On Community Gardens and Sweet Cicely - a Conversation with Jeremy Bartlett

Last week I paid a visit to Jeremy Bartlett, who over the past few years has co- ordinated the planting up of Grapes Hill Community Garden in Norwich. Jeremy is part of the Norfolk Master Gardeners group, who help local people and communities set up food growing projects. He also designed the Grapes Hill garden website.

I first met Jeremy online through his monthly update for the garden on the Transition Norwich News website which I help edit. Then on an early November morning last year when Rob Hopkins was in Norwich we took him to visit Grapes Hill, and in the briefest of exchanges I discovered Jeremy loved sages.

"You would love chia (Salvia hispanica)," I told him. "It's an annual sage. The seeds are an edible resilience food in Mexico. Mine are just coming into bloom with incredible blue flowers. Would you like some for next year?"

We arranged to swap seeds and cuttings in the spring. And for Transition Norwich's Low Carbon Cookbook group to have a small display of ancient and modern superfoods at the Grapes Hill garden. These would be the aforesaid chia, along with goji berry and amaranth.

The goji berry plants were given to me by Jo at Edible Landscapes London in January and rooted very successfully and the chia was grown by Jeremy from seeds I sent him. I'd hoped to add Amaranth but I've had poor results this year from the seeds. So I took a few other plants and went for tea on Monday afternoon.

We spent two hours in a full-on conversation about everything from the tall fernlike sweet cicely plants in his Norwich garden to the activity of furanocoumarins in plants like hogweeds and parsnips, its effects on human skin and how these effects vary at different times of the year.

I also asked him about how he became involved with the garden at Grapes Hill and in what way.

"I came in at the planting stage after the steering group had received funding for the garden in 2010. Many residents of Grapes Hill don't have gardens. They knew they wanted one but didn't know what they wanted in it. A lot of people were keen on the idea of an edible garden. This was great, but I felt it shouldn't be just edible. There needed to be some wildlife and human interest in there as well. Edimentals as Stephen Barstow calls them - where the garden is edible and ornamental.

"So I chose the plants and liaised with the suppliers and have led most of the fortnightly task meetings for the last two years. I'm looking to delegate more to the community now as the garden is pretty well established. And I've recently taken on a similar role at the Belvedere Centre's garden in Belvoir Street, which is requiring a lot of time and attention."

I asked Jeremy what types of plants he chose for the garden.

"I wanted to include all different types of plants. So there are native British wildflowers and also buddleia. And sages, of course. Many of the plants I chose deliberately for their long pollinating period to attract all different kinds of insects. And also to highlight how many different uses they have, how many different things they do."

The aim of the garden then is multifold. To be friendly to wildlife, attractive to people and visually enjoyable to be in, as well as provide a social space and have a strong edible element.

The garden is also partly educational, Jeremy told me, to show people what food plants look like. There are varieties of Norfolk apple trees, and also some more ordinary types such as Bramley, Cox and Discovery. And this year some of the residents have started to rent out their own small plots there to grow food plants.

I had to go on to another meeting. We swapped some tomatoes, peppers and tobaccos and Jeremy said that the Sweet Cicely in his garden had developed large taproots over ten or twelve years, so not to worry about my ones, which were only two years old and much smaller. In time they would also be splendid.

Before I left I asked Jeremy if he had any tips for people new to growing plants.

"A good gardener observes and pays attention, sees how the plants are doing, how much water they need. It's about love and attention really."

For the latest update on Grapes Hill community garden see here

Pics: Sweet Cicely (Myrrhis odorata) in Jeremy's garden, May 2012; "What was that about furanocoumarins?" talking with Jeremy, May 2012

Planting Medicine with Transition Belsize

On a hot Friday at the end of May I packed two cardboard boxes with ribwort plantain, vervain, peppermint, hoary willowherb, tobacco, japanese mugwort, valerian, dandelion and forget-me-not in pots along with a posy of cut wildflowers. strapped them onto a trolley and went to London on the bus and train. I was heading for Belsize Park in north London to teach a workshop the following day on Planting Medicine as part of Transition Belsize's new Royal Free Permaculture Garden project above the carpark of the hospital, part of the Heath Strange garden.

As well as creating an edible forest garden with heritage fruit trees and bushes, the group were keen to include plants used in medicine, especially as the site is in the grounds of the hospital.

This is where I came in. On a weekend visit to us in the spring, Alexis and Sarah of the permaculture garden's co-ordinating group, invited me down to kick start the medicinal part of the bed and teach a workshop introducing people to some of our wild and cultivated medicine herbs.

I was delighted. One of my favourite activities is inspiring people to connect with the plants and places where they live. Because everyone has access to plants. We’ve been co-habiting the earth with them since the beginning, so it’s kind of natural.

