Alan Watts

Watts stack.

With this, I am perhaps turning the last page on my research of the counterculture. When I finished “Retreat” I took a road which led me into the unusual terrain of self-help literature and the applications of psychoanalysis to business. That resulted in the comic book “TPM” which I remember as being incredibly satisfying to make. In due course, I’m going to do another print run of that.

In 2022, I was also busy with the “The ‘S’ Word,” another counterculture book, but about music and spirituality. Simultaneously, starting in August 2021, I was reading the books that informed “The Garden.”

Coming out of “The Garden”, headed back-to-reality as it were, I’m not inclined just yet to go on another research trip. I need to sort things out here on the material plane otherwise, as Stephen Gaskin put it, I’ll be “flappin’ in the breeze.” Therefore, currently, I only have a small pile of books to work through. Top of that list, sayonara to the mystic counterculture if you like, was Alan Watts’ autobiography “In My Own Way” (1973) which came out the year of his death.

I’ve read a number of Watts’ books, and they are uniformly enjoyable. Reading Alan is quite like reading a blog by someone very erudite. His writing is characterised by his freewheeling and informal authorial tone, which, because you’ve heard recordings of it, you can hear in your head. And he confesses many times in “In My Own Way” that he enjoys the sound of his own voice. His meeting with Carl Jung in 1958 is somehow emblematic of this, he reflects upon it that Jung “spent almost the whole time asking questions.” That’s another way of saying that although Alan was greatly impressed by Jung’s warmth, intelligence, and sense of fun, he didn’t really seize the opportunity to shut up and listen to him.

To be fair to Watts, this enjoyment of his own voice forms a part of his very healthy self-love. As he elegantly puts it, “since it is written that you must love your neighbour as yourself.” There’s not enough of that around. What we see on social media is the opposite, people showing off in a misguided attempt to curry each other’s respect and affection.

He’s certainly read all the important texts, and spoken to all the relevant people, but he lays it down in a very relaxed and non-judgemental way. But if the arguments in the books are always cogent, they are, even if he intended it so, a little thin on substance.

Mount Fuji across Paddy Fields.

There was a great deal I liked. I loved the numerous references to gardens, gardening, and gardeners (the last always satisfyingly grouped together with other denizens of the alternative underground: “…wizards, yogis, artists, poets, musicians, gardeners and madmen…”). Watts’ account of the potency of matcha confirmed what I suspected from my experience of it, “Mac-ha or koi-cha, the powdered green teas used for the ceremony, would doubtless be banned in this country if they were widely known, for, taken in strength, they are highly conducive to the states of consciousness characteristic of Zen meditation…”. And I jotted down notes of further places to visit from his luminous descriptions of Japan, should I ever get the chance to return…

However, what has really lingered with me is his, not exactly comfort, but acceptance of himself as a “weird” fellow, following his own “weird”. That’s something that I too am beset with. Indeed, close friends have advised me to dial it up a little more! Watts quotes at length this story from the Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu:

The area of Ching-shih in the state of Sung grows fine catalpas, cypresses, and mulberries. But those of more than one or two spans in girth are cut down for monkey-perches; those of three or four for ridgepoles, and those of seven or eight for the solid sides of coffins for the wealthy. Thus they do not attain the normal term of their lives, and fall in mid-career to the axe. This is the danger of being useful.

In sacrifices of purgation one does not use bulls with white foreheads, pigs with large snouts, nor men with piles as offerings to the river. This has been revealed to the soothsayers, and such creatures are therefore held inauspicious [for sacrifice]. The sage, however, would regard them as highly auspicious.

Then there was a hunchback named Su. His chin touched his navel. His shoulders were above his head. His pigtail pointed to the sky. His innards were upside-down, and his thighs were against his ribs. By tailoring and laundering he made enough to live, and by winnowing grain he produced enough to feed ten. But when the authorities conscripted soldiers he stood in the crowd waving them off, and when a work-party was pressed into service he was passed up as an invalid. Yet when they doled out grain for the needy, he got three full measures as well as ten bundles of firewood. If a weird body helps a man live out his full term, how much greater would be the use of a weird character!

Brown Rice and Aduki Beans

 Craig Sams, who I have had the good fortune to interview for both my books published by Repeater, “Retreat” and “The Garden”, has used AI to make a song about Macrobiotic food. It came out rather well.

Sams makes the point that there’s almost nothing about Macrobiotics mentioned in the body of popular music. This is indeed strange given how massive the diet was in the hippie era.

In my research for Retreat I only came across two musical references, Don Cherry’s “Brown Rice”, and Bob Dylan in “On the Road Again” (“So I get brown rice, seaweed and a dirty hot dog.”) Sams had another good one, a novelty hit by Larry Groce, “Junk Food Junkie.”

