wildflowers – The Potwell Inn

Walk on by!

Dandelion – obviously! but more complicated than you might think.

Everybody knows what a dandelion looks like, I imagine, but there’s no shame in not knowing that there are around 250 species of dandelion in the UK and – if you’ve got time and a good psychotherapist you could learn to tell them all apart. The beloved blackberry is a similar case but even more complicated, with around 330 species. They’ve evolved an interesting method of reproduction -known by the academics as apomixis which roughly translates as having sex with yourself; don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it – or as Woody Allen said – if you’re going to have sex you might as well have it with someone you love.

Anyway, and moving on rapidly, the dandelion is a handy reference point for what you might call the “walk on by” plant which draws together two threads of the WOB phenomenon. The dandelion in the photo, for instance, has been there along with its definitely not cousins for all of the ten years we’ve lived here. Until today I’ve never photographed or recorded it because it’s too common and therefore not worth the bother. However fate has confined us to short walks near home for most of the summer and the local rogues and vagabonds of the pavements and towpath have been the only available source of botanical interest; which disposes me more kindly to the dandelion. I’m sorry for my casual disregard in the past but now I just have to walk on by not because they’re common and vulgar but because I haven’t got the time or the confidence to sort them out; although I did shell out for the standard handbook which has been sitting unopened on the shelf like a bishop’s bible for months.

After months of tests and investigations we’re near the end of the tunnel (you’ll see why that’s a highly inappropriate joke in just a moment), and all I’m waiting for is to have a 35mm polyp removed from my colon so I can stop being anaemic and feeling knackered. I’m relying on the expertise of the multitude of consultants, nurses, interns and doctors who’ve peered up my rear end, when they tell me that this thing – about half as big again and the same shape as a champagne cork- isn’t malignant. Like birdwatchers they know the jizz of a nasty one when they see it. I have great confidence in them.

But spending every moment checking the phone for the next appointment doesn’t just cost you time, it drains the creative springs and makes life a bit grey and dull. We’ve cancelled several campervan trips so we could both be available for appointments at the drop of a hat and so necessarily I’ve been focusing on the local weeds. It’s bad enough trying to take macro photos out in the wilds; passers-by tend to stop and ask if you’re OK. Do the same thing on a pavement or on the towpath and they’re likely to call the police. But don’t for a moment suppose that all you’ll ever find outside your city centre front door is dog poo and beer cans. I’ve been amazed at how many relative rarities make even a temporary home for themselves in the mean streets of Bath, and recording the ordinaries balances the books against the statistical over-representation of exotica in the field guides. If we’re going to keep tabs on the unfolding runaway climate disaster we’ll need to record the sparrows, silverfish and brambles of the earth.

Here’s another one I’ve never recorded except in some remote and rather glamorous wild place. There was member of the same family, the Sea-spleenwort for which I persuaded Madame to walk miles in freezing wind and sheeting rain in January to find it on the sea-cliffs where it belonged, only to have it shown to me on the basement wall of the Guildhall in Bath. Sadly it seems to have gone now and I thought its near relative, the wall-rue, which has always grown unrecorded by me on the wall below our flat might have died from drought this summer. But this morning I dodged the rain to photograph the dandelion and came back with Hemp-agrimony; wall-rue and field-speedwell – all within ten yards of the front door. I shall have to make a list of plants that grow with 100 yards of the flat and I’ll guarantee it will exceed fifty species.

There’s a bit of a knack to naming plants from their leaves alone and today AI threw me completely off track with the speedwell which it identified as ground-ivy. A most enjoyable trip to the books settled the matter in favour of the speedwell but the two plants are alarmingly similar until you see the flowers. The purple flowers scattered near the speedwell had me scratching my head until I remembered there’s an Argentinian Vervain in full flower growing in a pot next to it. You see, even boring plants turn out to be better than the Times crossword for getting your brain in gear.

