The asparagus season gets underway

It’s ironic, really , that we dug up the asparagus bed on the Potwell Inn allotment pretty much on the first day of the official season. I’ve already written about its lack of productivity and in the end borrowed time has run out. Ours was barely 10′ x 5′ but we were down at the Lost Gardens of Heligan a couple of years ago and they had lost a very long bed. For reasons unknown to us, these beds will suddenly turn their faces to the wall and there’s nothing to be done about it. Luckily, there is a Worcester business run by the Chinn family who grow the most fabulous English asparagus no more than 50 miles from Bath. The long plane journey from Peru or wherever else is not just polluting, the flavour really deteriorates and if you, like us, can no longer grow your own it’s really worthwhile getting your hands on the local product. Then you need to make Hollandaise sauce, or at least learn to make it because again the commercial supermarket version is overloaded with chemicals and stabilizers. There’s a reason for that, because the sauce splits very easily – made properly it’s like hot mayonnaise with butter beaten into the egg yolks instead of oil. Life threateningly good for just a brief few weeks of the year; certainly not a dish to eat too often! Traditionally you add a teaspoon of Tarragon Vinegar (very easy to make your own) to the eggs at the beginning and that very faint perfume really brightens the whole dish. Our youngest son used to prep the Hollandaise by the gallon in one restaurant he worked in.

The downside to asparagus depends on your DNA because it makes your urine smell dreadfully sulphurous regardless; but only some of us can actually smell it. Like being able to curl your tongue, the rich odour of asparagus wee is a genetic gift. We had an old friend who was a member of a London club and who swore that there was a notice on the wall, begging members “not to piss in the umbrella stands during the asparagus season”. Oh how they live, the powerful! Anyway the Potwell Inn allows no misbehaviour of that sort, you’ll be pleased to know.

Actually asparagus is marvellous steamed just on its own with a dollop of butter and/or a curl of parmesan; but on high days and holidays we serve it as “Délices d’Argenteuil” in a recipe by Simon Hopkinson – you can find it online and it’s a bit of a faff but very grand as well. The combination of pancakes, Parma ham, Hollandaise and English asparagus is lovely. Then there’s the flan which Madame loves and finally the BBQ. With those four ways of cooking it and a season that lasts not much more than six to eight weeks, you’ll never get bored.

Alas, much of my time has been spent on the computer when it rains. My research into AI is very slowly gaining ground and it’s almost scarily efficient at doing those boring repetitive jobs that I so dislike. Whether or not it’s a threat to life and civilisation is almost irrelevant because Pandora’s box is open and bad actors can always find a way of exploiting new discoveries for personal gain. Our best defence is to understand the technology and use it enough to recognise the dangers when (as they inevitably will) – they emerge.

An update on the asparagus flan

24 hours later, having scoffed half of the flan for supper I feel I should report on a completely unexpected outcome. Somehow I forgot to start the timer when the flan went into the oven complete with its filling, so when I realized my mistake I had to finish cooking it by eye and instinct. Flans are simple enough to cook, and I really enjoy making them but over the years I’ve discovered that they can go from bloom to blown in two minutes. I’ve also, thinking back on it, fallen into the habit of going for a firm set of the custard which is always useful if the flan is for a picnic and going to be carried around in a box; and of course if you’re baking 20,000 a day in a factory. However, yesterday I had to make a decision without benefit of the clock, so as the top began to take a bit of colour I fetched it out of the oven and put it aside to cool. When it came time to eat it we discovered that the usual firm set middle was still a bit runny, faintly but not oppressively cheesy, unctuous and smooth; like home-made custard. The combination of crisp pastry, firm and very fresh asparagus and the unctuous sauce was absolutely lovely – an accidental discovery made in heaven. I’ve made up my mind to make a cauliflower cheese, not sauced as usual with a cheesy bechamel, but with a cream, eggs and cheese custard. Then we’ll see whether happy accidents can be turned into enjoyable insights.

