Going to the Larder

The little wood that lies an easy walking distance from my house is juvenile. It was planted maybe twenty-five years ago, mostly with hazel trees that have grown with multi-stemmed enthusiasm, peppered with birch and rowan, interspersed with tall sycamores and oak trees, now starting to muscle their way above the copse. Blown-in elder, and suckering blackthorn garland the woodland fringes. There are literally thousands of small ash seedlings covering much of the woodland floor; few-to-no surviving older ash trees. I wonder how these babies will fare in the aftermath of ash die-back disease. A large proportion are annually grazed out by deer; there are hares and hedgehogs hanging out in the top part of the wood, and I’ve seen red squirrels using the wood as an aerial highway. They, and other small mammals, feast on the hazelnuts in winter. This year, I heard and saw flashy jays on the rampage, and I’m seeing hazelnut stashes which may be their doing.

I’ve always referred to the wood, with unintentional and misplaced territorialism, as my larder. It contained the best patch of nettle shoots for soups, teas and pesto for miles, though these have now shifted as the shade has increased. In early summer, an army of Common Hogweed supplies me with chunky flower-buds to make my favorite pakoras or to braise as a vegetable. One day, I may be obliged to harvest the seeds to make flour; it’s as well the species is expanding its range. About the same time, elderflowers are picked for cordial or champagne, or just to eat. As summer winds on, the patch of feral raspberries in the clearing start to ripen. This year, they were pretty poor though, as are the ones in the garden. I’m not sure why. Competition from the broom, perhaps, whose yellow flower buds go into my May salad bowl.

I harvest the hazelnuts haphazardly; the trees I used to pick from now bear their nuts too high for me to reach – I either wait for the profligate mammalian and avian foragers to knock them to the ground or I gather from smaller trees, self-seeded from nuts none of us ate, or from trees on the edge. When I have enough and they are shedding their frilly petticoats, I shell and roast them to get the lovely chocolatey smell. Usually, about half the shells are empty.

The hazel wood is also the store I visit for the likes of washing-line props, bean-poles, and pea-sticks. No need to cut these poles, as regular storms bring more down; the forest floor is littered with useful sticks for every purpose, not least, lighting the stove. Children collect the long ones and build them into dens.

Today, I’m collecting rowan berries for the sharp, rich red jelly we’ve always had as a family to accompany Christmas dinner, and thereafter, everything else. The young rowan trees bear copious fruit, but I have my personal favorite trees, where the berries are larger, a feistier red or more juicy. I note the elderberries are nearly at picking stage, too – a winter essential for medicinal elderberry vinegar, or, mixed with hips from the wild roses along the field edge, a soothing syrup. Likewise, there is a particular hawthorn bush that has fruits large and sweet enough to stop and nibble at while contemplating the sunset or sheltering from a cloudburst. They make good liqueurs.

I gather a couple of Brown Birch Bolete mushrooms as well. It was a fair few years ago now that these edible fungi began to appear around one of the multi-stemmed birch trees. I don’t pick many, and am always watching for new patches of fruiting bodies as the mycelium spreads to other birches. It’s been fascinating watching how the fungal flora in the little wood has gradually established itself as the trees grew, and fungal threads found their roots, to embark on that precious, beneficial relationship that entangles both and is called the mycorrhizae (“fungus-roots”). The species I find have changed over the years, and will continue to do so. I hope more edible species will arrive soon. The Birch Boletes I don’t have for breakfast will be dried for the winter.

Will it be a good year for sloes? There have been crops from the blackthorns on the field edge so fantastic I’ve stopped making sloe gin for a while. Maybe time for another batch. The blossom was there in March, so I’ll check it out. If there are sloes, I’ll wait for the first frosts to make them tingle, and see if the birds have spared me any.

Later, when the leaves fall in tawny profusion, and the rose-bay willow herb from which I selected early shoots in spring for fake asparagus has shed its seeds, when the air starts to nip and my breath makes clouds, I’ll harvest the peace of the woods, the melancholy inertia, the stand-and-stare compulsion of fractal twigs and branches and the patterns on bark.

And perhaps pick curly, frosty old flower-stems of the willow herb to decorate the house for Christmas.

Night jars

Day descends
As we descend the
Stumbling hillside, dark
With gorse and broom.
Voices lower, whisper, cease, as steps
Grow cautious, hover, become still.

Wait. Listen. Breathe.

White orchid, luminous, rises out
From the gloom of dusk, distracts
From the strain of aching to hear.
So, unsought, barely registered, 
A faint new sound creeps from shadows .

They move invisible up from the valley,
Calling unseen from scrub and bracken.
They thrill the air. We are caught;
Transfixed, alert,
Skewered by sound.

Against a sky that reels
From peach to turquoise,  wrapped in night,
One arcs upward, coasts, swoops,
Swings and folds to right and left,
Dives into darkness, rises to light:
Swirling master of the night air.
Magician of dusk, and all the spaces
Between night and day.
Flash of white. A call that
Seeps in like the shiver of cold air.

