our souls (and don’t ask what I mean by “soul” because even though I couldn’t say what it is, it’s still an important intangible something which raises our humanity above the instrumental.
The weather here, even in the far South West, has been pretty awful, although not as bad as it’s been further north, but those flowers (even grasses have flowers) are a kind of token that we know will be redeemed as February turns to March and our hearts begin to thaw.
It’s true to say that I don’t really like this time of year very much. The botanical fairground has packed up and gone, and I’m left standing in the midst of the yellow grass and the mud wondering if there will be another one next year. Of course – short of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), doing a quick U turn – there will probably be an improbably wet/cold, dry/warm/generally unpredictable winter followed by another floral circus some time between february and April. Plants seem to be much more adaptable than humans because we spend so much time wittering on about difficult ideas like normal we can’t see what’s happening in front of our eyes, and I for one have no idea how to run a successful allotment in somewhere as cold as St Petersburg – after a spell in Babylon with Deacon Starmer and the funeral band in charge.
So in times of botanical dearth I turn to cooking, drying and preserving. On the stove at this moment is a large batch of ragu – enough for a dozen meals – and a gallon of stock reducing down. It’s a very homely smell and it’ll all go into the freezer against those days when we really can’t be arsed to cook. Good stock is the pixie dust of the kitchen. In the left hand jar photographed at the top is half of a large crop of Habanero chillies, dried in the oven ; an entirely unexpected gift, as it happens, because the nursery label said they were going to grow up as sweet peppers but obviously weren’t. So this summer we were pepperless and this winter we will have to cook Mexican if we’re not going to waste them. They did smell rather beautiful as they dried – even if they made my eyes water! Alongside them is the usual crop of surplus tomatoes, reduced and turned into sauces and passata. The crusty looking layer is butter from our favourite Hazan number one sauce which, with a lump of chopped chorizo and some of the (small) crop of Borlotti makes a decent ribsticker meal on a cold day.
We’ve got a couple more outings to look forward to; a trip up the Kennet and Avon canal in a narrow boat and a long weekend in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) with our friends Kate and Nick and perhaps one last adventure in the campervan before Christmas – probably on the Monmouth and Brecon Canal. But the flowers just aren’t there any more and there’s nothing much to report on the allotment (another load of wood chip today – etc), so given that I’ve taken Trappist vows not to spend my time grumbling about the state of the world I’ve very little to get my creative juices flowing.
I know, I really do know, that this time next week I’ll be enthusiastically photographing fungi and going through my endless list of unidentified fern photos ready for next season; and perhaps it’s because Madame and I have crammed a whole years worth of vaccinations, dentist appointments, X rays, cardo assessments, scans and physio stuff, that we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by our vulnerability; but, to be honest, I’m feeling fitter than I have done for a year or more. The Cardiology department of the Royal United Hospital is on the third floor, up six flights of stairs, and I can now climb then without collapsing halfway. There’s a notice at the top that says “if you can read this you don’t need us!”– (that’s a joke, they’ve been great).
Madame had an unusual conversation with an old parishioner in the week. He must have seen or heard about this blog because he mentioned that we knew we were now running a pub (presumably the Potwell Inn) and living in a council estate. Wrong on both counts I’m afraid. There are no longer any council estates because all the council houses have been sold off – making a cultural stereotype redundant at the same time; and the Potwell Inn isn’t a pub, it’s a metaphor stolen from an HG Wells comic novel called “A History of Mr Polly”. I think I was banned from posting on Facebook because an artificially intelligent (stupid) algorithm decided I am a business. I wish! Anyway Chris – rest assured that we are fine and living near to some Georgian terraces in a cold concrete building with damp and black mould and this is not a pub but an HMO with a lively drug subculture outside on the green; always entertaining. The river outside is pretty but often quite smelly. We’ve always suspected that it’s got sewerage in it – largely due to the frothy schooners that float down from Pulteney Weir when the river floods. But a couple of days ago our friend Charlie posted a copy of a video sent to him by a scientist friend across the way, clearly showing a dense brown slick pouring from what is supposed to be a stormwater outfall. Worse still, the swans seemed to be swimming in it – I’ll never kiss another swan.