Who could resist it? – meet the Hairy-footed flower bee (Anthophora plumipes)

This little fella – I know he’s a ‘he’ because the females are all black has taken to spending his nights in the keyhole of our allotment shed and I’ve had to chuck him out two or three times in order to get the key in to open up. We were talking about planting more bee attractors on the plot, and now we’ve made up our minds to plant some Lungwort – Pulmonaria, and more Comfrey because the old plants have expired. This bee isn’t a communal bee but a solitary one; however apparently he occasionally gets into a gathering rather like Ivy bees do. I owe this ID to Alvan, a fellow musketeer, but I’m desperately trying to avoid getting into bees because at least flowers stay still while I photograph them, and I find that entomologists and lepidopterists can go into a faraway place where their eyes swivel independently in order not to miss anything.

Anyway, any interesting botanical expeditions have been delayed while we get the allotment up to speed. You’ll notice that the tomatoes in our polytunnel are all carrying commercial labels, but before you toss your head scornfully, we moved over to commercial grafted plants a couple of years ago because they are completely blight resistant and much higher yielding. The grafted aubergines which we also buy are sitting atop a rootstock as thick as a pencil already. We are already looking forward to the summer crops. The potatoes are peeping above their ridges; the Chard leaves are enormous but delicious and the fruit trees and bushes are almost finished flowering. Our two resident robins are so fat from following us around as we work that they can barely take off and fly back to their nestlings. Despite the awful weather of the past months, nature has her hand on the tiller once more, it seems.

Last Saturday we had a local field trip around Victoria Park and the Botanical Gardens and we spotted these Three Cornered Garlic plants which thrive around here having evaded border control whilst migrating from the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in the UK they’re harder to find – but I think they’re absolutely beautiful and deserve to be spared by foragers. In Cornwall whole hedgerows have been stripped of Ramsons – Wild Garlic – by commercial foragers. Which reminds me – as it’s peak St George’s Mushroom season – that although they’re generally promoted as safe I’ve met two people, both highly experienced mycologists, who developed symptoms of poisoning after twenty or thirty years of eating them safely. Some plants and fungi contain some pretty nasty accumulative toxins so please do be careful. If there’s a scintilla of doubt in your mind, don’t eat it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The spuds are in at last

Madame wielding the rake with the Couch grass growling just outside.

I see from the newspapers that the national potato crop is in trouble again. On our way back up from Mendip last week we took the motorway and passed two heavy tractors attempting to plough a couple of sodden, clay rich fields on the Somerset Levels. The resulting mess was disturbing as it combined the pointless destruction of the soil with the consumption of a lot of diesel fuel. The grass pasture on either side of the hedges was looking green and fine. A bit wet for grazing, maybe, due to the probability of poaching the ground, but nonetheless recoverable. How anyone can claim that this terrible unseasonable weather is not connected to climate breakdown angers me. The Guardian reported that this is potentially the smallest potato crop since the last crisis in – wait for it – 2020. Separating out two events four years apart as if they were random acts of god, and seen in the light of record breaking temperatures with crazy winds and rainfall. In my book that’s not two short crises but one long one. Figures of speech like ploughing on make themselves ridiculous first and then redundant soon afterwards.

So I was almost pleased to see that George Monbiot had written a piece in the Guardian on beef farming. I say “almost” because almost every time I read his pieces I find they make me crosser and crosser. Here’s a writer who – on the face of it – should be a firm supporter of campaigns to de-intensify farming but instead completely loses the plot and shrieks at potential allies like a fundamentalist preacher. He starts badly enough by insisting that anyone who fails to agree with him must be the victim of some kind of sinister neuro linguistic programming conspiracy. Not, you see, someone who has also done their best to examine the facts and come to a different conclusion. Having sawn any possible objections off at the knees (a non vegan metaphor I’m afraid but I can’t find a comprehensible alternative); he then goes on to attack regenerative farming by claiming there is no acceptable (that’s a key qualification) scientific evidence to back any of its claims. Here’s a little bit of incontestable evidence that should encourage Monbiot to decide whose side he’s on.

