A circle a hundred feet round and Agnes Arber

As I said in my sermon last week at Harvest (see below) I might actually go out and draw the size circle Lew Welch suggested in his poem. Well I did (you can just see the line in the foreground) and here I am in it, looking a bit daft I'll admit, but hey, do I care?

Whilst In Wells-next-the-Sea I got hold of a book called The Manifold and the One by a Cambridge botanist called Agnes Arber. Now she was one extraordinary person and I recommend that anyone who is interested in the whole pan[en]theistic position should take a look at her work. Here is a link to a page which should enable you to do that. I particularly recommend the brief paper by R. L. Hauke Morphology to Metaphysics and Mysticism. I went into Cambridge University Press this afternoon to see what they still have in print (and on the shelves) and was told that only Herbals; Their Origin and Evolution: a Chapter in the History of Botany: 1470 to 1670 (1912) was still available. It is a lovely book but doesn't get into her own thinking. I hope CUP decide to make the later works available once again. The Manifold and the One has, alas, not been reprinted but I have scanned a copy which you can download at this link.

I'll leave you with a photo of Susanna and me drinking tea after the exertions of circle drawing and counting way more than three hundred things!