Back in August 2024 I set myself the target of organising my utterly random collection of photographs, and identifying the names and locations of all of them with a supporting photo. It took me a whole year to get them on to a spreadsheet and now there are 898 records sitting there waiting to land on several unfortunate referee’s desks. My species total is up to 472, just 28 short of the 500 target. I also set myself the target of completing 1000,000 words on this blog and so far I’m up to 951,500 which leaves me around 49 more posts to write. As my old friend Joan Williams used to say – God willing and a fair wind I’ll get there. But I’m not a trainspotter by temperament and so if it takes until next february it won’t keep me awake at night.

Aren’t statistics a slippery thing to deal with? I read yesterday that this polyp that I’m entertaining at the moment increases my risk of colon cancer by something like 75%. Reading that statement carefully suggests that my real risk depends upon what percentage of any polyps of any size are malignant. The answer to that is 5-7%. So my real risk is more like 75% 0f 10% ie 7.5%. It’s possibly less significant than crossing the A4 on a zebra crossing with a Range Rover approaching.

Toadflax poetry

Clockwise, Common Toadflax, Common Toadflax, Ivy Leaved Toadflax, Purple Toadflax, the white form of Ivy Leaved Toadflax growing on the walls of St David’s Cathedral in Pembrokeshire.

Palimpsest

Lovely word – “Palimpsest”, but not so lovely when you’re trying to type it into your mobile on a crowded train with no air conditioning and whilst being distracted by the sheer strangeness of your neighbours. We were coming back from Salisbury after a boozy lunch with friends, Madame was snoring gently beside me and I was gazing out of the window enjoying the hallucinogenic feeling of passing through fields and cuttings at 70 miles an hour. Opposite were a couple of very young women curled up together on the seat with their arms around one another in a kind of blissful sleep. Trains are more often very restless places these days. Mobile phones and laptops were playing their part in protecting people from relaxing and enjoying the experience, but I had just one word to type before it fled my memory altogether.

More often than not, for me, a potential post is just a formless and disorganized cloud of ideas until a single word or thought provides the catalyst which crystallizes the whole piece into (I hope) some kind of order. And so, in no particular order there were dozens of Purple Toadflax plants flowering in the back lane to the allotments. The walls around here are always covered with Ivy Leaved Toadflax and I’ve had a rather distressing difficulty in remembering the English name of plain old Toadflax because my mother usually called it “Bacon and Eggs” and I associated it with Snapdragons – from which there was no way back to its proper name.

English plant names are a delight and a minefield because so many of them are local or regional and all too often entirely different plants have the same English names. Small wonder that most botanists prefer the laser precision of Latin binomials to the poetics of local names. Linaria vulgaris is what it is and no other plant, relative, offspring or imposter will be allowed to claim the throne unless the DNA matches. Nonetheless, the evocative English names draw me in. “Why Toad?” “Why Flax?” – I wonder as I stroke their leaves and drink in their intense colour and faint perfume.

It’s not hard to see that these old names are evocative; suggesting ancient uses in healing such as Pilewort or brewing with Mugwort, or perhaps warning of danger – for instance, Fools’ Parsley – or descriptive like Jack go to bed at noon, whose flowers close up at mid day; Cuckoo pint (Cuckoo’s pintle) with its bawdy references to cuckoldry; Pissabed (Dandelion) which had always been used as a diuretic. I could go on almost forever but the best collection of these old country names is undoubtedly Geoffrey Grigson’s “An Englishman’s Flora” which you’ll probably find for 50p at an Oxfam shop somewhere near you.

The Old Hands Cafe. In 1971 you could buy a cheap lunch of cottage pie and chips, big enough to feed you for 2 days!

However some country names come loaded with so many wonderful associations that metaphor hardly fits the bill, and these Toadflaxes are better explained by the rather academic word – palimpsest – which sounds much more obscure than it really is. Here’s an example from Bath; the so-called ghost sign. When we were students here, there was a cafe called “Hands” in the Abbey courtyard. They’d never painted out the old sign for “Hands Dairy” which is still there today and neither have any of the succession of tenants since the cafe closed down and any number of different businesses took it on. A palimpsest is just the academic word for something which has been overwritten by something newer. Across history, writing materials were expensive and hard to come by, so recycling was the norm. The Romans re-used the little tiles used for sending messages, for instance. Scholars of ancient texts often have to read through several layers to try to separate the wood from the trees.

