Dark Mountain mead

Today is publication day for the long awaited Dark Mountain Issue 8 - our first themed book and paperback. Titled Techne it is a wide-ranging collection of essays, reflections and maker guides on all aspects of technology and tools.Tonight we launch at the /i’klectik/ studios in Lambeth where I am giving a slideshow of some of the artworks and photographs in this densely illustrated volume, and Mark is giving a demo on how to make a wild autumn mead. As well as co-editing the book I have written two of its pieces. Here is the first, a short practical one (the second Wayland and the Futuremakers will come later). 

This is a mead made for a talk about Dark Mountain at the 2 Degrees Festival at Toynbee Studios, Whitechapel, last June. My fellow editor Steve Wheeler and I had been invited to present our talk without any technology or power, as part of a ‘de-industrialising‘ workshop called ‘Breakdown breakdown’, organised by the artist and activist Brett Bloom. I took a jar of mead along as part of the performance.

Honey and water infused by botanicals make the simplest, most off-grid, hands-on, archaic, indigenous drink you can find anywhere. You can conjure mead elixirs from any fruit or leaves or roots, depending on your intent or sense of adventure. Fragrant elderflowers, bitter dandelion roots, birch bark, hawthorn berries; the mead circles of rural Tennessee, according to master fermenter Sandor Ellix Katz, make them with just about with anything. Ours had a fruity theme: conference pear, lemon balm, apple mint, lime blossom honey. The key ingredient in mead is raw honey. The honey has to be non-pasteurised, so it contains the wild yeasts that make fermentation happen.
 

Midway through the presentation, just after Steve had whirled about the circle of people, reading from his Dark Mountain piece, Ragnanok, about modern warrior training in Sweden, I passed the mead around to see if anyone could guess what it was. No one did, although a girl from Finland did say it reminded her of something her people made with raisins. 

‘Well, if you remember your Nordic mythology,’ I said, ‘you’ll know that when Odin and his sky warriors weren’t preparing for the Last Battle, they were drinking mead!’

The first time I encountered mead, I was investigating plant medicine in Oxford. One night, after drinking a cup, I dreamed my head was covered in bees. It was intense. The second time was at an editorial meeting in London. Six of us had been running a newspaper against the odds and were closing shop after three years. We sat in a circle, feeling The End drawing nigh, when the managing editor exclaimed, ‘Let’s have some mead!’ and brandished a Kilner jar containing an elixir of rose petals, redcurrants and windfallen cherry plums. Five minutes later we were all falling about laughing. I thought I was going to burst with happiness. 

‘It might be the end of the world as we know it,’ I declared to the audience. ‘but at least we can have a good time! 

INGREDIENTS:

1 handful each of mint and lemon balm leaves, or seasonal edible flowers and leaves
500ml of pure spring water (local if possible)
1 pear (organic), chopped (or any unsprayed seasonal wild or garden fruit
½ jar of raw honey (small local producers rarely process their honey)
1litre Kilner jar

METHOD: Pick a good handful of lemon balm and mint leaves from a garden or unpolluted location, and make them into a strong tea with some of the water (just off the boil).  Let it cool. Dissolve the honey with some of the cooled tea in the Kilner jar, then add all the rest of the ingredients, plus several fresh lemon balm leaves.

Leave the jar somewhere warmish and visible. Every day take up a wooden spoon and swirl the mixture briskly anti-clockwise and then clockwise. It doesn’t matter if you keep the jar open or closed, but if you close it you need to ‘burp’ the jar every day. It will make a satisfying hiss as the CO2 escapes and froth vigorously. Each day the mead will look different. The colour and fragrance will change. Transformation is happening!

After about 5-7 days it is ready to drink – though you can bottle it once the fermented process is complete and keep it for years. It is particularly delicious mixed with wine, fruit cordial, apple juice and/or sparkling spring water.

 All the ingre- dients in this mead are traditional herbs for relaxing and cheering you up. Contrary to expec- tation, facing the end of the world as we know it can be a cheerful thing, as every attempt to deny the situation, or to keep things going against the odds, disappears. It opens up a space you didn’t think was there. Suddenly you can see what or who was around you all the time, but you were too fraught to notice. 

