Plant Sentience and Stevie Wonder: The secret life of plants (1979)

With a experimental-funk Stevie Wonder soundtrack, this documentary is based on the 1973 book of the same name. 'The Secret life of Plants' explores way-out concepts and entertaining pseudo-science such as plant sentience (plants can feel, man!) orgone accumulation (plants can focus energy, man!) and plant emotions. Yes, plant emotions. Great timelapse photography and the film's interesting alternative take on our green leafy friends make this worth a watch.





Was Roald Dahl onto something when he wrote 'The Sound Machine'?

His 1949 tale of a man who invents a machine that can hear roses shreiking as they're cut and trees groaning as they're felled?

Of cabbages and kings

Who would of thought that allotments, those gentle havens of giant cabbage growing, would have an equally thrilling and horrifying history? It involves violent oppression of the poor, riots, revolts, bloodshed, deception and theft from the vulnerable. It is a story with many heroes, and an equal number of villains in surprisingly high places.

For anyone interested in knowing more, this fascinating book is well worth a read:

Of Cabbages and Kings: The History of Allotments by Caroline Foley

Going back to well before the 'dig for victory' campaigns of the 2nd world war, it goes right back to pre-Norman invasion times, and looks at the way society was structured to allow everybody, even the poorest members of society, access to enough land to live, grow fruit, veg, and cereals, keep animals and feed themselves and their families. There were large swathes of common land, belonging to everybody, where people could graze their animals and grow crops. 

       Then, already wealthy landowners started to petition parliament to let them enclose the common land and claim it for themselves. The Enclosure (or Inclosure) act of 1773 (which still stands today) allowed these toffs to implement a wholesale land-grab, booting the poor subsistence farmers from the land and taking away their means of existence. This ushered in dark, difficult times for the poor folk who depended on subsistence farming, leading to the horrors of the Victorian workhouse as peasants became paupers and no longer had the means to feed themselves.

        The book follows uprisings, protests and riots spawned by the theft of the land, and the heroes who kicked against the degredation of the poorest; from the enigmatic figure of 'captain pouch', to Winstanley and the Levellers sowing carrots on the enclosed land (his house was burnt down by the authorities for this heinous offence).

       Luckily, there were a number of philanthropists who recognised that people who could feed themselves would be less likely to cause problems, so land was donated to be used for allotments. and in 1908 it was made law that councils had to provide allotments if there was a demand for them. 

        This was all BEFORE allotments helped us win two world wars, and became a valuable tool in the fight against malnutrition, the current dominance of a processed junkfood diet, and an antidote to the stress of modern life.

        The book really highlights the incredible value of allotments, how hard the fight was fought for them, and how precious they are. 

Good reads:

This week I've been enjoying this book:
My Green City



 A great roundup of urban interventions and projects with a horticultural theme, several of which I've already featured on this blog.

I've also tracked down this interesting magazine;

 

It's currently on issue 7, which features the asparagus fern, eco-houseboats in Amsterdam, the Shunkaen bonsai museum, samphire, Las Pozas garden in the Mexican jungle, and a look at the symbolism of greenery in the Antonioni film 'Blow-up', amongst other things. 





Horror in the the garden (a literary look)

First up; a poem:

Everything In The Garden Is Lovely by Alasdair Aston

Even the fat slug

That drags its belly nightly

Over dank paving

And into the heart of the lettuce

Is lovely.

And the seething myriads in the ant-hill

Are lovely.

The stealthy, disruptive mole,

The grubbing, wet-nosed hedgehog

Are lovely.

And the millipede,

The centipede,

The sexually reproductive woodlouse

Are lovely.

The dung fly and the dung beetle

Are double lovely.

The burying beetle, the emmet,

The devil’s coach-horse, the dor

Are lovely.

Bean blight, leaf scab, club root,

Rose canker, cuckoo spit, wireworm

Cutworm, carrot fly, codlin,

Woolly aphis, apple weevil,

Leaf curl, algae,

Big bud, brown spot,

Rust, smut and mildew

Are all of them lovely.

And the flowers are lovely, too-

Nightshade, broomrape, henbane,

Love-lies bleeding and dead-men’s fingers,

Viper’s bugloss, red hot poker,

Wormwood, woundwort, rue.

And the gardener himself is lovely-

With one eye on the stable clock

And the other on lovely nothing,

Flat on his back where he fell.

The lovely flies walk in his lovely mouth.

Everything in the garden is lovely.

Alasdair Aston 1975

And secondly, a look at a greenhouse full of curiosities from 1884:

Against Nature (A Rebours), by J.-K. Huysmans

He had done with artificial flowers aping the true; he wanted natural flowers imitating the false...The gardeners unloaded from their vans a collection of Caladiums whose swollen, hairy stalks carried enormous leaves, shaped like a heart; while keeping a general look of kinship, they were every one different.

They included some extraordinary specimens,--some rosy-red, like the Virginale which seemed cut out in glazed cloth, in shiny court-plaster; some all white, like the Albane, that looked as if made of the semi-transparent membrane that lines an ox's ribs, or the diaphanous film of a pig's bladder. Others again, especially the one called Madame Maine, mimicked zinc, parodied pieces of stencilled metal coloured emperor-green, blotched with drops of oil paint, streaks of red-lead and ceruse: these,--the Bosphorus was an example,--gave the illusion of starched calico, spotted with crimson and myrtle-green; those, the Aurora Borealis for instance, had broad leaves the colour of raw meat, intersected by striations of a darker red and purplish threads, leaves that seemed swollen and sweating with dark liquor and blood.

This plant, the Aurora Borealis, and the Albane between them displayed the two opposite poles of constitution, the former bursting with apoplexy, the latter pallid with bloodlessness...

Read the rest of the contents of the ghastly glasshouse here....

http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/jkh/r08.html

Begonias from Leicester Botanic Gardens.