Permaculture co-originator reviews my book "The Garden"

 

Head over here to read David Holmgren's review of my book "The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture."

 

I often receive books to review from publishers, but recently I was sent an inscribed copy of a book, The Garden, directly from the author, Mathew Ingram. A year after my extended interview with him in June 2023, I received the manuscript for factchecking the material that he had written about my connections to the counterculture of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. This exploration was part of his wider thesis that the emergence of organic growing and agriculture had a strong crossover with philosophical and spiritual influences in the Western world from Eastern and Indigenous cultures. He suggests that the alternative hippy counterculture of those years had a pivotal role in drawing together the search for sustainable relationships to nature in the material realm, and the search for inner harmony and growth in the spiritual realm.

With the business of life (and perhaps because I am approaching 70 years old), I had completely forgotten about our connection when Mathew’s 500 page inscribed tome arrived. As an author, it’s a bit shameful to admit that I don’t read so many books connected to permaculture and its kindred subjects these days, but once I started this one, I couldn’t put it down. 

Permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison’s apparently hard-line dismissal of both hippy vegetarian counterculture and any notions of what he called ‘woo woo’ spiritualism suggested to Ingram that permaculture might not be an important strand supporting his grand narrative. But in the book, as with many other pioneers of organics and kindred ecologically-informed working relationships with nature, he used my own origins and inspirations to make that case. It was of course an honour to have a researcher be so thorough in his reading of my work and include me in his panoply of visionaries, pioneers and practitioners as diverse as Steiner, Lady Eve Balfour, Fukuoka, John Seymour, John Todd, Vandana Shiva, Eliot Coleman, Patrick Holden and Paul Hawken, amongst others. 

While the lack of footnotes to each and every reference, along with a few typos and rare errors (such as mixing up carbon to nitrogen ratios in composting) might frustrate the more academically inclined reader, I found the story of people, events and consequences of all these connections and crossovers an enthralling read. It confirmed and filled in my own scattered and sketchy understanding of this history of both organics and the counterculture. Further, I found myself imagining all the other permaculture pioneers from Declan Kennedy in Germany to Robyn Francis in Australia, who might be included to reinforce his thesis, along with Albert Bates in the USA whose story is featured in the book. Perhaps inevitably, the story is strongly biased in the Anglo-American and, more generally, English speaking world, but where does one draw the line between a book and an encyclopedia?

While I wholehearted concur with his thesis that the counterculture was a primary influence in the emergence of working ecological relationships with nature in gardening and farming, I noted his acknowledgement of the role of progressive collectivist politics of the left, in my own and many other of the organic pioneers. On the other hand I think Ingram perhaps underplays the contribution to organics of agrarian social conservatives from the libertarian right. I agree with his dismissal of some academic attempts to portray a strong connection between fascist ideology and organics, given that fascist ideology was so popular in the wider society in which organics emerged in the 1930s. However, as a young man immersing myself in Australian and New Zealand organic networks in the 1970s, I was surprised to see how many of that older generation came from the other end of the political spectrum to my own second generation, radical leftist heritage. Over the last half century, I have come to see the threads of wisdom from that lineage in its fruitful fusion with the left. 

None of this undermines the strength of Ingram’s thesis about the counterculture, which in many ways was outside of the left-right political framework. And in any case, maybe once the Trumpian revolution runs its course with a reformation of both agriculture and health along ecological principles, someone will write the book about how socially conservative values, including Christianity, were the primary wellsprings of the new organic orthodoxy. As always, the victors write history.

But to return to Ingram’s thesis… If his research throughout was as thorough as the parts with me, then I am really impressed at this effort spanning so many sources, including more than 300 cited books. As the people and events featured reach back some generations, it is timely in capturing firsthand recollections and reflections from so many older people still alive to pass on their aural history. These stories are a great source for understanding how a significant proportion of a generation reacted to the evidence that their ordinary everyday lives, and the systems that shaped them, would be seen by future generations as crimes against those future generations and Mother Nature herself.

Ingram avoids the tendency to either romanticise or demonise the counterculture and the working relationships with nature it imagined, spawned and rediscovered. 

He explores issues that have since become centre stage in any consideration of humanity’s future: from the practical question of till or no till and every variation between; the place of domestic livestock and wildlife in human habitats; the acknowledgement and/or appropriation of indigenous knowledge; the role of technology, for better and worse, in finding our place in nature; to the ways in which we can contribute to regenerating Mother Earth that reflect our earthly and etheric natures. 

For a general audience, this book is a window into how those at the fringe have been the creative sources of so many progressive and hopeful signs in a world of accelerating stresses and confusions. Thus I see it as an antidote to the current rising demands for conformity to current orthodoxies, which ironically includes some of those that the counterculture have helped create. 