In fact the more you look at it, the more it becomes clear that our lives are inextricably linked with plants. No plants, no life.


How does this relate to Transition? Just connecting with the places we are in and the plants growing there can increase our well-being in really positive ways. And it can open up conversations with others which might not otherwise take place. Growing plants as food forms a fundamental part of Transition. And foraging for wild food is popular too. Less explored are plants as medicine, both wild and cultivated.

Food and medicine are directly linked to our well-being and many plants double up as both. Some of our favourite cooking herbs are also excellent medicines. Thyme tastes great in omelettes and with roast vegetables and thyme tea is an excellent anti-microbial with a salutory effect on the lungs.

Then there are some plants which just don’t serve as food. Digitalin from foxgloves is an unrivalled medicine in certain heart diseases, but foxglove leaves in salads WOULD NEVER be advised. Foxgloves also cheer the heart as one of our most stunning wildflowers.

In the beginning my main focus was on wild plants, in particular those termed as 'weeds'. The more I considered the real value of these dismissed, neglected and even abused plants, the more astonishing they became. You could spend a year or more just working with dandelions and still not get everything about them down.

In the past people would look at me uncomprehendingly or even in panic as I extolled the scouring virtues of horsetail or the lymph cleansing nature of cleavers and suggest they leave at least some to grow. "Oh no, no. NOT IN MY GARDEN!" seemed to etch itself across their faces. “Nettles? Nettles?!?”

Ah, but did you know nettles are a primary food source for some of the most beautiful butterflies in this country? And they make great soup. And fertiliser. They fortify and galvanise a sluggish system after the winter. They are used to make cloth. They help purify the liver. They sting of course. But then there's likely to be some ribwort plantain around, one of our most common wild plants. Squeeze a leaf and apply the juice to the stung area. Many people prefer plantain to the more traditional dock leaves for nettle stings.

And this brings me back to the Planting Medicine workshop at the Royal Free Permaculture Garden the Saturday before last.

On the train I was worried that the site would be too open and bare. It was hot. We couldn’t all walk around in the heat for hours, otherwise we’d end up inside the hospital with heatstroke or sunburn - and I had no infused oil of St. Johns wort with me!

“Well, there are some trees,” said Sarah. “On the green beside the bed.” We walked there the evening before and there they were. Birch trees. We would sit under the shade of the biggest one. That would be the focal point for the workshop.

“I don’t dare look in the plant boxes,” I said. “After all that travel and heat through the hottest part of the day. Plus the underground at rush hour.” When I did look though I found all the plants, from the plantain to the valerian and even the sprigs of white deadnettle, lemon balm and ground ivy, almost as spritely as when I’d packed them six hours previously.

About twenty people came to the workshop, including foragers, gardeners, aromatherapists, permaculturists, horticulturalists and people keen to get more connected with plants. Oh, and my dad.

We sat under the birch in a circle and I jettisoned all six of the possible templates I’d worked out for the workshop, put the ribwort plantain in front of me and we went from there. Beginning with the tree were we sitting under, and introducing ourselves.

Over the coming hours we looked at the plants I'd brought along for the medicinal herb part of the garden and discussed (sic)* their various uses as well as investigating the garden itself. I asked everyone to pay particular attention to any plant they felt drawn to in the bed and on or around the green. Then we visited each plant in turn all together to identify them and talk about their medicinal properties.

One woman chose groundsel (Senecio vulgaris). I had no idea whether this very humble and common composite had ever been used as a herb or if so what for. But later I discovered in Culpeper's herbal it was at one time used for epilpesy. It is still used nowadays but has contraindications. This is the entry for it in Plants for a Future database.

We were joined at one point by a woman called Joy, who knew a huge amount about medicine plants. About ribwort plantain she said that at the start of any cold sore, the simple poultice of a crushed leaf applied will deal with it.

What I loved about the day was not only being able to speak out some of what I've learned in these years of working with plants, but also to learn new things from other people. And also sitting under a birch tree on a warm sunny morning with a whole group of people who really engaged in the subject.

Tomorrow I'll be closer to home, writing about my recent visit to Jeremy Bartlett, who was responsible for the planting up of Grapes Hill Community Garden in Norwich and is now helping to revamp the garden at the Belvedere Centre. I bet you can't guess what we were talking about.


*discussive refers in herbal medicine to the action of making something dissolve

Pics: Plants on a trip, Reydon bus stop, May 2012, Suffolk; Planting Medicine workshop poster by Sarah Nicholl and Alexis Rowell of Transition Belsize in local newsagents; Plant Medicine bed in Bungay library community garden, June 2012; Picking Nettles for Soup after the Spring Tonic walk Reydon, April 2009**; Ribwort Plantain in flower outside the back door; Connecting with people, place and medicine plants under the Birch tree in the Heath Strange garden next to the Royal Free (hospital) Permaculture Garden, London, May 2012*** By Mark Watson, **Helen Simpson and ***Sarah Nicholl

Talking with Fellow Transitioners - Plants and Places

Since I started blogging for Transition on This Low Carbon Life when it began in October 2009, and on the Social Reporting project since last September, I've written posts on everything from connecting with the earth and the value of a handmade 'A' board to personal carbon reduction and how to make a medicine jelly.