Jeremy Padfield and his business partner Rob Addicott, farm about 1000 acres of the land under Higher Level Stewardship Agreements of which 80 acres are specifically conservation managed for wildlife.  Their combined Duchy farms became LEAF demonstration farms in 2006. Over subsequent years soil organic matter averages out at around 5%; no insecticides have been used within the last 5 years; weed killing is targeted only reactively; antibiotic use has been reduced by 58% and  plastic use is down by 60%. Minimum tillage leads to a 68% drop in fuel consumption; water is intensively managed and stored, and solar energy meets much of the needs of the farm buildings. As well as wider wildlife field margins, Stratton Farms have been experimenting with skylark plots and wide strips of wildflowers and companion plants sown through the crops. Additionally, 20 acres of trees and 2000 metres of hedgerow have been planted. 

Notes on an indoor meeting of the Bath Natural History Society, written by me.

This isn’t, by the way, a kind of bucolic lament for the blue remembered hills. They achieve this by using extremely high tech equipment and it’s that convergence of scientific know-how with boots on the ground that makes these farms profitable. Monbiot, on the other hand takes up what I like to think of as the Amos Starkadder position. I sometimes think he’s got a bit of an Old Testament prophet in him; possibly a new Jeremiah – I suspect he’d like to think of himself as a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness; but in the end he’s always going to be Amos Starkadder – the fundamentalist preacher to the Quivering Brethren in Stella Gibbons’ lovely 1930’s novel Cold Comfort Farm. Amos Starkadder was unable to distinguish between the sins a bunch of small-time village dwellers and the inhabitants of Dante’s inferno. I’m always delighted, by the way, that Dante enlisted the first circle of hell for the eternal punishment of those people whose sin was not to give a shit!

Anyway the price of separating Amos from his flock was a small Ford van to travel the country and trouble thousands of moderately innocent souls who might once have cast a lustful glance in the direction of the squire’s son. or daughter (oh go on then, wife)! and then worried too much about it. George Monbiot makes the sixth form debating society’s error of allowing the perfect to drive out the good. Far from encouraging small and achievable gains to fight climate destruction, he treats a 30 acre mixed smallholding as identical to 50,000 head of cattle in a gigantic American feedlot, and then denounces the both of them with his shrill rhetoric. The thought of going after the biggest threat first seems not to cross his mind, which suggests to me that his views on farming are -to misuse an old Marxist term – overdetermined by a prior commitment to veganism and the memory of an unsuccessful attempt to live the rural life in Wales. He implied that the farmers didn’t take to him and the locals treated him rather dismissively in Welsh! How very dare they! They’re all dammed!

The haunting premonition of a vegan future leaves me shivering amidst 100.000,000 lonely wind lashed trees surrounded by huge industrialised vegetable farms and stainless gloop tanks all operated by (who else?) Monsanto and Cargill. I’m not badly disposed towards veganism, but I’m in no sense attracted by it. We’re walking up in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) this week and the local pub does excellent faggots at half the price of the cheapest steaks. The slaughterhouse is a ten minute drive away. There’s a lesson in sustainable living, somewhere in there.

But finally I want to draw your attention to the quality of the allotment earth. It’s been mollycoddled, sheeted , hoed and fed for nearly 8 years now, during which time it’s changed from intractable and shallow alluvial clay and stones to deep, black, friable soil. The 10X4 beds that took a week to clear of couch grass and nettles when we took the plot on can now be shallow tilled in a few minutes. Of course it’s not going to save the earth, but there are probably 300 allotments on the whole site and half a dozen sites in Bath. Every day we see bicycles delivering organic veg to cafes and restaurants around the town and regenerative farms getting going everywhere. So I’ll end with a question. Hi George do you really believe that all this is a waste of time and a greenwashing campaign by shadowy industrial finance? Is it all a distraction? or have you been out eating too much rich spring grass and got blown.