Some plant names like Toadflax are exactly like that. I’ll adapt the term palimpsest to emphasise the haunting thought that far from being a simple metaphor, behind the vernacular name there is a whole hidden history; a cloud of references to another way of life, to skills now almost extinct and an industry that even used its low grade waste to clothe slaves.

So firstly, why Toad? Well, for once we know exactly how and when the term entered the English language because it came by means of William Turner in 1548 when he translated the German name into Todes Flax. It’s all in Geoffrey Grigson’s book by the way. Its principal crime was to closely resemble the flax used for producing linen cloth (until it flowered). It’s also an invasive weed that, like bindweed, will grow from any stub or fragment of rhizome and was once a persistent weed of commercial Flax fields. So that’s the flax part explained, but why “Toad” or “Todes”? Well there’s a thought that the snapdragon shape of the flowers which gape wide when squeezed, somehow resemble the gape of the toad’s wide mouth.

But etymology is only a part of the fun, because beyond the name lies the industry. Fully grown flax was not cut but uprooted and dried. The seeds were removed by a process called rippling and then the plants were retted in water so that the woody layers were separated from the fibres. Trust me, this will have been a very smelly process indeed because it relied upon bacteria or fungi to do the rotting. The rest of the process is best described by quoting from the New England Flax and Linen website.

After retting, the straw is then put through three different mechanical processes. The first is called braking or breaking, where the bundles of flax are crushed and the woody material is broken up. The second is scutching or swingling, where the fibers are vigorously whacked with a wooden blade to remove the remaining woody material. Finally, the fiber is hetcheled or hackled by drawing the fibers through a set of sharp tines. The shorter fibers are removed, the thin strands of fibers are separated, and the fibers are aligned lengthwise. The shorter fibers are known as tow, and the long fibers are called line. At this point the fiber is ready to spin into thread and subsequently woven into cloth.

Braking, scutching, swingling, hetcheling and hackling; tow and line – these are wonderful lost words, lost procedures and lost skills from the flax weaving industry. They evoke the stink and noise of so many pre-industrial processes so let’s not get too whimsical about the pristine rural life. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to live next door to a tannery or a dye works.

Pale Flax – the precursor of the commercial species, growing wild in Cornwall.

There are many plants still growing wild in the UK that are the sole remnants of once common processes and industries and whenever we stumble across them they contain a powerful sense of history. Woad and Weld, Dyers Greenweed and Madder are as evocative to me as any Cornish winding engine or pithead. Plants and their uses are the faint traces of a whole culture and we would do ourselves no favours if we reduced them all to Latin. There’s very little difference in biodiversity between so-called brownfield and greenfield sites whatever the developers may claim. Of the Toadflaxes there are (according to the Book of Stace) eight wild species and fifteen garden escapes, the Ivy Leaved Toadflax belongs to a different family – Cymbalaria – and of all those, only one was economically important; the blue flowered Linum usitatissimum which provides both flax for weaving and also linseed oil when the seeds are pressed. As the Latin name suggests – it’s the useful one.

The dye plant Weld, growing in a wildflower mix on the riverbank in Bath in 2019.

The earth is the most wonderful photovoltaic cell – and it’s a gift.

Earlier today – after days of heavy rain – we drove about fifteen miles west along the coast from Mevagissey to Portscatho, via a diversion to the outskirts of Truro for a visit to the Great Cornish Food Store where we stocked up on some lovely local cheeses. By the time we’d stowed everything away the sky had cleared and we took a chance on a walk down to a local beach

So here’s my first list of the season; not a hands and knees search by any means but a simple stroll down the lane that runs from Gerrans down through Rosteague and on to Towan beach – no more than 3 miles down and back, that gave us 20 species of wildflower, and an interesting fungus; 17 of which were flowering. There were many more in full leaf and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were in excess of 50 species of flowering plant if you were able to walk the track throughout the year.

