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.
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.
This is the first post in what is a large series of six posts covering Biodynamic gardens and farms I have visited in the past year and a half.
The first three posts date from Saturday July 22nd, just over a year ago, when I visited Forest Row. Forest Row, a small town in East Sussex, is the spiritual home of Rudolf Steiner’s Biodynamic agriculture in the UK. It is the home of the notable Biodynamic farms Plaw Hatch and Tablehurst Farm, as well as the Steiner adult education centre, Emerson College.
Remarkably, very nearby, ten minutes away, is the important Scientology HQ at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead. So you’re really spoilt for esoteric religions. Nearby too is Ashdown Forest, home of Winnie the Pooh’s sylvan forays. Rock fans might be interested to know of the proximity of Hammerwood Park, once owned by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour was once a resident. Presumably there is something of a spaghetti junction of ley lines running through the area.
The then-resident gardener Laurie Donaldson, who now works in Hereford at the Growing Local CSA, showed me around the vegetable garden of Michael Hall School. I had reached out to Laurie through the WWOOF network, where they were advertising for assistance.
This Steiner children’s school (photos visible towards the foot of the column) was relying on Laurie to look after their beautiful walled garden. Part of the children’s education was to take part in working with the plants.
Laurie was able to point out, with justified pride, that the garden was financially profitable. There was an eager market for the incredibly vital biodynamic produce he had been growing there.
This was my first sighting of the Phacelia flower, which pollinators adore.
It feels like yesterday, but it was two years ago in June 2022 that I first went to Steiner House in London. It is situated just west of Regent’s Park.
The visit reminded me of my drop-in to Cecil Sharp House way back in 2007. That, on the north side of Regent’s Park, is another building-as-ideological-portal. However, in that case the agenda was English Folk Arts, and in this it is the Anthroposophical ideas of Rudolf Steiner.
I chose that Saturday because there was going to be a market stall open selling biodynamic produce from a variety of growers. This is where I bought this delicious apple juice.
On the ground floor there is a bookshop. It stocks many of Steiner’s own titles, largely lectures he gave which were dutifully transcribed and published, but also books by a wide range of authors on subjects, many not directly relating to Steiner thought. It’s a very interesting shop and has a more diverse offering than for instance than that at Swedenborg House.
The exterior of the building, as you can see from the opening photo, has this wonderfully eccentric art-deco styling. And this is carried on into the building’s interior.
In the stairwell cavity, there is what looks like a glass flowform. These are Steiner’s ritualistic sculptures, which are designed to energise water. It would be great one day to visit the Goetheanum in Switzerland and see more of this quirky architecture.
On the ground floor, the café and bookshop are open to the public. On the first floor, one is able to access the library. Here you can discover the full complement of Steiner’s hundreds of publications.
This shelf of art books caught my eye. I do like it that Anthroposophy covers the full range of human experience in the cosmos; from the most “spiritual” and etheric to the most “grounded” and integrated.
These boxes contain back issues of The Golden Blade, the Anthroposophical journal.
As I was making my way out, I asked the librarian which of Steiner’s own books that he would recommend for a neophyte. He selected the following for me How To Know Higher Worlds, Theosophy, and Occult Sceince. I’ve subsequently read these three, and they are certainly interesting, the first being the most indispensable.
In fact, my own recommendation to a beginner would be Steiner’s Autobiography The Story of my Life, which I think gives one a better idea of where he was coming from. The librarian also recommended the two books on the right as good supplementary reading. I haven’t read them…yet. If you get the opportunity, it’s definitely worth visiting Steiner House.
In the course of my research for my book “The Garden” time and again, I came across the work of the husband and wife Eugen Kolisko (21 March 1893 – 29 November 1939) and Lili Kolisko (September 1, 1889 – November 20, 1976).
They shared with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer the role of putting the flesh on Rudolf Steiner’s biological theories. It is my understanding that, while Pfeiffer was tied up on other Anthroposophical business during Steiner’s “Agriculture Course” lectures, the Koliskos were present at Breslau for them. This was the birth of the Biodynamic movement, which this year is celebrating its centenary.
