Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes

by Rosie Boycott

  When John was a teenager and first learned to arrange flowers under the watchful eye of Constance Spry, the flowers he had to work with came from Cornwall, the Channel Islands and the glasshouses where his father used to grow carnations. Until the 1950's, Ilminster had its own railway station, and if he wanted something special he could phone Covent Garden at six in the morning and the flowers would arnve, III returnable wooden boxes, by three o'clock in the afternoon. The station master, attired in a black suit, waistcoat and fob watch, would deliver them directly to the shop. To make a complex funeral wreath, John first had to make a frame out of wire, then stuff it with wet moss or straw, to support the flowers and keep them fresh. It could take ages. The most elaborate funeral display he ever made was a three-foot-high steam engine, crafted out of wire, moss, carnations and roses. The deceased was the young son of the owners of a travelling fair that toured the West Country in the summer months, transporting the merry-go-rounds and coconut shies on the back of huge steam engines, which lumbered slowly along the country lanes. Just outside Ilminster the boy had slipped off the coupling between two wagons and been crushed to death by the relentless steel wheels.

  I like watching while John's nimble, clever hands create arrangements saying 'Beloved Dad' or 'You will be missed' out of carnations and roses and 'mums. Fashions, he says, have changed, and now that most people opt for the crematorium fewer flowers are wanted. It has been ages since he has had to make a vacant chair, or a replica of the gates of heaven. Even the once popular symbol of praying hands is hardly ever asked for. Animals are still popular and John finds it easy to create a floral cat, or dog, but a request for a tortoise made him think. How to make the neck? He solved the problem with a chunk of courgette, finishing it off with plasticine eyes.

  Flowers have extraordinary designs. The numbers of petals in a single flower are almost always part of a series known as the Fibonacci numbers; 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89. While it is well known that number sequences occur throughout the natural world - for instance, years have 365 days and the moon's cycle is twenty-eight days - the curious pattern that occurs in the world of flowers is something that I have always found wholly awe-inspiring. Lilies have three petals, buttercups have five, many delphiniums have eight, marigolds have thirteen, most field daisies have thirty-four, fifty-five or eighty­nine. These are all in the Fibonnaci sequence, and while there are exceptions to this rule they are rare.

  This number series is obtained by adding together the two previous numbers. I + I = 2, 2 + I = 3, and so on into infinity. If you dissect the head of a sunflower the same numbers crop up in the spiral patterns of the seeds. I first learned about the phenomenon of nature's numbers from the scientist Ian Stewart. He was talking about his book Nature's Numbers and I took Daisy along to listen. As she was only ten I expected that she might be bored, but I was very keen to go and so she had no option but to tag along. Ian showed slides of the sunflower heads, pointing out that, in addition to the numbers of seeds, there was another even more amazing natural pattern in the shape. The seeds, or florets, are arranged on the head of the sunflower in two intersecting groups of spirals, one moving clockwise, the other anti-clockwise. In some species the number of clockwise spirals is thirty-four, and the number of anticlockwise ones fifty-five. In other species you find fifty-five one way, eighty-nine another, or even eighty-nine one way, with 144 going the other. Pineapples have eight rows of scales sloping left, thirteen sloping right. Daisy was spellbound and so was I.

  The number system inherent in plants and flowers was first understood by Leonardo Fibonacci, who was born in the 1170's in Pisa. His lifelong fascination was with numbers and numerology's impact on the natural world. But as Ian Stewart asked some eight hundred years later, 'If genetics can choose to give a flower any number of petals it likes, why do we observe such a preponderance of Fibonacci numbers?'

  Ian explained that the number sequences show up in DNA codes and then went on to talk about how, as the cells of the plant differentiate themselves into leaf cells, this precise pattern occurs. Plants grow from their tips. The tips are conical and leaves near the top are nearer the centre than those which are farther down the stem. If we could draw a line connecting the points from which the leaves grow, we'd find we have a spiral. The important number in this spiral is the angle between the lines connecting the stem's centre with each leaf. In 1837 a crystallographer called Auguste Bravais and his botanist brother, Louis, discovered that this angle is usually close to 137.5 degrees. This number is important because, if you take any two consecutive numbers of the Fibonacci series, turn them into a fraction, and multiply them by 360 degrees you get 222.5 degrees. But since this is greater than 180 degrees it needs to be measured in the opposite direction, so has to be subtracted from 360 degrees, resulting in 137.5. As an example, if you take 34 and 55 and multiply the fraction by 360 degrees you have 222.5. As their size increases, the ratio of the Fibonacci numbers gets closer and closer to I.618034, or phi, the Golden Number, a number which crops up in the shapes and designs of the natural world with extraordinary regularity. When you look on the head of a sunflower, it is easy to see the clockwise and counter-clockwise pattern. Theflorets growin a waythat makes the most efficient use of the space. But if the angle was slightly different, for instance if florets were positioned at 120 degrees apart, (which is exactly a third of 360 degrees) then there would be gaps in between. But nature, using the proportions of the Golden Number, ensures that the space is completely and efficiently filled.