Night falls.
Night bewitches.
Night jars.

Thanks, Jo Lear, for the photos. I don’t know how you did it!

Here be Dragons

If you take the road from Perth to Dundee, you skirt the edges of an explosion of geological delight known as Kinnoull Hill. Sheer cliffs soar up from sea level on your left. In autumn they are swaddled in the glorious golds and browns of beech woodland at the base; in spring and summer studded with the gold of gorse and broom. Dilapidated towers seem to teeter on the edge of the cliffs looking like something Germanic from a Grimm fairy tale (they were put there fore that very purpose).

These dramatic cliffs are the result of volcanic activity some 400 million years ago when a monstrous intrusion of magma elbowed its way through the older rocks in an enormous seam and solidified. Much later, the Kinnoull Hill geological intrusion was part of other monster-scale earth movements – the folding which left us with the Sidlaws on the north side of the Tay and the Ochil hills on the other (it’s called an anticline; think of a rainbow….). Subsequent faultlines and erosion removed the top of a rainbow and created the deep valley through which the Tay now marches triumphantly to the sea.

If, however, you approach these cliffs from the other side, the ascent is appreciable, but mild and steady, the slow, back-door rise of the escarpment. I went that way in April, and parked in the Corsie quarry, where volcanic dolerite and basalt is exposed, and from which it was taken for building for centuries. Up a steep bank, and a variety of paths are on offer, taking me first to the trig. point on Corsie Hill and fine views north over the small city of Perth and the vast breadbasket of Strathmore, to the mountains of the Angus glens to the east and the Obneys, marker-hills of the Highland Boundary Fault, slightly west. Up through roads and sheltered by woodland I went on winding tracks. Oak and birch dominate in places, in others, beech and non-native conifers stake a much-contested claim. Areas of heath and rough grassland house woodland sculpture in this popular spot.

Sometime between all that geology and now, we are told, a dragon arrived on Kinnoull Hill. It glided along the unassailable cliff edges until it found a crevice, leading into a large enough cave for a small dragon to set up shop. This cave, called the Dragon Hole, is high on the cliff and allegedly could hold a dozen adult persons, so it wasn’t luxury accommodation for a dragon. What the dragon got up to, to upset the people of St. Johnstoun (as Perth was then known), I have no idea, but as is the way with relationships between human animals and animals either good to eat or a tad scary, someone was said to have “slain” it. It could have been St. Serf (what IS it with saints and dragons??), commemorated as a dragon slayer in the old church at nearby Dunning.

But my bet is Serf made it up, and the dragon’s still about, somewhere. There is a record that in the late 13th century (first) wars of independence, none other than William Wallace “pressed by the foe, occasionally betook himself to the retreat of the Dragon’s Hole.” In the 16th century, it was the local custom for a procession of youngsters from the town to clamber up to the Dragon Hole on May 1st (the pagan feast-day of Beltane), with garlands of flowers, musical instruments, and what may have been a Green Man. Or was it a dragon, representing the sun god, Bel? Whichever, it certainly cheesed off the local minister. In 1580, the congregation of the Kirk were forbidden to “resort or repair” to the Dragon Hole, on pain of a £20 fine (quite a fortune in those days) and repentance in the presence of the people.

You might think that was the end of it, and the Dragon Hole, together with its occupant, faded and disappeared from local knowledge. I used to teach about landscape character and interpretation, among other things, to Countryside Management students at the local college, and used Kinnoull Hill as a case study. One year, a couple of the lads got quite excited about dragons (can’t think where they got that from), and vowed to find the Dragon Hole. But here’s the thing: their colleague Arlene, a local girl, told us she used to go there as a child and had been let into the secret of its location by an older relative. She also had the good advice that they should not attempt to climb up to it, but abseil down. They went off in cahoots. Term ended before I ever heard if Ryan and Hamish were successful. Knowing them, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Back to my walk. I came out to the viewpoint on the edge of Kinnoull Hill cliffs, where the ground suddenly ends, and bunches of flowers tell sad stories and remind us of human misery. The views downriver, with Dundee sparkling in the distance, and across to the greens and golds of Fife, with it’s own matching quarries and volcanoes, were more than worth the uphill slog. Everything, especially life, seemed precious to me then. I remembered the tales of the dragon’s hoard of treasure, the enchanted “dragon-stone” which James Keddie found in the Dragon Hole in 1600, the “Kinnoull Diamonds” that are said to sparkle by night. And I came right back to geology. Around volcanic intrusions, mineral-rich deposits hold many semi-precious and maybe precious stones – on Kinnoull Hill, it’s garnets and agates that are best known.

Back down to Earth, in every sense!

“Wild Flowers of the Woods” – a small selection from Five Mile Wood!

Although I was born and grew up in a London suburb, awareness of nature was hammered into me, partly by my family, partly by primary school, where the “nature table” was obligatory in every classroom and was always piled high with artefacts, and partly by the nature books that lay around the house. It was while poring over these behind the sofa that I began to learn my flowers.

