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The Creation of Plants
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The Art of India
I’m not sure exactly how I came across this book, “The Art of India” (1954) by Stella Kramrisch, but I’m pretty certain I read Allen Ginsberg talking about it.
That naturally led me to want to hunt down a copy. But this was at the tail of end research for “Retreat” when I was consciously attempting to dial back my focus on Eastern philosophy. Not an expensive book, really. But I satisfied myself with finding a PDF of it on archive.org.
A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging around in my wife’s study. Disturbing her when she was trying to write something on Le Corbusier, probably… As I was looking through her bookshelf, my eye caught upon the spine of this copy of “The Art of India.”
When my grandfather, the art collector Michael Ingram died, once their family’s house sold, the entire family was invited, almost as though we were vultures, to take whatever we wanted from the building. I was very fond of my grandparents and remember being a bit dazed. I think I took only one item, a small iron frying pan that I remembered my beloved grandmother frying me an egg in.
Thank god, Mrs Ingram had her wits about her. She took the Kramrisch book from his massive library of art books. In its frontispiece there is this review notice from Phaidon, announcing the publication to the reviews department of The Illustrated London News, which was our family business. Unprompted, and without any unseemly pleading from me, she gave me the book.
My grandfather took a deep interest in the culture of the far east. This ran in the family. His uncle was Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram – famous for saving for Japan one of their cherry trees.
By 1926, he was a world authority on Japanese cherries and was asked to address the Cherry Society in Japan on their national tree. It was on this visit that he was shown a painting of a beautiful white cherry, then thought to be extinct in Japan. He recognised it as one he had seen in a moribund state in a Sussex garden, the result of an early introduction from Japan. He had taken cuttings and so was able to re-introduce it to the gardening world as ‘Taihaku’, the name meaning ‘Great White Cherry’. His 1948 book Ornamental Cherries is a standard work.
Wikipedia
His father Herbert Ingram, son of William Ingram, was a collector of Chinese porcelain, whose collection is the heart of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford’s collection.
The arrival of the Sir Herbert Ingram’s generous gift of over 3,000 Chinese and Japanese objects to the Museum of Eastern Art in 1956, then housed in the Indian Institute, more than doubled its original holdings. In 1962, these were moved to become part of the collection of the Ashmolean Museum.
Eastern Art Online
In spite of his father’s generosity, their house was still full of lovely ancient pots, urns, and vases. But my grandfather was also fascinated by Eastern thought. I remember this quote from Confucius pinned up in their kitchen:
“If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character.
Confucius
If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home.
If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nations.
When there is order in the nations, there will peace in the world.”
This is, of course, the same call for “bottom-up” action which bewitched the counterculture as it rebelled against the political activism of the previous generation.
There are two particularly lovely pictures of the Buddha in the book.
And an exquisite “Tree of Life of Knowledge” perfect for this blog.
These little guys grown from seed: Brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage, cabbage, and calabrese broccoli. They have had enough time under the grow lights.
They need to go out under the cool autumn sun. It’s amazing how much more light there is outdoors, even on an autumn day, than indoors under lights.
They’re going in here, which is some of the finest topsoil rescued from my raised bed, with added biochar (not stirred in yet).
God bless the little blighters. Just the strongest seedlings which have shown the most vigorous growth. The rest I am going to eat as microgreens for my tea.
All tucked in for the winter. With, I think, plenty of space for them. At least for the time being. If Kiki the cat digs these out, I will throttle her. Or at least swear at her!
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Drugs
I came across these plants in the Medicinal garden of the Royal College of Physicians, besides Regent’s Park.
This is an ephedra plant, a source of ephedrine alkaloids, including ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. Natural speed.
A tobacco plant. The leaves are huge.
Opium poppies.
One datura plant.
And another datura plant. These trumpet-like flowers are enormous – about a foot long.
