Lets start with what has worked – its not a long list and even the successes are relative or need qualifying. Early potatoes like Charlotte and Rocket have been pretty good. In early, out early, before too much damage could be done. Later ones like Desiree and Pink Fir Apple have been a disaster. In the case of Fir Apple I actually got out less in bulk than I planted. Just, on average two tiny spuds per plant, so small that an entire rows produce fitted into the top pocket of my shirt with room to spare. Garlic, one of this years successes, it liked the early damp and the later heat. Tomatoes – pretty spectacular, still cropping well in October along with a couple of experimental tomatillo plants. Salads, stews, and plenty to freeze too. Basil, a glorious fragrant delight. Both green and purple have thrived, though like the tomatoes have needed constant attention especially regular watering. If that has at times in the sweltering heat felt like outdoor house work, at least there has been plenty of aromatic leaves to make up for it. Those other salad staples, cucumbers and lettuce, forget it. The punishing watering regimes from June through August meant some things never got planted and others – like cucumbers just never made it. Same was true of onions and shallots. They are water heavy and never thrived. They soon fell victim to the enforced triage of the watering rota. Beans were a curates egg, if that is possible. Broad beans did OK enough for a few meals before the heat got to them, but not enough to freeze as in most years. Runner beans, poor things. They don’t like the heat at all, their flowers don’t set. Note to self. Runner beans are a victim of climate change. 2025 will be last year I ever successfully grew some of my favourite vegetable.

It isn’t just the fruit and vegetables that were finding the heat challenging. The wild life was too. Most of the time (squirrels excepted) I can manage the tithe that wildlife take from the plot, ‘the angels share’ as whisky distillers put it. But this year drought brought forth a new boldness, from Muntjak, pigeons and even foxes. Anything green leafy was fair game, but even the spikyer leaved plants like courgette and squash fell victim to hungry and thirsty deer who ate the courgettes like they were ice lollies, and grazed the squash plants to within an inch, and beyond of their lives.

So what about those blossom-laden fruit trees? Yes they matured into decent fruit thanks to the bees, in very large quantities in fact. Two top scorers were cherries and greengages. I had the foresight to pick the only partly ripe greengages before going on holiday for two weeks in early June.T hey ripened at home and were absolutely delicious. Plenty to give away even. It wasn’t exactly foresight that led to a good cherry crop. In previous years the birds (did I mention pigeons?) ate them all before they were ripe enough to pick (I hope they got tummy aches), but this year I invested in sleeves to protect cherry laden branches. It mainly worked, but the pigeons worked out that if they stood on a strong enough branch they could peck through the sleeve and eat the cherries underneath anyway. Luckily they only managed this with one branch, and the shocked manufacturers supplied a new sleeve for free when presented with the photographic evidence. Pears and apples there were in abundance and juice makers Tiddley Pommes came by in early August and took two trees worth of crops, producing 45 bottles of juice. Not bad, but less than last years fifty one. Why less with such a good crop? Because the James Grieve were basically over and rotting on the tree or on the ground by early August. It was too hot for them. The other apple trees produced substantial quantities but the quality was poor, a high proportion had what Lady Muck calls ‘visitors’. That rather charming characterisation disguises the destructive power of the beasts, and nigh on 75% of the crops has been damaged. The same applies to pears. They look wonderful until they start to ripen and suddenly the rot has spread from the middle.

Which leaves ‘The Muck Report’ to round up on the soft fruit. Here too disaster reigned. The raspberries couldn’t stand the heat, and neither could the red and blackcurrants. None produced anything of significance and around half of the currant bushes died. The only exception were gooseberries – I got in just before the squirrels got to the crop (they took about 20%) somewhat over 3kg, but it was 13 kg last year. Consolation prizes: blackberries which were super abundant and juicy, but needed to be picked in June and July, and grapes, twenty three bunches of superlatively juicy ones from a single vine which has never produced anything seriously edible before. Some fairly obvious pointers to the crops of the next decade in this years successes. And time to put the thinking cap on about what Muck should grow to make that transition.

