The twofold marriage of cow parsley and hogweed

Cow parsley and hogweed are two common wild plants native to England (though i believe giant hogweed was brought from America) you will find them quite easily along the edges of hedgerows, fields, woods. Right now as my fingers go tappity-tap on the keys cow parsley is out there, defining the fabulous wild weed surge of late spring with her umbrella of dainty white flowers standing atop her slender stem. I can see some right outside my window, cow parsley throngs the land so much its like a host of country maids heading out to the fields for picnics with a multitude of suitors! Cow parsley belongs to the same family as carrots, parsley, parsnip, fennel etc which all share the umbrella-like flowers and long roots. Its leaves are similar to carrot leaves, and possess a bitter-carroty smell to its root. Cow parsley can also be mistaken with hemlock, which grows in damp places and has rather suspicious pink-purple spots on its leaf stem; hemlock is poisonous and in ancient Greece Socrates was executed by the state of Athens with a dose of hemlock. If you snap a leaf off the plant and smell it, it has an unpleasant musty, chemical odour, a bit like industrial tubs of paint.
Cow parsley though is not poisonous, and benign towards humans. Her long root works through heavy soil to bring up nutrients otherwise locked to shallower rooted plants that might struggle to grow without her companionable nutrient-releasing aid.
Here's what Roaring Poet experienced of cow parsely:

Dainty feather leaves,
spring from soil, 
like fine fins of fishes. 
I could pick them, 
and sew them into coat sleeves, 
like lace. 
Picking them, 
they are like parsley leaves,
smell a bit of carrot, 
the leaves get bigger,
seem to overflow each other,
like water bursting out of the ground. 
Then when its time,
for the cows to come out,
you have begun,
to climb on a stalk,
as slender as a carrot,
waving in the wind by the field edge,
or another edge. 
The cows parsley pops out,
her umbrella of frothy flowers,
in merry buttercuppy May, 
like ranks of maids,
strolling out in the sun,
in their best linen smocks. 
Leading the way for the great weed wave,
of summertime, 
which is a lot of fun,
for cow parsley,
to be encouraging on,
with her aerial inspirations. 


Hogweed is also in the same family as cow parsley, and particularly inhabits ground that has been trodden a lot by animals and made hard for other plants to root in. Hogweed is distinctly heavy and coarse in character,    spreading its leaves over the ground in quite a dominating, 'i'm here doing my work' manner. It seems to like growing together with cow parsley, as though its more earthy double. Hogweed as its name suggests, has some connection with pigs and probably in the past it was seen growing where hogs had disturbed the ground or that hogs liked eating its leaves, as hens enjoy eating chickweed and fat hen.
Hogweed is quite bristly and flowers after cow parsley, though never really achieves the same slender heights as its counterpart. Neither are its flowers as lovely and memorable as cow parsley. If you are walking out in the fields and woods and encounter hogweed, it is usually in big rough clumps that will impede your way with their enormous shady leaves. The plant has the same thick-skinned nature as burdock, and reminds me of a group of old farm labourers hanging about having a chinwag (about the cow parsley maids in their white linen).
Here's some hogweed verse:

Cow parsleys brother or stouter sister, 
bristly leaves, 
thick as pig hide, 
likes the good earth, 
keeps spreading leaves,
that shade the ground,
like a pig standing over it. 
But Mr.Hogweed prefers to be in company of cow parsley, 
all heavy and dark, 
the presence of her, 
fluting and lightly leaves,
cheers him up. 
He's a tough often,
not too good at being gentle soul, 
if you risk the muscle-yank, 
of digging him up,
hogweed will dig,
himself deeper,
down with a root,
that sticks sodwise,
a swollen thumb. 
Hogs I believe are the only things alive,
that can persuade him to shift; 
he's so stuck in Mr.Hogweed. 
He gets all fixated, 
on bristly stems, 
and gloomy great leaves,
that are kind of jaggedy. 
His flowers,
are like cow parsley, 
he's trying to understand her loveliness, 
but really his flowers,
are like his leaves; 
heavy as mud,
and his root, 
fat as a fevered gland. 
Its into summer,
by then, 
the flowers around,
him are getting on or dying off: 
Mr.Hogweed comes late to the party everytime. 