Immersive plant hunting

Two of our grandchildren playing in Dyrham Park

There was a moment on Tuesday’s fern hunt when a troubling thought occurred to me. “Why” – I wondered – “do I get so emotional about finding plants?” I think it’s a good question and a useful one. I remember we were once walking on Black Down (Burrington Combe) up at the top where the carboniferous limestone has been eroded away exposing the Old Red Sandstone underneath which is more acidic than the limestone everywhere else, and has an altogether different mix of plants. I was confused about this eccentric outcrop in the Mendips for years until it was explained to me how different the geology of that little area is. So there we were wandering along one of the tracks when suddenly a tiny flower caught my attention and I saw at once that it was an Eyebright, Euphrasia. As usual for me it’s not tremendously rare although it’s difficult to identify fully because it hybridises so readily. But what ran through my mind wasn’t the rational sequence of questions such as a professional field botanist might ask, as much as an explosion of joy; an anschauung, the intuitive understanding that comes with something discovered or revealed. No-one loves a list more than me, but that encounter involved a beholding such as might inspire a poet or artist; but when it comes to describing it, it’s just like trying to hold a writhing eel – trust me on that one, I’ve done it and failed on both counts!

The troubling moment on Tuesday came when I wondered if this emotional response might be no more than a form of sentimentality.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’
    ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
    ‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’

Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

Obviously you can take a fact and wrap it in sentimental drivel but it will always lie dead and cold on the page. On Tuesday the first fern we found was an almost perfect Rustyback; a textbook example if you really must but I’d prefer to think of it as an expression, an outpouring of natural energy which, when you give it its name, connects itself to you. The plants become my sisters and brothers – hence all the emotion – love, gratitude, respect not to mention aesthetic pleasure. The naming doesn’t create the plant; but it gives it an address, a point of reference to which I can return – named, and therefore capable of being found and greeted again in a way that makes the earth a bigger, more relatable place.

The Rustyback fern

What is undoubtedly the case is that my childhood was full of such moments because – especially during the long holidays – I wandered (unsupervised) for miles through the countryside with my friend Eddie; laid in the grass on Rodway hill and watched the wind as it swayed the harebells, swung on the trees in the big woods, fished for Sticklebacks in the Oldbury Court ponds and picked bunches of wildflowers for my Mum who always placed them reverentially in jam jars. I suppose we all have that sense of a lost Arcadia. If there were any clouds in the sky we would rarely notice. My Mum was a country girl and she knew the names of plants and taught me and my sister how to love them too as we learned their names.

So yes of course plant hunting takes me back into my happy place, not because I want to be ten years old again, but because it was my ten year old mind in which I first experienced what I came to know later as the “oceanic feeling” and which seems to occur more and more as we search for the ferns, plants and fungi out in what’s left of nature after Thomas Gradgrind has had his filthy way with it.

In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to “a sensation of ‘eternity'”, a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole”, inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics.

Romain Rolland (From Wikipedia)

The kind of earth we need to aspire to rediscover is not just a rewinding of the calendar to the nasty 1930’s; of Janet and John books, Ladybird and iSpy. More than anything else I’d just like to create the opportunities for our grandchildren to walk in the woods at night; count the stars and name the constellations; find and name plants and know some of their uses and qualities; feed the hens as my sister and me used to do in Stoke Row, and understand and practice the art of growing and harvesting. We need to rediscover and celebrate our relatedness to the earth, not in empty, sentimental, bound-to-fail aspirations but fully and deeply; surrendering any thoughts of domination. It is religion, you might say – but not as we know it!

Pteridomania strikes the Potwell Inn

Priddy Pool

• Priddy Fern List ST55F ( a quick way to describe part of an OS Grid square)
• Apologies for the Latin – English names are second
• Asplenium adiantum-nigrum – Black Spleenwort
• * Asplenium ceterach – Rustyback
• Asplenium ruta-muraria – Wall Rue
• * Asplenium scolopendrium – Hart’s Tongue
• * Asplenium trichomanes – Maidenhair Spleenwort
• Blechnum spicant – Hard Fern
• Dryopteris affinis – Golden Scaled Male Fern
• Dryopteris carthusiana – Narrow Buckler Fern
• Dryopteris dilatata – Broad Buckler Fern
• Dryopteris filix-mas – Male Fern
• Polypodium interjectum – Intermediate Polypody
• Polypodium vulgare s.s – Polypody sensus stricta
• * Polypodium s.l – Polypodies
• * Polystichum setiferum – Soft Shield fern
• Pteridium aquilinum – Bracken

