Prints by the artist.
Hexen 5.0/Tarot/Seven of Wands [2024]
Hexen 5.0/Tarot/The Hierophant – Spiritual Ecology [2024]
[Photos courtesy of RK]
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Suzanne Treister
Category: Agriculture
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Vincent van Gogh
I was entranced by the Vincent van Gogh exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery. Mrs Ingram, who is a member, has been escorting various people along to it – her aunt, her mother, and now me. She’s taking a friend along next week, which will be her fourth visit. It’s that good that she doesn’t mind.
Last year we went to see the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam together. Truthfully, we were disappointed. We didn’t think much of the selection. I came to the conclusion that, yes, he could paint some wonderful portraits, especially of himself, but people weren’t really his forte. In 2019, we’d seen the Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. That too was an interesting, but faintly disappointing selection dominated by interiors, portraits, and urban scenery.
This exhibition, however, really seemed to nail it with a focus on pictures of trees and plants. People who follow this blog will be familiar with my interest in this axis of ecology and therapy. More than any of his other preoccupations, it’s in van Gogh’s drawings and paintings of the rural landscape and its vegetation that his work really comes together in spectacular fashion.
Van Gogh, at the time these paintings were made in 1888, had been diagnosed with “acute mania with generalized delirium” and “mental epilepsy”. He made many drawings in the grounds of hospitals and asylums. It seems like the therapeutic power of nature in helping the physically injured, as well as the mentally dislocated, was better appreciated in his era than ours, when it is only just creeping back into serious acceptance.
Van Gogh’s drawings of the countryside have a tremendous intensity. He was a big fan of the Illustrated London News, and in fact tried and failed to get work with my ancestors, who ran the paper. Visually, these drawings of his were inspired by the technical necessity of mark-making in newspaper illustration.
In print production, pictures would have been built up from the mark in the same way that halftone would later become the underpinning of printed pictures. It was not possible to render gradients in any other way. But Van Gogh was fascinated by the technique of this mark making itself. He pulls it to the fore in a way that newspaper illustrators would have tried to make less obtrusive, as though it were an encumbrance forced upon them by the medium to overcome.
Van Gogh tailors his every mark in such a way to respond to what he is drawing: pebbles, grass, leaves, branches, the texture on rocks, everything has its own corresponding style of mark. Van Gogh’s responsiveness makes me think of Bob Dylan’s religious anthem, “Every Grain of Sand.”
In the fury of the moment, I can see the master’s hand,
Bob Dylan
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.
The landscapes, which are of special interest to me, often show fields of wheat, vegetable crops, allotment gardens and orchards at the edge of towns, (after Millet) sowing seed, or ploughing. Van Gogh romanticises this agricultural work. It represents to Vincent some part of his personality that has been broken from him. His paintings of it are an, arguably successful, attempt at spiritual reunification.
There are two of the exquisite sunflower paintings in the exhibition. As one literate in these matters, he must have reflected that the sunflower (Helianthus annum) was not just an ornamental flower but also a crop – and to that extent transcendent.
But there are other highly distinct plants in these pictures: Plane Trees (Platanus x acerifolia), Cypress Trees (Cupressus sempervirens), Roses (Rosa spp), Ivy (Hedera helix) in the undergrowth, the Iris germanica flower at the top, a favourite of the Arts and Crafts movement and gardeners like Gertrude Jekyll, and the Nerium oleanders directly above. This faithful depiction of botany was at once more normal in those times when the urban/rural divide was markedly less pronounced, but also unusual in van Gogh given his largely urban upbringing.
One sequence of paintings of an olive grove is presented as though a study in light, like Monet’s series of water-lilies. Van Gogh, god’s lonely man, works there in the heat of the summer sun – and only in the last picture do we see other people, and the olives being harvested in the cool of the evening.
“Long Grass with Butterflies” is the last picture hanging by the exit. It might have been my favourite painting in the whole exhibition. Every blade of grass here is sacred. The butterflies, Marbled whites perhaps, pollinators, flitter in the still Provencal air.
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The Garden
In the past, I waited until my books “Retreat” and “The ‘S’ Word” came out before pulling together complimentary mixes.