Roaring Poet will post some pictures soon of the plants, otherwise go and seek them in the open field

Badger medicine

This is photograph I took several years ago in Stroud from where I live up Rodborough Hill. I still remember my great delight at the experience of actually bumping into badgers in the street around the late hours; the hairy bulky bumpkins caught having a nosey about, and then charging off like small-bears down the road when I came their blunt claws going scratch-scratch on the tarmac. I spotted this badger one morning coming down from the house opposite, and felt rather privileged at the thought that I alone may have only seen this strange, woodland character poking about with a generally easy air. Before I came to Stroud I had had few live encounters with badgers, and certainly none in my street in Bath. I knew these strange and hairy striped beasts were out there in the woods but other than that merely cerebral knowledge, I had yet to know how they were in the flesh. Today as I go tappity-tappity on these keyboard keys in the English countryside I am quite aware of the whole pie happening with the badger cull; with half the public on one side protesting against it, the government saying the badgers need to kept under control because of bovine TB, and farmers inbetween supporting the cull or either vaccinations. Now the government is running trial culls in West Somerset and West Gloucestershire.
Badgers are among the nearly exhaustive list of other-than-human victims over the world who are being targeted, and framed as some kind of pest to the good running order of civilization. In Borneo and Sumatra where the palm oil plantations of pure evil are levelling the rainforests for temporary profiteering, orang-utans suffer as the plantations encroach on their habitat and the dispossessed apes are turned into 'vermin' by the industry whose imperative is to expand and eliminate: or squash the ecosystem, swell the business.
The persecution of badgers here in England may seem on another scale to the murder of orang-utans in palm oil plantations on the otherside of the world, but I don't think it is. Badgers, along with all other animals who struggle to exist within the imposed monocultures and building developments, are not really being understood as sentient beings with their own needs to shelter, food, and space. The kind of shelter, food and space all animals have in England is of a marginalised sort, with farmland and urban areas often fragmenting wild areas into pockets that just escape being carved up. For the sake of animals and diversity, we should create 'wild belts' that connect across whole regions as a series of habitats where animals can thrive. Another point is that modern agriculture is being thought of as though it exists outside the surrounding ecology, and that if any problems occur within its operations (such as bovine TB) they have to come from outside the farming system (I.e the surrounding ecology) and not within its own functions which are accepted somehow as efficient and faultless.
Possibly some badgers are giving the cows bovine TB, but why then are we having to rear so many cows on the land that a disease epidemic among them becomes a nations agricultural dilemma! I'm aware we live in a time where the consumption of meat is very high among the population. We demand meat from our farmers like kids milking their parents for more and more treats to keep them happy, without realising the parents have to go out and earn a living so they can buy you those 'treats'. With this pressure from consumers and the market for more and cheaper from the producers, standards go down and everybody is caught in an insane business of churning out as fast as possible the stuff wanted at the other end of the line.
The cows caught in this industrial consumerist diarrhoea, are like all the products that land on a supermarket shelf doubtlessly not the strongest or healthiest farm animals; even if they have had a decent life the pervasive pressure on them to yield enough for the supermarkets to keep the farmer contracted, must surely reduce their capacity to resist disease. Like the soil we are intensively farming and monoculturally cropping today the farm animals likewise trapped inbetween the market and consumer, must be experiencing a diminishing of their whole health as they are being made to give beyond what naturally they can.
The badgers cannot be blamed as though they are purposefully spreading disease to the cows. Because the situation has been removed from the bigger picture, from the labyrinth of life: why is everything, including us, suffering today from so much disease, disorder and diminishing of vitality!
Ok folks lets have some badger medicine, poetry from the Roaring Poet:
       
          Badger Ballad

        Woodland kinfolk.   
        
