Through a ruined doorway in the wall, behind the birdsong of Maytide, there is a fragile silence of broken things and the green light of woods coming closer. The ruins of Llanforda, just north of Oswestry, are the remains of an estate first built and planted in the 17th century. In 1640, it was described as having walks, pleasure gardens, and a wilderness and fountain to rival any grand garden in the county.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the garden and parkland was further developed in the grand manner of a Shropshire country house, but in 1940, Llanforda Hall was demolished. Local legend has it that an obsession for plants and gardening made the estate go bust.

Something of that all-consuming passion still haunts this place and is felt in the plants themselves. A once-manicured hornbeam hedge, now liberated, has thrown out arching boughs to form a tunnel. Ferns festoon piles of bricks. Once cordon and espalier pear trees lean against garden walls. Roots grapple with tumbled masonry. Silted fishponds flash white with water starwort flowers. Precious trees are besieged by sallow and laurel.

In the experiments with plantings (to compare what was possible to grow here in the Marches with London), the seeds of the garden’s own destruction were sown. Llandforda is what happens after the novel about the rise and fall of its creators has ended. The characters, the plot and its setting are scattered, and the place has absorbed what remains of the story. It is not just that this story is fragile; the language to tell it is weak.

Without those human dramas of ambition, privilege, love and death, the narrative is undone by more-than-human forces: weather, time and the ecological power of life. Words such as “abandoned” and “derelict” seem wrong now. The occupation has been replaced by the green genius of this place with a language of its own. It can be heard in the great oaks that have survived centuries; in the peacock butterfly that overwinters in the stones; in bluebells, nettles and wrens. Once familiar, now mythical, the view through the walled garden doorway shows where our obsessions end and magical life begins.

There is an urgent need for farming to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, with farmers also under pressure to be more sustainable. One suggestion could help with both problems: spreading crushed volcanic (basalt) rocks on fields to help capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

It is a sustainable fertiliser; basalt is rich in minerals, so the rock powder increases soil fertility by feeding nutrients needed for plant growth. Trials at the universities of Newcastle and Sheffield have shown that crop yields are improved, without any ill-effects on the environment or the plants.

This process of capturing CO₂ mimics a geological process called weathering. When it rains, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by the falling rain, and when the rainwater reaches the ground it reacts with basalt rocks to form inert carbonates, which are eventually washed into the sea where the carbon stays permanently locked away on the seabed.

Many parts of the UK are rich in volcanic rocks, which can be easily ground up into powder and scattered over fields. But this is no magic bullet to solve the climate crisis, as drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are still needed.

Charlie Colin, bassist and founding member of the US pop-rock band Train, best known for their hits Drops of Jupiter and Meet Virginia, has died aged 58.

Colin’s sister Carolyn Stephens confirmed her brother’s death to the Associated Press on Wednesday. He died after slipping and falling in the shower while house sitting for a friend in Brussels, Belgium, the celebrity website TMZ.com reported.

Colin grew up in California and Virginia. He played in a group called Apostles after college with guitarist Jimmy Stafford and singer Rob Hotchkiss. The band eventually dissolved and Colin moved to Singapore for a year to write jingles.

Eventually all three moved to San Francisco where Train formed in the early 90s with singer Pat Monahan. Colin brought in drummer Scott Underwood to round out the group, according to an interview with Colin and Hotchkiss in Berklee’s alumni magazine.

As a founding member of Train, Colin played on the band’s first three records, 1998’s self-titled album, 2001’s Drops of Jupiter and 2003’s My Private Nation. The latter two releases peaked at No 6 on the Billboard 200 chart.

Meet Virginia, from Train’s debut album, broke the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 but it was their sophomore album, Drops of Jupiter, that confirmed the band’s success.

The eight-times platinum title track Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me) – which features the Rolling Stones’ session pianist Chuck Leavell and Leonard Cohen’s string orchestrator Paul Buckmaster, and was written about the death of Monahan’s mother – hit No 5. It also earned two Grammys, for best rock song and best instrumental arrangement accompanying vocalist(s).

Colin left Train in 2003 due to substance abuse. “Charlie is one incredible bass player, but he was in a lot of pain, and the way he was dealing with it was very painful for everyone else around him,” Monahan told NBC San Diego.

In 2015 he reunited with Hotchkiss to start a new band called Painbirds, alongside Tom Luce. In 2017 he formed another band, the Side Deal, with Sugar Ray’s Stan Frazier and the PawnShop Kings’ Joel and Scott Owen.

On Wednesday a tribute to Colin appeared on the official Facebook and X social media pages for the band Train. “When I met Charlie Colin, front left, I fell in love with him. He was THE sweetest guy and what a handsome chap,” it reads. “Let’s make a band that’s the only reasonable thing to do.