However, this time, with “The Garden” my book about the visionary growers and farmers of the counterculture, I am running the mix beforehand as it were to set the mood. I’m also marking the moment today when this book that the team at Repeater and I have been toiling over for years has finally gone to print.
Both “Retreat” and “The Garden” have large discographies in the back. This forms part of my mission to reconnect people’s interest in this music with the ideas to which it was originally conjoined. These ideas were what gave it its power.
Music has become largely divorced from other contexts – to the extent that it’s become part perfume – part wallpaper – a decorative filigree draped over business-as-usual. If you wonder why some contemporary music (let’s face it, a lot of contemporary music) sounds a bit bland and empty – it’s not to do with the format, or the bit rate, or the way it was recorded… The hot music of the past, of the counterculture and other eras, was genuinely communicating something.
Mix is here and below.
The Move: I Can Hear the Grass Grow
An extremely early salvo of hippie plant consciousness released in March 1967 – critical mass not reached until 1969. Roy Wood here makes the connection between taking LSD as prescribed in rural settings, and from thence getting in touch with mother nature on a more cosmic level.
The Grateful Dead: St. Stephen
The Dead denied that this was named after the home-grown spiritual guru Stephen Gaskin of Haight-Ashbury’s then-exploding Monday Night Club. However, I believe this is largely owing to the firm wanting to put some distance between their business and Gaskin’s. Subsequently, Gaskin was the leader at Tennessee mega-commune, “The Farm.”
The Beatles: Mother Nature’s Son
McCartney was The Beatle most in touch with the soil. In “Mother Nature’s Son” he stakes that claim himself. Elsewhere, in Paul’s “Get Back” Jojo leaves his home in Tucson, Arizona “for some California grass” (here, I think, implying San Francisco and marijuana, not the lush countryside). McCartney advises him to go back home to the country, like agricultural philosopher Wendell Berry did, returning from California to Kentucky.
The Incredible String Band: The Half-Remarkable Question
This track was mentioned to me in an interview by the legendary dairy farmer and sustainability guru Patrick Holden. The ISB themselves had strong rural connections, retreating as they did to Temple Cottage in Balmore, in the countryside north of Glasgow. There they worked on the songs on 5000 Spirits (1967) and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968). But this from their underrated “Wee Tam” LP.
Vashti Bunyan: Window Over the Bay
Bunyan dreamt of having a flock of white sheep, a dreamy-eyed cow, and a cockerel to raise her at dawn. Lorra livestock.
Ron Geesin: Breathe
Roger Waters, accompanying his friend Ron Geesin, laments that “Something is killing the land before your eyes.”
Trees: The Garden of Jane Delawney
UK folk rock from 1970 with a psychedelic edge.
Alicia Bay Laurel: Planting Day Ceremony
Here Alicia was joined by Ramón Sender Barayón, co-founder with Morton Subotnik of the San Francisco Tape Center and her fellow communard at Ahimsa ranch, to craft this lovely hymn to plants.
Joni Mitchell: Woodstock
Like her “Big Yellow Taxi”, “Woodstock” is positively bursting at the seams with luminous and eternally durable imagery. The line, “And we’ve got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden” gives my book its title. But as hippie legend, and Biochar pioneer Craig Sams pointed out to me, Mitchell also sings, “We are stardust/ Billion-year-old carbon.” Let’s not neglect to mention the track’s brooding, portentous sonics: Mitchell’s plaintive vocals soaring high above her Fender Rhodes like an eagle above a smoking, ravaged landscape.
Neil Young: After the Gold Rush
Famous for the line, “Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s.” Neil has been farming since he bought Broken Arrow Ranch in 1971, where he lived until 2014. He’s been a stalwart supporter of the Farm Aid music festival.
Jackson Browne: Before the Deluge
“Before the Deluge”, with its apocalyptic mood, was from Browne’s 1974 LP “Late for the Sky”. It was picked up by a generation of back-to-the-landers.