        Their earth houses,
        loam rubbed bare,
        low slung rises, 
        among the ramsons.
        
        wearing thick cloak of fur, 
        stripe flashes whitish from eyes,
        like an arrow across flanks. 
        
        Keeping snout straight ahead, 
         rolls a hefty shadow; 
         gruffly, tough 
         loam shuttler.
         
         Tree's assured by his presence, 
          down among roots, 
          an extended family; 
           grooming each other
           raising young,
          bickering for space,
          biting each other to move out the way. 

         Not liking to be disturbed,
         the night is perturbed by,
          wierd bawlings and babels 
          among bins: 
          fierce eyes rove hungry. 

          eyes that know the treasures, 
          of streets waiting for the rubbish collection.
          
         Behind the scenes, 
         always an extended family; 
         loving,
         bickering, 
         biting off fleas,
         beneath the roots of trees.

What is a fool?
Words associated with being 'foolish' like 'silly' has its etymological roots in 'seely' or 'holy' or 'sacred'. Though fool apparently derives from 'follis' Latin for a wind-bag! Other words connected with the fool like 'jest' as in a 'jester' come from the meaning of 'a story or deeds' or 'doings'. The image of the fool is often of a ragtaggle figure wandering astray from the crowd, or a harlequin clad jester type, masked and with a stick. The fool seems to behave in a way that brings great hilarity, often because he has just shown his audience what is not allowed or suppressed among the collective populous. The way he has shown this is exaggerated and 'over the top'; the fool is releasing to the surface what is unconscious to most people in society, he is unblocking as it were the stopper in the collective mind that has been put there to stop people really seeing the kind of society they are existing within. The people though unblock it with their laughter as the fool is just acting as the valve switching on their consciousness, which has become stilted up with what society has impressed upon them through education, mass media, clothes and food. Society has people inhabiting what it is imprinted on our minds as to how we should be, act and show ourselves to others as that it is up to the fool to be their light-bulb to show them the shadows behind the scenes. He is deliberately acting out his seeming madness to reflect back to people what they are doing. The fool finds it unbearably hilarious to see all these people unaware of their behaviour so he has no choice but to act it out to them, to show them their foolishness. He is often the single figure in society who can also mock its rulers and how they rule; they will tolerate it to a degree because the fool comes forth from an order of existence they have no power over. I talk of where the fool walks. He has gone astray from the path and wandered over the borders of accepted reality/the status quo/the mundane and into the realms of imagination/the Other/ the fantastic kingdom. It is a symbolic reality he has been visitor to and become citizen of. This place is a bit like having a walk in the woods: you are still in the world but its façade has been hidden and you are forced to think differently with nothing familiar around you anymore. From the symbolic reality the fool comes back to ours and he brings special powers to change what he perceives in the world with his wit, imagination and humour.
As well as this the fool will have learnt humility. Humility is another wisdom the rulers see the fool possesses and they fear him because of it though they will not show this. He has learnt humbleness through experiencing there are actual limits to all human endeavours; that we cannot know everything, that we cannot win every battle, that we may lose the one we love, that we will ultimately go back to the soil. Through learning humbleness, the fool breaks down into laughter when he returns home to see all these men and women frantically milling about attempting to stop and control the inevitable majesty of being alive. Innocence comes in the bundle with the fool figure as well. It is the innocence of carrying your own child with its wide open mind that does not judge or presume, into adulthood; it is the innocence of allowing mistakes to be made, of being not over cautious, and permitting the great learning of life to seep ever deeper into ones core. When we think of innocence as this simplified concept of a person being rather daft, unworldly, and suggestible this is to be blind to its true power and meaning. The fool takes innocence with him in his bundle and goes walking on...straight over the cliff! That's another thing, the fool doesn't fear and innocence has a lot to do with being not controlled by fear and steered instead by joy and playfulness.
Can we see now behind the words 'holy fool'? it say's the 'sacred one who carries innocence' perhaps, but then the fool would probably laugh now at my attempt to define his gift and proceed to shake up, take apart, juggle and play about with the words into a silly soup.