The alchemical mead jar at the centre of the talk was a kind of metaphor for the Dark Mountain Project. I wanted to show hown if you gather some creative uncivilised ingredients (people) together, they can made a heady, healing and joyful brew. What is happening in that Kilner jar is the magic and medicine of fermentation -  communities of microorganisms working together, exchanging material, creating new forms, making life happen. All the active ingredients in honey are dormant until you mix them with water, and then everything wakes up. The yeasts that live on the surface of leaves and the skins of fruit add to the live action and flavour. The sweet nectar of flowers gathered and processed by millions of bees feeds them, and then us. Rewilding in a jar. 

Sip, share and enjoy!

END NOTE: Since writing this piece I have made fruity and foraged mead elixirs through several summers, beginning with strawberry, rhubarb and rose in June and ending with damsons, crab apple and sea buckthorn berries in September. Instead of making a tea of leaves as in the above recipe, I add more fruit and flowers directly into the honey-infused water. I sieve the fruit usually after a week and keep the mead in the fridge where it continues to ferment, though at a slower pace. Three of the best mixes are wild cherry and meadowsweet, gooseberry and elderflower, and blackcurrant and fennel. A great way to enjoy the top half of the year!

 Images: front cover of Dark Mountain 8 designed by Andy Garside; a late summer mead with cherry plums, rowan berries, yarrow flowers and mallow (Mark Watson); Mark in action at recent Raw Food and Drink demo at Giddens & Thompon's Bungay (photo by Josiah Meldrum)

ARCHIVE: All Hail Great Spring!

I wrote this post two years ago at Spring Equinox at our local hotel (we were off-line in those days). Spring was late that year and may well be in 2013. However when Mark and I made our annual pilgrimage to Dunwich Woods the snowdrops and the lilies were as lovely and vibrant as ever. Even though the day was cold and grey, as it had been all February, the new season was still round the corner. Woodpeckers drumming out the trees, jackdaws eyeing up chimneys, Whatever the weather, the wild flowers are still emerging in their glory. 

Gotta remind ourselves of why we are here I said . . . .
 

It seemed like it would never come. For months the land was hard and sere and all my attention seemed to be focussed on getting from place to place, from day to day. Even Malcolm shook his head about the lateness of it, when we went to collect our vegetables. "There’s just no sun," he said. "Nothing is growing." Then today we got up at sunrise and walked down the lane and realised winter had released us. Spring was finally here. The air was soft and vibrant. The earth felt near, as if every branch had come alive, buds ready to burst. We sat beneath an oak and breathed in the morning – blackbird singing high in the boughs, hazels dripping with golden catkins. Tapping of woodpeckers, mew of a buzzard above our heads.

After five months of watching the temperature gauge hover around freezing, it had suddenly risen six degrees. Six degrees makes a difference when you are living without central heating. Nine degrees means your bones stop aching, you no longer are terminally attached to your hot bottle, living in a cocoon of cardigans, kindling, soup and hot tea. You are no longer focussed inward, you are looking out towards the horizon, the room is full of unexpected light and air. Coming back from Norwich last week after a hard day’s work the sun burst through the clouds that had enclosed us in a grey helmet it seemed for weeks. The alders shone purple along the riverbanks and in the centre of each ploughed field there crouched a familiar form:

"I wonder why are there so many hares", I said to Mark.
"It’s March", he replied sanguinely.

Late Spring, cold spring. Is this climate change or just English weather?


One thing I know, we normally greet the snowdrops in Dunwich Wood at the beginning of February and this year it was the middle of March. We sat as we always do on a fallen trunk and listened to the soft inrolling sea against the cliffs and the birdsong amongst the yew trees, immersed in the quietude of white flowers.

It’s one of those moments you take in with your whole body – eyes, hands, feet, ears. The scent of rain and salt and sweet nectar, the hairiness of bark, the stillness and high vibration of the flowers. Spokesman for the wild places, Edward Abbey once wrote to all the environmentalists who had been inspired by his radical texts (Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang) to take action on behalf of the earth. Take time, he said, to go up in to the mountains and remind yourself why you are putting yourself on the line.

It’s good advice because with all the talking about feeding the world and energy reduction, about social change and behaviour change, all those hundreds of emails and newspaper headlines taking up your attention, you can forget why you are in Transition in the first place and what it means to be alive on the earth. In winter, summer or spring.

Sometimes I dream of a world where we can walk nobly, without shame, on this planet. It’s a future I hold in my heart, ready, like a leaf, to unfurl:

Happily with abundant plants may I walk.
Happily on a road of pollen may I walk
Being as it used to be long ago may I walk.