Bob Martin: Midwest Farm Disaster
The title track from Martin’s jewel of an LP. Right at the country edge of rock, it was recorded at the same Nashville studio Dylan used. Heartbreakingly documenting the failure of small farms in the Midwest.
John Cale: Hanky Panky Nohow
“The cows that agriculture won’t allow.” Never mind the bullocks.
The Groundhogs: Garden
The garden chokes the house, however Tony McPhee insists, “I’m not going to cut a single blade of grass / My garden will look just like the distant past / Before the days of agricultural land.” Truly rewilded.
Dando Shaft: Rain
Martin Jenkins’ mandolin here like dancing raindrops.
Lal and Mike Waterson: Child Among the Weeds
Devastating and mysterious UK folk rock from this seemingly cursed LP.
Dave and Toni Arthur: The Barley Grain for Me
“The farmer came with a big plough and ploughed me under the sod.”
Paul & Linda McCartney: Heart of the Country
McCartney provides a homely update to his rural narrative.
These Trails: Garden Botanum
Organic Hawaiian psychedelia.
Mort Garson: Plantasia
Exotic synthesised precursor to Stevie Wonder’s soundtrack to “The Secret Life of Plants.”
Dr. Alimantado: Just the Other Day
The good Dr. says that no one wants to be a farmer but advises: “So, be wise there, for you sons an’ daughters of earth / An’ know dat you got to go to the soil to toil, as I would say / ‘Cause, if you no reap, you cyaan not eat.”
Julie Anne: The Gardener
AKA Judy Mowatt, was one of Bob Marley’s I-Threes, and later singer of the roots classic “Black Woman.” “The Gardener” deftly weaves the strands of the hippie, the spiritual, and feminine power into an underappreciated ecological anthem.
R.E.M.: Gardening at Night
This remains my favourite R.E.M. song – saying a lot for a band I loved right up to “Document” (1987) – first they jangled and then they choogled. The original inspiration for “Gardening at Night” was a nocturnal piss-stop – a car’s drunken passengers bundle out into the night air to urinate by the side of the road. Urine, of course, being high in nitrogen is great for stimulating plant growth.
Scott Walker: Farmer in the City
You can take the boy out of the country…
Smog: Let’s Move to the Country
There’s a perhaps unintentional overtone with the motif of moving to the country to retire, “When my travels are through.” It is as though one were taking a step closer to becoming the humus (neither ashes nor dust, please!) that should be our rightful mortal destiny.
Charles Ives: Thoreau
The fourth movement in Ives’ lovely Piano Sonata No. 2, or “Concord Sonata”. The first movement dedicated to Ralph Waldo Emerson also of the same small Massachusetts town where more historic events took place than seems strictly feasible.
Gurdjieff: Kurd Shepherd Dance
The great guru’s memories of rural Armenian folk music patiently notated by his shishya Thomas De Hartmann. For fans of Popol Vuh’s “Hosianna Mantra.”
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RFK Jr
There’s been a lot of support for RFK Jr from unusual quarters in recent weeks. A number of my acquaintances have expressed hopes for his potential role as director of the Department of Health and Human Services in the otherwise dreaded Trump administration.
RFK Jr is Democratic Party royalty. He’s the nephew of assassinated president John F. Kennedy, and son of the assassinated senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. He ran an independent campaign for president, which was successful in swing states like Michigan but, to the disgust of his family, threw his weight behind Donald Trump. And he has bad form for choosing friends in the past too, hanging out with, at various times, Harvey Weinstein, OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Cosby.
RFK Jr, to his chagrin, is mainly known as a COVID vaccine denier. He does temper this position when he’s scrutinised in public forums, claiming that he just wants to see proper trials for vaccines, but in more intimate surroundings it seems to be a different story. His involvement in a measles’ outbreak in Samoa LOOKS pretty bad.
I don’t have a problem with vaccines. I’ve travelled a lot in the developing world – and you get very blasé about taking them. I took three vaccinations for COVID. I did it out of social responsibility to protect vulnerable people in my household and community, but also (lol) so I could leave the UK on holiday. It didn’t do me any good because I subsequently tested positive for COVID twice. The first time I caught the virus, it was very bad. I was the most ill I have ever been. Whether I should or shouldn’t have taken the vaccine is immaterial to me. It didn’t really make any difference either way – but it was worth doing out of esprit de corps. This is nothing more than my personal opinion, but I don’t think vaccines, which have done modern societies an immeasurable service, pose significant risks.
