HOW NATURE CREEPS INTO ARCHITECTURE

Even if it hadn't rained, we would have visited Gloucester Cathedral. And the rain wasn't too bad that day, more like on and off drizzle, so we were able to visit parts of the town as well - but the cathedral cloisters caught my imagination beyond everything else. (If you've seen the Harry Potter film where Hermione fights a troll - you've seen them too - and I understand they were used as a set for one of the Doctor Who episodes.)

I walked round and round (or square and square!). There's a garden in the middle but you can't see it unless you go out through one of the small doors.

These cloisters are large and wide. Very beautiful, clearly very old - but not exactly material for a nature blog so it took me a while to decide whether I should include them.

So, once back here in Dorset, I went for a walk. And as I went, I thought. And as I thought, I took some photos. Then I came home, turned on the computer . . . and looked at them all, holiday and here.

Part of why I felt so at home in those cloisters was evident.

It's a very outside sort of place. I doubt it would always have been glazed - even though monks would have washed in the basins at the side. And there's a stone bench running around the inner walls. You could sit there and be cool, or cold . . . depending!

These cloisters were begun in 1351 and construction continued over the next . . . well, decades. Never mind Rome not being built in a day - some cathedrals took centuries to build. Durham, which we visited later in our journey, took four - and they hadn't stopped tinkering even then! We may have less reason to complain about having the builders in than we think. The building of buildings like these was part of life's fabric through generations of workers and couldn't but have had an impact on everyone who lived in the town and the lands around.

Looking up - fan vaulting - the earliest surviving. Some of it probably the first ever built.

But 'fan' vaulting . . .

This post is a struggle. I'm heavily dependent on the internet for information and, so far, I haven't been able to find who first thought of the name.

To me, the 'fans' look more like support structures of umbelliferous flowers

- and such flowers are not a silly place to find inspiration. In the middle ages when towns were smaller and the country always close at hand, for people interested in pattern and structure (architects!) plants like these could not have been other than fascinating. So, for me, this is fennel vaulting. Whether fennel had been introduced by then is beside the point. There would have been all sorts of umbelliferous plants in the gardens and hedgerows of Gloucester and beyond.

(This family of plants has now been renamed 'Apiaceae' but (to me) 'umbelliferous' describes them better. Think of prongs which hold up umbrellas.)

I once spent ages trying to find out how long roses had grown wild in Britain - and writing a post like this forces me, once again, to realise that the English countryside is not ever-unchanging.

I don't know whether chicory grew in its mediaeval hedgerows (I suspect not) but the flowers, though striking in their blueness, are not alone in their umbelliferousness. Look at the shape of the petals too - tall, with straight, parallel sides and a toothed edge at the top. Look at their simple circularity. Then look at the lines and shapes and circles of the cloister windows.

This is a shoddy post. It is dreadfully short of information even though my brain is bursting. That's why it's taken so long to write. I've been hoping to find time to check out the facts, fill in the gaps - but, in the end, I've decided I'd rather post something inadequate than to let Loose and Leafy grind to a halt while I swim through a sea of research . . . so . . . take this next bit with care.

I'm not an indoors kind of person. Well, I spend a lot of time indoors but indoors is not where I feel most at home. Yet these cloisters entranced me.

Here is a door.

And this is a familiar walk along our old railway line.

There will always have been routes through woods where the trees arch over. There will always have been bridges of some kind to walk under. Doors into . . . where . . . ? One catches one's breath.

And ever since I walked in these cloisters, I've been plodding around taking pictures of the spikey tops of leafless bushes - and chimney-scapes. Of telegraph poles and trees. And examining the way flat topped builidings don't seem to fit into our particular landscape as comfortably on the eye as those with sloped roofs and overhanging eaves. Is this because some reflect the shapes of oaks and mushrooms but others clearly don't? Do I like some buildings more than others because I begin from nature (in other words, is this is a matter of taste) or does architecture go wrong for everyone when it abandons the way things grow and form?

(I put it this way because buildings which suit a rocky country might well need to be more angular than those which 'fit' here.)

No way is this to do with simplicity. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral are far from unsophisticated structures. They didn't take a long time to build because workers were short of JCBs and tall, metal cranes. They were a radical innovation. A new design. Something people hadn't seen before.

If only we in the twenty-first century paid as much attention to ceilings!

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