Last year some Dandelions sprung up in the garden and I was delighted.
Rather than just let nature take its course I thought I would cultivate them. Here are the seeds I gathered last year.
I planted them in seed trays here on the far left. Then transplanted the most successful ones into pots. It was fun doing this with a “weed”.
They bloom very early in the season. This is them at the very start of April. They open in the morning and shut in the evening in a very pronounced way that, familiar as we are with flowers in vases, one tends to forget.
Just as quickly they transform into their “clock” form. This was taken on the 15th April a mere two weeks afterwards.
Heaven in a Wild Flower
Here’s a close-up of the same head which image I’m using as an icon on my email account at the moment.
You can eat Dandelions and they are supposed to be good for you. I tried the yellow flower heads and the leaves. They taste ok but they might benefit from some vinaigrette.
One of my very earliest childhood memories was of eating Dandelion stalks. These are hollow tubes which you can split open and flatten out. Never did me any bloody harm I can tell you.
This photo, taken today on May the 5th shows how quickly the season is over. Perhaps they will flower again this year?
Again, I gathered some seeds. [David Attenborough VO:] And so the cycle repeats itself.
Rock nerds will know that Dandelion was the name of John Peel’s record label. Peel may have been aiming for the same free-wheeling, raggle-taggle vibe that characterises the plant but apparently the name came from one of his hamsters at the suggestion of his then flat-mate Marc Bolan.
There’s a very well put-together back-to-back exhibition of Hilma AF Klint and Piet Mondrian at the Tate Modern. It works nicely – both artists moving from painting landscapes to abstraction; and both dallied with spirituality. Amusingly there’s a letter written exhibited from Mondrian to Rudolf Steiner, which Steiner didn’t reply to, and which transaction infuriated Mondrian.
I first came across Klint in this beautiful old book. She’s been manna for the recent gender revision of art, like that written by the art historian Katy Hessell. I do very much like the big canvases but it’s the intimate things that are, on a devotional level, far more powerful. A case in point being Klint’s “Tree of Knowledge” series. Best of all though was these watercolour studies of plants (see above). They look like regular botanical illustrations but, knowing Klint, you sense that they are freighted with so much more. Positively glowing with bhakti.
Last Summer I ate a particularly delicious melon I bought from the supermarket. I thought I would try my hand at growing some from its seed.
Here they are planted in soil blocks. In fact this lot totally failed to germinate. A bit casually I didn’t use seed compost. Normal compost is a bit coarser and it seemed like the seedlings couldn’t struggle their way through it. I thought this was yer typical gardener’s myth but it turned out to be true.
Undeterred I tried again with a finer compost (this time in a seed tray) and they grew very vigorously.
Supposedly melons need a warmer temperature to grow in our climate. They will do well in a green house but I don’t have one of them. The window in my room has a nice south-facing aspect. It gets a lot of sun. So I planned to grow them there. I prepped a trough on the window sill, suspending stones on strings from the frame above so they would sit under each of the three root balls. By this method I plan to train the melon’s vine around each string.
When I popped the three strongest-looking seedlings out of the tray the roots were looking healthy. As far as I know that circular one off the bottom is the tap root.
I sunk them in deep burying the stem underground. This is cool apparently. Gets them snug.
A week or so later they are really thriving. I will update you on their progress. Let’s see if we can’t grow something we can eat.
This Friday I went along to XR’s “The Big One”. I thought I’d attach myself to a faction and, because I’ve taken refuge, the natural fit was with the XR Buddhists. I joined their Telegram group and immediately found myself volunteering to help out. Our leader Joseph Mishan asked me to collect an UNFUCK THE SYSTEM banner from Main Stage at Great College Street (where later I passed Brian Eno) and bring it to the group at Little Sanctuary on the corner of Parliament Square where they were camped.
None of us could find the banner on any of the vans which streamed in loaded with awnings, stage blocks, drums, flags, sand bags, sculptures and PAs. This event is huge operation logistically and the organisation complicated. A quite important-seeming guy Jamie and a woman Poppy combed through a spreadsheet on a laptop which was flecked with raindrops trying to identify where it might be. When I started sensing I was making a nuisance of myself I beat a retreat. Joseph reassured me that it wasn’t essential.
Joseph Mishan.
Behind The Supreme Court Joseph led a couple of meditation exercises. He instructed us to partner up and share our feelings about climate change. A very sweet lady Shirley and I took turns to run over our fears and hopes. Then we bannered up and headed off in twin-file to Tufton Street.
On this walk I joined up with a lady called Liz who, travelling from Bournemouth, had dropped her dog with a friend in the west country, and spent a night with her daughter in East London. No small feat of organisation itself. There wasn’t the slightest indication that these were the entitled bourgeoisie that the movement’s critics allege. I was the only posh person I encountered. Hello me.