I've also interviewed fellow transitioners and those engaged in energy descent, growing food, waste recycling, working with plants and living in a lighter way on the planet; and it's these posts I find among the most rewarding to write. One example is my interview with Nick  from Sustainable Bungay. We sat down over a cup of tea after he'd helped me fell a dead elm in the garden and saw it up for firewood, and I asked him how transition had changed his life. Another is walking down to the end of the lane I live in in Suffolk and speaking with Norman who has a local market garden there. And Saturday I did two short interviews with friends in transition in London.

Sarah Nicholl and Alexis Rowell were part of the original steering group of Transition Belsize in north London and have been instrumental in setting up both the food growing site at the Premier Inn on Haverstock Hill and the more recent Royal Free Permaculture Garden above the local hospital car park. Sarah is a trustee of the Transition Network and Alexis was a local councillor (Camden 2006-10) bringing climate change and peak oil to the local agenda. He also wrote Communities, Councils and a Low-Carbon Future: what we can do if governments won't (Green Books, 2010).

Last weekend Sarah and Alexis invited me up to run a Planting Medicine workshop at the Royal Free Permaculture Garden where I spoke about the medicinal value of wild and garden plants and brought some along to include in the bed with the food plants and fruit trees. They also put me up for the night, did brilliant publicity for the event and made me extremely welcome. Alexis cooked a delicious risotto for dinner accompanied by vibrant beetroot tops, curly kale, kohl rabi leaves, purple sprouting  broccoli leaves and spinach all freshly picked from the Premier Inn site.

I'll be writing more about the actual workshop in the near future, but I also took the opportunity whilst I was there to speak to Sarah and Alexis about some of the reasons they are involved in these growing projects. My questions are in italics and Alexis's and Sarah's responses are in normal type.

Alexis
What motivated you to start up these garden projects?

Primarily I wanted to inspire people to understand food and plants, learn how to grow their own, about the medicinal, the edible, as well as the beautiful.

What difference has your involvement in the gardens made to you?

Well, it's very relaxing to be on the growing sites. And also encouraging to see how many people want to participate. Also restoring a piece of neglected ground from a place full of cigarette butts and empty bottles to a living space that has meaning and beauty and relevance is very satisfying.

Has doing this work increased your knowledge of plants?

Before transition I knew nothing about plants. Now I know so much - about foraging, how to make a food site, do container planting, set up a wormery, and of course now something about medicinal plants.

Do you have any favourite plants?

Now Mark I think you know the answer to that one already.

This is true. When Alexis first came to visit us in Suffolk, I saw a pair of cycle shorts and a bicycle pass by the window and overheard a male voice say "Alexanders! I LOVE Alexanders!" Which was excellent, because the whole of our area is awash with alexanders. That was a very good start and we did a lot of foraging together that weekend and enjoyed some awesome salads.

Sarah

What keeps you involved in the food (and medicine) growing projects?

I've had a long term fascination with food, medicine and nature. Growing food physically helps to reconnect us with the living systems we depend on. It makes us whole. For me this is important given how disconnected we've become within the global industrial food system from the food we eat.

Growing food inspires all sorts of people and can really capture the imagination. At the Premier Inn site which has been going since last year, it's rewarding to see how building the garden has deepened friendships, formed new ones and how the combination of Transition and food creates beneficial relationships on so many levels. And all in the corner of a hotel car park! Now we have the Royal Free Permaculture Garden above the hospital car park. It's much bigger and feels more daring.

Yes, it's a very different space, more open and of course in the hospital grounds. How's it going?

It's been amazing. We started the planning in December and planting in March. The mix of everyone holding the vision, planning and joining in the practical action is very exciting. It has the potential to be a really great site and bear good healthy fruit on all levels. And it's something everyone can benefit from, including visitors and people who work at the hospital.

I know you have been instrumental in both these projects Sarah, from the planning to the planting. That takes hard work and commitment. What has your involvement in the Premier Inn food site and the Royal Free Permaculture Garden brought you?

Well, there's a good sense of teamwork. I love that. At the Premier Inn there's a nice dynamic, building beds together with people you didn't know before, making friends with the people working at the hotel. I'm always learning something about myself and others, and about how we can co-operate with each other.