“His unique bass playing a beautiful guitar work helped get folks to notice us in SF and beyond. I’ll always have a warm place for him in my heart. I always tried to pull him closer but he had a vision of his own. You’re a legend, Charlie. Go charm the pants off those angels.”

Before his death, Colin documented his time in Brussels, writing “Officially my favorite city” in a March Instagram post.

The owners of two mushroom farms in northern California where a disgruntled employee shot and killed seven people last year will pay a total of more than $450,000 in back wages and damages to 62 employees.

In an announcement released on Monday following an extensive investigation, the US labor department said the payment is an element of administrative settlements reached by the department’s wage and hour division with California Terra Garden and Concord Farms.

The government’s announcement comes after the incident in which the accused gunman, 67-year old Chunli Zhao, opened fire on two farms in Half Moon Bay, a small community approximately 30 miles south of San Francisco, on 23 January 2023, killing seven workers and injuring another.

Speaking to investigators, Zhao said that prior to the shooting, he had had an argument with a supervisor who insisted he pay $100 in repairs following a forklift incident that Zhao said was not his fault. According to Zhao, a co-worker intentionally hit the forklift with a bulldozer, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Zhao, a Chinese citizen, has pleaded not guilty to multiple murder charges.

Zhao worked at Concord Farms previously and was later an employee at California Terra Garden.

The deadly shooting and the labor department’s investigation revealed the hazardous working conditions that many migrant farmworkers have been subjected to in San Mateo county.

“Our investigators found workers at California Terra Gardens and Concord Farms housed in sickening conditions, forced to sleep near garbage and with insects all around,” Alberto Raymond, the labor department’s wage and hour division assistant district director, said in a statement.

At California Terra Garden, investigators found that 39 workers were housed in cramped cargo containers, garages and dilapidated trailers, were forced to sleep on filthy mattresses and were exposed to insects and trash. According to the labor department, the farm’s owners, Xianmin Guan and his wife, Liming Zhu, illegally deducted money from workers’ pay for the substandard housing.

At Concord Farms, investigators found that its owner, Grace Tung, housed workers in moldy, makeshift rooms in a greenhouse infested with bugs. Tung also violated federal regulations by shortchanging workers who were not paid appropriate overtime, the labor department said.

As part of the settlements, California Terra Garden has agreed to pay totals of $84,074 directly to 39 workers to recoup the employers’ illegal housing deductions, and $42,494 in civil money penalties to resolve its housing, wage-disclosure and record-keeping violations.

Meanwhile, Concord Farms has agreed to pay a total of $370,107 in overtime wages and liquidated damages to 10 workers, as well as a total of $4,242 in late wages to 23 workers. It has also agreed to pay $29,049 in civil money penalties to address its various violations.

The civil penalties are in addition to the more than $450,000 in back wages and damages to be paid to the 62 employees from both farms.

Another type of provocative flag that was flown during the breach of the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January 2021 was reportedly flown outside a summer residence of US supreme court justice Samuel Alito – following a similar, prior incident outside his main residence.

Last summer, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which originates from the Revolutionary war and has in recent years become a symbol of far-right Christian extremism, was flown outside Alito’s summer home in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

According to photographs obtained by the outlet and interviews with multiple neighbors and passersby, the flag was flown last July and September. The newspaper reported that the flag was visible in a Google Street View image from late August. It remains unclear whether the flag was flown consistently throughout last summer.

The New York Times report comes just days after it reported that an upside-down American flag was flown outside Alito’s Virginia home just days after the January 6 Capitol riots.

The Appeal to Heaven flag, also commonly known as the Pine Tree flag, was spotted among other controversial flags waved in Washington on 6 January 2021 when rioters and insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol, encouraged by Trump, then the president, over the false belief that the 2020 election had been won by him and not the actual victor, Joe Biden.

The Capitol attack was aimed at stopping the official certification by Congress of Biden’s victory, which was delayed by the violence but finally happened in the early hours of the following morning.

The Pine Tree flag was originally used on warships commanded by George Washington during the Revolutionary war. It has since been adopted by Christian nationalists who advocate for an American government based on Christian teachings.

The first report of the Stars and Stripes being flown upside-down outside an Alito residence provoked outrage about the further politicization of the supreme court, but Alito simply said his wife had done it and it was displayed only briefly.

The Guardian contacted the supreme court for comment on the latest report but did not receive an immediate response.

A Michigan dairy worker has been diagnosed with bird flu – the second human case associated with an outbreak in US dairy cows, after a case emerged in Texas earlier this spring.

The new patient had mild eye symptoms and has recovered, US and Michigan health officials said in announcing the case on Wednesday afternoon. The worker had been in contact with cows presumed to be infected, and the risk to the public remains low, officials said.

A nasal swab from the person tested negative for the virus, but an eye swab tested positive, “indicating an eye infection”, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a statement.

The first case happened in late March, when a farm worker in Texas was diagnosed in what officials called the first known instance globally of a person catching this version of bird flu from a mammal. That patient also reported only eye inflammation and recovered.

