Jung’s Cosmic Tree

Jung is underrated as an artist. There are some fabulous illustrations in The Red Book; indeed there could be less text… There’s an interesting story of how, after his own “breakthrough” experience one of Jung’s female followers had been keenly encouraging his art. Jung heeded this for a while before, presumably judging his pictures wanting, he dismissed the attention as sycophancy and summarily devoted his energy to Analytic Psychology.

These images, the bottom four certainly from The Red Book, all depict the Cosmic Tree. In the catalogue of The Botanical Mind exhibition the curators comment of his interest in it: “The tree was a recurring motif, pictured as both supporting and connecting every aspect of the cosmos. Planted in the earth its roots reach down through the terrestrial realm toward darkness and the shadow realm, whilst its branches stretch up through the celestial, toward the star-filled heavens.”

Garden Memories

 This weekend I was talking at Klang Tone Records in Stroud about my book The “S” Word. I grew up outside Stroud in the countryside. In fact my very first memories are there so the place has a particular mystique for me. I took the opportunity to drive past our old house. I wanted to see the vegetable patch where we grew potatoes. I have vivid memories of picking them out of the soil, also happily, of my dad pushing my brother and I around in a wheelbarrow. I think that might have been the most fun thing ever.

These days it looks like some wooden palettes are being stored where we used to grow a little food. This kind of thing was very common in the early seventies. We also grew tomatoes outside the kitchen and I remember being enrolled into shelling broad beans which presumably we had grown.

At the end of the garden there was a magical spot: a very low wall that looked over the farmer Mr. Dangerfield’s yard. Always left to my own devices I would often sit here and look across it. It’s still a cattle farm and I heard the ladies lowing in the barn. No doubt, because it is about to be April, they will soon be letting them out to pasture. See this amazing video of what that looks like.

Neurodiversity in G-Block

My uncle is closely involved with the charity Being Alongside. I’ve been to a few of their conferences primarily to show support for him, but they are always interesting. Being Alongside, a Christian organisation, approach mental illness as a condition to be aided by compassionate intervention. Unlike the generation of countercultural thinkers, they don’t concern themselves with the connection between the spiritualised state and psychological problems. The countercultural position is that mental health problems manifest in equivalence to the difference between consonance and dissonance in music. In normal states of mind the volume is low, even imperceptible. At higher volumes spiritual states of mind can be equated to consonance and mental illness to dissonance.

^{Jonathan Aitken looking at us slightly askance.}

This latest talk featured The Reverend Jonathan Aitken (prison chaplain) and Neil Fraser (Custody Manager) of HMP Pentonville. Aitken is a celebrated poster-boy for Christianity. An MP in John Major’s government he suffered disgrace in a law suit against The Guardian in which he committed perjury, and ended up spending seven months at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He was made bankrupt and was divorced to boot. His downfall and subsequent conversion to Christianity was greeted in some quarters with cynicism, but the church loves a repentant sinner, and, I dunno, he seems like a good egg.

Aitken talked about his experiences of being (briefly) the most vilified individual in the UK and about how he carved himself a niche at Belmarsh writing and reading letters for his fellow inmates. An opening act he was keen to set up his colleague at Pentonville Neil Fraser who has been instrumental in the initiative to set up and run an ADHD and Autism “Neurodiversity wing” in G-block.

^{Neil Fraser discussing life in G block.}

This continuum between the prison and clinic is interesting for a number of reasons. One knows from reading Foucault’s “Madness and Civilisation” that all manner of people were confined in the original asylums with genuinely mentally ill people being in the minority:

“From the creation of the Hôpital Général, from the opening, in Germany and in England, of the first houses of correction, and until the end of the eighteenth century, the age of reason confined. It confined the debauched, spendthrift fathers, prodigal sons, blasphemers, men who ‘see to undo themselves,’ libertines… One-tenth of all the arrests made in Paris for the Hôpital Général concern ‘the insane,’ ‘demented’ men, individuals of ‘wandering mind,’ and ‘persons who have become completely mad.’ Between these and the others, no sign of a differentiation.”

Fraser, who is described by Aitken as a very tough correctional officer, could perhaps be viewed in the same light as the earliest asylum doctors who, as Foucault elaborates, worked their miraculous therapy by policing ethical behaviour amongst their charges:

“In the time of Pinel and Tuke, this power had nothing extraordinary about it; it was explained and demonstrated in the efficacity, simply of moral behaviour…

I pointed out to Fraser that it was an extremely stressful position they had found themselves in and asked him whether they had received any therapeutic training or support. To my surprise he opened up and explained very movingly that, starved of funds, he and his colleagues have received practically no help at all. The profession is apparently dogged with staff barely coping with the pressure.