The Government’s COBRA committee has today, finally sat up and taken notice. In a cost of living crisis the price of food is about to go through the roof as crops fail both in the UK and across the continent, which is where we import most of our fresh fruit and veg from most of the year. As the Starmer Government was in its final days and the King of the North was preparing to ride into town (on a train, not a horse) to assume the crown, his team reached out to Muck in mid May seeking views on five Climate and Nature policies that were high priorities for early implementation. One of them was: ”Focus on food security to tackle  the cost of living crisis. We need to grow far more of our own food, especially horticultural produce  as climate breakdown and the  increasing difficulties of international supply chains make our strategy of ‘cheap’ imports unsustainable, and risk sudden and substantial price rises for foods people rely on (its already happening). The horticulture sector needs significant investment and guaranteed prices to make that investment viable”.

In the intervening three months since I wrote that, it has proved it to be both appropriate advice, and startlingly risky too. Growing our own food in the current conditions as farmers all over the country will attest, has become extraordinarily difficult. But importing it from wildfire-ravaged Spain or other parts of southern Europe which are far better prepared for these climatic conditions? Well, that looks like a challenge too. And a very expensive one for consumers across the continent and beyond. The cost of living crisis and the water shortages/drought and excess heat of the past few months (and for how much longer?) are inextricably bound up, whether that be people struggling to survive in over heated flats without access to shade or parks, or the prices we will all have to pay for basic foodstuffs. Who knew that the climate crisis had massive today, right now, impacts on ordinary people’s lives. But who took any notice when 30 years ago scientists warned that by the mid-2020s this would be the likely scenario if nothing was done. Well we are in the mid 2020s now, and that mere 30 minutes of rain is really is the news story.

A substantial spell of cold weather matters for many plants. That term vernalisation is the process where the cold is key to successful germination in a wide variety of plants. Traditionally garlic is ‘planted on the shortest day and harvested on the longest’. Why? Because garlic needs the cold of December-February to trigger the seed clove to produce a number of cloves in the new plant as it grows. The same applies to soft fruit like blackcurrants and gooseberries, and ‘top fruit’ such as apples and pears. All of them need about six weeks of consistently cold weather each winter. This not just to kill of bugs and pests – though that helps, but because they need a ‘chill factor’ as part of their seasonal renewal. And these days we aren’t getting it. How long ago is it since we consistently had six weeks of cold frosty and snowy weather in southern England each December-February? Quite a while. So much so that a 2-3 week spell seems both unusual and a cause for gardeners and growers to breathe a sigh of relief. And its not just fruit trees and the like that are affected; there is a tradition that root crops like parsnips are best not lifted until there have been a few frosts on them. Why? Because the frost encourages the plants to break down starch into sugars, and makes them all the tastier for us when harvested.

Meanwhile the cry goes up that as a nation we need more food security. Global instability and climatic changes that lead to crop failures in countries we increasingly rely on to feed us, are driving up food prices and with it a critical element of the cost of living crisis. So we should grow more ourselves and import less. While we do grow most of our food – just, arounf 53% , that proportion has dropped significantly since a high point in the early 1980s. Far more focus on horticulture as opposed to arable crops will help on the food security front. Meantime we just have to hope for less winter rain and their accompanying devastating floods, and a few more of those cold frosty winter days instead. The hedgehogs will thank us too.

This being the 100 anniversary there was a talk in the house after lunch by early printing collaborator Michael Hamish Glen who worked with Hamilton Finlay when he was very young. Charming, amusing, and informative. A fascinating coda; he is now (relatively recently) the partner of Sue Finlay who was H-F’s wife, and mother of his two children, and left him in 1990. I dont think he was the easiest person to live or work with. Michael was keen to point out – correctly I’m sure, just how important Sue was as a collaborator, particularly in relation to the construction of the garden. Hamilton Finlay had ideas, many of them good ones, but needed people to make them happen. The story of many great artists down the ages. Both of these two in different periods of his life and in relation to different art forms very much did this. Michael’s insights in to Hamilton-Finlays work and methods really made the day.