And what about the plants? I know from my experience setting up the Plants for Life talks, walks and workshops in Bungay that even after all these years working with plants myself, I learn something new every single time from the people who come, both the speakers and those coming to join in.

Well, my knowledge of plants has definitely increased. Though I've always loved them, especially herbs, and been a keen gardener for several years now, the learning never stops. We've done a lot of foraging for wild food as part of Transition Belsize as well. I've learnt to look at the many aspects of plants from the edible to the medicinal to how they bring up nutrients from the soil and what insects visit them.

It's also really interesting in an urban, public setting. You're working on the plant beds, people are passing by, conversations start up, you get to know your neighbours. I think this is one of Transition's really strong points. You're out there in the open, growing food together with others. People stop and ask what you're doing, some of them come back and get involved. They want to know about growing more food for themselves. They might want to learn about why we're doing it, helping to relocalise food sources for the future, having a living example of what's possible.

So working with plants in this way helps to make these links between people?

Yes, I think it does. After the workshop you gave today several new people approached me to find out about getting involved with the garden. Suddenly plants you thought were quite ordinary turn out to have all these amazing qualities. It was very inspiring.

Thank you Sarah. I enjoyed it thoroughly and really appreciate the effort you and Alexis made to publicise the day and get such a great crowd to come. It made all the difference. That's the kind of behind-the-scenes work I normally do in my Transition initiatives.

You're very welcome. We'll get those lovely medicine plants in now. It's great to see these patches of bare neglected earth transforming into a vibrant healthy garden.

And it's great being with it whilst it develops.

Photos: Nick Watts, Bungay Library 2011; Premier Inn food growing site, Belsize Park, May 2012 (MW); Alexis prepares white deadnettle and lemon balm tea for the Planting Medicine workshop (MW); Sarah Nicholl (SN); Planting up the Royal Free Permaculture Garden, March 2012 (Transition Belsize); Planting Medicine workshop poster in South End Green newsagents window by Sarah Nicholl and Alexis Rowell

Published originally on Transition Network Social Reporting Project on 29th May 2012

Brief Encounter

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star
(William Stafford: A Ritual to Read to Each Other)

"You play the cello, don't you?" boomed the editor. "Yes," I said. "Well, I played in the orchestra at school" "Oh, good," she said. "Then you can interview Segovia tomorrow".

I had a feeling I was addressed as Du Cann in the corridor that day, but maybe that's not what she actually said. Whatever, being commanded to interview the legendary guitarist on the basis of having strings-in-common was utterly petrifying. I had never done an interview in my life before. I was 22, cocky, but not that cocky.

"What shall I do?" I asked my fellow cub reporter, Rachel, who was busy writing captions about raspberry chiffon. "Buy a tape recorder," she advised.

I'm not sure that would happen now. In those days you got a job at places like Vogue with no experience and were thrown into the deep end. If you couldn't swim with style, you didn't pass the ordeal. I didn't interview Segovia in the end, but I did interview Simon Callow, just before he played in Amadeus at the National Theatre, in equally nerve-wracking circumstances. I don't know who was more shaky, him or me, as we sat in Snowdon's studio while the maestro photographer fumbled about with the camera. He took three hours to take one shot.

I learned my first lesson about interviewing that day. Which is this: while it may look as though nothing is going on and you are not in control, in fact you are clocking everything. Control is not what it's about. You are waiting for the shot or the quote, the aha moment that will turn the ship around. Sometimes you have to wait a long time to get that quote, usually after about thirty minutes fumbling around in the dark.

This week on the project is all about interviewing people. It was set up as a week by Adrienne Campbell, who couldn't do the assignment because she had to go into hospital (now thankfully out and in recovery). Her original - typically adventurous - idea was to interview someone difficult, even in opposition to Transition, and take them on in a dialogue, stand in their shoes and find out how they tick. I'm taking up the helm and introducing the week, but I haven't interviewed anyone specifically (my fellow reporters will be doing that from tomorrow). What I wanted to do was explore why we originally discussed the idea and what this standard media technique does, and how it could apply to Transition.

A writer always sells someone out, the great observer Joan Didion once wrote. That was the second lesson I learned, when I got to type up my first interview in the features dept. The heady feeling of having material and being able to fashion a story you want to tell around it. In magazine journalism the story is everything, and the writer of the interview is as key as the subject. This also held true, at that time, for television. The interview can be an investigation, a confrontation, or a dialogue in which both people can come to different conclusions about themselves and life at the end of an hour. It's a useful tool because most people enjoy the attention and will invaribly spill the beans at some point. The interviewer looks like a mouse, but is in fact a weasel, mesmerising its prey.