  The Golden Number, or ratio, or phi, is a never-ending, ever­repeating number: 1.6180339887 . . . When it was first realised that there exist numbers like this, which go on for ever, it caused a philosophical crisis among mathematicians in the fifth century Be. Numbers were meant to be manageable things: now suddenly, there were numbers which had no end, which stretched into infinity. The Golden Number is present in flowers and the numbers and position of their petals, in the growth pattern of spiral sea shells, in the structures of galaxies, in branches of mathematics, and in the arts, where, in the search for 'perfect proportions' in design and architecture, the golden ratio has been found to be the most pleasing. Maybe we like it because it reflects shapes and dimensions which we understand as natural, but it is so pervasive that it is impossible not to share Albert Einstein's sense of wonder. 'The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle.'

  By the middle of May, Bramble has grown so fat that she is finding it difficult to walk. It has been hot and she looks quite defeated, her belly hanging huge and heavy, her teats long and pendulous. If Bluebell had six piglets, Bramble's stomach would indicate that she must be having twice that number. She's been moved into the maternity ward on her own and when I go to bring her a carrot she follows me around the run like a lost dog, eager for strokes and, it seems, for conversation. One of the rescue chickens has moved out of her pen and into the pig pen with Bramble: every time David or Bob catches her and puts her back she flies out again and back in with the pig. The hen had started escaping when Bluebell and her piglets were still occupying that run: the little pigs would watch the bird with fascination, lying in their piggy heaps, eyes focused on her as she pecked the ground for grubs. We could trim her wings, but David thinks the hen might be a diversion for Bramble as she waits out the last days of her pregnancy.

  Bramble's re-housing means several other moves for the pig community. It's now Babe's turn to become a mother, so she is bivouacked with Robinson, a move she doesn't appreciate at all. Her method of vengeance has been to kick the food trough over and then to keep kicking it as the pig nuts spill on to the ground, making a great racket with her hooves smashing against the tin. Even when it's empty, she becomes periodically overwhelmed with fury and rushes at the trough, shoving and kicking, turning it over and over, making banging and crashin
g noises which disturb the otherwise peaceful sounds of the farm.

  Robinson is having problems of his own: he's been sunburnt on the white skin under his 'saddle' and his skin is peeling and flaking off through his wiry hairs. Pigs roll in mud to provide a sunscreen, but Robinson had been too lazy to walk down the hill to his wallow to muddy up his back and the sun has been beating down on his tender white stripe. Even though he's almost a foot taller than Babe, it's clear she has the upper hand. I watch her vent her fury on the empty trough and then turn on Robinson, who is snoozing in the shade by his water trough. He's splashed water on to the ground, creating a huge muddy puddle and he is lying in this to keep cool, balancing his head on the edge of his watering trough. With her snout, she pushes him hard in the side. When he pays no attention, she redoubles her efforts, until he is forced to get up, whereupon she immediately leaves him alone and goes back to beating up the trough. The moment she comes into season, all this behaviour will cease and she will become Robinson's willing and eager sex slave.

  In the adjacent run, the other pigs watch their antics, clustered together like a group of aunts having a jolly holiday in a nudist colony. Babe is the only virgin left among them and they seem to be enjoying her evident discomfiture. But they've all been through a pig's version of the first-night jitters, none with more anxiety and annoyance than Bramble, so I guess they know how she feels. When the vet comes to check on Boris's persistent health problems, he points out that the Empress has grown so fat that she won't get pregnant, so she has been moved in with the grown-up sows, where she is having to fight a bit harder for her rations. It's true, she is very fat. She looks as though she is wearing huge slabs of bacon as a topcoat. She still sticks her tongue out when she's thinking about things and I notice that she even sticks it out when she's having a drink. Guinness and Collette and Cordelia, the two saddleback sows, haven't been very welcoming to their new companion and are constantly barging into her and butting her in the softness of her underbelly. David says she is losing weight after just a few days, but it seems tough to be a pig on a diet, sort of against nature and instinct.

  Bluebell and her piglets are now living next to Hyacinth, Blossom and Lobelia and alongside the fence around the rare-breed chickens. The piglets are venturing further and further with every passing day, wriggling under the gate or through the square holes in the pig wire which they can still, just, force their bodies through. They explore in small groups, wriggling their way first into Hyacinth's run and from there, through another wire fence and out into the field. They stand next to dandelions which are about their height, staring in amazed delight at the big yellow flowers, then they scamper off through the tall grass, pausing to root up a divot of grass, pushing their noses into the soft, damp, muddy earth, their tails wagging furiously as they uncover a tasty stash of grubs. Then suddenly they'll all stand stock still, look this way and that and, as though summoned by a distant whistle, they'll race for home and the safety of Bluebell's belly. I watch one piglet fail to get through the fence first time and start to panic. He screams and jumps up in the air, then darts back and forth along the fence, looking for a suitable gap, but going so quickly that he clearly won't be able to see anything. Finally, he flings himself at the fence snout first and, pushing his head through the square hole, scrabbles with his front trotters for purchase in the earth on the other side. He finds it and wriggles his bottom, popping through the fence like a cork leaving a lively champagne bottle. Back on his feet, he shakes himself thoroughly and looks around, as though to check that no one has witnessed his moment of cowardice. Satisfied that all the other pigs are gainfully occupied, he trots back to his mother and latches his gums on to a teat, curling his tail upwards into a contented coil.