The results on the intervention in the Neurodiversity wing have been really startling. Simple measures like knocking on cell doors and waiting a minute outside (by which approach prisoners on the spectrum are not overwhelmed by an incoming herd of officers) or the use of a support dog called Dobby (the weekly appearance of whom is a highlight) have contributed to a radically different atmosphere. Prisoners interviewed in an internally-circulated video which has apparently gone viral in the service finds them sincerely expressing gratitude. Outcomes on release seem set to be more positive.

Clarkson's Farm

^{Diddley Squat’s crop of Melody Spuds}

The second series of this show was made available in February 2023, so it was a good opportunity to watch both it and the first series. Having no interest in cars I’d not seen any of Jeremy Clarkson’s programs before. In fact, I mainly know of him from satirical representations. Clarkson has the common touch and evidently taps into something so basic it’s practically primeval. That his subject is motor transport is incidental to the plain-talking, easy-going machismo he peddles. This sense of the comfortable is picked up in The Guardian’s grudgingly positive review of the second series:

Clarkson has always offered his viewers and readers comfort. Historically his prime audience has been men confused by modernity, dismayed at being told climate breakdown is real, furious at the news that they’re no longer allowed to be rude about people who aren’t English; it comforts them to see someone pointlessly jabbing at the things that annoy them.

The Guardian

In fairness this appeal runs deeper. Although stripped of the ability to appeal to these annoyants in the context of the countryside, Clarkson still connects with the viewer on the level of an essentially good-natured, masculine simplicity. Men: the endearingly loyal, one-dimensional animals.

^{Everything guaranteed NON!!! organic}

You’d expect a presenter who jokes about lorry drivers murdering prostitutes, quaffs gin and tonics while driving, and provokes record complaints for his recent Sun newspaper article casting Meghan Markle in a Game of Thrones-styled public humiliation, to find some easy target to ridicule in his Cotswolds adventure. It looked for a moment that organic, that brand sadly tainted by a supposed association with the rich and prissy, might be it.

^{Clarkson ponders the future}

However, in conversation with his land agent, Charlie Ireland, in the Melting episode Clarkson reveals hidden intuitions. He poses the rhetorical question, “How long can we we keep just spraying fields [with fertiliser and herbicide] before they go; ‘Actually you know what I’ve given all I can give.'” Ireland counters, “The crop?” to which Clarkson replies, “Just the soil.”

He has read that some experts predict there are only ninety to a hundred harvests left before the topsoil is dead. “It’s like saying to a footballer, ‘Right, now you’ve done the whole premiere league season. Now you’re immediately going on to play in the southern hemisphere and you’ve got to give just as much there.'” Ireland’s immediate recourse is to conventional ag orthodoxy, “That’s why we have a rotation.”

The crop rotation is supposed to give the soil a chance to recover, but at Diddley Squat, Clarkson’s farm, they’re not actually planting a regenerative cover crop like a Vetch, Rye, or Clover in their sequence, and Clarkson picks this up, “But we just go: Wheat, Barley, Rape.” Ireland concludes, “You’ve every right to be worried.” It’s progressive, and it’s his perspective as an outsider, a trainee farmer, that causes Clarkson to make these fresh observations.

^{Fresh cow pat}

To his credit Clarkson actually puts this impulse into action. In Surviving, in the second series, he sets up a mob grazing rotation. Cattle graze and lay their cow pats on the field, chickens in a movable hutch pick bugs from the pats, and spread (as Clarkson puts it) the cows’ “number twos” around, and then the process moves to a adjacent patch. The soil is enriched with the chemical nutrients and, which point is omitted, with the biology therein. Clarkson explains to the slightly bemused Ireland, “So you go back to old-fashioned farming, that’s my plan.”

^{Spreading chicken shit on the fields}

Series two’s Counselling episode is set against the background of the Ukrainian conflict. This has caused the price of fertiliser to rocket in the EU. As they are spreading chicken shit on their barley field Clarkson remarks, “I want that on the fields because it saves me from using quite so much nitrogen.” That’s positive too…

But what would a soil nerd say in criticism of the practices at Clarkson Farm? They might point out the staggering amount of tillage. Although ploughing and digging are fixed in the popular imagination as essential to farming and gardening, disturbing the soil is bad for it, and releases locked-in carbon. In addition to this, Clarkson is using tons of NPK fertiliser (the cocktail of Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium) and herbicides, he tells Giles Coren of The Times, “I spray Glyphosate on everything!” Although there are much larger farms than Clarkson’s that manage not to use chemical inputs in the US and UK, it is probably easier to manage both No Till and No Chemicals on a smaller scale.