So I spent a decade thereafter with a tape recorder in my pocket, interviewing artists, writers, singers, fashion designers, furniture designers, chefs, craftsmen. I wasn't interested in catching people out, or unearthing scandal, but I did want to know how people made things happen. I was endlessly fascinated by form and creativity. I hung around backstage, on film sets, in studios, in bars and swanky restaurants (not great for interviews - all that clinking of glasses). I thought nothing of getting on a plane to interview people about their house in Tuscany or their latest book in Albany.

Sometimes I got the quote easily, and sometimes I had to sweat a lot for it to happen. I was nervous, even when I'd become good at it, because it's a nerve wracking business. You have to think on your feet. Some people prepare a lot beforehand, but I waded in with one or two questions up my sleeve and improvised. It's a risky style but you can push the edge that way. People let their guard down and come up with surprises. Sitting in front of the filmmaker Wim Wenders and the designer, Yojhi Yamamoto in Paris, a great silence ensued that I thought would never end. I was about to break it, when the Japanese master of the understatement turned to me and said:

Black is the colour of hysteria.

Yes!

Once you've got the quote, you have the story.

Sure thing, you might say, but what has any of this old stuff got to do with Transition? Because the interview is a great tool and a key tool if we want to become our own media. People flourish with proper attention. Anyone's story is interesting, if you can find a way to open them up, ask questions, go back in time, listen, allow. In ordinary life we don't do this. We go to meetings. We see people every day in a superficial way, we don't pay each other notice, in terms of ourselves as beings-in-Transition, in terms of sharing a storehouse of knowledge, or skills. We're too busy to give that kind of time, and maybe not generous enough to find out what our fellow transitioners actually think or feel. That meeting with a tape recorder can give an objective frame, in which everyone can go deep and far, carve out an hour when the demands of ordinary life can be put on hold. When the best of ourselves can come out.

In Transition of course we don't want to sell anyone down river, especially since we are all in the same canoe. So the interview has to change its form in many ways. When I interviewed Rob Hopkins on his whistlestop visit to Norwich last November, squeezed between breakfast and a vist to Grapes Hill Community Garden, it was more of a conversation around the role of communication and social enterprise. We are not adversaries, sitting opposite each other, we are in the same business, sitting side by side, so the interview is more of way to reflect and connect, rather than a revelation.

Interviewing Shaun Chamberlin last month for the Transition Free Press over Skype, we had a great discussion and covered a lot of intellectual ground, which was the main point of the interview. But you can't be intimate through a machine. Had we wanted to talk at a more emotional level, it would have been tough going. You need the presence of people in the room. You need those awkward silences, the sense that someone is listening.

Since the creation of the Internet many interviews no longer happen in situ, but in the format of an (emailed) question and answer session. These don't require any skill (or daring) from the journalist, apart from formulating the questions. There is no encounter and no shaping of a story. As a result the material is far more limited and you tend to get stock answers. Some of this is due to a decline in journalism, the effect of a market culture on a creative form. Some of it due to the subsequent lack of expenses that don't allow writers to visit or spend months of their time around people, as Didion or Tom Wolfe or other "new" journalists once did in the 70s and 80s, in order to research a story.

When the Social Reporting Project was set up last year, I wanted to pass on some of the skills I learned in those glossy magazine Fleet Street years, when journalism was not just about press releases and getting stories "off the wire". Ed and I ran two workshops, one at the Sunrise Festival and another at the Transition Conference. In one exercise we asked everyone to split into pairs and interview one another for five minutes about a Transition project, then feedback to the group. These events are a whirl of constant conversation: most of them disappear afterwards. But I can still remember talking about our (Sustainable) Bungay Beehive Day and hearing about the Brixton Remakery starting up, how Rebecca from Transition Crouch End organised a community processon along an underground river to celebrate Guy Fawkes and Halloween. Something sticks when you make this structure in space and time.

So although none of us are working for the mainstream press, we work alongside each other all the time. We can all of us take time and ask questions, talk to each other as if we matter. Not in terms of "I want something from you" (the manager), or "You have a problem I am going to sort out" (the therapist), but as social reporters who are in search of a new narrative. Because if I don't know you and you don't know me a certain pattern will prevail in the world - one that none of us in our hearts want to see through to its logical end. We need to speak outloud and listen in our Transition communications as beings of the future, who possess certain experiences and skills that can change that pattern. We can't do this on our own.

Take the mic. Don't miss that star.

Interview with John Galliano, The Independent, 1990; poster for the docudrama, Frost/Nixon; interviewing Ed at the Transition Conference (Mike Grenville); with Rob Hopkins at Norwich station

When the experiment fails

This is part of a series we are running on the Social Reporting Project, looking at the 74 Transition Ingredients and Tools.

I was going to write about Communicating with the Media, a nifty tool in the second section of The Transition Companion. I planned a practical exploration to the business of writing press releases and cultivating a positive relationship with local newspapers and radio. But then whilst Becoming the Media - creating the preview issue of the Transition Free Press - I stumbled upon a subject which was closer to home, nearer the bone. More urgent, I reckoned, than raising awareness of our local projects in the mainstream press.