Starting from top left, and snaking down the rows from left to right – we found

Dandelion
Lesser celandine
Primrose
Common dog violet
Greater stitchwort
Polypody fern
Herb robert
Alexanders
Cow parsley
Snowdrop
Greater periwinkle
A Tremella indecorata (I think) brain fungus
Small flowered geranium
Red campion
Navelwort
Mind-your-own-business
Winter heliotrope
Three cornered garlic
Daisy – growing amongst cleavers and lords and ladies

There can’t be many more tranquil and inspiring setting for a bit of spontaneous botanising than lanes and tracks. Most of them aren’t designated in any way; they’re open access and you can find them all over the country. Of course wildflower meadows are the Royal Opera but I’m more of a folksong fan myself. Ordinary and local – like peasant – are praiseworthy in my phrasebook.

Yesterday was at the opposite end of the spectrum because I found a couple of plants – one in the wrong habitat altogether and the other either very rare or very underrecorded. I’ll write more about these later. A week of rain gave me time to visit the websites of the BSBI (Botanical Society of Great Britain and Ireland) and iRecord to discover how they could help me be a better amateur field botanist. Until I gave it a full three days of practice I had no idea how useful and how huge their databases are.

The greatest revelation of all is that you can research a favourite area and discover what plants grow there. You can discover where to find a plant you particularly want to see and you can check the distribution of every living thing to see whether the flower you’ve found even grows in the place you’re searching. Think of it – instead of stumbling around (like I’ve been doing) hoping to chance upon something special; you can search with a reasonable hope of success. That’s not cheating – it’s science! It doesn’t mean that your find isn’t what you think it might be – absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (as they say). It does mean that you need to be thoroughly sure of your ground before you make a claim you can’t stand up.

So I’m in heaven and full of Trelawney cheese. Madame is sitting next to me drawing and the last two hours have flown by in silence. Something odd happens when we’re in the campervan; I sleep happily for nine, even ten hours and feel completely free from stress. The world is going to hell in a handcart; we’re governed by liars and morons and the news is so distorted we don’t even bother to listen. I’d like to say I’ll pray for the people of Ukraine but I don’t think anybody is listening.

Here come the rogues!

Including two distinct types

So the first bunch are entirely harmless in most ways but just as a weed is a flower in the wrong place these are mostly weeds in the wrong place – that’s to say the North Quay in the centre of Bath isn’t the place you’d expect to see clifftop and ancient meadow specialists. But walking along the river just now is a continuous surprise, for instance I’ve never seen a corncockle in its natural habitat – there’s a clue in the name – and as for ragged robin, one of my favourite wildflowers I associate it with boggy ground in West Wales and on Mendip but not next to the bus station.

Now I know that there are many purists who think that these artificial wildflower mixes somehow ruin the ‘purity’ of the local environment – and you can see their point – except that short of seeing them in the wrong place you’d be pretty unlikely to see them at all. Why not a bus station? – if it keeps the species going surely that’s better than letting it become extinct because they’ve turned its favourite habitat into a car park. I’ve been fascinated to see what’s survived and what’s passed into oblivion over the last three years, and the sheer diversity of plant-life on the river bank makes a glorious picture in the sunshine. Sadly I think some will not thrive in this turned over soil and the nettles and docks are not going to give way to their more fragrant and colourful new neighbours. Perhaps this would be a good time to put up signage to introduce walkers to some of the newcomers. I was honestly flummoxed by the corncockle, for example, because I’ve never seen it before and it was just as beautiful as an unexpected non-native introduction because it’s virtually extinct in the wild. So rogues, but the kind you can develop some affection for.