My favourite was entitled “Spring Flowers of the Woods”. To start, I relished the beautiful hand-painted illustrations, and, later, when I read that the woods were full of flowers in spring BECAUSE leaves were off the trees thus allowing light for the flowers to open and the pollinators to amble in, it was my first glimmer of ecology, and the entangled ways of nature. I came to recognise and seek those exquisite, archetypal spring flowers such as primrose, wood anemone, wood sorrel, mercury and violet.

Today in Five Mile Wood, on a damp and overcast day, I greeted some of them. In the broad strip of mixed broadleaved and conifer woodland to the south, violets a-plenty sprinkled themselves over the dead leaves of birch and beech, growing on old stumps and under windthrown trunks. Sometimes they congregate with Wood Sorrel, whose edible, trifoliate leaves draped from spindly stems, and finely-veined, nodding white flowers are one of the (many) most beautiful things on earth. Wood Sorrel grows here only in scattered communities. I have the impression these colonies are networking towards each other, perhaps via the hidden telegraph of soil-fungal communication.

I have not yet found Wood Anemone here, which is surprising, but intriguingly, there is the merest germ of a bluebell wood, if you know where to look, and they are beginning to flower. (photos were horribly blurry, and I shan’t burden you with them. Everyone knows what bluebells look like.) Bluebells are said to be a sign of ancient woodland (which Five Mile probably isn’t) or at least a settled woodland ecology. I do not wish to unsettle them!

As the ground rises, that ecology morphs into something more akin to acid heath (there are certainly signs that at least part of the central area once held deep peat, signifying raised bog, perhaps). Two flowers in this habitat – not stars of “Spring Flowers of the Woods” – gave me great pleasure. One was the blaeberries that line the paths and snuggle up to trees here. They are now in hard-to-spot flower. Tiny, beautiful dull reddish bellflowers (look closely!) which will turn into the fruit of this our native blueberry and provide good walking snacks in the summer. It’s a treat to see this wild harvest crop doing so well; it was somewhat decimated by the last clear-fell. (Do we understand well enough the changes we force on a landscape by our actions? Do we care enough?)

The other is gorse. I have a very soft spot for this riotous, prickly native shrub. So many plus points does it have: nitrogen fixing, baby tree protecting, wild tea providing and a redoubtable habitat for spiders (see here) among others. What’s in a few scratches? A week ago, cycling round the wood at speed (to be honest, anything over 6mph is “at speed” for me even on an electric bike), I did incur a few scratches….. but it was like moving through a mist of warm coconut, the delicious gorse flower smell made powerful by the bright sunshine and muggy air. Today, it was fainter – but thanks to the slightly unnerving vigor with which gorse is spreading across the path, I could still catch it. Divine!

Primroses seem to be absent, as well as the wood anemones, but there was this unexpected relative – Primula denticulata, the Drumstick Primrose or, locally in Angus, the Kirrie Dumpling. Native to Himalaya, this has not, I suspect, got here on its own! If I were a hard-line ecologist, I’d uproot it (and find a home for it in a garden). I’m not, but there might be a good argument for collecting the seed before it spreads itself about. Or not?

Primula denticulata, the Kirrie Dumpling

Nursery Work

I’ve neglected my blog this past month. Not because I’ve missed out on inspiring walks, or failed to observe the nature of the universe, but because the weather’s been good, and garden or seed-sowing overtake me as soon as I get back from walking. “I’ll write it when it start’s raining…”, except it doesn’t, and I don’t. The walks will come, but in the meantime, all this seed-work did produce these (mainly) happy memories. I’ve changed the names of my colleagues in the unlikely event any may read this and feel affronted.

I never find myself fussing over seedlings in the green house without thinking of Roland, and his dad, Will, Nurserymen, of Woodham Ferrers. That’s where my horticultural career began, back in the weird 1980s, when men were men (or so they believed) and women had inexplicably curly hair.

I had decided to leave my comfortable, promising career in teaching to start again at the bottom, and become a horticulturist. I’d been accepted on a 3 year HND at Writtle College, but conditionally. Because I’d never worked in a land-based industry I had to find a job for a year to make sure I was up to it. The college had just rejected the first job I’d found (and which I was dearly looking forward to) because it wasn’t “proper” commercial horticulture. This job was working with Lawrence Hills at the Henry Doubleday Research Institute at Bocking – the organisation that came to front the whole UK organic growing movement as Garden Organic. But in the 1980s, as I said, men were men, and horticulture was about pesticides, power tools and paving slabs. Time was running short if I wanted to start my course in September 1984, so I walked into the nearest of a string of bedding and pot plant nurseries close to home, and proceeded to explain to Roland why he would like to take me on as a trainee for a year.

Roland heard me out, a twinkle in his eye and fingering his moustache to hide (I imagine) the urge to burst out laughing. “And why on earth,” he asked, “should I want to do that?”