Sams says the diet, “kept me in good health after I was unwell with hepatitis from my travels in Afghanistan and India.” At SEED, the restaurant favoured by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, he and his brother Gregory served Macrobiotic food.

From my library: Craig Sams’ book on Macrobiotics from 1972.

Macrobiotics wasn’t a diet per se – my own take on it was that it was a method of balancing your food to establish some particular cosmic accord. If you wanted the etheric high of a cave-dwelling saint, you should eat only brown rice: “Yin”. If you were prepared to slum it with the rest of us in samsara, you could have some whiskey: “Yang.”

However, it tended to be understood by the hippies as an injunction to only eat brown rice. In fact, if Macrobiotics is understood correctly, any grain would suffice! Researching for “The Garden” I came across self-sufficiency guru John Seymour quite correctly decrying this:

It is ridiculous for a whole generation of freaks in Britain to grow up thinking that the only good food to eat is “brown rice”, for example. We don’t grow rice in Britain. We grow wheat, and we should eat that – it’s a much better food than rice anyway.

John Seymour “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” (1978)

Macrobiotics books in my library.

I really went deep into researching Macrobiotics because, frankly, the depth is there. George Ohsawa’s early philosophical tract “The Unique Principle” (1931), published by the extremely highbrow and respected Vrin imprint, is one of the best books one can read about Eastern philosophy. In 2018, I visited sites in Kyoto frequented by Ohsawa and most notably the Macrobiotic HQ in Tokyo. I wonder if it is still there?

 

Findhorn and the Hippies

  

Article at Celebrating One Incredible Family

This is the story of Matthew Ingram’s visit to the Ecovillage Findhorn in 2023. He came to do research for his latest book The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture which chronicles how a generation influenced by psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, and reactions to Vietnam, the Oil Shocks, and DDT became interested in sustainable growing and farming. The book contains a chapter about what happened when the hippies came to Findhorn.

***

In August 2023, by train, plane, then taxi, I fulfilled a long-cherished ambition in taking the pilgrimage to Findhorn. Arriving in the middle of a rainstorm in the darkness, I gingerly let myself into “Genesis” the chalet that had once been the home of Eileen and Peter Caddy and their family. What had brought me to this enchanted site nestled on the dunes at Findhorn Bay in the North of Scotland?

I first heard about the intentional community at Findhorn when researching my previous book “Retreat: How the Counterculture invented Wellness”. It had been mentioned by one of my interviewees, pioneer of Holotropic Breathwork, Stanislav Grof. Grof had run a number of workshops at Findhorn and had a similar relationship with it to that he had forged with the Esalen Institute in California; the establishment of both, perhaps not coincidentally, was in 1962.

That previous book had looked at different techniques of healing against the backdrop of the hippie movement. There were a surprising number of candidates: Macrobiotic food, Transcendental meditation, LSD Psychiatry, Transactional analysis, and Esalen’s Gestalt Practice. But what I was unprepared for was the manner in which these were all tied into spirituality, and especially Eastern philosophy. That wasn’t the book I had set out to write! However, I ended up being fascinated by the holistic ideas of the Vedas, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Certainly, healing and its relationship to spirituality is a central motif of the community’s mission. It’s arguable that this need for revival was brought about by the trauma of the two world wars. Peter Caddy and Findhorn associate Richard St. Barbe Baker had both been in active service. With regards to the connection to Eastern philosophy, through the influence of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Peter Caddy had been transfixed by the spiritual culture of Tibet. Caddy was fortunate to travel there in 1945 just before the Chinese occupation. However, tellingly, he concluded of the experience that, “many of the people had become crystallised in their thinking and customs.”

It was, however, none of this that had brought me to Findhorn. In spite of Eileen Caddy’s view that the primary mission of the community was connected to her experience of the voice of god, “the still, small voice” and insistence that “the garden came second”, it will be eternally associated in the popular imagination with Peter Caddy’s giant vegetables. My latest book “The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture” looks at the connections between the hippies and growing. It takes in forebears like Rudolf Steiner and the UK’s organic movement (Lady Eve Balfour herself no stranger to the community), Self-sufficiency, the back-to-the-land movement, Masanobu Fukuoka’s Natural farming, Permaculture, and much else besides.

 Given that the “hippie farmer” is one of the best-loved and durable figures in society, a trope even, it is a wonder that such a book hadn’t been written before. Oh certainly, Tompkins and Bird’s “The Secret Life of Plants” (1973) was the foundational book of the plant-consciousness counterculture, but it didn’t discuss the hippies themselves – only their putative influences. Peter Tompkins can be seen talking to journalist and television presenter Magnus Magnusson in a wonderful BBC TV special on Findhorn from 1973.