^{Thoughts in the pandemic}

As he is working the field in his hilariously massive Lamborghini tractor in the middle of the pandemic, Clarkson ponders the potential impact of Covid on agricultural keyworkers. “I read the other day that 90% of the world’s 570 million farms are run by either one man or one family. So that if that man or family gets the virus, the farm dies.” Naturally the picture springs to mind of many similar operations grinding to halt. However, in the relatively recent past UK farms didn’t look like Clarkson’s with its thousand acres, massive mechanical and technological resources, and miniscule full-time staff (even if there are a few people working off-camera so-to-speak).

Owing to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, drawn up in 1962 by policy makers without any background in farming and with an emphasis solely on food security, production-linked subsidies were the first stage in the consolidation of many small farms into larger ones. Then hastening this process in 2005 area-based subsidies gave money to landowners linked to the size of their property, the more land the greater the state handout. Those farmers didn’t even have to farm the land. This frankly disastrous state intervention (which put small farms out of business) may be reversed by 2023’s Post-Brexit farm subsidies. These might be the only good thing that has happened thus far as a result of the UK leaving the EU.

Globally the reality defies the “conventional agriculture” model, especially in the light of green revolution threats that without big “ag” the world would starve. To circle back to Clarkson’s aforementioned 570 million farms with their single custodians; those aren’t nearly the size of his! The average acreage of the 200,000 farms in the UK is 320 acres, a third of the size of Diddley Squat. But 78% of farms around the world are 5 acres or less. The world is full of small farmers; industrial agriculture is not feeding the world. The “conventional” industrialised farming infrastructure in the UK and supermarket price fixing have created a situation where any alternative is ruinous to farmers. Without scale they would have been unable to tap into the subsidies which, as a result of price-fixing they were dependent upon for survival. To farm ecologically, with fertiliser so cheap, and scant financial encouragement to do so in terms of handouts, was almost entirely disincentivised. Even so the profit margin has shrunk from an early sixties peak of 80% to 8% today.

Scale is the issue. It would be good to see the UK’s agricultural landscape transformed into a patchwork of much smaller more ecologically-oriented, regenerative or organic farms delivering food locally and cutting out the major supermarkets. Like for instance in the entrepreneurial Community Supported Agriculture model. It may be that big estates and the extremely high cost of land (now at around £20,000 per acre) are an impediment to that, though some campaigners advocate tenancy working in that context if only large landowners were more open to it. Of course that’s wishful thinking but, for instance, why couldn’t a major metropolis like London be encircled with small farms like both it and Paris used to be?

^{A calf’s budding horns}

I don’t mean to undermine Clarkson’s widely-praised intervention. Again, it’s his outsider’s angle which throws such a revealing light on the process and trials of farming in the UK. For instance, the unflinchingly honest depictions of the rearing and slaughter of cattle and sheep led a vegetarian reviewer writing in the Oxford Mail to comment that he’d, “come to the conclusion that the raw take on the meat industry in Clarkson’s Farm is not necessarily a bad thing.” As saddening as it sometimes can be to witness, we should be grateful for the opportunity to see the reality.

Clarkson’s visceral discomfort with the practice of dehorning cattle was particularly interesting against the background of Biodynamic practice where cows are left with their horns. Somehow the welsh vet Dilwyn’s reply to his question as to the necessity of the process, “Because the ones with horns become dominant and bully the rest”, rang hollow. Surely this is something that could be worked through in a generation? Cows are apparently much more peaceful with their horns left on. But Clarkson’s cows all get to graze outdoors on pasture and are not indoors in some horrible CAFO being fed grain. I thought they looked very happy and probably taste delicious. He showed a very soft heart in sparing the cow Pepper at the end of the second series, announcing she would be a pet for his wife Lisa.

Even on the topic of insects he strikes a progressive tone, in the Wilding episode he remarks “Thirty or forty years ago after about five miles [of driving] I wouldn’t have been able to see where I was going. My windscreen would have been an opaque smorgasbord of dead insects. But now look at it, there’s nothing! You get more flies on the front of a submarine.” He explained to Giles Coren “Insects are very important, so I’ve tried to really up the numbers of insects which has had a profound effect on the number of birds. It’s deafening birdsong now at dawn and dusk on the farm.”