The garden is a bit of a walk from the car park, so the day managed to combine a stimulating talk (with souvenir print keepsake), a garden visit like no other, and a spectaular country walk from farm cottage and garden to car park in late summer sunshine. A combination that surely Ian Hamilton Finlay would have approved of, and no doubt enjoyed himself on many occasions. Cheers to his memory!

It is a big subject, slavery was a really important engine of wealth creation for the British Empire, not least for the merchants of Bristol. But this is part of the problem with the exhibition. It has been squeezed into a relatively small space in the museum. The result is that it promises more than it delivers. Ashman’s insight is to foreground the minute illustrations of African figures in Lindsay’s illustrations of his book, so creating an alternative narrative that explores how indigenous and African-Jamaicans used plants to resist their enslavement. It is certainly enlightening to discover what enslaved Africans and indigenous Jamaicans would have used as a form of resistance and connection to spirituality. So, Bellyache Bush was used as an abortifacient. The leaves and uncooked tubers of the Cassava were used to assist for both birth control and poison, while the Antidote Caccoon was considered an antidote to poison.  Plants with a spiritual dimension included Spiritweed – said to protect from malevolent ‘duppies’ or ghosts. The magic of horticulture is a key element of the work – plants as resistance, growing as rebellion. All this is stated and explained in the exhibitions accompanying explanatory texts, but in terms of source materials or responses to them there isn’t the room (or perhaps the funding?) to provide something that really seizes the imagination. Glimpses yes, a case made for sure, but a sense that there is so much more to explore that we don’t get to see.

I had a preconception that I’d be mucking around in something muddy and interactive and wondered if it would be quite small and a bit errr…. grey and dusty.  Not at all! This has to rate as one of the more extraordinary and revelatory exhibitions I’ve been to in some time. Now I know  something about soil… or I think I do. After all I’ve been digging, growing, composting, mulching and generally enjoying the Muck in soils for decades. They can’t tell me anything new. But actually it opens up a whole set of new vistas and understandings of a subject that collectively I sense we both feel we know a lot about – after all we stand on the stuff a great deal of our lives, and often not so much – we don’t examine it all that closely, except when we do.  So seeing it in a completely new context, an exhibition space, and  presented in ways that definitely aren’t grey and dusty  gives anyone, including Lord Muck, a completely new perspective.

Kicking things off are a series of photographs  by Frances Bourely of creatures that live in the soil and contribute so much to it – dung beetles and the like, highly magnified,  images somewhere between horror and surrealism. Jo Pearl  has a  wonderful collection of strange creatures hanging from wires, drifting in space,  an installation she describes as ‘oddkin’,  ‘…an attempt to overcome squeamishness and germophobia about soil’. So lovely, they look like something from an unusual Christmas tree decoration box. And of course they are all fashioned from clay.

The exhibition is staged over several floors and this is put to good use for example in a wonderful set of photographs  by Jim Richardson titled ‘Big Bluestem’ of the prarie plant.  Basically its ‘just grass’ on the American Praries. But look underneath in the soil. No wonder the ‘Dust Bowl’ occurred. This grass, so unprepossessing on the surface  has a rootscape  documented over six lightbox panels (three more are above ground) stretching down over four metres. No chance of being blown away or struggling in drought. Until  ‘civilisation’ got to work. Some of the ideas are so simple; a series of what look like they could be photographs of distant planets turn out to be  the result of soil  interacting directly with moistened colour film, soil and chemicals producing dramatic multicoloured images.

Fungus gets a big shout out too. More stunning photography  from Jo Pearl and even more extraordinary,  a collective called Marshmallow Laser Feast  who take us on a  filmic underground journey to reveal the way fungi roots break down and recycle dead plant and animal matter. The network  nourishes the mushrooms above ground which  in turn shed their spores out into the air. It’s no accident that the film is continuous – just like the ecological cycle it records.