The title of the second chapter is Deepening, and contains some of the harder aspects of Transition. The start up phase of initiatives is often exuberant and exciting. People are attracted to the buzz, full of hope and expectation. They stand up in rooms and declare what we (you) could do. Deepening is when you first hit the wall. Ideas and fancies about downshifting turn out not to be the reality of downshifting. Those big words fade in the light of day. You realise that you have to get on with the people in the room and do the work. Power struggles happen in deepening. Things don't go according to plan. People leave and let you down. You let people down. It's awkward because you don't know anyone in your fledgling initiative that well. The groups start to falter. What do you do?

Celebrating Failure is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the book. Because we live in a culture of success. No matter how we talk about losing being part of the game, it's still losing. Victors take all, stand on the podium crowned with laurels, king of the castle, biggest banker on the block. No one wants to be in the beaten team, on the bottom of the pecking order. But to be in Transition means we have to understand this win-or-lose mindset as an old order we need to transform.

Interviewing Shaun Chamberlin for the paper, he talked about the new book, The Future We Deserve, in which 100 authors write 500 words on their take of the title:

What was interesting in it was dissensus. The recognition that Nature doesn't decide by consensus on the ideal life form before it creates it. It just creates and creates and some things work and some things don’t work and I think Transition follows that “dissensus” approach - we don’t try and have a universal plan for everything. If someone wants to do something they go and do it. As Rob wrote about the punk ethic (here's three chords, now start a band): Here’s three ingredients, go and start a Transition initiative. That is that creative energy that underlies dissensus. Let some of the projects that we undertake thrive and let some of them die and don’t feel that everything we do has to succeed.

In a creative frame, you try everything. You start with the idea of communicating some key tips about the meda but then a more pressing subject comes up. So you change direction. From the creative perspective everything is material. There is no loss or failure. You carve your piece out of the mud, the clay falls to the ground, you sweep it up and use it again another time. Nothing is wasted. Everything is compost and you need that compost - those past events, meetings, open spaces, clashes, those wasted leaves, those dead heads. You need that stuff to rot down in order grow nourishing and beautiful flowers for the future.

In Deepening all the expectations of how life should be come up for examination, and it is wise to know Transition is not what you think it should be at all. But of course you don't read the manual. Your ego hits the wall, you are challenged in all directions. Most people at this stage, rather than let go of their defence systems, or their lifestyle, leave and blame Transition for not living up to their shiny idea of it. That's not the failure of Transition, it's the challenge of our society. We don't live with the messy paint box of dissensus, we live in the pure and airy ideals of the mind, and the vicious battleground of the will. I do it my way. Publish that email and be damned.

If we had heart we would realise that everything we do in Transition is to create a future that is not apocalypse, and in many ways we are blind to what this might look like. We are feeling our way ahead and "failures" are merely telling us that some paths are the ones we don't need to go down. Try again. Move your attention somewhere else.

Valuing experience

OK, so this is the theory. What about the practice? In 2009 I helped organise the second Transition East gathering in Diss and before the event interviewed 29 initiatives on the phone. I collated all the information and posted it on a regional blog. I asked everyone the same questions. How were they doing, how many people were in the initiative, what kind of town, village were they in etc? Everyone cheerfully answered the questions. Do you have any difficulties? I then asked them. There would be a hesitation and then suddenly a huge outpouring would happen. Ten minutes would turn into an hour. Up until this point no one had mentioned dificulties. We weren't sure how to handle them. But the fact is the difficulties were not "wrong". They are our experience of change, how we know what to focus on, and what not.

Today many of those initiatives do not exist. The initiative I have been in (Norwich) is a shadow of its former self. The 14 groups that began so exuberantly after our Unleashing in 2008 no longer exist. The core group disappeared. The Heart and Soul group faded away. In April the monthly bulletin was not sent out, as it had been for the last three years on the first of every month. No one noticed. Or if they did, they did not say anything.

What does this tell us? Some territories are not fertile ground for Transition. Something holds groups together and if it's missing the group will disband. At some point you realise that you need to put your time and energy into projects that feed back, and not just because you can do them or that you are expected to. You need to go with the spirit of the times, be amongst people who understand that the project matters. That communication matters. That Transition is not a hobby, a once-a-month feel good community thing, it's for real.

Some of this stuff is bitter stuff to swallow. And we don't like bitter, we like the sweet and sugary things in life, the triumphs and the happy moment. But bitter, as all medicine people will tell you, is the taste of the heart. It's what tells you what is good and not good for the system, how you grow up and take responsibility for your actions. How experience teaches us to shift out of being the haughty me-against-Them people who want to rule the universe and become fellows with all beings on the planet.