As we say ‘the action is at the edge’. This design principle works both spatially, in the interface with nature, and conceptually. The latter being characterised by the derided fringe-thinkers prepared to ignore the shackles of orthodoxy and chart their own path to the future in the brave hope that, if it is fruitful, others will follow.

For all those deeply embedded in permaculture as a lived reality, a conceptual framework and a global movement, I think this book is a must-read for delving into the many kindred spirits, influences and actions that precede and parallel the origins, rise and spread of permaculture over almost 50 years. 

And I think I now have to delve back into Ingram’s Retreat: how the counterculture invented wellness, which itself laid the foundation for this further exploration into the now ancient organic maxim ‘healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals and healthy people’.

Eartha & Aetherias

 

Alicia Bay Laurel is the celebrated polymath - artist, author, and musician - who found international fame as the visionary communard behind the classic self-sufficiency book "Living on the Earth".

Her latest production Eartha & Aetherias is described by her as an "eco sci-fi romantasy graphic novella." It draws upon her experiences living in Hawaii during the nineteen seventies and all that entailed: "hiking on volcanic mountains, swimming in waterfall pools, ecstatic improvisational dancing, communal living in the jungle, sailing, camping on beaches, learning natural medicine from holistic healers, permaculture gardening, foraging, cooking with hand-gathered ingredients, chanting with Tibetan lamas, and receiving Hawaiian songs & guitar tuning from Hawaiian elders."

The book's first incarnation was presented by "twenty-five year old" Alicia as a reading with illustrations and accompanying slides to a packed audience at the Maui Community Theatre in Kahului in 1974. But Alicia never pressed ahead with publishing it as she threw herself into touring as a singer-songwriter and storyteller. Circling back fifty years later "seventy-five year old" Alicia has brought a whole other set of talents to the production, and in a sense completion, of this enchanting book.

The central drama in the story is the ecstatic unification of the characters Eartha, the feminine nymph representing the embodied powers of mother Earth, and Aetherias, the masculine spirit representing an unfettered cosmic energy. In their coming together in love, the divine is made manifest. This classic spiritual concept is handled with the sophistication and profound wisdom that only this Queen of the Hippies could could bring to the tale.

There was so much I loved about the book. In the first instance I found the nudity of Alicia's characters very liberating. It's hard to imagine in our repressed and buttoned-down society how the natural unadorned body needn't immediately be sexualised, or equally that that sexuality might be woven with kindness and affection, and not fraught with violence. Alicia's instantly recognisable drawings are enchanting and slyly funny, the decorative aspect of the illustrations endlessly inventive, and structural ideas like the dotted lines representing "dubbed out" spiritual beings are ingenious.

The book is available in colour and with a monochromatic interior edition from her excellent website. Get yourself thence for some authentic hippie vibes in 2026.

Knepp

 

I drove down to Knepp yesterday with my friend Mags. The weather was stunning. We had a tour around the walled garden but the highlight for me was wandering around the estate itself. The place just feels so HEALTHY! The birdsong is simply incredible - Mags has a birdsong app on her phone - she ran it and there seven birds audible just where we were standing.

 

The rewilding is all very well and interesting but I really admire that they sell meat of the animals they cull - even horse we discovered. I had a choice Longhorn steak for lunch. The Knepp film is great if you haven't seen it - but I was also intrigued to learn that Isabella Tree has an interest in the esoteric religion of Nepal.

Einkorn

A field of Einkorn and Emmer Wheat I photographed growing at FarmEd.

I'm having a thing with Doves Farm Organic Wholemeal Stoneground Einkorn Flour.

I've only rarely endorsed a product like I did with Hodmedod's delicious Carlin Peas. That's reserved for food so great that by eating it you're making the world a better place.

Einkorn wheat is an ancient grain that was originally harvested as many as 30,000 years ago. The USDA list it as having the following advantages over modern wheat: +44% Protein, +291% Riboflavin, +23% Vitamin B6, +290% Beta Carotene, +28% Iron, +3367% Vitamin A, +10% Manganese, and +250% Lutein. I swear that after eating it for a while you can really feel that nutrition bump.

Like many people are discovering about themselves, I'm a bit sensitive to gluten. Einkorn has less gluten which is also less complex, and consequently easier to digest. Of course, in the absence of that regular gluten, that means that it doesn't make such pillowy bread and pastry. Like, so what?

Because Einkorn hasn't been refined through breeding, it has a relatively simple 14 chromosomes (as opposed to Industrial Wheat's 42 chromosomes). All these factors define it as food which predates Industrial agriculture's meddling. Today's food, especially food which isn't grown organically, is not only doused with toxic chemicals, it's markedly less nutritious.