Walking through Bath today we could see that, notwithstanding all the scientific advice, the streets are slowly coming back to life; and you have to wonder why this is being allowed? My own darkest fear is that the Covid 19 pandemic is being used as a kind of distraction burglary and what’s being stolen is the environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. What’s being stolen is job security, education, care in the community and a hundred and one other supremely important things that are regarded as profit sapping extravagances by the powerful, and if they get their way we can wave goodbye to any chance of dragging the earth back from destruction.

That corncockle is almost extinct because of what’s been done to its natural habitat. In fact you could say that the wildflower seed mix so beloved of architects and town planners is- ‘though it might be keeping the species just about alive – no more than a bit of idle greenwashing. Playing the fiddle while the earth burns. The same could be said of so many artisan extravagances and consumer distractions.

the more dangerous kind of rogue wears a suit and tells you what you want to hear while he’s draining away your hopes and selling them off to the highest bidder

There’s a very well thumbed copy of Naomi Klein’s book “This changes everything”. It’s so well thumbed, it looks as if I’ve had it for years, but it’s almost new. The truth is it’s so alarming that I can only manage a paragraph at a time and so it’s aged prematurely while it fuelled my anger and despair. And that’s the problem. Despair is their tool! It’s really not impossible to imagine a world in which we made things we needed for real, and made them so they’d last. I’ve got a large Pyrex bowl in the kitchen in which I’ve been proving bread dough for over fifty years. It’s scratched and dull from continual use and yet I’m so fond of it I treat it like an old friend. I’d be heartbroken if anything ever happened to it. I don’t feel poor; I don’t feel ashamed that I wear a pair of shoes until they pretty much fall apart; I don’t feel ashamed that I can sew a button on, or that we buy quality clothes because they last for years and pass through from ‘best’ to ‘OK for the allotment’. I don’t need a big car to prop up my fragile ego.

While I was writing this I wandered into the kitchen and saw a drug deal being conducted right in front of me on the street below. Both dealer and customer looked like rogues, but the more dangerous kind of rogue wears a suit and tells you what you want to hear while he’s draining away your hopes and selling them off to the highest bidder. Farmers and fishermen alike have been conned into thinking that leaving the EU would allow us to protect our own. It can’t do that because the World Trade Organisation is set up to make it illegal to protect our own.

Covid has taken our attention away from the environment – the hottest, sunniest and driest spring for many decades has been taking place. Levels of pollution have dropped – this isn’t rocket science! – but if we go back to the way things were they will rise inexorably again as they have in China. Covid has taken our attention away from an economic system that has served the wealthy for so long, but is now collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. We haven’t got one big problem we’ve got several and time is running out.

Fumitory, and more reasons for botanising.

Tall Ramping Fumitory – Fumaria bastardii

Thinking on from yesterday’s post, here are some extra reasons why learning to identify plants is a great thing.

Field botany – like astronomy – is one of those activities where amateurs can really make a contribution.
The healing properties of plants are not just historical memories, they have real significance for the future of medicine but unless we know what plants we have, we’ll lose them without ever exploring their possible benefits.
Knowing your plants is the best way of finding butterflies, moths and even birds. A bit of botanical knowledge feeds into the whole of natural history.
Knowing your plants helps to understand dozens of references in Shakespeare and across the whole of literature.
Making lists is fun
Fresh air and exercise are better for you than train spotting!

So back to Fumitory which seemed, when I first I/D’d it here, seemed to be the end of the matter – until I checked in Rose “The Wildflower Key”, which is an excellent guide, and discovered that my name was only part of the story because there are in fact thirteen representatives of the family in the UK. So today’s mission was to find another plant and identify it fully. Luckily it’s abundant hereabouts so that bit wasn’t hard at all. The identification involved a hand magnifier and a lot of hemming and hawing because confirmation bias is alive in this amateur botanist’s mind. It’s all too easy to read through one description and say “that’s it” and then read another and say “That’s it too” . So what you have to do – and it can be pretty tedious – is go through all the possibilities, narrowing it down one by one, until there’s only one left. It’s called “keying out” – and it’s a steep but worthwhile learning curve. Anyway the final result – in which I’m pretty confident – is that my Fumitory is Fumeria bastardii – result!