May it be beautiful before me.
May it be beautiful behind me,
May it be beautiful below me.
May it be beauitful above me.
May it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty is it finished.
In beauty it is finished.



Words from a traditional Dine (Navajo) Chant; Snowdrops and Mark in Dunwich Wood, purple crocus outside my door

Low Carbon Cookbook - the foragers

One of the greatest gifts of Transition is rediscovering the simple joys of doing seasonal things together - cooking, cycling, swimming in the sea, having a picnic. They bring sense and meaning into everything we do. Nothing though is quite as delightful and satisfying as foraging - going out into the wild territories and finding stuff to bring home and eat. This Spring the cookbook was all about leaves and energising wild salads, the Summer about flowers and refreshing drinks, but as Autumn stormed in our focus switched to the fruits of the hedgerows. We set out into the lanes and commons collecting berries, nuts and roots.

In Sustainable Bungay we served foraged blackberries at our Happy Mondays Mexican fiesta and talked about Autumn Berry tonics made with sea buckthorn, elderberries and rosehips at our September Plants for Life workshop.

Our wild kitchen discovery of 2012 has been hawthorn leather. Here is Mark's first sculptural attempt. The second batch sweetened with apple worked a treat. Medicine for the heart and stomach.

Nothing, however, beats mushrooming.

This Sunday Josiah, Nick, Janet, Mark and I set out at sunrise to Outney Common in search of breakfast. It was fairly slim pickings but a great morning's foray. We found oak milk caps under the trees and parasols along the path, alongside ghosts of the summer meadowsweet and a bright blue patch of devils' scabious. The river Waveney winds through the dry and wet territory of the common, like a slow and friendly snake. One of the best swimming holes in the valley is down here.

"Usually you find the best mushrooms at the last minute," said Josiah as we crossed the footbridge home by the massive distribution centre of Clay's printing works. And true to form we did. There on the green under the lime trees were several fairy rings and two cracked boletes. Oh, and a sign saying Help Yourself to windfall cox apples. Janet filled her basket.

This weekend Nick will be showing Low Carbon cooks from Norwich and Bungay how to make fruit wines and root beers. He's planning to demonstrate his famous late raspberry wine in three stages and also how to start off a dandelion and burdock beer. Stay tuned for the write up next week.

Meanwhile if you would like to join the TN blog team, or come and celebrate our third birthday tomorrow with us and discuss the future, do swing by the Bicycle Cafe at 6.30pm. Come and have a dance too at the Keir Hardie Hall, starting at 8pm. Hope to see you there!

A School of Apples

At Green Drinks we are looking at a map. It's no ordinary map of roads and houses and municipal buildings. It's a map of a community orchard, showing 100 fruit trees - apple, pear, quince, plum, cherry, damson, medlar - that were planted two years ago in the village of St James in Suffolk. Rob Parfitt who helped create the orchard is describing how a group rented the land (originally an over-grazed part of the common) and planted the trees, set around a restored shepherd hut which serves as an information centre and informal gathering space. The hardest thing, he said, was not the thistles in the ground, or raising the funds, but persuading the village to agree.

"People will just go in and take the fruit!" someone objected.
"That's the idea," he replied.

Last year, before one of our films held in the neighbouring village, some of Sustainable Bungay went and visited the newly planted site. Originally Rob said, the inspiration for a Village Orchard was romantic and Arcadian. Their choices for fruit were based on childhood memories and varieties that were locally known. The group had not thought about the future - who would look after it, or who the fruit might be for. Since coming into contact with Transition (Christine, his wife, is one of our Happy Mondays cooks), he was looking at the trees in a different light. In terms of local resilience. Most of the trees had been planted on dwarf stock, as the village had wanted "to see results", but some had been planted on M25s. Who knows who might benefit when those great fruit and nut bearers have reached their prime?

Behind us in the back room there is a tray of unknown apples, recently collected from a local school (who had no use for them) by Roger, Cathy and Nick. After the meeting we will all take some home. It's part of our Abundance project, which regularly redistributes produce at our events and at a table at our Happy Mondays community meals, and at the Library Community garden. As Apple Day (October 21) approaches, now is the time to start storing apples up for the winter. My own larder now has trays of scrumped, foraged, roadside stall and Abundance apples stacked beneath the shelves, perfuming the kitchen. One of the first things that sparks the imagination in Transition is its practical and poetic reconnection with neighbourhood trees, planting fruit and nut trees in urban spaces and holding apple pressing events. Abundance gathering and redistribution projects, large and small, have been cropping up all over the country.