I don’t use any drugs, but it has occurred to me how relatively easy it would be to grow one’s own. Obviously, marijuana can be grown simply enough, but also coca leaves. With the latter it would be impractical for industrial purposes to grow in the UK. This because of the huge amount of coca leaves needed for a tiny yield of cocaine, the expense of land, and large plantations’ subsequent visibility to law enforcement agencies. But climate-wise, it wouldn’t be a problem. With a greenhouse, you might be able to grow enough coca for your own personal use. You could even just chew the leaves like the South Americans do.
I came across a modern book on Amazon once of some home-counties apothecarist quietly growing his own opium poppies – plant and man getting “heavy” together.
After an exquisite Indian Summer, it seems Autumn is now truly upon us. Consequently, I’m packing up the garden for the year.
It’s bittersweet looking back at it at its height in August in comparison with where it is now below.
The only glimmer of hope is in these seedlings of brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage, cabbage, and calabrese. I thought I would try and get these established and see if I could grow them through the winter outdoors. That might just about be possible.
I had grown a little before November 2021, zinnias from seed and dahlias from bulbs in 2020, but never vegetables or indeed anything with serious intent.
It was a combination of two things, reading Theodore Roszak’s collection of essays “Ecopsychology” (1995) in August 2021, and watching an interview with Eliot Coleman in October 2021, that truly set me on this path. The latter providing maybe the lightning bolt moment.
Immediately before this I had been reading Alfred Adler’s majestic “Understanding Human Nature” (1927), at the tail end of my research after “Retreat” , which carried on quite a long time after the end of that book’s publication in 2020. Indeed, I must have finished “Retreat” in mid 2019 and there I was still working through, not even yet fully integrating, the ideas I had unearthed in that book.
So my journey into gardening had nothing, per se, to do with lockdown, as it did for many people. However, the same etheric conditions that we all experienced in lockdown, the ones which gave rise to other phenomenon like the huge growth in the amount of dreaming recorded in western populations, and the emergence of racial trauma out from the unconscious onto the social canvas, tracked in parallel my own etheric research into the dematerialised highs of LSD and meditation against the backdrop of the counterculture, and that generation’s subsequent post-countercultural integrated fascination with organic farming.
The immediate upshot was that I was keen to get involved somehow in growing food. I’m yet to totally work out how to make that transition in a meaningful way. It is, after all, a massive leap for a music-obsessed animator working in the centre of a city to undertake. A more etheric, less integrated existence it would be hard to devise, perhaps a coder working on a space station would be able to trump me? In consequence, the journey back to earth is harder to make.
Working on my psyche art project, I got in the habit of picking up pieces of wood in the street. Some time in November 2021 I found two huge beautiful huge planks of wood in this skip on Pear Tree Street round the corner from where I live, and decided that they would make the basis of an excellent raised bed.
I cut them to size outside in the street, soaked them in linseed oil to protect them from the weather, and assembled them with beautiful rust-proof, stainless steel screws. The frame looked great already.
Because it was going to be resting on a slate roof, with a base level of large stones beneath the soil, I left a centimetre gap along the bottom to help with drainage. I didn’t want it filling up like a swimming pool and busting through the roof. Accordingly, I rested it straddled on top of a supporting wall which runs beneath the surface.
I designed the bed with a central column, so I could suspend mesh across it. The mesh to protect against insects, slugs, and snails. This worked very well, but was a faff to remove every time. Eventually, when it became clear that the black cat wanted to scramble over the top of it, I built a bamboo frame to rest upon the columns.
I bought a number of bags of a mixture of topsoil and compost. This is where I betrayed my ignorance, indeed none other than Charles Dowding rolled his eyes when I revealed to him that I had been convinced by a garden supplier that it was necessary to have a mix of the two. Compost on its own would have been superior. I mixed a huge bag of perlite in with this – both to lighten the mixture and allow it to drain better. I don’t really like perlite, an industrial product, with the benefit of hindsight biochar would have been better, if more expensive.