Apart from that my list of plants in flower has reached 65, with some lovely finds today. I won’t give the whole list – because there are no rarities on it at all, apart from a little Centaury which I think is Centaurium erythraea var capitatum which is not rare but very local and pretty too.

Aside from the plants we saw 2 chough, 2 oystercatchers nesting unexpectedly high on a cliff, being pestered by a crow, 2 gannets, swallows in abundance, a kestrel, 2 Canada geese, and some shags apart from all the usual gulls. A stonechat came and showed off only a dozen feet away.

Later we sat with a glass of wine on our campsite overlooking the Bitches in Ramsey Sound as the sun sank through the sky into a sea of pure silver. It’s three days after the full moon and a very high spring tide was flowing and even at a distance of half a mile we could hear the menacing sound of the flow which was generating some big standing waves. A large sail cutter and two canoeists navigated through the waters, the canoeists needed to put hardly any effort into rowing as they swept past the headland. That’s what we come here for. Our walk today took us along the coast from the lifeboat station to an old mineshaft where we turned back across the fields where we feasted on wild mushrooms last autumn. So no more than three miles of coast path and 65 wildflower species in flower. Happy days!

English or Latin

I learned to love the names of common wildflowers from my mother who never used anything else. I totally understand why having three plants with the same name and one plant with ten names drives proper field botanists mad, but there’s so much pleasure to be got from the English names which frequently point to a medicinal use like, for instance, fleabane, or refer to an immediately recognisable characteristic. They can even be downright funny. Check out Arum maculatum for raunchy English names like ‘lords and ladies’ ‘cuckoo pint’ where the second word is, or should be pronounced to rhyme with mint and refers to a pintle which is the shaft on which the rudder of a boat is fitted. Cuckoo, as in ‘cuckoo in the nest’ needs no further explanation I hope. A supremely naughty plant whose latin name merely tells us what it is.

Anyway, as predicted we went for a stroll around the clifftop below St Davids and in order to facilitate actually going anywhere instead of grovelling around on my hands and knees, I just took my iPhone, a notebook and pen. These coast paths are the most joyful places in spring, with enough wildflowers to keep anyone happy. You’ll see from the list that we began our walk by crossing through a marshy area before we got to the coastpath. So here they are in no particular order because I started the list halfway round and had to remember quite a few.

Red campion
Sea campion
Scurvy grass
Southern Marsh orchid
Yellow iris
Dandelion
Celandine
Buttercup
Ragged robin
Herb Robert
Common Mouse ear
Marsh marigold
Cowslip
Navelwort
Lady’s Mantle
Cuckoo flower AKA Lady’s smock
Primrose
Dog violet
Spring squill
Tormentil
Gorse
Stichwort – forgot to check which one
Bucks horn plantain
Sea plantain
Ribwort plantain – three plantains in a short walk is good going, I think
Red clover
Oxeye daisy
Fumitory
Sheeps sorrel
Upright hedge parsley
Alexanders
Cut leaved cranesbill
English stonecrop
Sheeps bit
Foxglove
Bluebell
Kidney vetch

Isn’t that lovely? – 37 wildflowers – in flower – in a walk that can’t have been more than a couple of miles, and I’m sure that could have been fifty if I’d taken a day over it and carried my mighty copy of Stace and a magnifier. Oh and if I’d not chickened out of the grasses, although I could confidently add cocks foot to the list.

The day started badly, though, with a knackered water pump on the van. We’ve been nursing it along for a year with a leaking gasket, but today one of the spade connectors finally gave up the ghost, having corroded away in the leak. Two faults in two days, but the flat battery may have been connected to the wet contacts. At least it’s a repair I can carry out myself, and a replacement pump costs about £50 so not the end of the world.