After a pitstop at St John’s Square our division sat peacefully in Sukhasana on the wet road outside Tufton Strett. Joseph asked me if I would be able instead to stand with my “eyes of the world” banner near the podium and so I gladly obliged.
55 Tufton Street is significant to XR because it is the home of the Global Warming Policy Foundation which we were informed seeks to undermine the scientific consensus around the climate emergency.
Joseph gave a great and succinct speech reading from the group’s DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE. I especially like how this statement uses the philosophical and scientific insight at the heart of Buddhism, the principle of Pratītyasamutpāda or “dependent origination”:
The climate emergency brings both the most terrible of possibilities and the most transformational. The possibility of mass extinction of life on this planet is forcing upon us a truth long forgotten by the so-called developed world: that all things are connected. We have lived too long in a delusion of separation, disconnected from our true selves and the astonishing grace and beauty of human and non-human animals, plants, rivers and mountains with which we share our world.
Looking right and left along Tufton Street revealed that there was a healthy-sized crowd of us.
After Joseph had finished and the XR Buddhists had had their platform, a woman (whose name I didn’t catch) took the mic and discussed the work of the GWPF and the significance of targeting them. To break up her thorough history of the group she set up a call-and-response in which she would name a person involved and the crowd would call out “Tell the Truth”.
I had a curious sensation of déjà vu when she called out “Jacob Rees-Mogg” whose room was across the street from mine at school. People would often burst into my room and throw wet loo-roll out of the window at Jacob as he walked in the alleyway between our houses holding his umbrella. Always holding an umbrella I remember, thinking of it now it must have been as much to look the part as for self-protection. Even then he was a figure of intense dislike. I thought Jacob was extremely eccentric to a bizarre degree, but I never thought to hurl anything at him. In truth I found him quite enchanting as one might do a very peculiar animal. Although I am 100% behind the science, I don’t expect Rees-Mogg thinks he is lying, so it was odd to be asking him to tell the truth…
It’s that same familiar dynamic from the culture wars of sticking pins in people, of either side of the divide shaming and belittling the other. “You’re a bad person!”, “No you!” It can only serve to harden the subject’s incorrect beliefs. It’s very easy to get caught up with it, of taking sides oneself. For instance, for many years I found myself (naively) as an apologist for David Cameron. I sincerely believed he was a reconstructed type! This was due in many respects to being worn down by the unremitting focus on Old Etonians in the media. Every time the Labour Party wheeled it out my heart would sink. What about those titans Shelley, Huxley and Orwell? And when it comes to the environment in particular which one of us is blameless? Although I appreciate the value of XR that’s why I’m probably more at peace with taking whatever personal measures seem constructive, and why in particular I feel the XR Buddhists are on the right track. Dharma innit.
After Tufton Street I wandered round the corner to the DEFRA building.
Before resuming my day as a gratefully insignificant person. Phew.
Over the past few years I have frequently agonised over what to do with snails in my tiny garden. I’ve gone as far as airlifting them to local parks.
It’s been a tremendous weight off my conscience to realise that I don’t have to tolerate them. Consequently when I discover snails, like this one in a nightly sortie, I throw them away.
I’m happy to welcome cats, birds, flies, caterpillars, wasps, weeds, and all manner of bugs. But not snails, they can fuck off.
I was on my daily cycle which takes me over London Bridge, behind Tate Modern, and (walking) back over the Millennium Bridge. In the old days I would often go and see Luke and Edmund at their poetry shack by the river. In a skip beside one of the new developments that are going up that are the subject of litigation I saw a huge selection of plastic plant pots that were being thrown away.
Because it was fenced in I was unable to clamber in myself but a guard very kindly hooked out some for me. I took as many as I could carry with me on a bicycle. The process reminded me a little of collecting the wood for the forms sculptures. I saw from a sticker that the blue pots I liked had been part of an order of eighty Pinus Mugo Pumlio. These dwarf pines must have been for making little bushes or summat.
Here they are stacked up on a bench by The Tate. They cleaned up very nicely back at home. Can’t have nice plastic pots going to waste!
It’s interesting cultivating weeds. These plants are robust and want to grow where you find them. There’s a lot to recommend them.
Cow Parsley is on my mind because, just this morning, I planted some that I collected at the Tibetan Buddhist Monastery Samye Ling in the borders of Scotland. You can see a clump of it, white heads, just to the left of the gate in the picture of Tara above.
Cow Parsley is one of the very few plants I could actually name that I remember from the hedgerows of Gloucestershire and my childhood. Apparently it’s from the same family of plants as carrots; and if carrots cross-pollinate with it they can “regress”.
The seeds are satisfyingly large. I like large seeds.
I’ve planted them in a module tray. I tucked them in a bit after I took this photo. Very interested in seeing how they prosper on Old Street and whether the insects like them.
In a recent post I mentioned a Monkey Puzzle tree I had planted locally. By chance I came across a photo I took of it twenty years ago. It’s subsequently been cut down.
