Strolling smacks of introspection

"It is becoming hard these days to justify the pleasures of simply 'going for a walk'. In a world of sponsored hikes and mass marathons, strolling smacks of introspection and an unhealthy lack of competitive drive. Ambling about with no badges of purposefulness (shell-suits and dogs are the favourites) you are looked on as a figure of fun or, worse, of danger. Children cross the road as you approach. Long-distance trekkers elbow you aside, a cissified obstacle not worthy of consideration. Even the physical act of walking is now being streamlined by the health industry. Going for a stroll, one of the most civilized of pleasures precisely because it can be indulged in purely for its own sake, is now expected to do something, either for you or the world." 
- Richard Mabey, A Walk Around the Block (1988)

[The picture of course shows writer and long distance walker Will Self, appropriately clad, making a walk work for him.]

Botany exercises the memory without improving the mind

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, June 2, 1778.

Dear Sir,

The standing objection to botany has always been, that it is a pursuit that amuses the fancy and exercises the memory, without improving the mind or advancing any real knowledge: and where the science is carried no farther than a mere systematic classification, the charge is but too true. But the botanist that is desirous of wiping off this aspersion should be by no means content with a list of names; he should study plants philosophically, should investigate the laws of vegetation, should examine the powers and virtues of efficacious herbs, should promote their cultivation; and graft the gardener, the planter, and the husbandman, on the phytologist. Not that system is by any means to be thrown aside; without system the field of nature would be a pathless wilderness: but system should be subservient to, not the main object of, pursuit.

Vegetation is highly worthy of our attention; and in itself is of the utmost consequence to mankind, and productive of many of the greatest comforts and elegancies of life. To plants we owe timber, bread, beer, honey, wine, oil, linen, cotton, etc., what not only strengthens our hearts, and exhilarates our spirits, but what secures from inclemencies of weather and adorns our persons. Man, in his true state of nature, seems to be subsisted by spontaneous vegetation: in middle climes, where grasses prevail, he mixes some animal food with the produce of the field and garden: and it is towards the polar extremes only that, like his kindred bears and wolves, he gorges himself with flesh alone, and is driven, to what hunger has never been known to compel the very beasts, to prey on his own species.* (* See the late Voyages to the South-seas.)

The productions of vegetation have had a vast influence on the commerce of nations, and have been the great promoters of navigation, as may be seen in the articles of sugar, tea, tobacco, opium, ginseng, betel, paper, etc. As every climate has its peculiar produce, our natural wants bring on a mutual intercourse; so that by means of trade each distant part is supplied with the growth of every latitude. But, without the knowledge of plants and their culture, we must have been content with our hips and haws, without enjoying the delicate fruits of India and the salutiferous drugs of Peru.

Instead of examining the minute distinctions of every various species of each obscure genus, the botanist should endeavour to make himself acquainted with those that are useful. You shall see a man readily ascertain every herb of the field, yet hardly know wheat from barley, or at least one sort of wheat or barley from another.

But of all sorts of vegetation the grasses seem to be most neglected; neither the farmer nor the grazier seem to distinguish the annual from the perennial, the hardy from the tender, nor the succulent and nutritive from the dry and juiceless.

The study of grasses would be of great consequence to a northerly and grazing kingdom. The botanist that could improve the sward of the district where he lived would be an useful member of society; to raise a thick turf on a naked soil would be worth volumes of systematic knowledge; and he would be the best commonwealth's man that could occasion the growth of 'two blades of grass where one alone was seen before.'

I am, etc.

An untypical letter from Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne (1789). Richard Mabey's biography paints White as an amiable country dumpling, a landlord with little land, a prospected vicar who never managed to become one, a man who arranged his financial security with a few miserly tricks: the portrait of a minor caricature in a Jane Austen novel. White travelled throughout Britain but in the end preferred to stay home, tend his garden and study the plants and birds around Selborne the village where he was born and where he died. The special contribution of his History is that he is the first one to dwell on the simple, mundane things in nature without apology and with complete relish. His book, he wrote only one, is reminding us that we do not see anything out of the ordinary, we already see so much. To use the phrase of Robert Walser.

Earlier posts on Richard Mabey include posts on his forage guide, and his journeys through wasteland ecology.

Food for Free and the foragers backpocket

OOHHH was my first response when this book arrived with the post: it really is small and ready to be put in your back pocket! It's tiny.

Food for Free was first published in 1972 by Richard Mabey, author of 'The Unofficial Countryside' (earlier) and it remains the absolute benchmark of wild food guides. It is totally sympathetic with its modest writing (and size) and the hearty simplicity of the information given. In 2006 Mabey wrote an article for the Guardian about the Great Forage Revival and in it reviews his own book as well, well recommended.   