I'm thinking more and more about how that big shift in human behaviour from our traditional pre-Industrial lifestyle, to how we live today, is my real subject. The counterculture seems to me to be an inchoate yearning for that relatively recent lifestyle. It was a yearning for traditional non-hierarchical spiritual beliefs, truly "conventional" agriculture, natural food, and community living.

I really missed bread, and this has now become THE staple in my diet. I make a simple loaf with it once a week, and usually eat it twice a day. In due course I might figure out to make a sourdough loaf but right now that's beyond me.

Sick Veg 100

Twenty years ago at my blog WOEBOT, in December 2005, I made a list of 100 records.

 

For a couple of years I've been planning a 100 for the Sick Veg blog, but this time of non-fiction books. I first thought I would do it for Christmas - but I've had a little time free - so think of it as an early Christmas present. You're welcome.

 

This moment has arrived because I'm clearing my decks. Last week I finally got to the bottom of my pile of non-fiction books. I can date the start of this reading process with accuracy to 15th April 2017 when I ordered a copy of Theodore Roszak's "The Making of a Counterculture" and begun the research on "Retreat". Since that date, eight and a half years ago, I must have read close to two thousand books. One book lead to another - in most cases because it referred to another book that I ended up investigating - until the process felt complete...

 

The books themselves were not expensive, and it'd be inaccurate to think of this as an exercise in bibliophilia, with me showing off my valuable possessions. I was almost entirely concerned with their content. The real cost was the hours I spent reading when I might have been doing other things.

 

The books here are all ones which made a big impression on me, usually because the ideas they convey are luminous. I've broken down the one hundred I've chosen into the following categories: History, Psychoanalysis, Eastern Philosophy, Tibet, Philosophy, Beat, Theodore Roszak, Self-sufficiency, Acid, Anti-Psychiatry, Communes, Agriculture, Permaculture, Anthropology, and Self-help.

 

Strictly non-fiction, the list obviously doesn't include books of poetry (William Blake, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg) or fiction (Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Herman Hesse, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Phillip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon). But also not writing on music (Simon Reynolds, Lester Bangs, David Toop), on artists (William Blake, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Van Gogh, Edward Bawden, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Crumb, Moebius, Basquiat, Keith Haring, Brian Bolland, Yayoi Kusama), or practical growing (Eliot Coleman, Charles Dowding, John Jeavons).

 

Collected together I see these one hundred non-fiction books as the ultimate progressive "Behaviour Change" curriculum.

 

Eliot Coleman: "The Self-Fed Farm"

 

 

Great interview with Eliot Coleman at The Real Organic Project for his new book, "The Self-Fed Farm."

 

Coleman argues that vegetable growers can effectively generate their soil fertility with Green Manures.

 

To the layman, the city-dweller, this sounds like obscure, agricultural jargon. Eyes roll. Why should anyone care about this?

 

Because it's so totally critical, let me break it down for you:

 

1) Everyone survives by eating food.

 

2) While it is perfectly possible to survive by just eating plants, of course, the meat that is eaten is first fed on plants we grow.

 

3) Growing vegetable and grains is extractive. So if we want to keep eating food, and, er, living... we have to engineer properly sustainable ways of making a contribution back to that fertility. This is what Sir Albert Howard called "The Law of Return."

 

4) Industrial agricultural systems cheat the replacement of macro-nutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium) by importing them to the growing site at great expense to the farmer and the environment. As for micro-nutrients - they usually don't even bother providing them for the soil, which leads to a reduction in their presence in the food we eat that these Industrial systems produce.

 

5) Other agricultural systems also import fertility to the farm. This includes Organic as well as Regenerative (for which there is no legal framework and is basically a free-for-all). With Organic this can be animal manures or other organic matter which feeds the soil microbiology.

 

6) Eliot Coleman and a few other innovative Organic farmers argue that, rather than importing this Organic matter to the farm, it is possible to grow plants called Green Manures. These can be legumes like clover, vetch, alfalfa, and peas, or non-legumes such as mustard, rye, buckwheat, and phacelia. If these plants are grown in a farmer's rotation, and then chopped down into the top four inches of topsoil (not deep digging which would damage the soil), they can provide all the fertility that the soil requires. Furthermore, as the Green Manures break down on the surface they produce carbonic acid which etches valuable minerals out of stone in the top and subsoil.

 

It's a system as elegant as it is brilliant. Not a new idea, but one which needs all the publicity it can get. It has been elbowed to one side by not just Industrial agriculture, but also Regenerative agriculture. The latter, with its emphasis on No Till, to the delight of herbicide manufacturers who can keep on selling Glyphosate to farmers, has vetoed even the minimal tillage that the system Coleman describes requires.