The book’s final chapter concerned the community at Findhorn. Reading extracts from it published in Harper’s Magazine, as he sat in his cluttered and shabby warehouse in the old industrial section of Boston, Paul Hawken, author of the subsequent “The Magic of Findhorn” (1975) was rendered “psychologically flatfooted and analytically agape” – and set off on his own pilgrimage to visit.

The world of the founders of the spiritual community at Findhorn is referred to by Celebrating One Incredible Family chronicler Cornelia Featherstone as one of “tweed” but my book concerns the counterculture, that intense revolt of the youth against straight society that peaked in 1968-69 with The Beatles “White Album”, the Parisian student riots, Woodstock, and the back-to-the-land movement.

As Cornelia puts it, the original founders were at work in a field that was, “very specific and quite esoteric in the true sense of the word, ‘Not seen’.” Arguably, it wasn’t until the small community’s discovery by the hippie movement that it became what it remains to this day. Right at the heart of its visionary offering, setting it a decade ahead of other early intentional communities, was Peter Caddy’s vegetables. I had the good fortune to be able to talk to some of those original hippie visitors, briefly with Paul Hawken (now the world’s leading sustainability guru), with another key American émigré from that era, the sparkling Roger Doudna, who still lives in the dunes, and with Leonard, one of the original gardening “gnomes” who arrived as a gang from Blackpool in 1971.

Living Machine

Being guided around the site by the delightfully bossy Caroline Shaw, I was able to see firsthand the ways in which growing food and working with plants is still central to the Ecovillage Findhorn community. Caroline let us into the magnificent water purification plant, set up in collaboration with expertise from Cape Cod’s New Alchemy Institute (featured in another chapter of my book), where reeds are used to convert grey water till it’s clean enough for goldfish to happily live in it.

Cornelia’s greenhouse

Cornelia Featherstone showed me around her magnificent vegetable garden which has already, thanks to a lovely film by internet gardening sensation Huw Richards, attracted worldwide attention with half a million views. Cornelia’s garden was, in the true ‘spirit of Findhorn’ like Peter Caddy’s before her, growing biologically without chemicals; that’s to say in accordance with nature. This choice of growing methods, and indeed the whole organic movement, were closely followed by the countercultural generation.

 

Michael and the Soillse Garden

Michael Shaw led me around the Community Supported Agriculture garden on the site, which was being tended by WWOOFer Veronica Caldwell, returning from Australia to Findhorn where she grew up, and now a highly-skilled grower.

 

 

Raised Beds

Composting Hot Bins

Park Garden cold frames

But even this abundance of gardening was not all at the ecovillage! There are raised beds, composting hot bins, and cold frames in the community “streets”.

Massive rosehips

On a walk into Findhorn itself I was delighted to encounter some actual massive fruit. In this case rose hips reaping the benefit of a whole summer of long days. There has been much speculation over the years as to the causes of Peter Caddy’s forty-pound cabbages. Was it the devas? Without wanting to spoil anything, this matter is explored in the book with some interesting new material which came to light in my research. In strictly literal and ecological terms though, the real miracle is how a vibrant topsoil has been created upon such unpromising land. Ecovillage Findhorn, long may she grow!

“The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture” by Matthew Ingram will be published on April 8th 2025 – but is available as a pre-order.

RHS Level 2 Principles

My stack of course notes.

Between August 2021 and December 2024 I was researching and writing this forthcoming book about gardening, growing, and farming. Yes, I did learn a lot about those topics in my reading, watching, and interviewing (and can confirm, looking back with what I know now, that I didn’t make any mistakes!) – but I wanted to double down on that research for three reasons. Firstly, I wanted to make sure I really knew from a scientific and practical point of view what I was talking about. Secondly, I wished to learn more about plants purely out of personal interest. And thirdly, I had a view that this might be a qualification useful to me to get work. What shape that work would take, still not being totally clear to me yet.

Something that came up whenever I was looking into this area, as I was as early as October 2020, was the Royal Horticultural Society’s Level 2 qualifications. I’m glad I waited, because in September 2022 the course was updated, and it’s more appropriate to my interests now. There’s now a strong emphasis on biodiversity and sustainability. And with the introduction of conceptual tools like the Garden Health Plan (which combines abiotic and other factors with previous techniques like Integrated Pest Management to create a panoptic view of health), the whole course is by definition holistic in its perspective.

The RHS: Not just about ornamental horticulture.

Before making the leap, I reached out to legendary gardener Jack Wallington, author of the classic “Wild about Weeds” and he kindly reassured me that the course was also very applicable to vegetable growing. Indeed, the RHS isn’t just about ornamental horticulture. Many of the figures in its hall of fame have an interest in what’s termed “productive growing” and “edible landscapes” – like, for instance, Rosemary Verey and William Robinson. Any residual snootiness towards growing food seems to be, if not entirely absent, then gradually eroding away. Certainly the high rigour and impeccable standards of the RHS are exceptionally useful in that sphere.