What does pose significant risks to health? Diet. And diet, especially with regard to nutrition, connects us to farming, because biologically-grown food is more nutritious. And this is where it gets complicated because, even if you disagree with RFK Jr’s position on vaccines, he is simultaneously a staunch opponent of processed foods. Here, in a video with 4.3 million views, he is railing against food additives, singling out Tartrazine. Why on earth are food additives like this still allowed?
The platform he shares with Trump is deregulation: Trump for corrupt ends and to give tax breaks to the richest (speciously) in the name of growth; RFK Jr to support small businesses crushed by expensive bureaucracy. However, it’s ironic that the removal of additives from food is largely going to be one requiring… yup, that’s right… regulation. Indeed, he praises the previous Trump administration for making some additives illegal where the Democrats did nothing.
Even firebrand of the left, senator for Vermont (like being the MP for Brighton), Bernie Sanders has recently found common ground with RFK Jr in a shared focus upon obesity and diabetes. Overlooking processed meat and the absence of micronutrients in chemically-grown food, the true enemy, however, is not additives but something far simpler: sugar. Good luck regulating (or deregulating?) that! It’s closer to a society-wide addiction, a social problem like alcoholism, than anything to do with government.
As well as his interesting approach to foods, RFK Jr also has an impressive grasp of the arguments around organic farming. This is on display in this interview he undertakes with legendary progressive farmer Joel Salatin, the star of Michael Pollen’s landmark book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Salatin, a Republican, talks passionately about his ability to be able to compete with much larger organisations and to be able to leverage technology to reach markets which have been stifled by their local administrations. It is a strategy right out of the small-state play book.
I’ve got to admit that on the back of research I’ve been doing for the past three years, what RFK hints at sounds potentially very interesting. The problem with agriculture in the US and UK is that government subsidies, bolstered by the claim that food security is only possible under the aegis of chemical agriculture, have pumped money into supporting industrial farming. Truthfully, large farms do NOT farm their lands for profit, they farm the government for subsidies. A whole toxic architecture is held in place by these subsidies. This is the principal reason that organic food seems expensive. Yes, their removal would be cataclysmic if it happened quickly. We’ve come so far from the small-farm, local food model, that it’s almost inconceivable that we could turn the clock back. But the current status quo is still a nightmare on many fronts, not least ecologically.
Besides this call for a reduction in state regulation, RFK’s position feels like it ought to be a position taken by a Democrat – and his family background in the blue camp makes sense. However, equally, there is plenty of libertarian anarchism inherent in the idea of growing organic food. The fundamental principle is, after all, that a healthy undisturbed soil creates a healthy plant. That can be construed, as in Sir Albert Howard’s model of the forest manuring itself, or Masanobu Fukuoka’s call for no tillage, as a call for no intervention – a classic right-wing trope. Of course, this ignores the idea and role of composting – which might be equated to lavish state intervention.
Organic cranks have always taken pride in not taking medicines or stimulants, and historically there have been minority elements within the organic movement that have been on the right. Knowing the history, I wouldn’t overemphasise this especially, but it’s a factor.
The libertarian aspect of these ideas have already influenced fringe ecologists such as the beautiful Artist as Family group. This fascinating, radical self-sufficiency collective from Australia who I find entirely enchanting, also, like RFK Jr, adopted an anti-vax position. No, I don’t necessarily agree with them, but unlike so many commentators I’m not fearful of it, and I appreciate the coherency of their logic.
So what’s going to happen as this Trump/RFK Jr saga unfolds? As I understand it, he’s yet to actually secure the nomination. Like the woebegone Pete Hegseth, he might even now fall by the wayside. And if he gets the job, will Trump actually keep him in the role? I can’t see that working. RFK Jr is going to infuriate too many rich and powerful people who the Donald will want to ingratiate. But maybe, just maybe, RFK Jr will hang in there and will have a positive effect! Who would have thought there might be a silver-lining in this dark cloud?