So just to cheer up gardeners and allotmenteers everywhere I’ll finish with a photo of everyone’s very favourite plant. Please welcome the Large Bindweed- cousin to the Hedge Bindweed, the Field Bindweed, the Sea Bindweed and the Hairy Bindweed. We used to have a couple of families like that in one of my parishes.
It’s a Mullein – can’t officially say which one until it’s been verified, but our local Country Recorder says that if I’m right it would be a great find.
I’m indebted to Clive Stace and Michael Crawley’s marvellous book “Alien Plants” for much of the historical perspective in what follows.
I don’t suppose anyone knows what a Lamp Boy did, getting on for a century ago; but back in the age of steam it was what we now call a gateway job into being a railway worker. Much of the menial and repetitive work on the railway was done by young people who would, today, be described as children. My dad – born in 1916, left school at 14 and among his first jobs he was a lamp boy. After a series of disastrous railway accidents; safety measures became part of the life-blood of the industry. I remember my Dad sitting at the dining table memorising every signal between Bristol and London or Derby (he changed regions several times). So polishing the lamps and lenses, replenishing the oil and trimming the wicks of the red and white lamps that were mounted front and rear of every train and all the points and signals across the country was the beginning of many a career on the railways; a high status job back in the day.
But of course there were plenty of other menial jobs that occupied young men and kept the country in profit in all our colonial pomp. International trade brought ships and their cargoes from around the world and sailors needed feeding. Most cargo ships carried supplies of food “on the hoof” as it were. Cattle, chickens and such like were often kept on ships and slaughtered to feed crews (or perhaps just the officers) on long journeys. The ships were loaded with fodder before they left and by the time they returned across the oceans they needed to be restocked with grain, hay and straw which, in those days before farm machinery, carried their burden of weed seeds back from abroad. When these ships docked – in Bristol, for instance, they were unloaded and then the holds were swept and all the manure was removed to the dockside where it would be sold off to local farms. The cargo would be loaded onto wagons or railway trucks and narrow boats for transportation to further places. The dockside, canal and railway sidings were a happy hunting ground for botanists like James White. These days we still find unexpected plants which are spread by passing lorries on roadside verges which, it seems, are especially attractive to salt-loving stowaways.
So drawing all those threads together we have James White publishing his invaluable 1912 book “The Bristol Flora” after hunting for all those casuals in the places they were spilled or blown; and one of the biggest railway sidings in Bristol was at St Phillips Marsh where my Dad polished his first lamps before a long career with the Great Western and London Midland and Scottish – still separate companies in those days. For all I know, he may have stepped over my plant or one of its nine cousins as he crossed the lines at work as a child. He once told me about a mass migration of rats from the stables when he said they were so many it felt like a moving sea. Freight trains were loaded at the dockside and passed through the sidings which were almost alongside the Feeder Canal which connected via a navigation section along the River Avon, into the Kennet and Avon canal flowing east towards London past our flat and just up the road from where the plant, mentioned by White, is (possibly) now growing over a century later.
So is my solitary plant a sighting or a history lesson? I like to think it’s both. Even so-called scientific disciplines are set within a broader culture
If you were to do a word search on this blog for “canal” (please feel free, it’s great fun) you would find many mentions of the Kennet and Avon because it’s now a significant part of the life of the Potwell Inn. We walk one section of the bank at least once a week and it never fails to deliver plants that I’ve not seen before. Some of them are medicinal herbs, probably planted by boaters in the past, who had little access to medical care. There is the usual brigade of thugs, vagabonds and chancers brought in by the wind, by birds, on the tyres of push bikes and the boots of generations of walkers. Some of them flower a couple of times and move on, or die in an unsuitable environment. Some set up permanent residence and some – Himalayan Balsam for instance – think to themselves whoopee! and raise families of thousands and tens of thousands. Lazy fly tipping by overtidy gardeners has led to Elijah’s revenge and we are whipped with scorpions. Then there are obvious garden escapes and plenty of native plants that just are – in all their beauty.