There is a huge inertia about collecting and gathering our native fruit and these enterprises help galvanise interest and connect us with our native roots. Industrialised to the max, we would rather buy apples flown in from New Zealand in a plastic bag from a supermarket than make good use of the fruit lying freely all about us. At Green Drinks Eloise told us that at her local primary school the School Council (made up of pupils) voted against planting fruit trees around the playground "because of wasps" (so much for education improving your intelligence!). Eloise who organises a team of "eco warriors" at the school has said the team are going to change their minds!

Not all institutions however are disconnected from nature. Recently the Norwich Steiner School began fruit-collecting and preserving alongside the Norwich Abundance Project and we were sent a press release about the project, written by one of the (14 year old) students involved. Do get in contact with them if you would like to take part. Here it is:

Norwich Abundance

by George Thorley, Elder Class, Norwich Steiner School.

Norwich abundance is an urban fruit harvest project. Abundance began in Sheffield in 2007 finding all unused fruit trees and sharing the fruit with the public. This was to help show that fruit is being wasted each year and left to rot.

The new upper school of Norwich Steiner school recognised that they wanted to make people aware of the vast amount of fruit produce that is being wasted every day in the UK and other countries. There are lots of fruits being imported from New Zealand and other countries with a large carbon footprint, instead of using our seasonal glut of local fruit.

Norwich Steiner school upper school students, during September and October, are picking unwanted fruit and then this will be distributed to people who may not have access to fresh fruit. With any extra “fruit” we are making jams, chutneys, juices, and more. Alys Mendus, our teacher and project leader, said “We’re giving away the good apples then making the bruised ones into chutney and juice, that will be sold."

“The money that we make is going to fund the project, and any profit is going into our class and the school,” said class member Barnaby Taylor.

We are working with Transition Norwich who have been recording where fruit trees are. So we can help them map out fruit trees as well as picking fruit. Our class has created posters and these have been emailed to parents and others who are in the school mailing list. We have also made a flier that will be distributed to people in the local area and some shops in Norwich.

Get in touch with the school if you are willing to help us in this quest. Or if you have trees or know of any where the fruit needs picking, or if you have any queries get in touch with us. Those people who offer us their fruit will get them picked for free, then, we will offer them some of the fruit and take the rest for processing and distribution. So please get in touch if you are interested, and help us start picking!

Norwich Steiner school: 01603 611175 Email: info@norwichsteinerschool.co.uk

The fruits of Transition: map of St James Village Orchard; damson tree at Cathy's orchand  Ditchingham (Charlotte Du Cann; NR3 urban foraging map (helen of norwich; drawers of apples.Thorpe St Andrew (Bee Springwood)

Dog Days

Maybe it is because I was born on midsummer’s eve, at the zenith of the year, at the time of the greatest light, that I can now write of what it means to take the irrevocable step, the 52 steps along the downward path that lead us back toward the ancestral land, back down toward the sea. Maybe because the golden English oak stands so firmly behind me that I can embrace the dark holm, his brother, and let everything fall, as I step through the solstice door, as the mood of the great year shifts, as the key slips irrevocably from major to minor, from sweetness into bitterness, from pleasure into duty (Wormwood, 52 Flowers)

This week a book with a dark blue cover emerges into the light, officially published at last! It is, dear Reader, my own book, written during the course of 17 years travelling and exploring the world of medicine plants - the green beings that have shaped our destiny since we first emerged onto the planet.

It also appears, by happenstance, at the time of year the book ends - the beginning of August, the day some call Lughnasa, when people traditionally gathered together and celebrated the harvest. This past two weeks as the sun has finally shone I have taken to going down to the shoreline where the book ends. We have taken a thermos and a rug and gone swimming early in the morning in the calm sparkling sea. And though the sea is beautiful and the sound of it sighing against the shore, and it is lovely to feel all that expanse of sky and summertime, the taste in my mouth is of the bitter plant that now flowers at the sea's edge, wormwood. The plant that heralds the end of a certain world.

Another favourite shoreline plant, the sea holly, is bereft of its usual visitors: the small copper and the small blue. In the garden the huge buddleia now in full flower has yet to see a single painted lady or peacock or tortoiseshell. The apple and greengage trees in the orchard are without fruit. Down the lane I have seen no sloes either, or damsons. It's been a tough and topsy-turvy year for growers - battling with drought, heavy rain, cold, too few pollinators, and way way too many slugs. Abroad a rainless and unprecedented heat, from the grainbelt of America to the ricefields of India, is challenging crops everywhere.

