Haven’t blogged for months, curiously the number of hits on the blog has rocketed whilst those on the actual Arne Herbs web site have, until the last seven days, been running at below last year’s levels. I suspect that this is the result of  the government, press and financial authorities terrifying people into not spending any money, although my cynical friend has  pointed out that a lot of you are sitting in your offices with nothing to do except read my spiritually uplifting blogs and that you would still be doing this whether the country was crashing in flames or not. Ho ho ho! well it is Christmas and in fact this week, for the first time this quarter, we are very busy indeed. So, you ask, am I sitting here being jolly? The short answer is no; for one thing, it’s cold and wet, secondly the mentally-challenged courier company delivered several hundred sprigs of Rosemary to London instead of to Yorkshire where they were urgently needed for garnishing John Wright’s famous free range turkeys. I also discovered  that the people who set us up with our credit card processing facility (come on, now it’s in place, the least you can do is to use the thing) failed to fill in an on-line questionnaire and we were being fined for non-compliance on every transaction. No one bothered to tell us and we only found out when the amount coming into the bank didn’t equate to the receipts we issued. Since we are herb growers rather than IT specialists and far too small to have such a creature in-house and in spite of making no claims to computer literacy, I had to do the compliance thing myself. Total nightmare, but we now have an extra layer of security and a certificate to prove it. As I so often say to our intern, running a herb farm has very little to do with growing herbs

I owed a favourite editor an article, so I did him a piece on achieving authenticity in re-created medieval gardens in the context of that cringe-making travesty, the corporate “Medieval Feast”. I expect you too have received spam inviting you to squander a hundred and thirty quid on a lump of factory-farmed roast, probably accompanied by chips and failed buskers driven in by the cold from their usual pavement pitches. The piece was derived from a lecture that was supposed to have been delivered at a medieval congress in America until I chickened out of flying goat-class to the far west, One Trans-Atlantic crossing per year under such conditions is one too many and so unless the organisers think I am worth pampering with an up-grade, they can do without me. Once one gets into the medieval veggie theme, one can go on and on, just dealing with the question of whether “Appium Risus” was  Chervil as suggested by the “Agnus Castus”  scribe, or whether it would make you dead in the interesting manner described by Pietro D’Abano and Mattioli, is good for a couple of articles. The question of potentially toxic veg of course is something that shouldn’t really be ignored by the corporate hospitality functioneer. However if, as I suggested, it’s the sort of event in which “Mothers Pride” is served rather than the somewhat disgusting rye bread more familiar to medieval diners, I don’t suppose it matters much either way  

So having got that one out of the way, another editor, yep, the very same one who asked me who wrote Pliny’s “Natural History” (oh well, we all get tired!) slapped a “like yesterday” dead-line on me.  The computer was still warm from doing “Appium”, as opposed to Apium, so it was already partially done. Hurrah for a word processor and historical vagueness, though in compiling this medieval glossary thing, it can drive me mad. Anyway, Benedicenti identified Pietro’s plant as Oenanthe crocata and Mattioli, inter al,  as a buttercup, not illogically if you compare his description with Dioscorides. Mrs Grieve, describing “wild celery” aka Oenanthe, in one of her rare acknowledgements of another writer’s work, quotes F Edward Hulme’s “Familiar wild Flowers” (1885) in claiming that “No British wild plant has been responsible for more fatal accidents. Actually I read some years ago that there are more man-made toxins in real celery than in any other vegetable so you will probably get sick any way. Having written that, I don’t suppose the celery growers association or whatever will be sending me festive greetings.   

Last time I blogged I left you with the cliff hanger of me about to go to London for an event associated with the Olympics, my misgivings about anything involving sport notwithstanding.  In fact the reception was organised by BCGI, a highly laudable organisation, in the Lords and the inanities of Political Correctness which are usually inextricably bound up with anything to do with sport and parliament were wholly lacking. This may have been something to do with the fact that inarticulate, like, well, you know the “household names” of Saturday television were like almost entirely, you know, mercifully absent. As they themselves say, “Yeah!” (why?)   Instead it was nominally hosted by Baroness Joan Walmsley who has done such sterling work to rectify the appalling  lack of taxonomists in this country. As the party was largely attended by the great and the good of the botanic world, most of the guests would have been aware of this, but it did provide an opportunity to plead for similar attention to be paid to the scandal of the near-extinction of pharmacognocists in Britain. After all there is little point in running around bleating about the extinction of plant species if one can recognise neither their form or nor function. Since that party, all of three months ago I have heard that there is barely a university left in the country where one can take botany as a free-standing degree subject. Obviously you can learn the basics of taxonomy on a zoology course and scrape together some grounding in Pharmacognosy in a chemistry lab, but  applying it to herbs is a whole new ball-game if you haven’t been taught the difference between a flower and a leaf.  This means that soon there will be no one left who can distinguish between an actual celery leaf and a toxic plant vaguely resembling one. Given the errors perpetrated by media “celebrities” when talking about “food from the hedgerow” and the scary nonsense emanating from the circle-dancing sorority of quacky herbalists, this is an alarming prospect indeed. Incidentally the canapés, courtesy of Richmond catering college, were as excellent as predicted.