Then of course plants associate with insects and many other forms of wildlife and what we get – passing intact through many industrial, post-industrial and suburban areas are linear nature reserves of real significance. Abandoned railway lines; derelict docksides; old gasworks (too expensive to develop); post industrial sites polluted with heavy metals and land rendered unusable through flooding – they’re not pretty but in this age of industrial farming they probably furnish many of the richest wildlife habitats we can enjoy. Forget the SUV – you can probably walk out of your front door and abandon yourself to the wild in a walk of a couple of miles.
I turned the whole of last week over to a personal project that – like a treadmill – wouldn’t let me off; at least that’s my excuse for not posting for a while. I’ve been meaning to gather together all my untidy botanical records into a single spreadsheet for ages; but knowing it would be a bit of a struggle I put it off until it converged with another thread: self doubt in its most insidious form. I’ve got notebooks and photos (many not properly ID’d) going back over years and I am for the most part organised, but only for short periods like trips away in the campervan. Any qualifications I possess are completely unrelated to natural history and so if it’s not theology or ceramics I feel like a minnow in the shark infested ponds of botanical expertise. I know my place but I’d like to swap it for a better one because I really enjoy finding and identifying plants and – dare I say – I’m pretty good at it. However, not possessing a piece of paper with an “ology” on the top, makes me a bit of an insecure wallflower. My inner policeman urges me not to make a fool of myself (psychological code for venturing an opinion).
So I thought I’d make a list. I thought I might find a hundred plants that I know at best and that would be a confidence booster and so I set up a spreadsheet, opened up the notebooks and Google Photos and started to enter plants matched with photos wherever I have them and double check every entry against the field guides, excluding anything I might have got wrong. I soon reached 100, then 200 and then – running out of steam – got to the high 200’s with only a handful needed to cross the magic 300 boundary.
Meanwhile, back on the allotment it’s always busy and so watering, planting out for the winter and weeding also demands time. That’s OK for me because I can weed and look out for likely additions to my list at the same time and so I was taking a break and gossiping with our next door neighbour when I caught sight of a carrot family (Apiaceae) plant that I initially thought could be a Pig Nut and took a quick photo to check. I often use an AI app to quickly assess what I’ve found. They’re pretty useful for identifying the family, but less so at species level. Anyway it came back as a plant I’d never seen – Bullwort. So having told our neighbour that it could be unusual I went back ten minutes later to take more detailed photos and it had disappeared, presumably into his compost heap. It was such an interesting clash of cultures; for me a plant of interest and for him a pernicious weed that needed to be removed ASAP. In the event my first photo was good enough to confirm Bullwort and it didn’t take long to realize that it was at the edge of a scattering of wildflowers grown from a packet of supermarket seeds. So dilemma number two came up – should I record it as described by the field guides – an occasional stray from birdseed and seed mixes – when I remembered my copy of the 1907 Bristol Flora written by James White who haunted railway sidings and docksides in search of accidental introductions that fell off the back of a wagon or out of a torn sack. If he found them he recorded them – and so shall I!
And so I crept and then tottered across the magic 300 with the assistance of a walk down the Canal which rarely fails to yield something interesting and also a photo of an utterly common weed such as often passes under the radar because it’s so common and I feel just a bit vindicated as well as tormented by the thought of the next target. All this is a bit too trainspotting for me, and yet the temptation is enormous.
Realistically the majority of field botanists are complete (but extremely competent) amateurs, and the professionals – with very few exceptions – are helpful, kind and considerate. There are also BSBI tests we could take to award a level of competency but the thought terrifies me, and so I’ll bumble on at my own speed and keep up the day job – writing and gardening and tonight, cooking a courgette risotto for Madame.
From the top left: The canal today; Gypsywort: next line are Gypsywort and Skullcap growing together on the water’s edge, then two photos of what I hope will be confirmed as * Flattened Meadow grass; then on the bottom line Snowberry and Soapwort.