The plants and pollinating insects we depend on for our lives are reflecting back the planetary crisis we now recognise as climate change. 52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth, was written before I had heard about climate change or peak oil. And yet at its core is the key directive of Transition - downshift, relocalise and connect with the living systems. It follows the years as I leave the city and travel abroad with Mark, as I encounter a different way of being on the planet, as we begin what we call the Plant Practice in Oxford, as we work with medicine people in the desert of Arizona, as we return home to a different England.

Another thing history does not tell us: you do not return when you expect to, in the spring with the hawthorn flowers, or at midsummer, with the rose, but when the barley is being cut, the time of the fall, in the heat of the dog days, as the broad haze of sun burnishes the land. You arrive at the seashore, with wild carrot and valerian, when the harebell and the rowan berries shine in the heathlands.

When I went down to the shore to greet the sunrise that August day, the day of the losing throw, I repeated to myself a phrase that struck me as I had awoken at dawn:

"This time it will not be me that loses." (Sea Kale, 52 Flowers)

The book is centered around 52 Flowers, each with their own narrative and their own medicine. Each show how physically, energetically, imaginatively, we can break out of a thousand years of conditioning by our "Empire" civilisation. The book is set in the mood of the dog days, as we realise we are no longer a people in the time of ascent, but of a descent that is unwritten and unknown. Descent is hard for our all-conquering, illusion-loving culture. We are still acting as though we still have the world to achieve and a planet to exploit, but the times are not telling us this. The droughts and the butterflies are not telling us this. Techno-fixes and building empires in space are not where we are going. Reconnecting with the planet and coming home to ourselves is where we are. Reality is where we are. There is an ordeal ahead, as Charles Eisenstein has gently pointed out, and a lot of loving to do.

Descent begins at Lughnasa with the harvest. Descent begins when we wake up to the times we are in and don't look for someone to blame. What are the narratives of descent? What knowledge have we gleaned in all these years? What do we hold dear at the end of the day?

There is an elegiac beauty in loss (or what we imagine is loss), to coming home, to realising your limits, to deepening your experience, to loving the neighbourhood, the people in the room, a humble dish of new potatoes, the small strip of seashore I go to each day, where once I could roam the world like Alexander. In fact when you look back and see the track you have made, the dance you have made with your fellows, that's when you understand everything, the beauty of it all - even the hard times. We're trying as a people to get back on track against all odds. We're not doing it because the government is telling us to, or any religion, or ideology, we're doing it because our hearts are telling us to, of our own free will. That's why these times taste bitter: bitterness is a quality of all heart medicine. We learn though experience and in this the earth, not our education system, is our great teacher. All her plants are books of knowledge, if we can learn to read them.

When I was young I ran away to Italy to try and write a novel. I read Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, and I could never understand how someone who had loved Africa so much could bear to go back to the dark and cold of Scandinavia. Now I do. It's going back and treasuring what you have experienced that really matters. That's what writers do and inspire everyone else to. You treasure everything in your store cupboard. It's a certain stage, a time of making sense, a time of giving back. That's what writing my own book of return did later in my life, when I had given up ambition and success. It made sense of my own downshift and the collective downshift that Transition prepares us for, as small groups, in communities and towns everywhere.

I could never write that romantic novel in the beautiful Riviera garden. It wasn't the book I had to write. Many of us are not configured to be romantic heroines, conquerors and achievers, we're here to do another job entirely. It has a different narrative, one that is only just beginning. One we are creating together. I don't know the ending, none of us do. One thing I do know: love always turns the ship around. If you can still love the world, in spite of everything. The people, the places and the plants.

There will be a Plants for Life talk and reading from 52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth (Two Ravens Press) this Sunday, 5 August at Bungay Library, 3pm. All welcome. Further details here. If you would like to buy copy of 52 Flowers (£10) do get in touch with me at theseakaleproject@hotmail. co.uk, or you can order directly from Two Ravens website.

Poster for Plants for Life; buddleia in the garden; sunflower from 52 Flowers That Shook My World; scythng workshop at Uncivilisation Festival; beside the sea holly, 2011; Lughnasa sunrise, 2011

FROM THE ARCHIVE: The Spirit of the Beehive

This is a report from the first Bungay Beehive Day last year. Today the Transition group, Bungay Community Bees are holding their second celebration of the honeybee and the plants they love, on Castle Meadow, Bungay, 10-30am-4.30. Talks, walks and workshops, children's activities, stalls, a film, refreshments, and of course honey. Hope to see you there!

