I'll be honest. I'm not exactly sure where this one came from. I do like me some concrete poetry. If I had time I'd wallow in it. Ideas come easily but turning them into work requires patience and more skill than I possess. I once had a radio character called Shaman Hamish who got away with uttering abusive and subversive nonsense, often in Scots. One day he was in the studio being airbrushed for a radio show and got mangled in the process. Maybe it's time for a resurrection. 

I might have mentioned that a small group of us in Jedburgh were interested in growing food around the town. This conveniently falls within the social domain of the Fallow Land Project. Vegetable planters here and there that anyone can access when the plants are ready to pick.  Some call this guerrilla gardening (which would seem to be out of kilter in the Tory Borders) but we can look at it as enabling fallow communities to spring into life, an exploration of the fallow commons and so on. Our working title is Get Jed Fed.

Placing planters around the town seems to be feasible and straightforward. There’s strong support from the council and the community generally with no real objections as long as we apply common sense.

The other idea of reviving the herb garden at the site of Jedburgh’s Franciscan Friary isn’t going so well. What we wanted to do was plant some herbs in the existing quadrants, as close as possible to the original garden, and make the place more beautiful for citizens and visitors to enjoy. But because it’s an archaeological site there’s some confusion as to who’s responsible for the upkeep, who should be maintaining it and whether or not townspeople can have some agency in replanting and improving the site which is, to be frank, at the moment somewhere between a dog toilet and a skip. All above my pay grade but let’s see how things pans out over the weeks ahead. 

Here are some pictures of how things stand. The box hedge surrounding the herb quadrants is blighted and the fruit bushes at the back need attention. Above and beyond simple growing the whole site needs a lot of love. Some of the archaeological features have been vandalised and need replaced or repaired. The signage could be done with a facelift and the decking platform, which offers views of... the decking..., would benefit from being re-designed with more benches installed. A more welcoming entrance and it could be a very special place to sit and read a book or play your guitar in the fine weather. 

I’m going over different ideas for an eventual art work or works relating to the Fallow Land project and its themes. I’ve covered a lot of ground (literally), what with the art walks, my own walks and spending time in the field (again literally), looking, listening, thinking, exploring through all the senses, in both the mindful and the mindless modes. The other part is the social dimension which involves growing initiatives in the town and those are going very well. I’ll report on them next.

A few ideas are coming to the fore. Some of these involve recycling ideas and concepts that I've had bubbling away as part of previous investigations into Jedburgh and its hinterland. I had discussed with two of the farmers I know the possibility of making small signs to put on the gates of those fields along the paths where people walk the most, signs illustrating through symbols and/or words what’s going on in the fields. This might still happen and my own preference here is for some kind of ideograms that encapsulate the growing or function that the various fields are undergoing over a given period.

​From my neighbour Alfie Dodds who farms below Hunthill south of Jedburgh I have some wonderful descriptions of the fields in the area I’m investigating. One goes like this: Species-rich meadow used for grazing, cannot be ploughed without permission from Department. Presumably that’ll be the Department of Agriculture. I thought this was all about insects, maybe dragonflies, but what it means is that there are rare grasses in that field and somebody has considered it worthwhile to protect them. As you’d expect other descriptions are very functional, for example Permanent Grass will be left until July and cut for silage or, more detailed, Arable silage field under sown with grass. Will be ploughed out in Spring and re-sown with arable silage mix and grass. To be cut for winter fodder 2025. I especially love this one - Winter stubble scheme to encourage birds, will be ploughed and sown in Spring with Spring Barley, because it's a novelty to me that food growing involves feeding the birds. It all makes sense within a more holistic view of the food environment.

Out of all this I’ll be spending a lot more time in the spring, wallowing in the amazing milky light you get at this latitude. In and around these fields employing cameras, lenses, a bunch of objects and ‘stuff’ to make some short test films and staged photographs, probably in my performance mode as ‘Landowner’. Back to the ideograms I can see a place for those as objects, printed out or as linocuts, brought into the environment.

Sound is tricky and I say that as someone who works with the medium every day. The sounds in those high fields and woodlands can be undifferentiated, nuanced and subtle at the same time, not without interest but difficult to manipulate into an accessible art work. Until I adequately decode the soundscape my way round this problem is to represent the sounds visually or even sculpturally which I find fascinating.

Finally, alongside finding a place for the words and phrases that the farmers themselves use to describe places and processes, I'm considering some activity around sonograms, again linocuts or other prints. If you’re not sure what I mean by sonograms I should make it clear that I'm not doing pregnancy testing for cattle.

​After all that lot I might be able to make some decisions. 

The Fallow Land Project is one that obliges me to take my time, slow time, time for reflection and research over days, weeks and months. Without this temporal stretch I wouldn't be able to unearth meaning. Mining for meaning. Fallow is an interesting  signifier. It carries with it agricultural and ecological significance, metaphorical resonance in the biblical and spiritual spheres and, as I'm discovering, there's an important social meaning that emerges slowly when you start to work with people and form small communities around activities that connect us to the land and the food environment. 

I'm interested in how we can form small communities around food growing in the town - planting vegetables, siting planters around the public space and working with the council to recreate the historical herb garden in the Old Friary. The Jedburgh Artwalks already have the feel of a nascent community.

If they can be sustained these modest initiatives could and should transform social potential from a dormant state into a productive state, releasing creative energy and offering benefits to the individuals, the groups involved and the town. A side benefit, much needed in this slow small town, would be the establishment of a precedent in the cultural creative and community domains, a template that enables further development. That's where I am just now with the meaning of the word 'fallow'.