  Our second outing as stallholders is to a market at Langport, on the banks of the River Parrett. Langport is deep inside the Levels and, as its name implies, the town was once an actual port, servicing the boats which chugged up the Parrett into the heart of the swampy lands. Charlie went to school there between the ages of four and ten, commuting alone by train from Charlton Mackrell every morning and then home again in the afternoon. In the days before Beeching ripped out so many of the rural lines, Somerset was criss-crossed by small trains, which enabled a small boy to safely travel eight miles twice a day on his own.

  The night before, Charlie was at a dinner for his head of chambers and I was on Late Review, discussing the disappointing and rubbishy film version of The Da Vinci Code among other new arts events of the week, and we didn't leave west London till well after midnight.

  Shortly after 9.30 a.m., still half asleep, I climb into the old white Transit with Bob. David has built a precarious arrangement of shelves to enable us to transport hundreds of plants and herbs, but as we bump over a small bridge on the drive across the Levels the table lurches to one side, sending a tray of lavender plants flying. Half a dozen of them come loose from their pots and earth scatters over the other plants and the bottom of the van. The marquee is almost empty when we arrive, a clear advantage as we set up shop in a prime location by the entrance. After shaking off the soil, I arrange fifteen different herbs, petunias, hostas, rosemary plants, lavender, marigolds, geraniums, sedums, grasses, lupins, busy Lizzies, and royal blue irises on a rickety wooden table. I make a pile of copies of the herb book which has turned into a steady seller, earning us 50P on each sale. We've also got three boxes of different lettuces - Webb's wonder, lollo rosso and unico - on sale for 60p each.

  Next to us, Angela Davage from nearby Curry Rivel is putting out her stocks of homemade pasties, sausage rolls, bacon and tomato rolls, cakes, scones, cheese scones, all neatly wrapped in cellophane and labelled by hand. She is yawning too, after cooking till ten the night before and then getting up at five to finish the packing and sorting. Angela's husband had to stop work at Westland Helicopters due to ill health. Now he is unemployed. Her baking hobby is the mainstay of the family finances and she cooks for farm shops and works the local markets. Her mother helps out, and while Angela is manning the stall in Langport her mum is doing the same thing at the nearby Drayton market.

  Bob and I lug the trays of herbs and plants from the back of the Transit into the tent. I realise that we've brought no bags, no signs and no tin to put any money in, but luckily Charlie hasn't left home yet and I am able to reach him on the mobile and divert him towards the office for brown paper carrier bags and flat-pack cardboard boxes. By ten-thirty we are set up and ready so I go to look round. Langport town extends into the village of Huish Episcopi, home of one of Somerset's most remarkable churches. In 1972, when Britain converted to decimal currency, the first decimal stamps featured great English church towers. Huish took pride of place, appearing on the 9P version, the most expensive of the issue. The tower is celebrating its 550th year, although the church dates back to the 1200's. Huish was reputedly the model for Plumstead Episcopi in Trollope's The Warden, and in an adjoining tent an exhibition of paintings, photos and collages of the tower are being auctioned in aid of its upkeep. Outside on the rough grass beside the river, nine members of the Wessex Highlanders, splendid in tartan kilts, hats and bum-freezer black jackets, are warming up their bagpipes. A little later in the day, one of them comes by the stall and tells me that he learned to play the bagpipes in a piggery, where the noise was sufficiently loud to drown out the shrieks and wails that he made while trying to master his instrument. He thought the pigs quite liked it, as they'd cluster round him as he went through his scales.

  There's no formal opening of the market, but by II.30 we've already sold two herb books, twelve different herbs, two irises and all the lupins we bought - sadly only three: we could have sold many more. David had packed the Transit the night before and Charlie is annoyed to find that there is no coriander in with the herbs, as we've grown loads of it and it is already going to seed. But Bob is enjoying himself. On the drive over he told me that he was particularly chuffed that Bramble had finally started to treat him as a friend. The day before, he
'd been spreading extra straw in the maternity ward and the fat sow had shown a keen interest, helping push the straw this way and that, creating a big luxurious bed in which she will soon give birth. Apparently, she'd nudged him several times on the leg, not her usual pushy shoves, more a gesture of thanks. She had bestowed a little gift of grace on Bob and it was touching to see how much it delighted him.

  'Make eye contact and smile,' Charlie says. It's late in the morning and, exactly as happened at the Montacute market, the stalls selling food are doing a roaring business while trade on our plant stall is lurching along in fits and starts. Mark and Sue Tutton of Orchard Old Spots are nearby. Since opening time, Mark has been frying pork burgers, bacon and sausages on a portable gas grill and one of his daughters has been stuffing the meat into buns, adding fried onions or generous dollops of Sue's home-made apple sauce. By twelve-thirty there's a queue and the smell is mouth-watering.