In 1923 the philosopher and seer Rudolph Steiner gave a series of lectures on agriculture in which he predicted the future fate of the honeybee. Mechanical beekeeping practices were putting these creatures under high levels of stress and interfering with their natural cycles. In eighty years' time bees will face a crisis, he said, and because bees are inextricably linked with the human world, we will also.

The honeybee has worked her delicate symbiotic relationship with the plant world for millions of years and for as long as anyone can remember the sweet substance she makes from the nectar of flowers has attracted the attention of human beings. Still today men will climb trees in the deep forest to steal honey for the benefit of the tribe. It is a substance that no man can make himself - its flavour and density changing from flower to flower. From the light and delicate orange blossom to the deep resinous flavour of pine trees. Only when civilisation came did people begin to cultivate and control bees and provide them with hives. For hundreds of years people chased out or killed colonies from their skeps at the end of the honey season in autumn. Now they feed them with sugar to substitute their foraged winter stores and it is this practice, along with manipulating the queen and her colony and the damaging use of pesticides in our agricultural systems, that has precipatated our present world-wide collapse of honeybee populations.

It was in response to this crisis that we beganBungay Community Bees in 2009, a small Transition project that was the first Community Supported Apiculture in the UK and caught the imagination of bee and flower lovers everywhere. Last Sunday we held a Bungay Beehive Day in “celebration of the honeybee and other pollinators along with the plants they love”. We held it in the local festival marquee on Castle Meadow and though it was a first-of-its kind event it attracted the attention of people from all over East Anglia. Because, no matter how dark and difficult the times, there is something the honeybee colony has that brings people together in a certain spirit. And it is this spirit that Steiner referred to when he said that, in spite of the crisis, the evolution of people would follow along the lines of the honeybee.

It’s not personal, said Margie from the Natural Beekeeping Trustas she described the way bees work with each other and the world. The Trust promotes a move away from commercial beekeeping practices towards a harmonious relationship with the bees and a respect for nature. She was opening a series of talks we organised that ran along with our information stalls, bee and flower walk (conducted by Mark), display hives and children’s activities. And though there was respect for the scientific method the talks we gave that day were about something else.

People say they have done Transition for years, they don’t need to be part of a Transition group, or they try and hide the Transition word at all costs from their friends and community and pretend it is something else, something less challenging, less well . . . evolutionary. But the fact remains it is evolutionary. Not in the way Steiner or a scientist might describe evolution, but because it is effecting something people have not done collectively before, which is to live in harmony in nature and with each other, having spent millennia living against nature and against each other.

The two spheres – human and natural - are indivisible. Those that feel they don’t need to join the Transition movement because they have championed the environment for decades sometimes forget that this is a social movement. And those that feel it’s all about community and people also forget that it is based on permaculture and our right relationship with places and plants. Something has to bridge those two worlds in our imagination and in our actions and no creature does it more effectively, more elegantly, more beautifully than the bee.

The honeybee was first cultivated in ancient Egypt and has been used as a model for social organisation within civilisations, from kingship to socialism to Buddhism. Hive mind is something that is both sought by controllers and feared by the controlled. However this is to entirely misunderstand the organisational field bees operate in and what that feels like.

Imagine you are in hive, I said the schoolchildren as they sat by their computers in May. It’s warm and dark in there (20c) and scented with flowers and there is a hum that resonates inside your body. It is one of the cleanest and sweetest-scented built environments in the world. The bees fly out into the sunlit world and they return with the sweetness of the earth. The queen is like the sun in the solar system and everything in the hive is organised around her creative powers. Everyone has a role and knows what to do.

You don’t understand the field with your mind, you understand it with your heart and your physical form. It’s a different order of intelligence altogether.

It’s hard to talk about the organisational intelligence of the heart, because we are a cold-blooded mind culture, addicted to competition, fantasy and domination. We worship science and reason and champion our above-it-all powers of control and give little place to the warmth and beauty of our natural beings that love to work in co-operation. Publicly we do not acknowledge the effect of high or low vibration in the physical world, even though privately we respond in every moment to atmospheres in rooms and people.