So I explained. I was confident, I was clever, I nearly had an OU degree, I’d run a school garden and sure I knew lots and lots about gardening already? And I was enthusiastic. Little did I know that being clever and knowledgeable were useless skills in the job I was telling Roland he had available, and confidence and enthusiasm were about to take a beating! Yet Roland too had been sent to college by his dad back in the day, and maybe he was just feeling sympathetic. “Let me think,” he said, “but there’s no money in it. Nothing like you’ll be earning as a teacher.” Later that day he rang and offered me a job as nursery worker, and the wages were actually better than I expected, so I was thrilled to accept.

It was baptism by fire. First job, alone in a huge greenhouse cleaning mouldy leaves off a sea of potted cyclamen. I thought it might take me all year. There was the clocking on and off – a factory action which underlined the fact that I was no longer someone with authority, responsibility or respect, but just the lowest of the workers. Bells rang to signal the beginning and end of short tea breaks. The day started at 8am sharp. The work was physical, sometimes very repetitive, frequently boring and there was a workplace ethic that derided anyone sitting down even for a second. I was then married to a white-collar office worker who couldn’t understand why I was prepared to give up a well-paid job with prospects and considerable autonomy (this was teaching as it was 40 odd years ago, remember) to arrive home daily “tired out and covered in mud”. But if this was what it took…. I gritted my teeth through a winter of miserable work in freezing cold polytunnels, trying to learn something of plants, but learning more of chilblains.

My colleagues were not sympathetic towards me, at least, not to begin with. There were three other female full-time workers, and all were looked down on by the men, who mostly had large egos which stated that they ruled the roost. A couple of the guys were possibly not the sharpest knives in the drawer, and were also looked down on by the alpha males (the ones who drove the lorries of course). Poor, tormented Jim and Mikey were at least considerate and polite to the women. Then there was Billy, with his Boy George haircut and that camp air that made him the butt of every insult and brutal homophobic joke. I had never encountered homophobia before and couldn’t understand how Billy bore it. But he was made of stern stuff, didn’t waste his time talking to the rest or fighting back, and just got on with his job. In the end, they let him do so without too much baiting. I was the new target of course, because of my lack of experience in physical work, because I had a posher accent than the rest, and mostly because I was clever – but not in ways that mattered.

In late winter, a small army of women appeared. The big shed was set up with office chairs and high- level desks or tables, a radio, and heaters. The women brought cushions, snacks, hot drinks and sat comfy on their thrones, demanding that poor Jim supply them with endless pallets of compost-filled bedding plant modules, and trays of seedlings. Then they cussed and muttered about poor Mikey, who wasn’t shifting the finished work away quick enough. These women’s sole job was to prick out the seedlings into the modules, and they were on piece rates. The more modules they turned out, the more they got paid. We permanents knew for a fact that some of the women weren’t too worried about whether a seedling had roots, because we would have to go and fill the gaps a week or so later – rarely, unfortunately, on comfy seats. Oh no, we had to stand or crouch! When the bedding production season was at its height, we occasionally got pricking off to do as well, which was considered a cushy job by the men and indeed, it did beat hours at the potting machine or dragging laden trolleys up and down the nursery by hand to lay out filled pots on the floor of the polytunnel. But we didn’t get the bonus. I never learned to sow seed – a job reserved for only the most senior alpha male.

Gradually, I got used to the sheer physical effort, and became good friends with Ruth, with whom I was often partnered for work. She taught me a lot and we had huge fun. I think it was Ruth’s acceptance of me that changed everyone’s attitude in the end. Then Kate, one of the other women, left, leaving Colin, the most arrogant and bullying of the lorry drivers, without a mate to load his lorry. He wasn’t at all keen to have me thrust on him, because Colin HAD to be the first loaded every day and beat his chest about it, and he refused to believe I was up to the task. Loading up involved not just physical lifting and moving, but selecting out the best plant material for the customer, and racing to and fro to hand them up to the driver, who stood on the back of the lorry bellowing out instructions. Loading Colin was a personal challenge for me…. and he lost. Because lo, I COULD run up and down quickly, I DID remember exactly where every variety was to be found, I was shit-hot on getting the quality right and, best of all, with only a little practice I could handle 5 bedding trays at once without dropping any of them. Somehow, the bedding season became an exhausting but hilarious laugh, as Colin and I teamed up to get finished before Len and Ruth.

So, by the end of my year, I was indeed fitter, stronger, impervious to monotony, cold-hardy, heat-resistant – and far more tolerant of my fellow woman. Or even man. As proof, I opted during college holidays to go back to Roland’s to earn some money – and was always warmly welcomed. I’ve had my career in horticulture now, and part of it involved me in much pricking out of seedlings for my own small nursery. I brought to it the skills learned that year, and it’s always brought to me the image of Roland’s twinkling eyes as he made up his mind to take a gamble on the idealistic and misinformed schoolteacher and gave me that first chance.

Thanks Roland!

Wild-ed

Now the Irish yews are surging skywards, thrusting out dark flames of leaf and stem.
They are slow, but it’s been over a decade now, trickling from flame to flame.