Plant hunting is helped immeasurably by a bit of homework before you set out and equally with more homework even after you think you know what you’ve found. So this rather grand list was easily got by searching the accessible-to-the-public list and ticking off the ferns (Pteridophytes! As my mother used to say “the P is silent as in bathing” . So it turns out that in the little corner of High Mendip where we’re camping, there are 13 fern species (3 are hybrids – only separable by experts with microscopes) and yesterday in our short walk we found five of them – the starred names which are in the photographs clockwise from top left. None of them rare but some, much more common on the limestone rocks hereabouts – environment is a huge thing for plants. Whilst you might think that finding 38% of the available species isn’t bad for a half mile walk down a bridleway, they’re just the ordinary common species. The rarest fern that could conceivably be found near here is the Limestone Fern, but collectors are still capable of uprooting and stealing rare plants so their exact locations are withheld from general access.

The walk was exactly as planned on Monday. Cross the road and walk 250 yards to the entrance of a bridleway; walk very slowly down it as far as Priddy Pool, photographing any interesting plants, and then – depending on the weather, walk on to the churchyard and the limestone walls near Swildons Hole and then across the village green to the pub. The weather, though, was ferocious. The little spring expedition in our imagination actually brought with it 50 mph gusts of freezing wind and occasional pellets of sleet that felt as if they were lacerating our faces. 1000 feet of altitude makes a huge difference.

Down in the bridleway we were pretty much sheltered from the worst of it, and I got some good photographs of the crozier stage of some ferns as they emerge. They are wonderfully sculptural. We also found two very common flowering plants which were quite hard to identify. Yellow Archangel ought to be easy enough, but this one had silvery white spots on the leaves and so I used a bit of internet AI and chased it down to subspecies – probably a garden escape but it seemed fully naturalised.

Priddy Pool – and I mean the pool that adjoins Nine Barrows Lane is a truly magical place. There’s a certain ambiguity about the name because the plural – Priddy Pools refers to a couple of larger ponds in the Mineries nearby, now a nature reserve but once a lead mining area. My Priddy Pool – the only one named on the OS map – holds the water which subsequently runs underground at Swildons Hole. On July 10th 1968 we’d had two months worth of rain in two days, three thousand houses were flooded, eight people died and 24 buses were abandoned on the streets; and Swildon’s Hole took so much floodwater that the entire upper series was rearranged and the old 40 foot pitch (shaft) disappeared. Cavers who entered after the flood found an altogether different cave. It occurs to me that Priddy Pool, far from being an ancient natural formation may have been altered by 20th Century cavers to assist rescues when the cave was flooded. There’s certainly some stonework on the boundary with Nine Barrows Lane that was built there by someone. But now it’s just a lovely place to watch and listen to birds. Of course it could be a buddle pit or a sheepwash – someone must know.

Then as we came out on to Townsend we spotted a Forget me Not. Exactly as I had done with the Yellow Archangel I rather dismissed it as a garden escape with a toss of the head and curl of the lip – but I photographed it anyway because it was growing wild in a shady verge. Back in the campervan I looked up the Myosotis family in the Book of Stace and discovered that there are loads of them and that my suspicion of nursery bred plants was a bit over egged because there are ten legitimate wildies; three of them rare but the others, although they get grown in gardens often escape back into the wild. Another handy ID shortcut was to go back into the Distribution database and see how many of Forget me Nots have ever been seen in my grid square. That reduced the number from ten, to seven and then to an easily manageable two which were so different it was easy to choose the right one. By the time we reached Townsend our fingers were white and we were shivering, so we wandered back to the campervan and turned the heating up to tropical so we could properly enjoy a bottle of Provençal rosé with our sandwiches.