The loss of these groups told us that power struggles are not for the future, nor is old-fashioned spirituality, hierarchy of any kind, hostility or control. It taught us that you can't really co-opt the future. It doesn't belong to big business or to the institution, and it will slip out of the Empire's clutches at every turn. In Norwich we learned that our Transition Circles brought a key aspect into the fabric of Transition - personal carbon reduction. We have one circle left still meeting, but the legacy of all that great experiment lives on. It's in the comments pages of the Transiition Free Press, it's in the interview with Shaun Chamberlin. It's just taking another form, working with a new mix of people. No blame. No loss. No failure. Just celebration.

P.S. There is only one real tip I would add to the media tool in the book and it's this: journalists are people and finding the story is what we really care about.

Photos: Untitled piece by Maria Elvorith for the cover of The Future We Deserve; Banner for February edition of Transition Norwich news bulletin; Transition East Gathering 2009 at Diss; with Alexis Rowell, News Editor of Transition Free Press (photo: Sarah Nicholl)

Place Making and Neighbourhood - Being Here

This was a piece originally written for May Day, though the subject it considers is eternal . . .

Right now at Geldeston Locks Rita is sitting down with the crew to eat breakfast after a hard hour’s dancing in the rain and wind. We’ve just come in soaked from walking across the barley fields, waiting under the oak and hawthorn for the sun to rise (invisibly). Outside the birds are singing (wildly). The black poplar leaves are unfurling (like tongues of fire). The heavenly scent of alexander flowers and bluebells is in the air. We’re all still up at daybreak, in spite of everything, still here.

Most people are asleep in their houses. Maybe they don’t remember it’s May Day, or know why children on the greens of England are dancing round a birch tree. Still the Spring pushes the leaves out of dry wood, pours forth her beauty in the woods and hedgerows, out there, down the lane, in the neighbourhood. And true to this moment, to the revolutionary nature of the day, I’m breaking form. We are commanded, as social reporters, to be writing about our local initiatives, but I feel something collective has not yet been explored in Transition. It feels urgent, planetary, larger than all our projects and yet underpins them all. Bear with me.

The myth of community

It was Susie Hargus who first mentioned it. We were driving down the freeway in St. Paul Minnesota and she said: This road really split the community. And I looked at her, nonplussed. She was an artist and a dreamer and the crowd of unknown people who lived in her district hadn’t, up to that point, figured in anywhere in our conversations.

After that I kept hearing the word. In Bisbee, Arizona, in Oxford, England and then everywhere I went in Transition. People with a dreamy look in their eye, uttering the special mantra that transcended everything. Community! Pretty soon I worked it out. “Community” didn’t mean people in the district, it meant a group of people like yourself, who loved you for who you were, who made you feel good. Imaginary friends and neighbours, ideal playmates in a rocky time.

Maybe this is why the word Community alienated me. How can you be part of someone’s else’s idea? Or maybe it was because I had spent my bohemian youth with a band of fellow journalists, connected to a whole city (London), that I never yearned to belong to a set of people. It wasn’t until I returned to England after travelling that the word started to mean anything, as I found myself isolated from the human inhabitants in the lane where I now lived. An incomer, a renter and of no significance to the local rural, suburban and strangely, feudal society.

Writers, by their nature, are wary of traditional community, the status quo who judge and condemn any one who thinks out of the box, who pushes, like the Spring, for new life and liberty. What we love is neighbourhood and the pattern language of place. We love street trees and corner shops, we love the sun reflecting gold on the windows of the towerblock, the scent of rain on pavements, the local restaurant with its chairs outside, our conversations with market stall holders, the numbers of buses. This C2 bus I am catching now with Sarah Nicholl, that runs from Victoria Station to Parliament Hill Fields.

We love those names of places, our memories of journeys and meetings. Our bodies remember their curves and gradients, as we cycle towards the library, the office, the theatre, our feet remember street corners, canal paths, parks and bridges. My feet remember the way from Oxford Circus to Lexington Street, even though I haven’t walked through these back alleys for twenty years. I don’t have that network of media friends in London anymore, but I do have Transition. It’s a network too, of course, just one that is working for a different world. We’re on our way, Sarah and I, on this Spring night walking to Mildred’s to meet some of our Transition companions on the eve of a Peak Money conversation.

I haven’t been in Soho in a long long time, but in spite of all the changes I have gone though in that time, the changes the world has gone through, I look around the room and see it’s the same. These buildings have been here for centuries, hosting loud and boisterous conversations between people, the small rooms are rocking with words and laughter, the clattering of plates and chinking of glasses. It’s London. Fast, furious, communicating like mad with itself. I don’t live here anymore, and yet here I am. In my element. Home.