As charmingly ham-fisted as Clarkson’s environmental measures sometimes appear (a case in point being the admittedly funny debacle of his natural lake with its electric fences to keep away otters), because he has clung tightly to conventional industrial agricultural orthodoxy there has been almost no negative commentary of the show. Dramatising countryside matters, about which urban critics know less about, he’s had a very easy ride. Paradoxically if he had run an organic farm like nearby Daylesford (where he is seen shopping in the show), and which would genuinely be ecological, he would have been attacked. As it is the only friction he has put up with is his local council battling him over planning permission.

Guerrilla Camellia

 

^{How it looked freshly planted in 2002.}

I planted this Japanese Camellia in the leisure centre flowerbeds in 2002. It was a gift from my father-in-law which I didn’t have a pot large enough for. For many years it was dwarfed by the trees and bushes around it. I was sure I was going to be rumbled and the council were going to cut it down. That never happened thankfully. In the intervening years I’ve composted around its base occasionally.

These days, twenty one years later, it’s absolutely massive. It has really thrived. And this time of year, at the end of February, it flowers. It’s very pretty though sadly the petals go brown and it starts to look a right mess. Requires me to dead-head it.

^{It’s like a flipping tree trunk.}

The Monkey Puzzle Tree I planted at the same time didn’t fare so well. Where I put it it had almost no light and it got choked by other hardier bushes. It looked pretty terrible by the time it was cut down.

Winnowing Limanthes

Growing veg on my roof garden is only meaningful up to a certain point. You couldn’t pretend it was a substantial amount of food or that it was making a dent in your shopping bill. It’s for laughs really. To that end I like to plant to a lot of flowers with the focus on ones which the bugs like. And they love Limanthes which is sometimes called poached egg plant because it has a yellow bit in the middle and a white rim. Geddit?

^{Limanthes in bloom early last summer.}

Last autumn I collected the seed of the flower and stowed them away in the dark in a jar. The Limanthes jar is here in the centre with my saved Poppy seeds and saved Borage which I also planted yesterday. Yesterday was an auspicious day to plant because it was three days before the full moon.

^{Home-grown Poppy, Limanthes, and Borage in jars.}

Because I was a bit lazy when I gathered the seed it was mixed up with a load of other shite. Twigs and stuff. So I had the opportunity to winnow it. I scrunched it all up and blew the chaff away.

^Blow…

 

^blow…

^{blow your house down.}

Then I stuffed them in pots and marked them “LIM”. The temptation is to overplant because you’ve got so much seed. Which I probably succumbed to. Though it’s supposed to keep it’s not going to be so lively next year and you don’t want to waste it. Home-saved seed is supposed to be particularly vigorous, these little guys know the scene and they’re back for more action. We’ll see.

^{Potted for 2023.}

Beetroot seedlings

 

^{Soil blocks in 2023.}

^{Is this a jungle? It just came alive and took him.}

^{It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.}

The last frost here in London is towards the end of March. If you were to plant seeds outdoors after that point you’d have to wait a while to get a vegetable you could eat. Therefore you plant seedlings earlier indoors in the warmth, and get a head start. And then you transplant them outdoors as soon as it’s a bit warmer because a frost will kill many types of seedlings. I use some cheap LED grow lights because there’s not enough light on my window ledge. In theory it would be good to have a greenhouse but I don’t have enough space for one. Furthermore this early in the year you’d need to heat a green house somehow. I heat my study already because I work here. Therefore, on balance, I think it’s justifiable.

If you don’t have enough light the seedlings get “leggy”. The poor things are stretching themselves up higher to reach a light they perhaps assume is just out of reach; like they think they are under a pile of leaves or summat. And then they fall over. This, below, is my leggy seedlings last year – terrible. But you know they planted just fine outdoors and grew into big healthy beetroot. You just bury them and their stems a little deeper in the soil. I’m not going to have that problem this year. In fact I’m pretty happy with how they are looking.

I’m planting all my seeds in soil blocks which are like home-made chocolate brownies. You could make them just as easily squeezing the soil into a little ball and popping the seed in the top. That’s apparently how lots of native peoples do it. Maybe I’ll try that in the next batch. I plant a lot of beetroot because it’s maybe my favourite vegetable. I like to roast it. Delicious.

^{2022’s leggy seedlings.}