On the left the Wood Forget me Not – Myosotis sylvatica, and on the right Yellow Archangel – Lamiastrum galeobdolon ssp. argenatum

Anyway; notwithstanding the weather – which has been awful – wandering the bosky dells wasn’t the only reason for coming here. We needed to test out all the systems in the campervan to make sure it’s ready for the summer and happily – aside from a lousy WiFi signal which is only just about workable, the van is good. We, on the other hand, are sitting in it in the midst of a cloud with visibility down to 100 yards.

850 feet up a hill, spring comes later

Cuckoo flower on the campsite

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

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

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

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

You know the one – where the princess kisses a frog ….

Coltsfoot again – in the centre of Bath

It’s been a while, I know, but following the demolition of the Avon Street car park, many of us have wondered which building will take its place as the ugliest and most ill-advised building in Bath, and I’m delighted to announce that the top place (of my long list) goes to the old telephone exchange on the corner of Monmouth Street and Princes Street, built in the days when Crown buildings were not subject to planning permission. It’s always been a bit of a shady place as to its purposes, and it’s about to be anointed as Bath’s new police station – plus ĉa change etc.

Anyway, we were in the centre of town yesterday and as we passed the building I noticed this redemptive clump of Coltsfoot growing through the cracks in the neglected paving. As ever, Nature is quick to reclaim any neglected spot and I suppose we should record and enjoy this brief moment before it’s designated as a weed and summarily removed. Bath deserves its John Clare and I’m holding the place open until somebody better qualified turns up to celebrate the invisible residents of the city. In 2020, during the lockdown, I listed 26 wild plants growing in and around our car park – once a builders yard – and there are probably as many again waiting for someone to notice.

I know I write a lot about Cornwall and Wales and their wildflowers; but when push comes to shove there’s plenty going on in our own backyard – it’s just that the sunsets aren’t as good! As it happens it’s been a bumper year for Coltsfoot now I’ve got my eye in for likely spots. Their technical name is “ruderal” which means, well …… rude I suppose, in the sense of unkempt rather than wild; neglected rather than protected, and scarred rather than ploughed or dug. It’s the botanical equivalent of the favela or the refugee camp and it’s a great environment for dodgy characters to melt into the background. We even had a Sea Spleenwort hiding on the basement wall of the Guildhall – all washed up I suppose.

We’ve got a few guerilla gardeners in our neighbourhood too. Last summer we put some large compost filled pots outside the block and planted them up. This spring we see that invisible hands have planted tulip bulbs and even a bay cutting which seems to tolerate the extreme environment. The same invisible hands watered the pots when we were away in the campervan. Every year a solitary council employee hacks off the pavement squatters and sprinkles rock salt over the remains. Every year they return undiminished and sing their colourful madrigals to those with ears to hear and eyes to see them. It’s a dog eat dog existence for the rough sleepers of the plant world, but they seem miraculously to get by, and until you learn to distinguish one from t’other you won’t be able to understand their colorful histories. Railway trucks loaded with grain, bird seed imports, wool, and poorly tended compost heaps; even winter salted roads and lorry tyres all add their pennyworth to the diversity of the neglected environment. Old factories, mills and dyeworks cast off their workforce and their raw materials. These plants are evolutionary heroes, rapidly adapting to the new, often tricky places, where their better heeled cousins deign to set up home; on slag heaps, coal tips and mineworks; quarries, gasworks, docksides and railway sidings not to mention empty buildings like the old telephone exchange. Sadly, no-one is going to block the road marching for Whitlowgrass or Wall Barley, but they’re all part of the vast interconnected network of living things we call Nature – capitalizing the word although we have no idea if it really is a thing at all.

Still, we felt blessed by the Coltsfoot yesterday and celebrated with a pint at the Grapes; two old people drawing energy and hope from the crowd of young bar staff beginning their shift. We wish them the greatest happiness knowing, (as they have yet to discover), that in the end we’re all pavement dwellers.

Rue Leaved Saxifrage growing on the telephone exchange wall

“UK genetics project looks for lost apple varieties to protect fruit in climate crisis.” George would have known what to do!