Finding Lights in a Dark Age.

 I've absolutely loved Chris Smaje's previous two books.

Smaje has been locked in life-or-death tussle with the journalist George Monbiot - bravely articulating what many of us think about Monbiot's celebration of lab food. Monbiot here is reduced to a very brief cameo - somewhat like a pantomime baddy; mercifully diminished.

"Finding Lights in a Dark Age" is, instead, a much more personal book. Smaje draws on his experience of the realities of managing land and market gardening. I laughed when he said he has been described locally as "not really a farmer" because it highlights the sclerotic attitudes of conventional farming and the countryside's too-common snobbery.

Bang up-to-date with the latest academic and sociological perspectives, the book nevertheless falls into the grand tradition of radical self-sufficiency. One could be reading Scott and Helen Nearing or John Seymour.

J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World" gets a very welcome mention and a highlight for me was the epic chapter twelve in which Smaje renders a genuinely excellent "Soi-Fi" projection of life in the South of England in the coming Dark Age he has conceptualised throughout the proceeding book. I'd read a whole book of that.

John Seymour: The Self-Sufficient Gardener

 

Just when I thought I had read all the books by John Seymour that were pertinent to me I came across another. "The Self-Sufficient Gardener", which I should have discovered sooner, was referred to in Paul A.Lee's "There is a Garden in the Mind" - his memoir of Alan Chadwick and the Organic Movement in California.

 

Published in 1978, two years after "The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency" (1976), this is a sequel to that classic. My hunch, no more than that, is that this will have been commissioned by the publisher Dorling Kindersley. John Seymour was an expert in growing vegetables, but from reading his other books I suspect that (a) he preferred the larger canvas of the farm, (b) his wife Sally, a remarkable lady who has recently passed away, was the true authority when it came to the art.

 

This is still an excellent book. I was very pleased to discover many references to Alan Chadwick within it. Seymour, like his friend Fritz "Small is Beautiful" Schumacher held Chadwick and his ideas in the highest esteem. He refers to Chadwick's "raised beds" as "deep beds"; and "double-digging" as the creation of "bastard trenches". This might be Seymour's translation of the original terms from French Intensive market-gardening from whence these concepts originated. I was especially delighted to read Seymour referring to Chadwick's disciple John Jeavons who I interviewed for "The Garden."

 

 

 

Worth the price of entry alone are the exquisite colour illustrations of fruit and vegetables the illustrator of which, sadly, is not credited.

 

 

When I interviewed Seymour's daughter Anne in 2023 she mentioned Tao Wimbush and the nearby Lammas Commune and I included this in the book. My curiosity piqued, this summer I visited Lammas in South West Wales on one of their rare open days and swapped books with Tao himself. His story of the commune's foundation, the pioneering example of Wales' stringent "One Planet Development", is a rollicking good read.

 

 

Subsequent to our meeting Tao made a video which doffs its hat to Seymour and the era which I chronicled in "The Garden". Check out some of their other videos too. Tao is a true rebel. 

 

Nature is One and Indivisible.

 

 

You'd have to have a hard heart not to chuckle at F.C. King's name. And this IS Sick Veg after all.

 

I was delighted to find a cheap copy of this slender classic from 1951. I have restored it with a replica printed dust jacket. It was written in his capacity as the head gardener at Levens Hall in Kendall in Cumbria. King met Sir Albert when Howard was evacuated from his home in Blackheath, London in wartime 1940 to Heversham, just a mile away. As a result the text is topped and tailed by Howard.

John Harrison of "The Allotment Garden" says,

"Levens Hall’s ten acres of gardens date back to 1690s including the world’s oldest topiary gardens. Even though the days of estate gardens were fading following the First World War, being Head Gardener of something like Levens Hall was a very prestigious position."

I'd heard of King before but first came across the book when it was mentioned approvingly in Joseph A Cocannouer's "Weeds: Guardians of the Soil" (another classic). This is because King took an astonishingly progressive view of weeds,

"Everything in Nature has a definite place and it is our duty, as gardeners, to find a much better use for weeds in future than we have done in the past. Frequently I am amused at the amount of sympathy I receive from visitors when they see my weed crops. It is difficult to convince them that I deliberately encourage such growth on any piece of ground not immediately requiring food production..."

And he explains a number of advantages to their cultivation.

King, a compost evangelist, while not entirely a proponent of No Dig, says of compost that he did "not advocate digging it deeply into the ground. The best results I have obtained by its use have been on plots where it was kept reasonably near the surface."