There is a blurred line
where a century of tidy head-height tinkering ended, and a tight sea of brooding, black-edged green foliage has broken through, and swept away order.
The yews erupt, as stone crumbles and falls.
Birds roost in them at twilight in scores, warm, undisturbed, by gale or snow.

Behind the safety fencing, beyond the do-not-pass and danger signs,
is a place where no man goes.
Gravestones lean, tip and tumble; make new, safe alcoves, tunnels and tiny shelters for unregarded lives.
Grass rises, dances with nettle and willow herb, falls, forms dense mats and decomposes slowly.

Rhododendron Elizabeth, first red fire of February, sprawls and spreads and flowers on, uncorseted.
But most of the orderly and well-tamed shrubs they planted by the paths and over loved ones shrink and cower now
beneath the onslaught of bird-borne buddleia, bramble and insidious sweet elder.

Secrets are kept here among the dead. Trysts are made
between fungus and flowers, moss and bird, animal, alga, insect, lichen and all
the free flow of life invisible, multiplying, dividing, swarming, with the Irish yews, making universes from perceived dereliction.

Sanctuary now, holy ground, as never before.

God’s Pockets!

So, the other day, I rounded up all the dirty washing to go in the machine with care and began the long walk to the kitchen, head full of a million jobs needing done and a million things I’d rather be doing. As I turned into the kitchen, a sock and a hankie fell to the floor. So what? Just that doing chores while encased in what I grumpily call leg-irons to heal a busted knee takes five times as long as it should, and any unsought-for bending and lifting caused by careless dropping of items is somewhat unwelcome.

“God’s…..” I began to bellow, but instead of one of my usual mildly blasphemous oaths such as Godstrewth! or God Almighty! or even Ye Gods it doth amaze me! – out of my mouth came the word ”pockets!”

Crisis over, washing in, I began to ponder where in heaven or earth “pockets” had come from. I wasn’t thinking about pockets. I’m not aware of any alliterative alternative which I might have been intending to cuss with. But, somehow, I liked the sound of God’s Pockets, and fancied that if there were such a thing, they would be something quite nice.

Several nicknames for places and things have their ownership attributed to God. God’s Acre, for the churchyard. God’s own County, for Yorkshire (in England) or Perthshire (in Scotland), much squabbled over. Rather more are named for the Devil. What could God’s Pockets be a nickname for? And then again, which god? I mithered on, through the morning chores.

Pockets, to begin with, contain things that are useful, important, or maybe precious. The word implies a fairly enclosed, secret place, so sometimes, but not necessarily, the pockets of a garment. A source of riches, perhaps? Gold?

“What has it got in its pocketses?” asked Gollum of Bilbo Baggins. A cursed golden ring of power?

Human gods have been many, and varied, and presumably, their pockets would also have very varied things in them….. If it were the wandering Norse god Woden, the pockets might be literal, and contain a water bottle, a tinder box, spare pants… the things essential to survival as a tramp with an ashen staff. If it were one of the deified Roman emperors, God’s pockets could contain anything from vials of poison (Nero) to a tablet of half inscribed meditations (Marcus Aurelius). If the god in question was non-human – the sun perhaps – God’s Pockets would surely be all the secret and calculated places where rays of sunlight lit up the secrets of the seasons. Maes Howe in Orkney would be the archetypal God’s Pocket to the human sun-worshipper.

But wasn’t this getting a bit too human-centric? What about the gods of other species? For my kittens, God’s Pockets would be those irresistible-to-cats snacks which hide intoxicating and addictive catnip inside a crunchy coat. The god in question would be me, dishing them out frugally. For the goldfinches in my garden, they would be the outer casings of seed heads that had to be penetrated to find the golden seeds. The image of something golden and of great worth kept repeating in my head, and led me to honey, which led me to bees…..

And then I had it. What was precious to bees? What was usually (if not always) golden? Pollen, the baby bees’ protein source, found in flowers. What flowers are like pockets, golden themselves, and a radiant blessing from the god of the bees in January and February, when the queen bee starts to lay eggs, young larvae need to be fed, and sources of pollen are thin on the ground?

I wandered out into the garden. It was a mild day, and the sun was shining. The sun is the measure and compass of the life of a bee. It rules their time of waking, by caressing the hive entrance with light. It spurs them to life and flight, by warming their thoracic muscles. The sun guides them to sources of food. Bees communicate the distance and direction of a good pollen or nectar source to the rest of the colony by a dance which reveals an accurate angle from the sun along which to head when leaving the hive. All their foraging time they will be engaged with where the sun is. Fly this way, says the sun, for that many metres, and you will be rewarded with gold from my pockets!

On this day, some of the overwintered bees in my hive were flying, tentatively. And sure enough, I found Winter Aconites – Eranthus hyemalis – coming up above ground and uncurling their flower stalks, powered by and dependent on energy from that same sun. Bright golden balls of flowers, opening shyly to reveal the treasure inside – yellow pollen, a magnet for the early bees and their growing sisters, hungry in the comb and waiting for spring.