Eugen Kolisko had a perhaps broader range of interest than his wife. This above is my copy of “Zoology for Everybody” (1944) that I discovered in the bargain bin in the bookshop at Emerson College. But his other works include writings on nutrition, natural history, geology, chemistry, medicine, even fiction.
Lili Kolisko, on the other hand, was dedicated to the scientific method. Early on, pursuant to Steiner’s esoteric ideas about the function of the spleen, through her microscope she discovered a new type of speckled platelet, which she and Steiner termed “regulator cells”. This reminds me somewhat of Wilhelm Reich’s microscopic investigations.
As much as Steiner himself celebrated her work, she was met with a cold shoulder by the medics and scientists of the Anthroposophical Society. These internal disagreements between the couple and other senior figures in the movement effectively drove them from Germany to resettle in England in the thirties. Eugen Kolisko died relatively shortly afterwards in 1939 leaving Lili in penury and eking out a living sewing purses.
In 1936 Lili Kolisko published “Moon and Plant Growth” in which she showed, by means of statistics and these beautiful photographs, how the influence of the waxing and waning moon could be used to optimise sowing. The Biodynamic idea is, in short, that you should plant root vegetables on a full moon, and leafy ones on the waxing moon.
The couple’s book, Agriculture of Tomorrow (1939) is probably their masterpiece. Although Eugen had compiled the research with his wife, just as they were about to start writing it, he died, leaving the task to her. In it, they set out a series of experiments exploring the influence of the moon and planets and the role of chemical elements on plant growth, and upon the subject of nutrition. They also perform a scientific breakdown of Steiner’s suggestions for the renewal of agriculture.
In a sentence that could be penned today, in the book’s introduction Lili writes, “I want to write therefore about the regeneration of agriculture, which is the basis of the physical existence of men. Without proper food mediating life-forces to the human organism, human beings cannot grow strong and healthy, nor become able to develop the clear minds and moral strength we so urgently need.”
Among the photographs in the book (see below) you can glimpse the Kolisko’s house, Rudge Cottage, Edge, Stroud in Gloucestershire. Lili Kolisko died there in 1976, and it’s interesting for me to reflect that at that very moment I was living only 3 miles away in Lypiatt, Stroud.
Because I am in Gloucestershire often, with two uncles and aunts living just outside Stroud, and on this occasion travelling back from Wales, I thought I would drive past their old house and have a look.
Thanks to Sukhdev for sharing this documentary with me about New York City Garden Activists. Quite a lot of the film’s focus is upon things which happen in gardens, rather than growing. This is a typical media bias. It’s impossibly rare to come across any commentary which connects the dots between farming and culture.
However, the featured Adam Purple is definitely an interesting figure. I’d be including him and “The Garden of Life” in the book in greater depth were I, (a) not already discussing an arguably more interesting guerilla gardener, (b) as Sukhdev points out, Purple was, regrettably, an unsavoury character.
Purple’s “Garden of Eden”, built by him single-handedly over five years starting in 1975, was a well-known open, community garden on Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The garden began when the city and the neighborhood were blighted with urban decay. A building was razed in 1973 on Eldridge Street behind Purple’s apartment, and he decided to plant something with his companion, Eve.
The process of clearing the lot took some time since the couple would only use hand tools. Modern machinery was considered “counter-revolutionary.” He would haul manure from the horse-drawn carriages around Central Park and created a highly fertile topsoil. The garden was ready to be planted in the spring of 1975. The garden was designed around concentric circles with a yin-yang symbol in the center. As buildings were torn down on either side, Purple would add new rings to the garden, allowing it to grow. By the end, it was 15,000 square feet featuring a wide range of produce, including corn, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, black raspberries, strawberries, and 45 trees including eight black walnuts. He regularly bicycled to Central Park to collect horse manure to use as fertilizer.
Wikipedia entry
In the film, Purple is shown with an enlargement of a photograph from the September 1984 edition of National Geographic. My curiosity got the better of me, and I tracked down a copy of the issue on eBay for a few bob. It’s a truly glorious photograph.
The article which it is a part of, “Do we treat our soil like dirt?” By Boyd Gibbons, with photographs by Steven C. Wilson, is excellent. I thought I would go ahead and share it here. I love the illustrated soil cutaway especially.
