A Spring in Time

It takes a chest infection and a week of sitting around indoors to appreciate fully how quickly the spring is moving. Even before I got sick, the world around here was golden, with primroses dotting the banks and vast drifts of daffodils and celandines everywhere I looked. The marsh marigold beside our back door was bursting with thick buds, the first violets were appearing and the first few white flowers of stitchwort were starting to emerge in the rapidly-greening hedgerows.

Just one week later and the marsh marigold is now a mass of glorious flowers. Stitchwort numbers have doubled, the violets have trebled, there are already wild strawberry flowers appearing. Scurvy grass is suddenly flowering where last week there were just glossy green leaves: the wild garlic leaves are well and truly up and the dog’s mercury now has its sprays of flowers—those humble little things too tiny for the naked eye to register as such but flowers, nonetheless.

Ten days ago there were no chiffchaffs; on today’s walk I encountered eight of them, singing lustily from eight different trees spread evenly across my three-mile route. I fancied, in my anthropomorphic way, that they might be singing about how glad they are to be back: glad to have left the south before it hots up too much: glad to have made the journey safely back from the macchia to these English woods of oak and ash, beech and sycamore. There are other warblers again too now, singing from the about-to-leaf-out branches of the goat willows. And the robins, who never venture far but spend their winters quietly alongside us, are well into their glorious annual songfest now.

Soon there will be bluebells—their leaves are now well up. And today I searched for a hint of the wild orchids. No leaves yet except in that certain place in a nearby bank where I knew one would have already emerged. Why that plant is so far ahead of the others I’ll never know but it always is. And when I parted the ferns and peered down into the tangle of undergrowth there it was, sure enough, its exotic-looking spotted leaves already in position, patiently awaiting the flower spike that always comes.

In the worldview of many indigenous people, such as Native Americans and Australian aborigines, time is perceived not as a linear progression but as cyclical, with patterns that appear, disappear, reappear. Living with that worldview also involves living with a sense of responsibility for maintaining balance and harmony. It comes with a feeling of deep embeddedness, a knowing that we humans, as one species among millions, are part of the very fabric of the Earth. As part of the Earth, we can never be separated from it. Thus it behoves us to take care of whatever other parts of it we come into contact with, whether directly or indirectly. For if we harm the Earth in any way at all, we are harming ourselves. 

Being outside, walking these green lanes in the fullness of spring, I find myself remembering other springs, just like this one. As I walk, springs past present and future merge together seamlessly and just for a few precious moments I know what it is to live in cyclical time. These celandines, as they fade and reappear, shining golden again in the sun, year after year, are eternal celandines. They are the celandines of my English Dreamtime. There is only one timeless spring, a pattern that appears, disappears, reappears in endless celebration of the life force. There is just one chiffchaff, a bird who was and is and always will be, singing those two joyful notes again and again from the top of the tallest tree.


(Chiffchaff photo by Andreas Trepte (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Behind the Scenes

A few years ago, Big Pharma’s push to have everyone taking cholesterol-lowering statins was starting to make news all over the place. See for example this article in the New York Times from 2008.

More recently, there has been more and more news emerging about the downside of ingesting these drugs. More and more warnings against starting on them. More research into the dangers. I was reading about this, often, in the ‘natural health’ magazines. But following the recent publication of two scholarly articles about the dangers of statins in the hallowed columns of the British Medical Journal, the pushback has started in earnest.

A report in the BBC today says that: “A leading researcher on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs has accused critics of misleading the public about the dangers of taking them.

Prof Sir Rory Collins said two critical articles published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) were flawed. But BMJ editor Dr Fiona Godlee said they were well researched. The drugs are already offered to about seven million people in the UK who have a one-in-five chance of heart disease in the next decade. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) says the scope for offering this treatment should be widened to people with as low as a one in 10 or 10% risk to save more lives. Its recommendation follows a study which was overseen by Professor Collins' team at Oxford University. Prof Collins criticised articles in the BMJ by John Abramson from Harvard medical school, and Aseem Malhotra, a UK cardiologist, who both claimed statins caused harmful side effects and did not reduce mortality.”

Professor Rory Collins is the lead investigator of the Heart Protection Study - the largest trial in the world of cholesterol-lowering therapy. According to the official press release, the funding of £21 million for the study was provided by the UK's Medical Research Council (MRC), the British Heart Foundation (BHF), and the pharmaceutical companies Merck & Co. Inc. and Roche Vitamins Ltd.

The Medical Research Council website tells me that: “Alignment with industry remains at the heart of the MRC's strategy and delivery plans and there is continued commitment to develop and sustain close and productive collaborations with companies in the UK. …The MRC has promoted partnerships with more than 500 companies, ranging from the large pharmaceutical companies to small and medium sized healthcare companies. To date, collaborative efforts have resulted in the development of 518 products and interventions, with 23 of these currently in wide-scale adoption.”

Oh yes, the Heart Protection Study press release is at great pains to point out that “The study was, however, designed, conducted and analysed entirely independently of all funding sources by the Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) of Oxford University.” Independently? One of the co-directors of the CTSU is Prof Sir Rory Collins. And the CTSU also gets some of its core funding from the Medical Research Council, (and some from Cancer Research UK, which also goes in for ‘corporate partnerships’)

And you still think Big Pharma isn’t pulling the strings?

My New Copper Trowel

My new copper trowel arrived in the mail this morning.

It is truly a thing of beauty. When I unwrapped the parcel and took it out, it positively glowed. As I held it in my hand and admired it, it seemed almost a shame to put it into the ground.

We already had a trowel like this that we bought several years ago. But since we have two gardens—the one next to our cottage and an ‘allotment’ down the lane, in our neighbour’s field—only one of us at a time could use it. So last week, we made the big decision to buy a second one. At £30 for a small trowel, this was no small decision. These trowels are guaranteed for 25 years and in 25 years from now I shall be 102. It would be nice to think that I shall still be out there messing about in the garden at 102, but I think it is a fair bet that this trowel is going to outlast me by decades. But, as the poet said, ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ And now we are a two copper trowel family.

The Austrian engineer, forester and wise elder Viktor Schauberger, best known for his discoveries of the energetic properties of water and his design of beautiful, functional flowforms, also did research into the use of copper in gardening tools. He came to the conclusion that cultivating the soil with copper implements rather than steel ones would be more beneficial to the Earth and lead to healthier plants. In his writings, he listed several reasons for this.

§                Minute amounts of copper create the conditions for beneficial micro-organisms

§                Copper tools penetrate the soil easily. Copper has a low coefficient of friction, therefore there is less tendency for clay to cling to the tool

§                Copper is not magnetic so it does not disrupt the electrical fields in the soil

§                Copper tools be kept sharp with a whetstone, file or by peening (hammering the edge against a steel anvil)

You can read a whole lot more about this concept—and about Schauberger—here

The other thing about the use of copper tools in the garden is that it is said to deter slugs. And here in our damp corner of south-west England, that is certainly a plus.

I carried my shiny new trowel up to the garden and I knelt down and stuck it in the soil. Kind of reverently. But isn't that how gardening should always be? Reverent?