Not everything about the soil is underground though. The utterly charming photographs by Ken Griffiths  ‘A country cottage calendar 1974’, records in  a dozen monthly snapshots the rebirth, growth, flowering, harvesting and return to dormancy of the garden of an elderly couple, the Sweetman’s  across a year. It is touching  not least because they aren’t recorded doing any actual gardening, but rather stand proudly in it just knowing what they and nature have created. More  troubling is a film originally shot in the 1930s and 40s in what was then the Holy Land  by a Scottish missionary seeking to record the flowers of this even then contested land. The original film – shot in colour, unusual for that time itself had lain unwatched for decades  until it was restored and reframed as  an elegy to something past and yet not forgotten. The beauty of Palestine – mainly as far as I could tell shot around the Sea of Galilee, was obvious; lake, landscapes, flowers and the friends and family of the minister picnicking, walking, and examining and picking the flora in an unhurried and unselfconscious way – little realising  the dystopian horrors of what was to follow. Locals got practically no look in – so some things never change –  a point made in the remake. Despite its surface beauty a difficult and moving watch,  and a different take on the meaning and significance of soil. And finally .. a chance to get  hands dirty. Almost.  A highly amusing  installation, a kitchen where nature cooks up the soil.  A  tap drips onto limestone, the content of a fruit bowl rot,  a mixer  plays with river sediments. What a discovery ”Soil” is.  And yet  there it is, underneath us every day. As the exhibition sub-title puts it, ‘A world at our feet’. A joy!

There is in fact a book called The gardens of William Morris  (Hamilton, Hart & Simmons 1998) with a very fetching  painting of Kelmscott Manor set in its garden by the Morris’s friend Marie Stillman on the front cover. It is very good on the principles of the Morrisian garden, if we are to believe such a thing exists, connecting it with the distinctive  natural character  of a place, the importance of the  thread of indigenous flora in Morris’s artistic work, and the idea that Morris’s ideal garden contained the essence of the man and his history; ”From his boyhood reading came chivalric scenes and romantic images of knights and ladies in vine-covered bowers. From studying Gerard’s sixteenth century Herball with its woodblock drawings of plants, he retained the  picture of an early garden all cruciform paths and neat raised beds.” The authors are bold enough to set our the principles of Morris’s garden design. They are pretty timeless and make a lot of sense. Basically: unify house and  garden;  enclose the garden with trees, hedges or natural looking fences; preserve local identity; plant simple flowers; eschew fashion; integrate existing trees; make it productive; and, include places for recreation and relaxation. I’d settle for that in any garden of mine.

So does Kelmscott Manor’s garden measure up? It certainly starts off with a number of significant advantages; beautiful house and out buildings made from old stone, those outbuildings including a dovecote, privvy and various barns allow for walls and hedges to seem like the natural order of things, a significant walled garden, some ancient and impressive trees and the space to allow them to thrive rather than feel constrained or too dominant of a small space,  and a certain solitude in the flat, reedy landscape that the house is set in. The entrance, through a  relatively small doorway in the wall leads up to the front door  along a flagstone path  flanked with standard roses – a view familiar to anyone  who has seen a copy of News from Nowhere. That entrance and the layout of the  front  garden certainly met with Morris’s approval, approaching his ideal,  with straight paths and separate ‘rooms’ bounded by old yew hedges. It didn’t take long for Morris to integrate his love of Iceland into the garden, taking his shears to the yew hedge under the gable of the tapestry room and recreating it into a topiary dragon which he named Fafnir after the dragon in The story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876) . It is still there, breathing fire.