*Sadly that one didn’t work out.
It’s been the strangest week. For a start it was overshadowed by the prospect of endoscopy – I’ve had some dodgy cells in my oesophagus for way over a decade and so they make sure every couple of years that they haven’t gone rogue. Most of the time I don’t think about it but as the day approaches I start to imagine the worst. Ironically (gimme the sedation and lots of it!) it’s pretty painless and certainly not frightening, everybody is very professional and kind and I even get a cup of tea and a biscuit after the local anaesthetic has worn off and I can swallow again; but until I see the photos and get the first draft of the report, I’m sleepless and I worry. Happily, once again I emerged under the blue skies of a good outcome – pending the pathology results, that is.
So – thus reprieved – next day we worked on the allotment in the heat until we were so exhausted we could hardly stand and generally overdid the celebration of our fitness. Apart from Madame’s dodgy knee we were no worse than walking wounded but painfully reminded that we’re no longer in our thirties. The good news continued with my walking trousers being mended free of charge when one of the pockets fell off – and even better, Osprey provided, free of charge, a replacement for the lost waist strap for my rucksack, and so we were set for a celebratory walk. Madame guessed I was suffering from a bit of Mendip fever and so she suggested we might make for the hills.
Come this morning, however, and we had one of those pointless circular discussions (familiar to anyone in a long relationship) about whether we really wanted to drive for an hour to Priddy Mineries to look for a single rare fern. After three or four turns around the circuit – “look if you really want to go we can go …” – “But do you really want to go all that way ……?” – we both realized that neither of us wanted a long drive. Which left the “where” question wide open. Victoria Park? – No – Botanical gardens? – no – Henrietta Park? – no. Canal? hmmm, ummmm, why don’t we walk up to the George? DEAL!
There’s a real point in having some home territory. The Kennet and Avon Canal isn’t just a lovely place to walk, it’s the place where I almost always find at least one plant I’ve never seen before. Knowing most of the residents by name in – let’s say March or April, or perhaps December, if you like the perfume of Winter Heliotrope, doesn’t mean you’ll know them in May or – like today – in August. The towpath is constantly and astonishingly renewing itself month by month with fresh new growth pushing up through the senescent remains of the old. This miracle of renewal is happening just slowly enough to fool us that nothing much changes. In real life the canal banks put on a new set of colourful clothes throughout the year. Yes it slows down in the winter but even then, we find new growth in the rosettes of leaves that will flower later in the year. You’ve no idea how many shades of green there are in leaves alone, and when you add in texture and shape you can be lost in contemplation without a flower to be seen.
If we’d gone to Priddy as planned I would have yomped across the Mineries with my nose pressed into a GPS app and probably seen nothing. But on familiar territory that we’ve walked hundreds of times I found and photographed Gypsywort, Skullcap, and Soapwort as well as what I hope will be verified as * (wasn’t) Flattened Meadow grass growing on top of a rather famous Brunel wall. That’s three new personal records – and we found the Soapwort exactly where I remembered it from 2020 during the lockdown.
Back home I transferred all the photographs to the computer – the new camera does this wirelessly – and identified them all as best I could, calculated the National Grid references from the camera Lat and Long, using an OS app and turned to my old pal Mrs Grieve to see if her 1920’s herbal thought Gypsywort had any healing properties. She didn’t even mention it, and when I double-checked online, every single historical use for it has been deemed dangerous by science, so nothing to report there. Skullcap too passes under the radar but Soapwort root was once used to treat syphilis which neither Mrs Grieve or me have suffered from – all she can say in its favour is that it was thought to be “better than mercury“. Well thanks but no thanks – we’ll give that one a miss too. I often think the use of the word natural to bestow instant credibility is one of the quickest ways into A & E.
Wild swimming is about as natural as it gets, and yet – looking at the top left photo of the canal, taken today, the spring water trickling in from the hill was very pretty – but I’d say there are a few unsavoury additions to the cloudy waterway – so however hot the day I’ll be keeping my trousers on.