Joseph Beuys the activist-artist, once set up an installation calledHoney Pump in the Workplace, inspired by the lectures Steiner gave. He contended that if you provided the right conditions people would naturally communicate and work together in harmony. You don’t have to explain anything people just "got it". The warmth and vibrancy of natural substances related to the warmth and movement of our blood and activated the higher centres of our consciousness: thought became imagination, feeling became inspiration, and will, intuition.

It's that natural harmony we are trying to get to in Transition. It’s a hard slog because the mechanical forces that keep us within the unnatural system of civilisation, that stop us swarming, that overwork us, seem stronger than our natural instincts. Our immune systems have been weakened by the chemicals we have been absorbing for decades, and the powers of the sun that emanate from all creative people within the collective have been routinely excluded or they have had their wings clipped.

And yet if we provide the right conditions people come together and things change quickly. Those sunny creative forces emerge from within and affect the whole. As soon as Bungay Community Bees was formed the whole initiative underwent a shift of mood and tempo, meetings suddenly got easier and more coherent. Other projects started up. Within the town council where there had once been mistrust and dismissal, there was interest and acceptance. The local newspapers ran full page stories, local radio and television interviewed our first beekeepers. On Sunday an estimated one thousand people came to the workshops, talks, walk and to visit the stands and stalls.

We’re doing everything we can to help the bees.
What we don’t know is that the bees are doing everything to help us.

Entrance to the Bungay Beehive; our first top bar hive; Margie's talk on Natural Beekeeping; children's workshops, making bee masks and puppets and bug hotels; Plants for Bees board; climbing Castle Meadow on Mark's walk; in the Bungay Library Community Garden; wild "weeds" in honey jars; on the way to the garden (photo by Muhammad Amin); Philip's talk on bumblebees and wild plants; Bungay Community Bees boards

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Herbs for Resilience

This is our first archive Sunday and in line with many of our plant and tree posts this week, it is about limeflowers and has the same date as this one two years ago! Synchronicity all round . . .

"That’s very precise," said Erik. "The eighth of July."

"I know ," I said "But it’s true. Every year that’s the day when I start noticing them."

We were talking lime trees. Those extraordinary trees with sticky heart-shaped leaves which for most of the year appear inconspicous beside the showier oaks and horse chestnuts. But suddenly in early July they burst dramatically into flower. And every year I make a journey down the coast to an avenue of great limes and pick some of the flowers for tea.

Because if you want to go to heaven for five minutes drink a cup of fresh limeflower tea.

Fragrant, golden, tasting of honey.

Limeflower gathering is a very rewarding kind of foraging. The flowers are easy to pick and easy to dry. The trees are abundant, dripping, laden with flowers, so there’s no chance of reducing stocks. And what more lovely way to spend an hour: standing, paper bag in hand, beneath a lime tree, immersed in their awesome scent. You’re never alone when you do. Because every bee in the district is there with you foraging for its sweet nectar. Everywhere is humming.

There are three kinds of lime and all are good for flowers. The small and large leaved limes in the country, the common lime frequently planted in the city (several huge ones in St Benedict’s Street). The tea is one of the world’s great downtimers. You can mix it with other heart herbs (lemon balm, hawthorn flowers, rosehips) or have it straight before you go to sleep. It’s a flower that uncoils the springs inside and won’t weigh you down like valerian. Those relaxing flowers will put you on a different wavelength altogether. Out of the mind’s urgency and into the expansiveness of the heart.

I haven’t got a pic of limeflowers yet because it’s early (six o’clock - now added! ed.). But here is a downtime tea I’m drinking right now (rose, lavender and chamomile - divine!) and above some resilient herbs I picked from just outside my door. They are all stalwart members of my medicine cabinet. Elderflower and yarrow tea deal with any shivers in a chill. Marigold is a great anti-inflammatory and lymphatic cleanser (I’m using it right now as an eyewash for conjunctivitis). Rosemary, sage and horsetail, all excellent tonics.

The small daisy-looking flower is chamomile which I grew from seed (thank you Erik!). At the beginning of the year I decided I would put together a Herbs for Resilience Toolkit. Some simple wild and garden plant medicines that fellow Transitioners might like to know about. Plants I’ve used through the years that have been useful remedies or tonics. I’ll be writing about all these flowers and leaves in more depth later in the year.