Beyond the formal garden, the area of orchard and meadow leading down to a stream  has ash, elm, elder, poplar, and willow along with hawthorn hedging and apple in blossom. Bird life, something Morris cherished and is reflected in his designs – think ‘Strawberry thief’, is in abundance, though the ‘bird apps’ of my companions seemed to be dominated by rooks. Noisy birds! As for the fruit and veg, well the Morris household table was well known for its productive kitchen garden, and in season there were  cherries, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries apples and plums. The modern tea room (in one of the airy stone barns) maintains the tradition, serving  ‘apples quinces, mulberries and damsons’ from the garden. It isn’t hard to see where the mulberries come from. The tree is huge and like many of its species is held together with ropes, props, and ties, to minimise the chances of falling branches killing the visitors.

April is a little too early – even with the remarkably warm and wet winter we have endured, to see the main flower beds in their full glory, though honesty, cammasia, and the grey of cardoon foliage – grey was actually Morris’s favourite colour –  gave a hint of  pleasures to come, and the planting indicated considerable thought as did the fading cowslips and may blossom in the more informal spaces which lit up the Spring. Perhaps the full enjoyment of the  garden requires another visit – nothing wrong with seasons. In News from Nowhere the visitors arrive at ‘the old house’ at the end of their up-river journey, in June. As they raised the latch of the door in the wall, ‘My companion gave a sigh of  pleased surprise and enjoyment;  nor did I wonder, for the garden between the wall and the house was redolent of the June flowers and the roses were rolling over one another with that delicious superabundance of small well-tended gardens which at first sight takes away all thought from the beholder save that of beauty.’ Does Kelmscott today match up to this imaginary space so closely modelled on the 19 century home Morris so cherished?  One hundred and fifty odd years after he first fell in love with it, the answer has to be, yes.

But it is the connection with another William that has particularly intrigued me. William Morris.  As a child he had access to the family copy  of the Herball and studied it closely. He also tended a little garden of his own and learned the names and shapes of plants with the Herball’s help poring over its illustrations. It helped him develop his sense of floral colours, textures, scents, structures, and life cycles and although he was never a garden designer, nor even a great ‘practitioner’ of gardening, he had as Fiona MacCarthy puts it in her comprehensive biography of Morris, ‘a deep appreciation of a garden’s possibilities’.  Of course William’s early interest in individual flower forms is not so surprising in the person who became the most floral of designers.

But this grounding in both plants and the Herball  became far more important later in life as he embraced dyeing in the mid-1870s.  He sent Thomas Wardle a copy of the Herball which he said  contained  ‘useful information about certain disused vegetable dyes’ as he learned about the techniques of dyeing textiles. Before leaving for Leek in Staffordshire where Wardle and his dyeing works were based, he spent two years preparing, mastering the theory while he carried out inital experiments at Queen Square, the family home at the time. His younger daughter May wrote of this time ‘The air at home was saturated with dyeing: bits of madder and indigo lay about, papers of the kermes insect brought home and its habits and customs explained; dyestuffs of the home country would be inquired.’ Gerards Herball would be read out of an evening to the family, and the two girls, Jenny and May, in their early teens at the time, were given their own sets of dyestuffs. Morris himself  was paying extended visits to the Staffordshire works from  early 1876, keen to learn the trade. Suzanne Cooper (in How we might live: at home with Jane and William Morris, a delightful new perspective on the Morris’s lives) characterised it as a typically Morrisian activity ”He was keen to get his hands dirty. His eagerness to plunge into the dye vat  was almost performative – as if he wanted to prove his worth  to the working men who watched him.” Blue to the elbow in smock and clogs. He told Georgie Burne-Jones that he was ‘taking in dyeing at every pore (otherwise by the skin of my hands, which is certain). You know I like that.’ MacCarthy reckons that ‘Blue has a special place in Morris’s colour spectrum. In his poems and his novels it is the sign of happiness, of holidays. Blue was the colour of his working shirts.’