Most bracing is his belief in the need to return organic matter from the city back to the countryside,

"For too many years townsmen and countrymen have tried to exist in a state of complete divorce the one from the other. Such a condition is wrong from every point of view. A campaign to educate the town-dwellers in their duty towards the land which is their heritage and from which they spring is long overdue."

The opening line touches a cosmic note in accord with my book, "The Garden". It starts, "Nature is one and indivisible..."

Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture

 

A clean version of the presentation I gave at Capel Manor College, Groundswell, Green Gathering, and The Organic Growers Gathering.

Winding things up

I recently harvested my tomato crop and turned it into chutney.

It seemed like a good moment to reflect on four years of growing.

Whole Earth Discipline

 

I’ve mentioned it before that one of the quirks of researching history is that you are usually only presented with information which draws you further into the past. Sometimes it is possible to be unaware of more recent events and discourse. This is how I belatedly encountered things such as the “Zig Zag Zen” book, a landmark retrospective survey of Psychedelics and Buddhism, and the phenomenon of Cuba’s organic agricultural revolution. And it’s always a surprise!

However, even as I went deep into the connection between the Whole Earth Catalog and radical agriculture, I was aware of the significance of Stewart Brand’s more recent ecological thinking, as well as his late sixties and early seventies activities which I chronicled. That’s because of Brand’s well-known support for nuclear power, and the influence his example of reframing ecological problems has lent to George Monbiot’s position on land sparing and lab meat. Furthermore, Brand’s example must have inspired Bill “Greenfinger” Gates’ own interventions.

Stewart Brand became famous in the sixties for his role at the Trips Festival (1966), and conceiving of the badge which asked, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” This prompted NASA to create just that. Brand was instrumental in setting up the Whole Earth Catalog to give his colleagues, who were heading back-to-the land, access to information.

Even before his more recent breaks with the traditional ecology movement, Brand had increasingly less sympathy with the back-to-the-land movement that he supported with the information in the Whole Earth Catalog. Although he frames this difference in absolute philosophical terms, I think it might be one more of temperament. I believe the urbane Brand simply felt more comfortable in the town, and doesn’t understand the perspective of people who profess to enjoy working the land. Rather than acknowledge the difference in that lifestyle choice, and come to terms with his own preferences, he may have sought to position himself as correct in his own choices. For all his apples, I suspect George Monbiot, who has been openly critical of what he has called “neo-peasant bullshit” might be another example of this. It seems it is harder to admit something is not your cup of tea than acknowledge that your chosen lifestyle is, on those terms, out of kilter.

OK, so this is a book review that’s 16 years late, but I think it’s important to circle back and examine the evolution of Brand’s thinking here, as one might comb one’s hair repeatedly, because I sense these locks are knotted, and the bearing on the evolution of our collective thought is evidently at stake.

Brand’s influential book “Whole Earth Discipline” (2009) introduced controversial ideas into the ecological debate. Rather than a Green manifesto, this was as he described it, a Turquoise one, responsible in no small respect for creating a turquoise sensibility. As much as I found myself disagreeing with it, it’s an interesting and thought-provoking read. There’s quite a lot of what Brand says that I don’t mind. Here are the big three topics in the book:

(1) That human society is much better and more efficiently served by living in cities.

I don’t particularly mind the idea that it is more ecological to live in cities. It is probably my own personal preference too. And I like the idea of greening-up cities also. It’s only one example but I remember as a child being driven endlessly around the countryside. Most people in the countryside drive everywhere, and all the time. However, that and other arguments against living in the country are largely to do with how it is currently arranged. People should be encouraged to go back to the land if they want to. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if more people were prepared to do it, and set about it intelligently like in Wales’s stringent One Planet Development framework, the evidence shows that within the context of biological agriculture it could greatly enhance productivity.

Tied up with this is the idea of land sparing – over land sharing. Brand prefers the idea of spared land in the form of wilderness areas (he uses the examples of the area around the Soviet reactor which melted down in Chernobyl, and the corridor between North and South Korea), as opposed to shared land (which “sparers” generally envision only as land farmed with industrial agricultural techniques). This is even enshrined at policy level in the UK where subsidies don’t benefit ecological agriculture; only either leaving land alone or farming it chemically. However, in direct conflict with his position on sparing land, Brand celebrates native population’s careful management, cultivation, and shepherding of nature. Here he cites the Indians of California. So, which is it?

There’s no getting away from the fact that agriculture is extractive, but well-managed it can increase biodiversity and, it is coherently argued, can even sequester carbon.

(2) That Nuclear power ought to be embraced by the green movement.

