January 2023

I once read a book written by Canadian zoologist and author, Farley Mowatt, who spent some time living in the Arctic with a group of Inuit just after WWII (Farley Mowatt, 1952 “People of the Deer”). At the beginning of chapter VII he described a meal in which his hosts presented boiled meat and gravy in a large communal tray. They ate the meat using fingers and knives, but conveyed the ‘soup’ to their mouths by using their cupped hands. It was apparently a messy procedure as lots of the soup dripped down the front of their clothes. I was much struck by this. It had never occurred to me that any human would attempt to eat soup without a spoon, or some substitute such as a seashell. It just goes to show that you cannot take anything for granted when studying human behaviour.

Most cultures use spoons for sloshy foods. So when did people start using them? There are apparently rare examples of spoons carved from antler and ivory which date back to the later part of the Ice Age, up to 20,000 years ago. They come from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer sites in Russia and France. Were they used for eating or serving or, as happened millennia later (think communion spoons), for religious rituals? Before the invention of pottery, how much food was cooked by boiling in liquid? There are methods of doing so, but were they used? (and how could you detect it if they were?).

There are many finds of spoons from the Neolithic, when farming and pottery were introduced, and people began to boil things in pottery vessels. Wooden spoons have been found in waterlogged sites such as the Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels, the lake villages of Egolzwil and Niederwil in Switzerland, the French lake village of Charavines, and the Danish bog of Christiansholms Mose near Copenhagen. There are ceramic spoons from Dikili Tash in Greece and bone ones from Barcin Hoyuk in Turkey.

But I think my favourite Neolithic spoons are the small bone spoons from the Balkans and Turkey which have been found to bear the tiny marks of baby’s milk teeth. They are considered to show that during the Neolithic, babies were weaned earlier than before, as their mothers could now boil up cereals to make porridge and feed it to them with a spoon. Cute!

Strangely enough, sometimes a gardener can enjoy the almost total absence of vegetation. As in karesansui, the Japanese Zen dry garden.

Karesansui are composed almost entirely of sand, carefully raked to give the effect of ripples on water, surrounding a few rocks. Occasionally there might be moss, a shrub, or a water feature. The gardens are small, and usually surrounded by buildings or a wall. The extreme simplicity and lack of colour are intended to be symbolic of the essence of nature and the world. They are intended to aid meditation or contemplation.

This is a very old form of garden, dating back to the 12^th to 14^th centuries, usually associated with Zen Buddhist temples and cared for as part of their duties by the monks. The outstanding example usually cited is the dry garden at the Ryoanji (‘Peaceful Dragon’) temple in Kyoto, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Here carefully raked sand is arranged around fifteen stones which are placed in small groups, each set in a small patch of moss. It is considered important that you cannot see all of the stones from any one viewpoint. The garden is surrounded by a wall on three sides and by one of the temple buildings on the fourth side.

Karesansui are popular outside Japan. There are a number in the UK, including one at Kew Gardens in London. They are even found in Scotland. The best known example is part of the Japanese Garden at Cowden castle near Dollar in Clackmannanshire. This garden was designed in the early 20^th century for a wealthy woman, Isabella Christie, a traveller and Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. It was unusual in being designed by a Japanese woman designer, and was largely maintained by Japanese gardeners. Cowden’s Japanese garden was closed in 1955 after vandalism and neglect, but has been restored and is now open to the public again.

The natural world sometimes offers a similar ‘garden' experience. Around the cliffs and beaches of Orkney, a few dwarf plants often grow among the rocks and sand giving a very pleasing aesthetic effect, a spare beauty almost like a wild karesansui.

I tend to enjoy the simplest and most minimal in art of any kind. I find these gardens very peaceful and satisfying.