Here’s a fascinating and chastening story from the Guardian newspaper at the weekend. It’s all there above, but you’d need to have sharp eyes and plenty of patience to join the dots. The common factor that joins the threads together is a name you’ll probably never have heard before. I always feel I knew him well because he was Madame’s boss for the four years that she worked at Long Ashton as an Assistant Scientific Officer helping to record experimental field trials of apples and pears; especially for their cider making properties but also as eating and dessert apples. If ever there was a man who knew his apple varieties inside out it was George Gilbert. After he retired he had a considerable hand in designing the orchards at RHS Rosemoor and for the Lost Gardens of Heligan. He could name many varieties simply by closely examining them; the markings, the shape and structure of the flower end and the stem end, and no doubt that word beloved by field botanists and birders – the jizz.

It was George’s great misfortune to live through an era where the brewing of cider shrank to a vestige of its former self, and the justly mocked Golden Delicious apple, grown mainly in Europe was feted as the apple of the future flavourless, unattractive but capable of being used in a cricket game without bruising and easy to grow. The Cox’s Orange Pippin – one of the few apples to come true from seed – always was, and still is liable to disease and difficult to grow. Hybrids galore have been bred from the Cox, but the emphasis was always on yield at the expense of flavour, and they have to be sprayed with a cocktail of fungicides and insecticides every ten days from fruit set until just before harvest.

Tens of thousands – if not millions of apple trees were grubbed out on government subsidies, many of them irreplaceable local varieties naturalised within their unique microclimates. Our son helped grub up an orchard on Severnside until the farmer discovered that he was only thirteen years old and not allowed to drive the tractor. Apples for the most part don’t come true from seed and so resurrecting these lost varieties can almost never come from seed banks, they have to be grown from grafted budwood. Back in the day if the question “which variety of apple is best adapted – let’s say – to growing on a windswept island, battered by the salt winds of the Irish Sea, a hundred people would have shouted out – “The Bardsey you idiot!” The good thing about the Bardsey apple is that it survives in specialist nurseries and orchards and could form part of a grafted apple renaissance in the midst of a climate catastrophe. The real challenge is that there must be hundreds, even thousands of micro-adapted apple varieties which were grubbed out and burned; so the scientists in the study cited by the Guardian are taking samples in Rosemoor Orchard – planted up by George Gilbert who must have had an eye to their future usefulness. The key point is that these are just a tiny proportion of the varieties that once grew in gardens and orchards over the previous centuries. Stripping out and comparing DNA samples is not the best way of discovering their unique properties, but the only way that’s available to the researchers – post orchard-apocalypse. As Joni Mitchell sang so beautifully – “you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone!”

The battle to save the lost varieties takes on a much more than antiquarian significance as the search to find apple varieties for a very different climate future gets more intense. Many important insects have a mutually important role to play; they pollinate all kinds of fruit but many have evolved to emerge at exactly the time the apple blossom appears. They gather nectar and pollen for food, and the trees get pollinated. If that partnership fails we get a catastrophic failure of biodiversity and we lose a valuable crop. Just to take one example, most allotmenteers like us, no longer have any clear idea of when to sow and plant. Spring weather is so unpredictable now that we’re always trying to second guess the date of the last frost, or those destructive easterly gales. Will April this year bring showers of soft refreshing rain or portend the beginning of a prolonged drought?

I very much hope that the scientists can make rapid progress towards a DNA database and find ways of combining the growing and eating qualities of even a very few traditional varieties. This, surely is just the beginning – there are lovely collections of Welsh apple varieties (some of them in the photo above) in orchards run by the Marcher Network in the Welsh Borders. There’s another lovely collection at Plas yn Rhiw on the Lleyn peninsula in North Wales; and the National Botanical Garden of Wales also has an extensive collection of Welsh apple varieties planted by our friend Charlie Stirton, the first Director and now close neighbour. There are the Lost Gardens of Heligan and probably hundreds of other unknown collections nurtured for their qualities in remote farmsteads across the Western side of the UK. The writer and singer Raynor Winn and her husband are custodians of one of these. Cider has become a big business now, and so-called varietal ciders – Katy, Kingston Black and probably somewhere in a Dartmoor village even such melodious relics as Slack ma girdle fetch premium prices, although a now-passed cidermaker universally known on Severnside as ‘Doughnut’ – once told be that he always blended his cider and always included a few Cox’s.