For surely, if I were a honeybee, the sun would be an omnipotent god, whose greatest gifts would be the nurturing flowers of late winter, and which I’d be pleased to call God’s Pockets.

Comfrey is Not Just for Compost

Photo: Kate Jewell / Comfrey (Symphytum officinale)

Comfrey is in the Borage family of plants. There are various species, strains, and cultivars, which all have similar properties. The one which spreads unrelentingly in my garden is the Tuberous Comfrey (Symphytum tuberosum), which is low growing, spreading (via its knobbly, tuberous roots), and has dingy off-white to cream flowers. I am in negotiations currently with Tuberous Comfrey to spread unrelentingly where it can out-compete the ground elder, rather than among the potatoes. This species, along with Common Comfrey (S. officinale) is a native of Britain. A number of imports and acquisitions by Henry Doubleday in the 1870s led to an important cross between Common Comfrey and a Russian species, S. asperum. The hybrid became known here as Russian Comfrey (S. x uplandicum).

Common Comfrey has other common names: Knitbone and Boneset. The generic name Symphytum means “to join together”. The specific name “officinale” indicates medicinal value. (Readers of my last post may see where I’m going here!). Comfrey roots and leaves have been used for many, many centuries in poultices (mainly) to treat sprains, bruises, inflammation, cuts and sores. Comfrey contains allantoin, a chemical which is crucial to cell regeneration and healing. In my garden, the unruly Tuberous Comfrey disappears during winter, but I also have two Russian Comfreys which don’t. One of them used to be variegated, but soon reverted to green and vigorous.

Therefore, in the mild weather between Hogmanay and the end of last week, I manoeuvred myself laboriously up the garden on my crutches, to pick the freshest leaves (yes, there were some!) from the plants. Roots may have been better, but digging isn’t in my current skill-set. A knee with anonymous sprains and tissue damage and a minor fracture of the tibia was going to get the comfrey treatment. I made the poultice very easily, by zapping the fresh leaves to a dark green liquid and mixing it with flour. A square of muslin, folded at the edges to stop the poultice oozing down to my ankles, held the comfrey against the affected bits of knee. An elastic tubular bandage kept it in place, over which went trousers and the leg brace. I did this for 4 days consecutively, but removed it from sight when I went for the fracture clinic appointment. (Self-treat? Who, me??)

On the X-rays, it was very hard to see where the fracture is now, but the doctor pronounced everything was well placed to heal completely, given time. Leg brace for at least another month! Then the weather turned snowy, followed by the customary January freeze, so the Comfrey pharmacy is temporarily closed. I’ll never know for sure how far it is contributing to healing, but that’s no problem, I am happy to be my own experiment in this.

Now to the other uses of Comfrey, including compost. The extravagant growth of the various comfreys which Henry Doubleday imported and which interbred led the organic movement pioneer Lawrence D. Hills to found a field station in Bocking, Essex, dedicated initially to research and breeding of comfrey strains for agricultural and horticultural use, named the Henry Doubleday Research Association. The best-known strain is probably “Bocking 14”. Later, HDRA became the influential Garden Organic charity, with thousands of members. I met Lawrence Hills a couple of times, when I switched from teaching to horticulture and was looking for a year’s work placement as prerequisite to starting a course at Writtle Agricultual College. He was so charming, so enthusiastic, so hard-working – and I was so looking forward to working and learning in an organic garden and taking part in field research. But organic was still considered the domain of hippies and weirdos as far as Writtle was concerned. I was told that HDRA was NOT ACCEPTABLE as a PROPER horticultural placement, and I ended up on a bedding plant nursery. Learned a lot, but you know how I just adore bedding schemes……!

*A Much-thumbed Reference for Improper Horticulturists*

But I grow Comfrey. I would never be without it in the garden. The lovely purple, red and white flowers attract every kind of bee in the district, it suppresses weeds, and is so vigorous I cut both the Russian and Tuberous back several times during the year. Most of the green material goes into the Comfrey bin (joined by excess nettle tops). The bin has a lid but no bottom, and it stands on a perforated metal square (actually a redundant queen excluder from beekeeping), which is balanced on an old washing-up bowl. Into the bowl collects a dark, viscous, evil-smelling liquid – Comfrey tea! NOT for drinking, but for use, diluted, as a liquid feed for tomatoes, vegetables and any plant looking under par, just as Lawrence Hills told me all those years ago. Many gardeners believe Comfrey tea confers disease resistance to plants as well as a nitrogen boost. I don’t add any water to the bin, and the dry material left goes onto the adjacent compost heap. Sometimes I add fresh Comfrey to the heap if it’s being a bit tardy in decomposing – it acts as an activator. Another great thing to do is liberally cover the ground between developing plants such as courgettes with fresh Comfrey leaves as a mulch. Not only will they decompose happily in situ and directly feed the plants, they help to warm the soil and stop weed seeds germinating. (TIP: Don’t accidentally mulch with tubers still attached!)