I don’t mind this so much either. It makes sense in the developed world. But not so much in the developing one. One thing that I didn’t feel was emphasised enough in “Whole Earth Discipline” was the fact that energy use needs to be radically reduced. Brand takes the perspective that society’s energy needs to be generated without elevating carbon dioxide with little thought of behaviour change. What’s missing here is David Holmgren’s idea of “Descent”, the necessity of everyone using less energy, and the benefits of that initially painful adjustment.

(3) That genetic engineering ought to be welcomed by Greens.

This is where I really diverge with his thinking. Brand thinks that Genetic Engineering is the natural bedfellow of organic agriculture. He sets about describing how plants are all already, by processes not involving gene splicing and the like, genetically engineered. He describes maize being cultivated from a Teosinte grass as a miracle. OK, the argument runs – that process took thousands of years – but nevertheless it was a miracle of genetic engineering achieved without CRISPR. Methods of creating cultivars without recourse to these techniques are already so sophisticated (noting recent innovations like Corteva’s drought-resistant wheat) that it is arguable that these gene processes are risky and basically unnecessary.

I don’t believe it’s any coincidence at all that GE crops are, like they were in the Green Revolution, strictly the bedfellows of industrial agriculture with its chemical fertilisers, herbicides, and massive destructive irrigation schemes. The problem here is the celebration of reductionist science over the strawman of purism. What we need to be celebrating is science which is mature, and therefore by definition holistic. Again, it comes down to confusing not shiny progressive science with luddite rusticism, but bad management with good.

---

There’s a lot to love about Brand’s book though. Obviously not the dreaded chemtrails, but some of the geo-engineering ideas sound, well, fun! Like many of the counterculture, Brand who started on his odyssey in the sixties fascinated by the American Indians, loves the idea of the Inca’s Terra Preta, today’s Biochar. He also cites John Latham’s idea to brighten the albedo of the earth by adding more water droplets to the stratocumulus clouds that cover a third of the oceans, and John Martin’s plans to seed the oceans with iron filings to increase phytoplankton which would die off and sequester carbon. No doubt people will be horrified by these latter two, but they felt OK to me.

I also remember vividly that my hero Masanobu Fukuoka had no problem at all with plants being grown in zones they had previously not been – and was therefore totally enchanted by the idea of Josh Donlan’s, which Brand cites, of introducing surrogate replacements of big mammals to the North American ecosystem: cheetahs, lions, and elephants. Bring it on!

Zig Zag Zen

 

My research for “Retreat” was pretty exhaustive, however one thing you find researching a particular era is that all the references within books and among the rest of the material (interviews, articles, documentaries etc) only relate to then-contemporary or historic writing. So while it’s natural that research will lead you further into the past, it’s harder to discover more recent things which might be relevant to you.

In writing “The Garden” the case in point was the Cuban urban organic growing revolution which happened in the early nineties with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with its horto intensivos and Organopónicos. It wasn’t that I missed it out of the book where it should have been included – it wasn’t countercultural as such, but the phenomenon was so fascinating within the context of “The Garden” that I had to double-take when I first came across it. I’m sure all the countercultural growers and farmers I interviewed would, in the nineties, have been incredibly excited about it. But no one ever mentioned it to me!

So, there are things that one misses out… And this book “Zig Zag Zen” first published in 2002, and then updated in 2015, was definitely one of them. It looks at the interface between Buddhism and psychedelics, most explicitly against the background of the counterculture. I read it with bated breath, nervous that I was going to have missed something significant out of my own history, and was genuinely relieved that I hadn’t. I had read Rick Fields’ book “How the Swans Came to the Lake” (1992) but Fields’ excellent and entertaining article “A High History of Buddhism in America” comtained within "Zig Zag Zen" is one of the neatest historical summaries I’ve read of the confluence.

 

Trungpa.

Throughout the book, there are a lot of mentions of Chögyam Trungpa which didn’t surprise me, but was nevertheless good to see. Someone I hadn’t come across was Neem Karoli Baba’s student, the controversial Lama Surya Das. L.S.D, geddit? If there’s one omission it would be him, but the beloved Bhagavan Das, who I did discuss and interview, is a more significant character from the same niche.

Besides Fields’, the other strong article was an interview with Terence McKenna. McKenna is a magnetic personality and a very powerful orator, but what I’ve read of his writing, “Food of the Gods” (1999) is nonsense. Maybe because this article is a transcribed interview with Allan Badiner (Zig Zag Zen’s compiler), and flows with McKenna’s diction, it’s much more coherent.