As Cooper remarks it was ‘a time of great inventiveness’. In April 1876  he registered three new textile designs Tulip, Marigold and Larkspur. At the same time Wardle was making trial prints for Columbine a block-printed cotton in muted green and salmon pink. All four patterns  demonstrated the skills that William had learned in designing wallpaper, based on the interplay between flowers and foliage. John Gerard’s Herball was hugely popular when it was first published, and an extended and revised edition (rather more botanically accurate than the first) was published in the 1630s.  Its influence over the centuries has  been  significant. And for me  it has become something I treasure, for its wisdom, the glory of its illustrations, and for the connections it has with geniuses that I admire.

To kick it all off the Cultvate team took on  a ten acre patch of farmland on the Earth Trust estate not far from Didcot. Members and there were a few, were encouraged to support the core team by volunteering at the site. Lord Muck mucked in. But  visits  soon revealed some of the pitfalls in the vision. A large area was devoted to potatoes – hardly a high value crop, and  we were encouraged to come and help harvest. But there was a problem. The variety planted Cara? Arran Pilot? were highly susceptible to eelworm. It soon became apparent that at least 95% of the crop was irreparably damaged and completely unsaleable, and sorting out the final 5% wasn’t worth the trouble. If we found a decent spud we could put it in a bag and take it home with us, gratis. Thin pickings. Complete crop failure. This could have been bad luck – farmers the world over have crop failures, or it could have been a mis-reading of the soil type and previous crops. Another potato variety might have thrived.  I didn’t know. But more pertinently, nor did the Cultivate team. The first experience of vision coming up against reality. Local production in the hands of people who had never farmed before proved to be more challenging than the business plan/prospectus had anticipated. Many other crops, particularly grown in the poly tunnels did well, customers appreciated them, but could they be produced more cheaply than they could be bought in from local suppliers with decades of experience, and scale to match? Basically, no.

On the other hand the VegVan concept looked like a really interesting innovation. Founder member Joe Hasell, a gardener at Worcester College explained it in an interview in the Oxford Times business magazine: ‘We will establish pop-up markets wherever people want one, outside business premises or schools for instance.’ The food sold would come from their smallholding or be bought in from other local suppliers. Member investors who were issued with a membership card could claim 10% off food purchased from the VegVan and the various locations and times were widely advertised. But a significant problem quickly emerged with this too. As time passed reliability at its various stops slipped because the co-op couldn’t afford to keep two vans on the road, one collecting the produce from producers and one selling to the public. The  collection van had to go, and the sales van had to do double shifts, and was getting older.  When it broke down there was no replacement available to cover. So what was its USP apart from selling local fruit and veg from the back of a van? If you wanted sustainable produce, big companies like Riverford or Abel & Cole were happy to oblige and deliver to the doorstep, and if the local dimension and the associated sociability was a premium, then the farmer’s market network could provide.

That this was a problem soon became apparent at a pretty stormy AGM in 2013 ie barely a year into operation. North Aston Organics put in a heartfelt appeal that Cultivate quit acting as a competitor and coordinate with their existing box-scheme. Essentially what local suppliers were finding was that Cultivate was  buying off them and re-selling to their own customers. But sales were good, or at least good enough with the support of volunteer members (around 400 or so investors in all) and the support of various charitable trusts. But as a business model it didn’t work. While staples like potatoes and carrots could be sold at ‘loss leader’ prices in the hope of attracting customers in and then get them to buy the more premium produce at prices to match, those prices put people off. Sales of profitable veg simply didn’t cover the operating costs. An attempt to enter the veg box scheme  didn’t work out  either, as the ‘big boys’ had already cornered most of the market and the infrastructure – vans and delivery drivers as well as a cooled distribution centre were expensive. By 2016 the VegVan (yes, just the one) was showing its age, and the co-op had withdrawn from the Earth Trust smallholding recognising that the lovely veg that could be grown there could also be grown more cheaply, by others locally.

The end didn’t come quickly. The 2018 AGM, the last one Lord Muck attended in person, wasn’t quorate, so the facilitated sessions on ‘brand’, ‘membership’, ‘Cultivate online’ etc had a forlorn sense about them.  Like with so many other  brilliant ideas, the pandemic rang down the final curtain. By late summer 2022 Cutivate had ceased trading, and officially ceased to exist at the end of April.