My grandfather, a carpenter by trade, had a huge collection of tools, many of which he’d made himself. The point about them wasn’t that he used them very often; there must have been some that he never used – but if he’d ever needed it for the once in a lifetime job it would have been there waiting for its moment in the sun. Biodiversity is crucially important to us because when we move into unpredictable times is when we most often discover the irreplaceable usefulness of a single species. The apples are teaching us a lesson we simply can’t afford to ignore because – to quote a memorable sermon I once heard preached by Bishop David Jenkins “if we don’t act now there may be hell to pay!”

Back on the allotment again

Tall Ramping Fumitory – Fumaria bastardii, var hibernica

Everything about the name of this wildflower is correct. It is tall, it’s ramping and it’s definitely a Fumitory. It’s also quite rare in this part of the world and in order to get the ID verified as correct, I had to take it to the national expert. If there are any other Fumaria experts out there who think that’s wrong then please write and I’ll find ripping it out by the handful in our polytunnel less ethically challenging, because the thing is – however tall and rare it may be, the ramping bit of the description is a problem for us. It sets seed prolifically and spreads like wildfire tangling itself rather weakly through our vegetables which makes it very hard to weed out. It started out as a single plant one plot up from us on a path next to a compost heap and it caught my eye. By the next season it had spread to one of our beds and now it’s competing with the Chickweed that also grows prolifically after the beds are cleared in the autumn. We would normally have covered the beds in the polytunnel to suppress weed growth but last autumn we had a bit of a punt with ultra early potatoes broad beans and carrots and so the beds were left uncovered. Apart from the beans, neither potatoes or carrots grew at all and the weeds had free range to strut their stuff. We’ve now had three years of different crops terminally weakened by what I now feel happy to call a weed and Madame rebelled against any protective thoughts I might have been secretly harbouring and so I reasoned that there was no form of weeding short of chemicals or a flame gun that would effectively kill the seeds. Flame guns and polytunnels or nets are not a good combination. And so my plan is simply to fight back by hand weeding, knowing that the process is inefficient enough to keep a few field botanists happy for decades whilst allowing us to grow some crops.

Allotments aren’t always well tended, and weed invasions – whether underground; Bindweed, Creeping thistle, and Couch grass – or by air; Dandelion, Willowherb or by human transfer, the infamous allotmenteers boot with plants like Fumaria – are always a danger’ especially on organic plots. Nature abhors a vacuum and bare earth can be seen from Mars especially if you’re a weed looking for a comfortable and well fed berth. I’m quite sure that one of the biggest reasons for new gardeners giving up their plots is when they leave them in October looking pristine and then in February and March return to an unmanageable jungle. The other reason is probably pigeon attacks. This year we lost much of our purple sprouting crop to a pigeon who managed to crawl in under the nets and then get trapped. We probably spend far more time dealing with weeds than we do sowing and harvesting. We don’t dig unless we really have to remove Bindweed for example.

It’s been an awful beginning to the new season and our plots are still sodden. Even the soil in the polytunnel is wet due to an underground stream running deep beneath it. However the warmest and wettest February could easily be followed by an April heatwave in this unpredictable age of approaching climate disaster. But we’re back with dirt under our nails and with aching backs. It’s good to feel better, but six months of fretting about AF has taken its toll on my confidence and I’ve been approaching physical tasks with my foot on the brakes. I haven’t felt like me at all until quite recently, and all the advice I’ve had is just don’t overdo it – what does that mean when it’s at home? (Sorry that’s a bit of a local phrase).

So there we are – onwards and upwards, but not too far we hope. The campervan is fixed and we’ve got places to go.