Wild food require none of the attention demanded by garden plants and possess the additional attraction of having to be found. I think I would rate this as perhaps the most attractive single feature of wild food use. The satisfactions of cultivation are slow and measured. They are not at all like the excitement of raking through a rich bed of cockles, of suddenly discovering a clump of sweet cicely, of tracking down a bog myrtle by its smell alone.

The Unofficial Countryside

Through the many reviews of his new book I came across Richard Mabey's old book 'The Unofficial Countryside' (1973). These are Review Review for his new book, 'Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature',  and the title alone is enough to rouse our interest in Mabey, a London writer, forager and cryptoforester avant-la-lettre. The unofficial countryside is a bit of a crap name, because the areas he visits and writes about are clearly part of the city and it doesn't help either that Mabey is a birdwatcher: the annoying thing about birdwatchers is their habit of wanting to tell you about every blue tit and gold-crested ding-dong they have seen, even if it has no relevance at all to the overall story. It is probably the first book of its kind and many things Mabey writes have now become accepted; an admirable feat. But I have to say that I found it a slightly disappointing read. Perhaps I had too high hopes. Iain Sinclair re-reviewed it for The Guardian in May 2010.  

The philosophy and ethics of weed

To a gardener weeds are plant growing at the wrong place and/or the wrong time (nettles where once a sought after delicacy). To the cryptoforester weeds (as you call them) are a source of inspiration.


Peter Del Tredici is a Harvard biologist with a special interest in weeds and 'emergent forests', these are quotes from the Boston.com website.

The very characteristics that most people deride are ones that Del Tredici admires. He calls this area an “emergent forest,” an ecosystem formed spontaneously without the help of human hands. Those thin trees, for instance, are ailanthus trees, featured in the book “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” — planted originally for ornamental purposes, but now flourishing on their own because of their ability to grow by cloning themselves at the roots. “I don’t think anybody has planted an ailanthus tree in 100 years, yet it is the most common tree in most northeastern cities by a long shot,” Del Tredici says. The phragmitis reeds, which also fill the Back Bay Fens, are able to thrive in highly degraded wetlands like this one, where they help clean polluted water.

What some people see as a collection of undesirable plants, Del Tredici views as a valuable ecosystem that’s unique to the hostile habitat of the city.

and

“I consider ‘weed’ to be a politically incorrect term,” he says. “There is no biological definition of the term weed. It’s really a value judgment.”

If we saw this motley collection of plants differently, Del Tredici suggests, we’d realize they’re a kind of marvel: living things in the harsh and stressful urban landscape that don’t just survive there, but thrive. With no effort on our part, they fill the city with greenery, providing cleaner air and water, shade, and food and habitat for wildlife. They do it without expensive fertilizers and irrigation. It’s time, he suggests, that we learned to embrace them — to stop thinking of them only as weeds to uproot, and start considering what they have to offer.

English nature writer, forager, and crypto-forester avant-la-lettre Richard Mabey has devoted an entire book to weeds. The Guardian writes:

Professor Edward Salisbury, director of Kew from 1943-1956, once cultivated 300 plant species from the dirt he found in his trouser turn-ups. 

...

We may hate them, but there is no question that they succeed as they do partly through our efforts. Large areas of Florida are now under threat from paperbark trees introduced to the Everglades in order to drain the land and thus make it suitable for development. And as Mabey notes, the UK's three Most Wanted superweeds were all deliberately introduced to this country.

Giant hogweed, Indian balsam and Japanese knotweed were each brought to Britain in the mid-19th century as garden ornamentals. It didn't take long before giant hogweed went native, absconded from its original home in Buckingham Palace Gardens and colonised London's canal system. Knotweed went one step further, demonstrating a Hulk-like ability to rip through pavement slabs and muscle through brickwork. It's now considered such a threat that eradication programmes cost the taxpayer £150m a year.

Richard Mabey writes about weeds with the confident affection of someone discussing old friends – which many of these plants must now be. Back in 1972, he went for a walk from his office in London and happened upon what he called the "unofficial countryside": abandoned or forgotten scraps of the city in which plants and wildlife thrived. At the time his interest in those urban scraps was taken as no more than a hippy-ish novelty, but in the years since he took that first walk, the rest of the world has caught up with him. Urban planners have recently made the astounding discovery that plants and wildlife can get on with being beautiful and regenerative without any outside assistance. When weeds colonised an abandoned section of New York's high-rise railroad, the inhabitants of the Upper West Side were split between those who wanted the High Line demolished and those who liked looking out on a vagrant landscape of irises, daffodils and rogue Christmas trees. The preservationists won and the High Line reopened in 2009 as Manhattan's newest slice of urban parkland.