Anyway, as far as Heffalumps are concerned, I’m more and more convinced that there’s no real need to be searching across distant counties until I’ve looked more closely and found all the available ones nearer to home. I understand that in the wildflower meadows of Yorkshire and Cumbria they stand shoulder to shoulder, and maybe one day we’ll get there. I do love a good Heffalump specimen, but I don’t always need to wear my tropicals and a pith helmet.
We grow our tomatoes in the polytunnel on grafted rootstocks and with blight resistant varieties. It’s by no means cheap, but we haven’t lost a crop to blight in years, and having grown both from seed and from grafted rootstocks, the commercial ones, bought from a local nursery (so we can see what we’re getting) have a much higher yield and more than pay for themselves as long as we water them consistently and feed them with an organic seaweed based fertilizer. They ripen over a period which gives us plentiful fresh tomatoes in the kitchen but any surplus is quickly preserved. Freezing is very energy intensive, so we rely on reusable glass preserving jars with new metal tops every year so they seal perfectly. Our collection of Italian jars and bottles has been in continuous use for nearly ten years now. After several years of pushing the pulp through a sieve – which is very slow – we bought a cheap hand cranked passata machine which will easily mill six pounds of tomatoes in ten minutes, neatly removing skins and seeds which we don’t put into the compost any more because then we land up with hundreds of tomato seedlings!
The passata machine and the pulp. The pale yellow lumps are butter.
Depending on which part of the cycle the little spring loaded paddles have been assembled in against the sieve, the first few turns of the handle yield hesitant and irregular clickings. But as soon as the hopper is filled with peeled and chopped tomatoes and the process speeds up, it sounds to me something like “Lets think! Let’s think!” Each hopper goes through the machine five times, recovering first the juice and later the thicker pulp. Finally the skins go through because there’s a surprising amount of pulp still on the skins. At the end I have a deep pan half filled with passata and a shallow enamel dish filled with almost dry seeds and skin. It’s high summer and one of those grounding kitchen rituals which mark the transition of the seasons, just as marmalade making marks the end of winter and Christmas pudding, the beginning of it.
This kind of sauce making reduces our almost unmanageable crop of tomatoes to around a quarter of their original weight and prepares them for storage so they last more than a year. We make several kinds of sauce, but this one – which we simply call Hazan number one comes from Marcella Hazan’s marvellous book “The Essentials of Classic Italian cooking”. We also make straight passata and roasted tomato sauce from Pam Corbin’s River Cottage Handbook “Preserves”. Then there’s tomato ketchup from a 1950’s HMSO book and, if there are any leftover green tomatoes we make chutney from my Mum’s old cookbook. Nothing gets wasted at the Potwell Inn apart from (very occasionally) the Landlord.
Meanwhile Madame has been continuing with her years-long search for a ratatouille recipe that I’ll actually like. I was put off ‘rat’ by over-exposure to it on camping trips in the past, when it always tasted of methylated spirits from the Trangia Stove. However, because we’ve got all the fresh ingredients coming off the allotment at the moment, she has been experimenting from a whole pile of recipes and yesterday’s came from Delia Smith, but shares its DNA with a much earlier one by Jane Grigson. The whole aim is to create a dish that doesn’t look like pavement vomit. Simply boiling up all the ingredients into a wet and slimy sludge should be enough to get you a stiff fine for vandalism. Anyway, Madame’s latest iteration last night looks and tastes like the best yet.
But there’s more to it than that. “Let’s think ….. let’s think” sings the passata machine as I crank the handle.
I love this kind of seasonal cooking (and eating), and I learned about kitchen thrift from my mother and grandmother who understood food shortages from the experience of two world wars. But there’s more to it than that. “Let’s think ….. let’s think” sings the passata machine as I crank the handle. These seasonal earthings are incredibly important to both of us and at these times we work as a team in the kitchen. I suppose – if you suffer from the burden of believing that there are better or more important things to do with your time than press tomatoes through a sieve or make your own Hollandaise sauce – then you’ll miss the meditative thoughtfulness that repetitive kitchen work brings. The meditation strengthens the link between growing the plant, preparing the food and eating together.