It is hard to draw lessons. But a few tentative thoughts are:

idealism won out over the nitty-gritty of  getting the job done. Especially in the first few years there was huge emphasis on  quite abstract goals to do with sustainable farming, food security and climate change; the niche of a VegVan was too small to be viable, and as a result Cultivate ended up competing with some of its suppliers and potentially undercutting farmer’s markets; alternatives such as online retailing were tried before being properly thought through. Riverford, Abel & Cole and even very local but already well established outfits like ‘Veg in Clover’, already had the market covered; over reliance on charitable/grant giving trusts masked the underlying problems in the business model and dragged out the final reckoning; and finally, the impact of the cost of living crisis and all the associated responses to an increasingly difficult macro-economic context, perhaps exemplified in the rise of food banks over the past decade, meant that even the relatively affluent demographic that Cultivate appealed to couldn’t or wouldn’t buy enough  produce at the prices they were selling it at. There was a touching, and telling, observation in Cultivate Chair Sarah Flood’s introduction to the 2016 Annual Report, where she characterised the loss that year as ‘We do still need to bump Cultivate over the line to turning a profit, but an extra bag of salad here or an extra bunch of carrots  there, and we’re there..’    Was it all lost for nary a bunch of carrots?

Turnips have an odd  cultural resonance. Ever since ‘Turnip’ Townshend aka Second Viscount Townshend (1674-1738), he of Raynham Hall in Norfolk,  began his agricultural experiments in the early 18 Century, the turnip seems to have acquired a special place in our national story.  His invention of the four crop rotation method: turnips, barley, clover, and wheat, led to a significant  improvement in agricultural production three hundred years ago. But even he considered the turnip crop suitable only as animal feed.  Baldrick  in Blackadder was a big turnip fan, especially if they looked like a ‘thingy’ (they don’t) and had much amusement  serving up especially carved ones that reminded people of ‘their wedding night’. Which proves that they were popular as long ago as medieval times.

In fact they were popular in medieval times when they were referred to as ‘neeps’ as in haggis, tatties and neeps – the only context in which that term is still in use, and Gerard in his Herbal (1597)  refers to ‘small turneeps’ which he considered particularly sweet and tasty, that were grown in the village of Hackney and brought to London for sale in the market at Cheapside. The interesting question is why they fell out of fashion so quickly. Seemingly by the late 17 Century the arrival of new root vegetables such as potatoes and sweet potatoes from the New World displaced them, as well as the rapid increase in sugar production also mainly from the New World, a simpler substitute for the sought after sweetness.

More recently – than the Blackadder series that is, they were a source of abuse, when the England football team lost an international to Sweden in 1999. The Sun’s headline on this humiliating event: ‘Swedes 2 Turnips 1’. But to prove that you can’t keep sex (thank you Baldrick) out of politics, when our ‘blink and you missed her’ Prime Minister Liz Truss  was seeking selection in 2010 for a Tory seat in – where else, Norfolk, and was rumbled to be having an affair, or at least sharing their mutual interest in turnips, with a married Tory MP, her local Association tried to get rid of her – a married woman, sex in the 21 Century, whatever next! The press rode to her rescue, labelling them, what else, but the ‘Turnip Taliban’.  She may have lasted long enough as PM to crash the economy (£40bn and counting)  but her legacy also seems to be to have promoted the hitherto unknown Therese Coffey to Ministerial office (Deputy PM no less) and her skirmish with the ever topical turnip. The Daily Star, having managed to get a lettuce to outlast PM Truss’s tenure, has now started a similar challenge – to see if Coffey can outlast a turnip. As fellow East Anglian grandee ‘Turnip Townsend’ could have told her 300 years ago, that is a risky bet for Coffey. It is no accident they are fed to over wintering livestock – because they last so long!