Back to the wildlife, and it’s been a sunny but cool day in a brisk northerly wind. Back on the headland we saw a brief skirmish between a common blue butterfly and a small copper. I would have loved to be able to say it was a small blue, because the foodplant for the small blue is the kidney vetch which was there in abundance. However the small blue prefers a more sheltered site and is not recorded here. The small copper has plenty of common sorrel and sheeps sorrel to lay its eggs on, and the common blue has a feast of birds foot trefoil at its disposal so enough said. I am condemned to wander the earth encountering and recording the ordinary and everyday, hoping desperately that these ordinary objects of joy are not about to vanish.

I’ve just finished reading Dieter Helm’s excellent book “Green and prosperous land”. It’s the first book I’ve seen that considers the economic case for what he describes as “natural capital” that’s to say, the natural assets of the world, wildlife, water, clean air which are being destroyed by our present way of life.

Some of the alexanders we saw here were very sick, with every appearance that spray drift from the adjacent field had killed them. It’s difficult to be sure, because it could as easily have been frost damage with such confusing spring weather. What is certainly true here is that intensively farmed land is butted up against these last strongholds of wildflowers. Surely we have to stop paying farmers simply for owning land, and start re- assessing our entire apporoach to subsidy.

Fumitory – Fumaria officinalis

Hi Veronica – Hi Violet

Allium ursinum – ramsons

Anemone nemorosa – wood anemone

So there were mouse ear, bluebell, red campion, herb Robert, violet, celandine and wood anemone, all growing within a small area and there were many more, including primroses, marsh marigolds and little spurges. I had to stop.

In a ideal world- that’s to say the one we don’t actually inhabit – I would organise my botanising a bit better – but what I mostly do is start out resolved not to spend the whole walk rooting around at ground level, and then reinforce my decision by leaving behind everything I will eventually need. Field guides – out, pocket magnifier – out, camera with ridiculously expensive macro lens – out. Mostly, then, I take my mobile phone a weatherproof notebook and a space pen that writes in the wet. Serious field botanists are the ones that walk around with a permanent crick in their necks carrying a clipboard with the vice-county list on it and they know the plants by heart. I’m so unconfident that I could easily persuade myself that a dandelion might not really be a dandelion at all, but any one of a dozen similar looking plants.

This is a serious challenge, although I joke about it. I was in my twenties before I realized that not all dandelions were dandelions but could be cats’ ears or hawkbits; and even dandelions live such promiscuous lives that their microspecies number in hundreds. There are people out there who can sort them out, but not me. So I muddle along like all self-taught amateurs, fearful that I’ll make a complete idiot of myself by mispronouncing a name or fail to get even close to identifying a plantain properly.

I know that the proper way to do it is to gather all the information I know I’ll need but in reality I never do. My phone photos don’t have sufficient depth of field and so the very detail I need is just out of focus and useless. I fail to observe the shape, pattern and placing of leaves, or whether the roots are creeping, and if the stalk is square or hairy, and don’t even ask about flowers! I found a despairing note today in my journal from three years ago where the identification of a very common plant hinged on my understanding what a ‘hemi zygomorph’ might be. Aaargh.

Some families are real killers – Apiaciae, umbellifers to most of us, are stinkers and I’ve spent hours getting them wrong. The culprit at Heligan last week was Angelica sylvestris – wild angelica – which I can’t say I’ve ever noticed before. But our walks took us through a very wet and marshy habitat which has a flora all of its own. All of which grumbling is a long way of saying that my resolve to list all the flowering plants we found has been frustrated by my inability to nail the second plant from the left, top row because I only had a rubbish photo. The closest I can get is one of the forget me nots, but which one I can’t say because I didn’t get enough information. Veronicas and Violets have the same capacity to drive me mad because even with 100% hindsight there’s no substitute for plodding through the keys with a hand lens and a partner with more patience than Madame posesses. Enough! There’s a daisy and a dandelion there that I am confident I recognise and can name, except the dandelion will have to be Taraxacum agg, which is scientific for WTF?