Growing food, cooking and eating together are fundamental to thriving; much more – dare I say – than commodified health and conspicuous consumption. Pouring damson jam into pots brings the trees and their fruits to the table in the depths of winter. Making a wish over the Christmas pudding mixture is – at its very least – a wish for a peaceful future. Beating a mayonnaise or mashing potatoes will give a few minutes respite from endless bad news about riots and hatred. Baking bread means committing 24 hours to something of more moment than gossip.
My thoughts – as I crank the handle of the passata machine – are the spiritual equivalent of Mother Julian’s prayer that – “all will be well and all manner of things will be well.” The seasons, the moon and the tides wax and wane without regard for our existential angst. Whilst anyone with a grain of common sense will understand that we really cannot be anything we want to be, because our lives are a continual negotiation with nature and circumstance; we can still thrive by immersing ourselves in the flow moments when we know what it means to be human rather than spend anxious lives doom scrolling on our mobiles. Maybe the wooden spoon should be promoted to first prize?
The bindweed in the background should remind any gardener that the devil is always lurking in the background, waiting for an opportune moment
A local blogger posted a couple of pictures today rather like the ones above except that the left hand picture showed a pavement lined and ennobled by plants and the right hand saw the same picture with all the plant life taken out by the moaners and scrapers employed to humour tidy minded citizens. These two plants are respectively Knotgrass and Procumbent Yellow Sorrel, both eking out a living barely two centimetres above the pavement and inconspicuous with it – like all successful squatters; and you know how it is when someone passes a deeply upsetting remark without even realizing they’re being annoying. Like one of our neighbours who thought I’d be impressed by his decision to vote Reform in the recent election. I don’t think our blogger – one I follow and who is normally very sensible – thought for a moment that anyone would disagree with his settled opinion that “weeds” make the pavement look bad and upset the tourists. But urban plants are fascinating and I’d venture that they’ll get even more fascinating as the climate heats up and we all start to wonder what will survive global climate change. What lives on air, dust and heat ? What is it in their DNA that makes them such great survivors, and can we borrow a bit of it? Here are some more weeds.
So – left to right, Rue Leaved Saxifrage, Coltsfoot and the old Charles Street Telephone Exchange – all growing together. So tell me which of these three is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen? I’m all for uprooting the building which was built facing the end of a lovely Georgian street under crown privilege and therefore bypassing planning regulations. Our backyard – an old builders yard – featured 47 species of weed last time I counted. Every year a council employee comes along the street scraping them all off – he used to spray with glyphosate; then they tried rocksalt and now it’s down to a sharp hoe. For the sake of setting the record straight, the plants all regrow in roughly the same time whatever the council do. In Oxford a rogue urban botany group started to label the “weeds” so that passers-by could see that they had names and often uses too. Brilliant idea but I daresay by now they’re all banged up in prison for discussing writing plant labels on a zoom call intercepted by GCHQ.
Of course you might find the mean streets of central Bath so upsetting that you can only traverse them by blotting out the noise with headphones and adopting that curious mobile phone walk, head down with the phone held out ahead like the prow of a ship breasting hostile waves. The other day we were in Great Stanhope Street and we saw a Lesser Black Backed gull attempting to swallow a rat whole, shaking it around to try and align it into a suitable position; an operation which caused the rat’s tail to wave around rather upsettingly in the sunshine. On the same morning we saw a pair of pigeon’s feet on the pavement – pretty clearly the remains of the local Peregrine Falcon’s recent meal finished off by a fox or a carrion crow.
Throw away the mobile distraction unit along with the headphones and you too could enjoy nature red in tooth and claw; share the outrageous joy of the carousing teenagers on the green and talk to the flowers whose worldly experience as survivors exceeds all expectations. The countryside isn’t a nature reserve somewhere outside the city boundary, nature is right here and we’re part of it.
Sea Spleenwort – living off Pepsi can, crisp packet, dog ends and McDonalds tray. NB – no sea!