Making Myself (Our Self) at Home

What has this to do with Transition? Belonging is the core of everything. We have to be home first before we go anywhere near the future. Otherwise we will always be operating from the past as "non-belongers" -working from outside in, when we need to be working from inside out.
What I learned travelling is that belonging doesn’t depend on those alliances with friends or colleagues you once knew (or perhaps still know). It doesn’t depend on having a community you can call your own, or being tapped into the conventional circles made by institutions, by church, school, or family. Belonging is belonging to humanity, to the earth, knowing that how you act and move and give every day matters.

Belonging is loving the world wherever you are. It’s loving the city neighbourhood, it’s loving this country lane. It’s loving the plane trees of Hoxton Square, the damson trees in Philip and Irene’s garden, the rain as it slides down the window. It’s knowing that being in a place doesn’t depend on the people who live in the district, or what they think of you or you them. Belonging is something impersonal, and because it’s impersonal it’s more intimate, more generous than any idea of community. It’s feeling at home on a corner in Mexico City where I sit drinking my morning coffee, to the long road across America, edged with sunflowers, it’s belonging to the mountains and the desert, to the Thames, to the Ganges, to the California coastline, to this grey North Sea, with all its watery territories, all the tracks we make, the people and the animals and the birds, the indigenous blueprint of places, the vernacular of everywhere.

Breaking out

We can talk carbon emissions and climate change, we can talk community and Transition, we can think in numbers and statistics, tell our horror stories and hopeful visions, but nothing will change outwardly, the way we all wish it would (which is to say for real), unless we come from this kind of affection for the places we live in. Unless we break out of our “left brain” understanding of geography, class and history and start tapping into our “right hemisphere” collective lineage, connect with the people who have been speaking, singing, creating this pattern language for millennia. Everyone who keeps this sense of rootedness and fluidity alive in us all. Until we start belonging to the trees and the wind and feel our feet on the ground, at home with perfect strangers in all places, we are going nowhere. All our conversations – peak oil, peak money, peak everything – will be stuck within an old paradigm. Stuck in me and my idea of the world, separate from you.

We have to know the physical world as our home territory, we have to see each other as we really are: native, indigenous to this earth. We have to know we are the bio-diversity we talk about. We are the heritage seeds of the future. That each of us holds a planetary form, shaped like the sun we cannot always see. A true form that is also a colour, a sound, a frequency we sense when we feel light, relaxed, in synch with everything and everyone in the neighbourhood. When we do Transition from that place, it’s happening. It’s happening in London, in East Anglia, in Pittsburgh, in Japan, wherever we are. That’s the moment when we know what we are doing on the planet, in each other’s company, when we wake up. The reason we keep dancing in the rain.

Merry May morning everyone!

Mark leading a Plants for Life, Walking with Weeds, Bungay; Green Lane, Suffolk; Sustainble Bungay Give and Take crew, London; Children dancing at Geldeston Locks, May 2011

News from a very busy Norwich FarmShare

This really is a last minute blog! I was trying hard to relax tonight, trying to calm my head from its perpetual buzzing and get it to settle down and enjoy a weekend off. I know that I need to organise that irrigation rota for the farm (must call Christophe to see if we've got the electricity sorted yet); find two more volunteers for the Norwich Lanes fair; four more for the Norwich veggie fayre; sort out the email to all our members with loads of hot off the press exciting news (which I mustn't accidentally post here and spoil the surprises!); and goodness know what else... but I most of all need to switch it all off for a couple of days and do very little. But then I checked my email and found a friendly reminder from Charlotte that it's my turn to blog. Cripes. Well, as long as it squeaks in just this side of midnight, I reckon I'm in the clear.

What's changed on the farm since last theme week? Everything, it feels like. Last time I blogged, it still felt like early spring. We were eating a few of the first spring crops and mostly polishing off the last of the overwintering veg. Now we're in the depths of the Hungry Gap with barely a cabbage to keep us going. We're relying on a network of growers around the UK and even further afield to keep our member's shares full. But our polytunnels are full to the brim with summer veg merrily climbing, flowering and thriving: beans, tomatoes and aubergines are full of promise of good things to come and even the tomatoes in the field are looking sprightly.

We've just crossed the 100 member mark, which feels like an unbelievably huge milestone, and this month we'll also reach the first anniversary of sharing veg with our members. I remember the excitement last year of those first veg coming out of the ground; this year I think I'm even more excited as I know how good they're going to taste. When you pass people working on the farm, more often than not they're discussing which is the vegetable they're looking forward to the most this year. I think mine is tomatoes. Or maybe new potatoes. Mmmmm...

If you'd like to know more about the farm, join us for a workday or anything else- it's all on our website: www.norwichfarmshare.co.uk

Pics: Onions, Elena; Summer veg share: Jan