Places, people, & wildlife, with a dash of distilling and wild swimming
Swim outdoors and you’ll encounter wildlife. Creatures and plants inhabiting the water are one of the most distinctive differences between swimming outdoors and swimming indoors. They can be a source of delight and sometimes a worry. I write a column for Outdoor Swimmer on wildlife for swimmers, exploring what to look out for, where to look for it and how to enjoy it. Illustrations are created by Alice Goodridge, a swimmer who also draws. After a few years this column evolved into the Eco Pages
It was fun making Cocktails at Inshriach London launch till dawn in a leafy glade in Bow. Summer heat had provided plenty of blossomy ingredients, and we had a couple of types of chillies in some cocktails too. Everything was laced with juniper picked by the banks of the Spey only a short walk across the field to the Inshriach still where it gets turned into gin.
Here is a feature on swims with nearby distilleries I wrote for the Outdoor Swimming Society on some of my favourites around Britain and Ireland. I have also added these swims to Wild Swim Map in this collection of Swims & then gin (or whisky)
People who knew I ran workshops and training sessions for distillers looking to find and learn about botanical ingredients kept asking if I would run a foraging day that they could come to. Time off is precious so the venue is fun and weatherproof as well as an edible playground. Get in touch for details.
I have been invited to speak at the symposium ‘Tackling over-collection of wild plants: is horticulture a conservation problem or solution? ‘ at the International Congress for Conservation Biology 2017. I will be talking about ‘Horticultural propagation versus wild collection for commercially viable yields’ .
An overview of what I will be talking about is:
With profit as the driving focus of trade in plants the cost of cultivation in comparison to the cost of wild collection is an important consideration when evaluating existing supplies or projecting future supplies of botanical ingredients and products. Not all plants are easy to cultivate and obstacles to cultivation can be presented at the initial stage of propagation. Agriculture is dominated by domesticated plants that have been differentiated from their wild ancestors via trait selection by people cultivating them. Ease of propagation is an important component of cultivation. However many wild-collected plants in trade are not replaceable by domesticated cultivars that are easy to propagate. Modern technology and advances in scientific knowledge on propagation are increasing the repertoire of plants that can be cultivated. However factoring in the costs of propagation can make cultivation an unviable supply route from a commercial perspective. The case for evaluating commercial viability on a species by species basis is illustrated by contrasting examples of undomesticated vascular and non-vascular plants, propagated by different means, which are traded worldwide from both cultivated and wild-collected sources.