What might be the most commonly acknowledged role of psychedelics is as a waystation. Alan Watts puts it, “many of us who have experimented with psychedelic chemicals have left them behind, like the raft which you use to cross a river…” McKenna summarises his own position in the interview that, “Psychedelics give people the power to overcome habitual behaviours.” He wanted to see this combined with the compassion of Buddhism, “Buddhism and psychedelics are together probably the best hope we have for an antidote to egotism and materialism.”

I wrote “Retreat” in what was the summer of the psychedelic renaissance. Michael Pollen’s book “How to Change Your Mind” (2018), probably the high-watermark of the enthusiasm, came out somewhere in the middle of my research. If you’ve read it, you will know that my chunky little book pulls no punches in what is a brutal depiction of the aftermath of psychedelics in the sixties. The book could not have been much more negative about psychedelics, and especially the power-play around it.

I remember the distaste with which this presentation “Psilocybin & LSD: Lessons from the Counterculture” was received the first time I gave it to the Psychedelic Society. And at least two people who I had approached with “Retreat”, who I now notice are contributors to “Zig Zag Zen”, went from initial interest in “Retreat” to frostiness and anger upon reading it.

However, and I take no pleasure in this, in the five years since the book came out in 2020, when I haven’t been much preoccupied by psychedelics, there have been a depressing litany of abuse and scandals associated with them. There’s been a lot of coverage of this, and I don’t feel like adding to the censure, so google it if you are curious. The major culminating event might have been the FDA rejecting MAPS bid to legitimise MDMA-assisted therapy.

In retrospect, what’s cool about “Zig Zag Zen” is the surprisingly open platform it gives to a lot of psychedelic sceptics. There is an extensive refutation of the drugs’ importance in an interview with Esalen’s Michael Murphy (who is chaperoned by his friend George Leonard), and a very powerful essay by recovering marijuana addict China Galland, in which she concludes as she avoids an ayahuasca ceremony, “I did not go to the jungle.” My favourite essay, however, is by Zen Buddhist Brad Warner, who I have only just discovered, and, a fellow nerd, am greatly appreciating.

In “Retreat” I took the angle that it was the process of the subject’s descent from the etheric heights that mattered; what Jack Kornfield describes as “the laundry.” This grounding, or alignment, in the process of descent constitutes the real “learning”. These lessons are not impossible, but harder, to glean from the quick comedown of psychedelics. Whether more likely to be grasped coming down from the spiritual high, or harder to learn from the psychedelic experience, this lesson might be described as a more-willing readiness to accept existence for what it is – with less compulsion, even, to go clambering up further mountains: “I have seen the peaks, thank you. There is a great deal which needs accomplishing in the valley.”

…unlike the tourist who will comfortably get back into the cabin and be delivered again to the valley, for the mountaineer (like Jung for instance) the return journey is fraught. Gone is the adrenaline that swept him to the summit, his rations are exhausted, the sun has begun to set, and the weather has closed in. It is raining. He may have figured out the path to the top slowly over a long period of time from the comfort of the valley, possibly even trying a number of routes before finally reaching the peak. To avoid becoming a statistic, the mountaineer will need to rally all their human resources to find their way down in the dark alive.

Me “Retreat” p 105.

What I didn’t know writing that passage was that a study in 2017, by Dr Martin Faulhaber at the University of Innsbruck of mountain climbing in the Austrian Alps, revealed that the most common cause of accident when climbing is falling, and that 75% of falls happen on the descent.

Just like I did, Brad Warner used the same analogy of the trip being like a helicopter ride to the top of the mountain. But his angle is slightly different. He says:

To a mountain climber, the goal is not the moment of sitting on top enjoying the view. That’s just one small part of the experience. It may not even be the best part. To a mountain climber, every view, from every point on the mountain is significant and wonderful. People who think that the pinnacle of the experience is that moment of being right on the tippy-top, don’t understand the experience at all.

Brad Warner “Zig Zag Zen” p182.

Brad’s big takeaway is that what Buddhist practice is about: “Learning to wake up by yourself.” He argues that you can’t just take “medicine” to achieve that.

Jay Stevens (1953–2025)

 

Jay Stevens in his kitchen in Vermont in 2022.

For the past seven years, since 2018, my world has been dominated by work on the two books Retreat (2020) and The Garden (2025). There have been other projects during this time, the comic book TPM (2022) and my book about spirituality in alternative music, The “S” Word (2022), but these were essentially accompanying volumes to the big two.

Not everyone I met I ended up interviewing or being part of the fabric of these books: most notably, one particularly special person, Jay Stevens, who to my eternal sadness died of a heart attack with brutal abruptness this February 2025.

Storming Heaven.

