Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (29 page)

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 crashing 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.