*Fresh Comfrey Boost for Peely-Wally Sweet Corn!*

I also eat Comfrey leaves. Now, my herbalist friends will tut-tut, because Comfrey also contains alkaloids which can damage the liver, to a point where cancerous tumours may develop. I can understand reluctance to prescribe it for internal use. Most of the alkaloids accumulate in the roots and the older leaves, and laboratory trials on unfortunate rats indicate that you’d really need to eat or be injected with an impossible amount of Comfrey to have such a reaction. Nevertheless, I stick to young leaves, in moderation, as a delicious vegetable in combination with nettles and other spring greens. They fill the so-called hungry gap abundantly well, and are a tasty substitute in any recipe involving spinach. Covered in beer batter and deep fried, individual leaves are a really, really bad-for-you treat!

But whether you eat it or not, Comfrey is for life – in more ways than one.

Tayport, Tentsmuir, & the Dance of Death

Three days of Christmas torpor, punctuated by food, beer and Irish cream liqueurs, two days of damp murk – what happened to the pretty snow that began falling so seasonally on Dunkeld Cathedral at midnight Christmas Eve? – then Tuesday dawned with clear-ish skies and a watery sun. Finally, an opportunity for a decent walk, and a collective itching for sea air drew us like a magnet to Tentsmuir Forest.

I consulted my knee, which has been challenged by non-specific pain since I fell onto it while raspberry pruning at the end of October. My knee said in no uncertain terms that those strong anti-inflammatories from the doctor had worked miracles in the preceding week, and it was quite sure any torn ligaments, lumps of cartilage etc. were virtually mended. It also said forget the looming possibility of the onset of osteoarthritis, let’s not even go there. The beach calls. So we drove – no, I drove, another possibly poor decision – to Tayport and marched across Tayport Heath with a head-clearing north easterly behind us, and the sun making Dundee all sparkly. Tide was out; wide sands, gleaming waters, massive blue skies splashed with the long brush-strokes of brazen clouds.

Getting to the forest, we saw many of the pines that cling to the edge of the sand had been toppled by recent storms. In a hollow of dunes, the trees had fallen in to the centre. The upended roots, with the sandy soil washed or blown off them, were a fierce tangle a-top the weathered trunks and skeletal remains of earlier storm victims. It became clear that the parallel forest track inland, which would have been our easy and shorter return route, was blocked.

Rowan spent an age taking black and white photos with an antique film camera, unloading the film and loading a new one. I took photos of the camera on my phone in an instant, and was glad to wait and rest a slightly uncomfortable but not yet painful knee, while reflecting on the different mental input and rewards of each method.

Afternoon light on the estuary emphasized the form and movement of the bare birches and broom in silhouette, as the tide turned. When we reached Tentsmuir Point, the knee was starting to think maybe it should not march on to Kinshaldy Beach as planned, but turn around now. After all, that would still be 5km of exercise and fresh air in total, though I dearly wanted to paddle in the distant, sparkling waves. Pausing to decide, I stepped down a 45cm bank, bad leg first.

There was an audible explosion in the knee, and I was no longer standing up. Actually, I couldn’t. We sat for a while, till I felt the pain might just be away, but that I should definitely head back. When I tried to walk, that became “we should all head back”. Various efforts at walking supported by one or both of my familial companions were not very successful on the uneven, up-and-down path – someone was always either the wrong height or moved at the wrong time, and any sideways movement, flexing or bending of the knee was pretty agonising. We minimised such movement with my new Christmas walking socks and a filthy and disreputable Tay Landscape Partnership buff, belonging to Andrew. (I wash mine.)

There were lots of folk out on that path (all others being closed off), and many of them were wonderful. Jolly Fifers and Dundonians with sympathy, but a strong sense of the ridiculous kept my spirits up with their black humour and all kinds of offered help and advice. To the lovely man who had collected a polished peeled pinewood stick and surrendered it to me before going off to see if there was any way he could get his car into the forest to pick me up, my grateful thanks. That stick (pictured above, behind) was a real help and enabled me to avoid the shifting sands of human support. People, so often, are just brilliant, something we forget too easily, confronted as we are by insensitive, heartless, mindless acts – not infrequently by politicians.

However, light was starting to fade, and progress was slow. I had to keep stopping to recover. One long stop was by a heart-searingly beautiful birch tree on which I leaned. Tucked between its twin trunks was a little pine seedling. I wished it every success, while Rowan rang 999 and Andrew marched off to meet the emergency services back at Tayport.

Getting an ambulance in to where I was proved impossible because of the windthrown trees. The ambulance people called on the fire service who have the keys to the gate at Lundin Bridge, and on their colleagues in Edinburgh to come up to Fife with an all-terrain vehicle to get me. Meanwhile, two paramedics and 4 fire-people set off with a narrow-wheeled stretcher trolley, while Rowan kept everyone updated with a brilliant App called Three Words which can pinpoint location accurately.