I first contacted Jay out of the blue in 2018 when I was writing Retreat. I was searching for contacts, and wanted his advice. Jay’s book Storming Heaven (1988) is, without a shadow of a doubt, the very best book about LSD. I think it’s also one of the very best books ever. There can be only two or three books I have ever bothered to read twice, this is because, in its pages, Jay touched upon the fundamental nature of reality, on the very fabric of the universe itself. Jay was an incredibly perceptive, startlingly intelligent, and highly sensitive individual. And enchantingly modest to boot.

After giving me some excellent advice, we stayed in touch. Jay was passing through London on a trip to Europe in 2022, and we met for lunch on Old Street. I told him what I was working on as a sequel to Retreat, and Jay came up with some great insights that were helpful with The Garden, the most important of which was hipping me to the New Alchemy Institute and the Green Machines. I had never heard of them and their work. Jay, whose family had farmed for decades in Vermont, instantly understood how radical agriculture connected together with the counterculture when I pitched my idea to him. That was a massive encouragement to me, as was his very generous contribution of an endorsement to the book.

Yurt with Jay’s trailer loaded with books visible.

One of Jay’s collection of indigenous artwork.

When I was passing through Vermont in 2023 he put me up for a night in the yurt in the garden and regaled me with wonderful stories of Rudolf Steiner, his brush with Bernie Sanders, time spent with Stephen and Ina May Gaskin, and Vermont’s period as a rebel republic.

Moonlight in Vermont.

In the yurt.

In 2024, Jay and his lovely wife Sara came for dinner with us at home on Old Street, and it really felt that we now knew each other well. Jay and Mrs Ingram talked art history together. I was looking forward to many years of his sparkling company. That wasn’t to be.

Drumming at the Edge of Magic.

When I interviewed Dave Chapman of the Real Organic Project who is based just 15 minutes up the road from Jay in Vermont, he mentioned that his wife was a huge fan of Jay’s other notable book Drumming at the Edge of Magic (1990). Despite being a music nerd I had never read this. After learning of his death, when I had dried my tears, I resolved I would find a copy and see what I had been missing.

And damn, Stevens writes like an absolute angel here, too. Once again, the research is very deep. The contributions he martialled from Zakir Hussain, Olatunjii, and Airto Moiera combine so well with the Ethnomusicological information on drumming and shamanism, and the colourful touches of Mickey Hart’s own life. It is one of the great cosmic books about music, up there with David Toop’s Ocean of Sound (1995).

But of course, I was looking out for signs of my friend and his elegant turns of phrase. When I read the following, “The Yoruba say that anyone who does something so great that he or she can never be forgotten has become an Orisha.” – and I thought of Jay himself. It was very moving to me that the book’s epilogue is about Jay, who Mickey Hart refers to as “the last dancer” and “the prince of words.” May he rest in peace.

Munch’s Garden

   

Mrs. Ingram and Celyn Brazier’s “Munch is Missing” is a total delight, a veritable banquet. The work involved in creating these books is mind-blowing.

Commissioned by the MUNCH Museum in Oslo, Catherine went to exhaustive ends researching Munch and the cosmos which has woven itself around his art and ideas; even traveling to Norway to trace the artist’s steps.

She painstakingly devised these concepts and blocked out these layouts, which Brazier has rendered into exquisite and iridescent dioramas.

There’s way too much to mention, but I have a personal attachment to “Munch’s Garden.” Munch grew his own vegetables and canvassed for people to eat more veg.

Here at the first page is macrobiotic pioneer George Ohsawa eating a bowl of brown rice sitting atop a mushroom; beside him is vegetarian Sun Ra. There’s Paul and Linda with a friendly ram. Look at vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson… and attending one of Bergson’s lectures, George Bernard Shaw accompanied by one of the ladies with fruit laden hats who flocked to hear the great French philosopher.

There’s vegetarian Philip Glass, Chuck Close’s portrait of him in the style of Arcimboldo. Jane Goodall and Nico in a bananadrama. And Mahatma Gandhi!

And who is that hiding naked in the bushes?

Gravetye Manor

 

To visit William Robinson’s oval vegetable garden at Gravetye Manor, we had to eat an expensive lunch, because the hotel that runs the site doesn’t let people wander around otherwise.

I think that, probably without question, this is the most important historic vegetable garden in the UK. Robinson (1838-1935), who reacted against the artificiality and strictures [edit: and impracticality…] of pompous Victorian gardens, developed his idea of the “Wild Garden”.

And there was room in his vision for more than ornamental horticulture. Robinson loved trees, and with this oval vegetable garden he showed how important growing food was to him also. Think of him, therefore, as one of the great horticultural rebels alongside the likes of Masanobu Fukuoka and Eliot Coleman. The garden is kept in rude health by head gardener Tom Coward – and provides an abundance of vegetables for the hotel.