Colleague Jonty Toosey has made this short film to support The Big One.
I’m totally committed to going along to this. XR have done the right thing with this shift in strategy. Ahimsa.
I sowed Rocket last October. With the Broad Beans it was the only thing which I grew through the winter.
You can see it here in the autumn just beginning to sprout beside the Red Cabbage.
Rocket is amazingly hardy – surviving even the snow.
By last week it was a riot. But the stems had started to get quite tough and it was beginning to flower. That’s supposed to make the plant bitter to eat. Tasted fine to me. Nice and peppery.
I like this shot deep in the foliage. It gives one the sense of being its own little cosmos.
By Old Street standards I got a pretty huge crop which did about three meals.
Here is the bed tidied up, mulched with some compost, and sown with Leeks. Thought I would give them a try because my daughter has always loved them.
From farm to table. XD.
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!
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Walden Comic
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Cow Parsley
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.
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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.”
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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.
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Beetroot Planting
The last cold night in Central London this year was Tuesday 14th March. As you can see from the Frost Map above this last freeze happens sooner with us in the metropolis owing to the effect of the urban heat island.
If I had more space I would have a water butt on the roof and would gather rainwater there to feed the plants. That’s because using chlorinated tap water seems a real shame. The hard water deposits also build up calcium on the leaves of salad greens. Farming operations like the legendary Jadam in Korea filter their water. If one was using water from a borehole at least the chlorine wouldn’t be a problem. Following this thought to its logical conclusion in the summer, in the absence of as much rain, I would need to filter the London tap water to some degree. There are some quite ingenious techniques for creating DIY filters using charcoal but at the moment life is too busy.
The root ball here is what they call “air pruned” in the soil block. That’s to say, unlike roots in a seed tray which start growing back in on themselves, in a soil block when the roots reach the air at the edges they stop. Or at least that’s the argument… These seedlings were multi-sown, that’s to say I put three seeds in each block so they get to grow with a buddy.
I worked out where I was going to bury them here and then, as you can see below, buried them relatively deep. I could have done deeper I guess but didn’t want to disturb the soil unduly.
Last year I remember being worried when I’d planted my seedlings. Like these above they look very defeated. The expression gardeners use for this period of adjustment is transplant shock. Soil blocks supposedly fare better, and you can sort of see why as they’re already in their little universe, but like everything in horticulture people give you a million reasons why one thing or another is optimal – and most of them are bullshit. Dressed with a little compost just to tuck them in; these will do fine.
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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.
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.
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.