 

At the end of July last year I made a start revising for the RHS Level 2 Principles exam (on the right in the image above). The Practical half of the course is more weighted towards ornamental horticulture which, at the moment at least, I am less interested in. For instance, I’ll wager that 95% of the plants one is expected to identify in the Practical course are jazzy shrubs, roses, and ornamental grasses. However, to the contrary, I’m happiest identifying: flowers that pollinators like, herbs, fruit, wild flowers, weeds, crops, and trees. And I was able to bend the Principles’ syllabus to accommodate that preference. Indeed, I leave the course with a huge “My Plants” spreadsheet which I compiled of plants that I love which illustrate various horticultural points. For giggles check out this large entry, only one of 238, which I compiled:

Like other of the Rosaceae family can be affected by fireblight. A lack of calcium causes malformed dead cells scattered through the fruit called “bitter pit”. Apples suffer from apple scab, powdery mildew, orchard fireblight etc. Seed designed to be eaten and then pass through the digestive system of birds or mammals far from the parent plant. Fleshy portion removed if planting horticulturally. An important early-flowering resource for bumblebees and mining bees and a key nectar resource for early hoverflies and bee-flies. Orchard trees decay more quickly than say Oak and cavities which open out in them can be homes for Great tits and Spotted woodpeckers. Orchards also home for Bracket fungi. Different cultivars of apples require different cumulative hours of cold in the winter to produce flower buds. Chemical inhibitors prevent germination. Self-incompatible – has to be pollinated by a different plant.

My Malus domestica (apples innit) spreadsheet entry

Another advantage of the Principles course is that it can be done remotely – but that’s changing with the advent of at least one provider offering blended learning for the Practical course.

 

One of the most highly recommended texts. My edition already out of date.

The RHS Level 2 material is typically described as being equivalent in difficulty to a GCSE. It’s been 37 years since I sat one of those! However, and here’s the clincher, the volume of information is enormous. One of my fellow course mates had this to say, “I came into Horticulture after 27 years of teaching GCSE at secondary level. Compared to what I have taught, the level of detail and volume of work in the syllabus seems massive.”

Add to this the ornate and convoluted way that the RHS asks questions, (from the same observer), “It felt as though the questions were deliberately trying to trip you up or focusing in on one minute detail rather than being a test of your breadth of knowledge.” That tricky way of asking questions (where it’s also not entirely clear what you’re supposed to be replying with in your answer), tripped me up on multiple occasions in my revision. It led, depressingly, to numerous failed pilot tests and dismal marks, even when I was reasonably confident of the material.

 

Peter Dawson’s swan-song. A handy resource for both Principles and Practical courses.

I do hope that none of this discourages people from doing the RHS Level 2 Principles course. If you get a decent provider with solid learning material, then it’s totally great. Bloody marvellous. I LOVED IT. I learned so much, and was genuinely fascinated by 99% of the material. Only garden design, of which there is only a little, left me cold – and to be fair, I am coming at all this from what is to most people today a very weird angle.

I sat the two unit exams this Monday and Tuesday after cramming the material very hard through December and January. I won’t get the results for a few months – and I’m really hoping I pass. However, if I fail I will pick myself up again and have another crack at it. It will be another opportunity to learn some more wonderful information

Fosco Mariani on Life

 

An edition of Fosco Mariani “Secret Tibet” with debossed Mani mantras.

I stumbled across this passage a few years ago in Fosco Mariani’s “Secret Tibet” (1951) – one of the great accounts of travel in Tibet before the Chinese occupation. Very beautifully and without recall to superstition, it encapsulates the vedic idea of the individual human’s spirit as a fragment of the larger universal consciousness; I think it would make an excellent reading for a funeral.

Running water reminds one strangely of human life. It first emerges so thin and small and devoid of strength. In its infancy it runs sparkling through meadows, among flowers and shining stones. Then the waters gain in weight and vigour and rush downhill; their youth is bold and happy, a time of singing and dancing in the sun, celebrating noisy marriages with tributaries, forming crazy little waterfalls and exultant little lakes. All is joy and high spirits. But gradually the slope diminishes, and the stream grows and becomes a river; youth turns into manhood. Its course is now more regular; it no longer runs crazily, but has become sensible and strong. It is less beautiful, but has become useful to agriculture and industry. What makes it attractive now is its calm, serene maturity. Enthusiasm, love, passion, beauty, have given way to quiet, useful purposefulness. At last it imperceptibly approaches the estuary; the lagoon-like expanses, the sadness and sweetness of old age. Then it once more mixes with the original waters.

Fosco Mariani: “Secret Tibet” p287-288