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Smog in India
News just in that the Taj Mahal is obscured by smog will come as no surprise to anyone who has visited India in this season.
When I visited in December 2019, in what felt like minutes before the COVID crisis struck, wherever I visited, Delhi, Bodh Gaya, and Varanasi, everywhere was shrouded in the smog caused by farmers burning crops. You could even see it hanging in the air in the large airport halls.
The farmers will tell you that this is the only way to clear their fields and ready them for the next season’s crops, but truthfully, it doesn’t have to be this way. It was possibly the most unpleasant and disturbing experience of pollution I’ve ever had, especially in that beautiful country.
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Riverford Field Kitchen Garden
When in Devon, we went to lunch at the Riverford Field Kitchen. Wow, what a treat that was! What they cook is largely made from ingredients grown on-site.
After lunch, we went and had a look at the kitchen’s gardens. There is a large field to its right and an incredibly long poly tunnel.
This was quite some tableau.
This is the seventh and final post picturing my trips to Biodynamic farms in 2023 and 2024.
The background to these visits is the research for my forthcoming book “The Garden”, which is due to be published by Repeater in 2025. There’s a very thoroughly researched chapter on Steiner, agriculture, and the Hippies at the front of it.
I was extremely fortunate to meet, beforehand, director of the Apricot Centre Rachel Phillips. Visiting Devon this summer for my tiny 5-day yearly holiday, I took the opportunity to drop in and see the market garden and CSA she runs with legendary Biodynamic grower Marina O’Connell. I came across Marina’s work some time previously when, visiting Steiner House, I was recommended and bought a copy of her excellent book Designing Regenerative Food Systems.
Nobody was around when, this time with the beautiful Mrs Ingram, we dropped under invitation to see the exquisite site. The pollinator garden of flowers was particularly special and welcome to see. My aunt recently remarked to me that a visit by car to Devon in the sixties would leave a car’s windscreen thick with dead bugs – and that today there will be practically none.
Everything was bursting with life, though there were the telltale signs that the year’s growing season was coming to an end.
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Ruskin Mill
This is the sixth instalment of the seven posts on Biodynamic farming.
I came across Jason Warland online – reached out to him – and so when travelling back from a conference in Wales arranged to drop in and see him. He works in the gardens at Ruskin Mill outside Stroud as a therapist helping young people. He’s astonishingly knowledgable about the history of Steiner’s thought, and also on the topic of growing – entirely self-educated as far as I’m aware.
Jason is something of a superstar in his own right, as he contributes a column on Biodynamics to one of Rick Rubin’s channels. I didn’t know this before we met in person, and it was funny when Jason told me, because I suspect I was the first person he’d ever mentioned it to who knew who the world-famous record producer Rick Rubin was.
It was a beautiful evening on Sunday July 7th and we walked up a narrow valley past vegetable gardens, fish ponds, flowforms, past a wood and a pottery workshop. Then we turned left up a steep hill through Park Wood to Gables Farm. This is the main growing centre with whole fields, the characteristic attendant livestock, poly tunnels, and composting site.
Thanks so much to Jason for showing me around. I am so grateful.
My third visit of the day was to Tablehurst Farm. It is possibly the most renowned of the local Biodynamic farms. Once connected to Emerson College, the agricultural wing of it so-to-speak, for many years it has operated autonomously. It abuts the college.
Notable sights here were the enormous water-tower-sized barrels for making Steiner’s preparations at massive scale. This featured impressive Steinerite flowforms that are visible in the photo. The huge compost mounds were also remarkable. I thought that the pigs and chickens seemed especially happy and lively.
Just like Plaw Hatch, Tablehust Farm has a shop, but also a very nice café where I ate lunch.
Plaw Hatch Farm just up the road has cattle at its epicentre. This is the way Steiner would have wanted it. Indeed, Laurie Donaldson of Michael Hall School got his cow manure for growing vegetables from here.
I didn’t get the opportunity to meet the herd, but inside the deliciously-stocked farm shop there are photos of them all with their names.