It took a long time. Wistfully, I dreamed of a helicopter air-lift (which was considered, I learned later, but they said it couldn’t land on the estuarine sands) or a Bond-style speedboat rescue. The tide was visibly rising and although still a way off I knew that at high tide the sea washes the track. And it was getting cold. So, when I could, I kept moving on, in the crab-walk sideways step I’d almost perfected, leaning on the stick for dear life in front of me, dragging the damaged right leg up to join the poor, put-upon left. (It was ever thus.) We noticed that the movement was in waltz time, and tried humming the Blue Danube by Strauss for encouragement. That was too corny, so Rowan found Iron Maiden on her phone and I crab-danced along quite the thing for a good while to Dance of Death…..

“Feeling scared I fell to my knees
As something rushed me from the trees
Took me to an unholy place
That is where I fell from grace”
(lyrics, Iron Maiden)

Appropriate, or what?

When we met the brilliant team of combined emergency service people (yes, I know, but they bloody were), I opted to be carried on the jolting trolley (apparently a wheel came off at one point) till we met the ATV. The ATV got lost (“Edinburgh folk” tutted a Dundee fireman, as if he’d not really expected anything better), so didn’t arrive till we were out, but I enjoyed passing under the overhanging pine branches, set against a darkening sky, and the vivid sunset over the flat and increasingly wet estuary. There are worse settings for being a casualty.

The two Edinburgh paramedics transported me to the car and thence off to A&E. Five hours later, and more hats off to the NHS, I left, with a pair of crutches, a fractured or chipped shinbone in the knee joint encased in a massive Velcro-assisted immobiliser, and a probable torn-asunder lump of cartilage called the medial meniscus. Which came first, and whether one caused the other, I hope to learn next Wednesday at the fracture clinic!

Fringe benefits: 1. Gas and air! Happy memories (?) of childbirth! 2. From the Xrays, my knee “is like that of a young woman” said the doctor. No osteoarthritis yet! 3. The kittens like tight-rope walking on the crutches more than I like using them. 4. Time to write my blog, which I signally failed to do before Christmas. Too late for Christmas greetings, but have a good Hogmanay and new year when it comes…..everyone, but especially two doctors (one of Philosophy with heavy metal expertise), all the happy walkers in Tentsmuir Forest, three firemen and a firewoman, four paramedics, innumerable NHS staff from the reception desk to the porter, one man with a stick (which I’m keeping unless he wants it back), and a partridge in a pear tree……(imagined.)

Of Reed-Mace, Reeds and Winter Storms

Between the arc of reedbed near to Port Allen in the Carse of Gowrie and the artificial embankment thrown up long ago to prevent the Tay from breaching the land, is a lagoon. Once it was a field subject to a bit of flooding after wet weather. The lagoon, a wide, flat infill of water fed recently by copious rain and sleet and tide and river, has grown immensely in recent years. The field we walked over on a dry, low-tide day of spring fifteen years ago is no longer visible.

Drifting tones of yellow and grey shiver across the winter sky, reflected in the still water, protected by the spur of reeds and unruffled by wind or wave. A hint of watery sun shimmers out, a double, hesitant glow that recedes and approaches. A pair of Mute swans nonchalantly float away between clumps of stark vegetation.

When we walked that field fifteen years ago, we came upon a small but healthy patch of Reed Mace, a plant which is neither a reed nor, despite its other name of Bulrush, a rush. Reed Mace is a spreading, vigorous, semi-aquatic plant, with many uses historically. The starchy roots are roasted, boiled or baked like potatoes. The cigar-like floral inflorescences – called cattails – are edible when green and young, and later full of pollen which can be used as a flour substitute – as can the dried and powdered roots. Being aware of this, and also of the law prohibiting uprooting wild plants, it was the spring shoots, or young buds, that I wanted to try. We cut off a few, cleaned them up and lightly braised them. They were delicious.

Today I am happy to see that the original clump now almost lines the margin of the lagoon nearest the embankment. Reed Mace, Bulrush, Cattails, Typha latifolia – it’s a bit of a thug but beautiful in its way, and so useful no resourceful forager would shun it.

The embankment meanders on, dividing the wide waters of the estuary from the chundering, muddy grey outfall of the Pow of Errol – a man-made channel too. The landowner who stabilised the bank long ago planted trees – incongruous beeches, limes, hornbeams – to hold the metres-deep cliffs of unstable clay and keep them from eroding. Some of the old trees still stand, clinging to the edge of the wetlands, throwing out massive limbs at right angles to counter-balance the sucking pull of water and gravity.

Not all have survived.

Storm Arwen, the first of winter, tore most of the leaves from this woodland, apart from some of the tenacious oaks and the frivolous young descendants of the old beeches. The seductive webs of branch and twig and shoot weave spells against the fluid skies. Long vistas open – reedmace, water, reeds, river, sky – and are closed again by the tracery of trees. Fallen leaves moulder, curl, betray their origins, are curiously warm and comforting underfoot.

The finest and mightiest of the reed-side oaks spreads proud limbs and proclaims, towering over the cottage that lay empty for so long, and where, in a fantasy that didn’t include sea-level rise, I dreamed of living, pointing skeletal fingers down the watery path into the hushing reeds.