Meanwhile here are one or two good tips about foraging. Rule one: Go for it! Walk out and tune in. Put a pair of scissors and a brown paper bag in your pocket, grab a flower guide and step into the green world of the neighbourhood. You’ll find the plants and trees everywhere once you decide to look. Rule Two: recognise what you need. Get a feeling for those plants appearing in front of you. Certain ones will grab your attention at different times. Those are the ones you need: for your body, for your mind, energetically.

The planet’s wild plants are stronger medicinally and nutritionally than anything cultivated. The native ones most of all. When I went on a wild plant walk at the Transition Conference the herbalist told us that wild greens contained ten times the minerals of commercially-grown plants and recommended putting a handful in with your stir-fries and salads through the year. Here she is talking about the daisy, a substitute for the rarer mountain-growing arnica, whose leaves can be mixed with chickweed and dandelion earlier in the year .

With the flowers of summer: take from the most abundant and least grimy places and only what you need. Shake out insects. Dry in the airing cupboard (in the paper bag or on a tray) and store in jars. You’ll find yarrow is on all the roadsides at the moment, horsetails in every damp patch and sun-loving rosemary and sage growing in neighbourhood gardens if not in your own (be bold, ask for a sprig if you don’t). Elderflower is almost at the end of its season (but keep an eye out for its marvellous berries later on).

And it’s the eight of July: so dear reader look upwards as you walk down the street today. You might find yourself in heaven very soon.

Photos: elderflowers, Greek mountain sage, marigold (calendula), common horsetail, chamomile, yarrow, rosemary; limeflower tea; rose, chamomile and lavender tea; pushing daisies at the Transition conference; walking down the lime avenue Suffolk.

A Swinger of Birches

I don't know when the climbing thing began. Maybe it was in Port Meadow in 1998 when I found the apple tree down Aristotle Lane. One of those surprise trees that bear fruit with a taste you can never quite recapture. There were some way out of my reach. So I climbed up in the branches and helped myself. Once I got there, I didn't want to leave. I stayed aloft for a while and surveyed the scene. It was a whole new perspective. When I jumped down I felt full of vim.

After that I came across an ash down by the Thames that gave me a great view over the river. Sometimes people passed by below me and were surprised by the sight of une femme d'un certain age up a tree. Mostly no one noticed. Then I found a yew in Holywell Churchyard and swung up into smooth red arms. Unmistakably female, austere and yet very friendly.

Friendly? Yes, well that's what I started to notice. That each tree had its own character and mood. It was something you noticed when you were up there. Different things occured to you depending on the type of tree you were in: some reflective, some to do with action.

I wasn't alone. In 1998 there were a lot of activists who spent time in trees in the city. Down by the station a crew were trying to stop two horse chestnuts from being cut down and were keeping vigil in a tree house. Something jolted inside when I saw them. I have to make contact! Shortly afterwards joining a campaign to save the green corridor of the Oxford canal (with its great willows), I met people who had spent months up the oak trees at Newbury. Trees brought us together, irrespective of class, history, politics. They welcomed us to the neighbourhood, made us feel at home in a rocky time.

So after that I climbed a lot of trees: huge crab apples at Shotover Hill, goat willows down by the railway track, boxes in the University Parks. Unusually I didn't climb trees in America, or Mexico, when I went to those places during the millenium years. It was a thoroughly English obsession (though I did spend time in a thousand year old holm oak in the South of France). When I came to Suffolk there was no stopping me. Scot's pine, alder, sycamore, black poplar, holly, cherry, rowan and oak. I sailed in the canopies of trees as I walked through my new found land, across marsh and fen, on the way to the sea, back to the house.

I'm still climbing them.

My favourite climb is a birch. I love her soft bark and easy low limbs. As soon as I swing up and find a perch, all thoughts of people and situations drop away and I am in earth time, at home, here and now. You feel warm and secure up there, in contact with the ancestors of the planet, communicating in a language you can't always write down. An encounter that is joyful and sober at once.

We're always labelling our posts Reconnection with Nature as if this were a big task, requiring years of training, or special abilities. It's not. It's a small step you make as you walk out the door. A move out of the squares and boxes we think in into the fluidity of the physical breathing world. A shift sideways from your left hemisphere to your right, downwards from your mind to your heart, into your body.

And sometimes upwards, into a tree.

Climbing in a hazel at Frostenden; ash flowers in Marsh Lane; black pine at Oxford Botanical Gardens; up a sycamore in Marsh Lane; birch at Thorpeness fen; checking into an Italian alder in Finsbury Park. Title take from the poem, Birches by Robert Frost.