And so it was for nearly three years.
Perhaps you’ve seen the pictures I’ve posted of all the things I grew here over the past three years? Carrots, Cabbage, Spinach, Pumpkin, Lettuce, Cavalo Nero, Rocket, and Beetroot. More besides.
But this year it had to come to an end.
I got sick of the rigmarole of removing and replacing the netting. I’m figuring that a small greenhouse, or a cold frame would be more interactive, that I might have more fun with something like that if we stay put.
Also, I needed to tidy up the roof garden because we’ve put the house on the market and, well, it looked too bloody eccentric.
So everything got harvested.
And the whole thing was dismantled. I was surprised how horrible and clay-like the first soil I used was. It came off in large clods. Also, how meagre was the inch-thick topsoil which I had created with fine mulches and biochar. This I bagged up and kept. There was no digging ever on this patch, and I would have liked to have seen more evidence of soil structure. Maybe that’s precisely what I had? Sure, it was productive…
And this is how the space looks now. Like a regular bourgeois roof terrace.
I’ve got to work out the big picture. Sure, I’m dismantling this tiny part of the dream – but I’m working on a much larger and transformative scale these days. Times are very hard in consequence, but that’s to be expected.
More news soon. Stay tuned veggies.
As I wrap up growing on my roof garden this year, it’s an opportunity to look back at the food I grew and enjoyed eating at home.
I decided in February that because my raised bed was such a nuisance to remove its protective mesh from, that I wanted to grow something in there that (a) I could plant and leave alone the entire season (b) I really enjoyed eating. This year’s massive beetroot patch was the result.
These seeds were the “Bolivar” variety from Tamar Organics, which I started in seed trays in March. I did weed the bed once or twice, but mainly left them alone. I cropped and thinned them once and then took out the whole bed on the 19th August.
A previous year I pickled these and made a hash of the pickling mixture – way too sharp… This year I worked hard on it, and I’ve been loving these delicious beetroot pickles. One or two a day, sometimes before a meal, a great way to kickstart the tum.
I covered my success with potatoes in a previous post, but never showed what a delicious meal they made. Here, baked and roasted.
These are the “Lady Di” variety runner beans, visible on the top right-hand side, which I grew from last year’s beans. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a nice crop from these, and I have no idea why I have persevered with them. They eat very badly, tasting as though they are run through with bits of hard plastic.
Perhaps the first year’s crop was tender, and I’m forgetting, and that they’ve subsequently shed their characteristics? Never again.
I’ve grown vine tomatoes before – but this year decided I would give the “determinate” bush variety a go.
Growing in containers without much wall space, this made practical sense. I chose the Jani variety which had the advantage of getting going quite quickly in the season. It’s easy to grow something like tomatoes, and suddenly it’s July and one finds they are still green – so that speed in a tomato variety is very valuable.
Practical considerations aside, I have to admit to being disappointed by the flavour in these. I wouldn’t grow them again. Edible, certainly, but…
This rosemary bush has, I believe, grown from seeds started in 2023. I’m so proud of it!
Damn, what a wonderful thing Rosemary is! Green all year round, bees love its beautiful small blue flowers, it’s an amazing medicinal herb (sometimes I just chew on a branch when I am outside in the garden), and it’s really valuable in the kitchen. The potatoes shown above were roasted with it and some garlic.
This Amaranth is now in its third season on the roof garden. Grown from its own seed twice. It loves the sun but more than any other plant needs careful watering, wilting quite quickly without sufficient care. I haven’t yet eaten my own Amaranth, but one day I shall.
Finally, there’s my “Red Drumhead” cabbages. Here showing the twins being united in a single planter with a Comfrey plant between them.
Cabbage takes a long time to grow and in the past I’ve settled for cabbage leaves but no crown. But this year I’ve only gone and smashed it. Check out the head on that whoppa!
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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.