Why am I writing this? I love every moment of it, and every foray into the ordinary everyday plants that I vaguely recognise (like most people) makes the world feel richer, deeper, more complicated, more generous and simply more beautiful.

Potatoes, however, are easier to list – I just had to walk up the rows at Heligan and write them down.

Pink fir apple
Shetland black
Lumpers
Tyecroft purple
Herd laddie
Ninetyfold
Vitelotte noir
British queen
Beauty of Bute
Edgecote purple
Early market
Snowdrop
International kidney
Forest gold
Myatts ashleaf
Lord Rosebery
Royal kidney
May queen
Early rose
Sharpes express
Red Duke of York
Epicure
Arran pilot

On the allotment ths year we’re growing pink fir apple, Arran pilot, jazzy, red Duke of York and sarpo mira. I love the fact that these old varieties are being kept alive because we may well need their genetics in the future, but I’m grateful for the efforts of plant breeders who can increase blight resistance in a potato like sarpo mira to the point where they’re safe to grow, even in our blight ridden weather.

Later today we’ll be up at the allotment. The potatoes are very nearly ready to ridge up for the first time. We’re expecting warmer weather for at least a week, and every day we creep closer to the time when our tender plants won’t be ravaged by a late frost. Happy days.

No more lists, I swear – well just one then.

I was determined not to compromise what’s supposed to be a relaxing break, so I left binoculars, cameras and books back at the Potwell Inn and came down to Heligan with nothing more than a mobile, a notebook and a pen. When we set out on a walk in the sunshine this morniing I lasted about six paces at proper ‘going for a walk’ speed before I noticed the abundance of rather early wildflowers and that was that. At best I’m an indifferent botanist, and so identifying the most ordinary things takes an age but, on the other hand, I like the ordinary. So there were mouse ear, bluebell, red campion, herb Robert, violet, celandine and wood anemone, all growing within a small area and there were many more, including primroses, marsh marigolds and little spurges. I had to stop. Heligan has a series of different habitats and attractions and today we spent most of our time in the woodlands.

Yesterday I forgot to take the camera and so I couldn’t photograph the navelwort – or pennywort as it’s also known; its Latin name is Umbilicus rupestris, and there were several noteworthy facts we found out. Firstly I’ve always seen it on walls and never looked for it anywhere else, but here it’s quite common at the bottom of tree trunks. Secondly its succulent leaves are apparently good to eat and thirdly if you scrape the back of the leaf off it exudes a sap that has healing, coagulant properties and will – if you care to try – adhere to your skin like a natural elastoplast. Isn’t that fascinating?

Back at the veg garden we made a list of the 23 varieties of potato they’re growing this year. Yesterday’s tour leader talked a little about these heritage potatoes and said that although they all tasted good, they were tricky to cook correctly and if overcooked they would become waterlogged and collapse. Many of these varieties, regardless of their quality, are not on the EU permitted list and so cannot be sold. We’re growing three of their varieties this year on the allotment, along with two more modern cultivars. But we really envied the space they have here to experiment. After we’d finished the list we sat enviously in front of their rhubarb patch. Again, so much space – and yesterday we tasted rhubarb in a way I’ve never even thought of – in a salad. I suspect it was very lightly ‘fridge pickled’ and we both thought it was delicious – time for an experiment in the Potwell Inn kitchen. I think the starting point for us will be a poaching liquid with raspberry vinegar, water and a little salt, brought to the boil and simply poured over the sliced rhubarb. I’ll report back later.

Then we moved on to the apples where we had a good look at the pruning method they’re using here. It looked very like the Modified Lorette ststem that we last saw in the National Trust gardens at Dyrham Park. It involves cutting back very hard in the winter and then again in the summer. It’s not a system either of us knows but it looks very productive. The gardener at Dyrham Park said it was very slow to establish but, on the other hand it seems capable of sustaining excellent crops. So much to learn! So many lists!

Natural – Wild – Ordinary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tag: wildflowers

Walk on by!

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