The CDC said “similar additional human cases could be identified” given high levels of the virus in raw milk from infected cows, and the extent of the spread in dairy cows.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said it believes unpasteurized milk is the primary vector for transmitting the virus among cows, though officials do not know exactly how it spreads.

To limit transmission in cattle, the USDA in late April started requiring dairy cows to test negative before being shipped across state lines.

“It’s likely that there will be several cases that emanate from exposure to infected cows and their milk amongst farm workers,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, Maryland.

“The key thing is to make sure that testing is wide enough to capture them,” he added.

Since 2020, a bird flu virus has been spreading among more animal species – including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises – in scores of countries. The detection in US livestock earlier this year was an unexpected twist that sparked questions about food safety and whether it would start spreading among humans.

That has not happened, although there has been a steady increase of reported infections in cows. As of Wednesday, the virus had been confirmed in 51 dairy herds in nine states, according to the US agriculture department.

Fifteen of the herds were in Michigan. Health officials there have declined to say how many people exposed to infected cattle have been tested or monitored.

The virus has been found in high levels in the raw milk of infected cows, but government officials say pasteurized products sold in grocery stores are safe because heat treatment has been confirmed to kill the virus.

The new case marks the third time a person in the United States has been diagnosed with what is known as type A H5N1 virus. In 2022, an incarcerated person in a work program picked it up while killing infected birds at a poultry farm in Montrose county, Colorado. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered. That predated the virus’s appearance in cows.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

Late-night hosts recapped Donald Trump’s unfulfilled promises to testify at his criminal hush-money trial in New York.

Stephen Colbert

Testimony ended on Tuesday in the first criminal trial ever for a former president of the United States. “Now, it may not have been the Trump trial we all wanted, it may not be about his most hideous crimes, but damn it – at least he farted,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “They can never take that away from us.”

“Today was Trump’s chance to wake up and snort a line of gas station energy powder and get on that stand to prove that this is all a big Joe Biden witch-hunt,” Colbert continued, but it was confirmed on Tuesday that Trump would not testify in his own trial. “That is shocking – Trump is not talking? What happened? Did he write himself a check for $130,000?” Colbert joked.

The trial is not over yet; closing arguments will wrap next week, and the judge will give the jury instructions for their deliberation. Colbert imagined how it would play out: “Thank you for your instructions, your honor. We will return with a verdict after careful deliberation … yeah, he’s guilty.”

Outside the courthouse, the crowds have been much smaller than the police prepared for, according to the New York Times, and included amateur puppeteers, a DJ with a portable speaker and a self-proclaimed “most successful” sex capsule salesman in Idaho, Utah and Nevada. “Really makes you feel for the second-most successful sex capsule salesman in Idaho, Utah and Nevada,” Colbert joked.

Without grassroots support, Trump “has been forced to call in the Maga goons on his behalf”, Colbert added. So far 25 members of Congress have attended, including Matt Gaetz, the Florida representative “who was mostly there for the sex capsules”, he quipped.

Jimmy Kimmel

“Our former president and future convicted felon, who after saying who knows how many times he would absolutely testify, has opted not to testify – and the defense has rested their case,” Jimmy Kimmel summarized on Tuesday evening.

“Of course, no day with Donald Trump would be complete without a mention of the size of the crowd,” he added before a clip of Trump outside the courthouse, claiming that crowd size is “not a really big thing for us, we don’t really care that much”.

“Yeah, right”, Kimmel scoffed. “If there’s one thing we know about Donald Trump, it’s that he couldn’t care less about crowd size.”

Still, Trump claimed he had “a lot” of supporters outside the courthouse. “No, there aren’t,” said Kimmel. “I drove by there last week – I was in New York – and there’s no one. You have no supporters in your home town.

“The only supporters Trump has in New York is the army of ass-kissers who fly in from Washington every day to suckle his teats on camera,” he added.

Kimmel also mocked a new Trump campaign video in which the words “unified reich” appear in grayscale beneath the fake headline: “TRUMP WINS!”

“Trump wants to bring the country together. The bad news, that country is Germany in 1933,” Kimmel said. Trump’s campaign claims that it wasn’t Trump’s team who made the video, and that Trump himself did not repost it. “It was one of the junior Nazis who works for him,” said Kimmel. “What else does this man need to do for people to see what he is? Grow the moustache?”

The Daily Show

Trump’s trial is near completion, and “just like Stormy Daniels said, it was over much more quickly than expected”, said guest host Michael Kosta on The Daily Show. And despite saying he was ready to testify under oath, Trump declined to testify in his defense.

“He’s like, ‘Let’s do it, swear me in on that shiny book that Mike Pence is always blah blah blah-ing about,’” Kosta recapped.

But “after talking such a big game, he’s not testifying?! So he’s doing the opposite of what he told us he was going to do over and over again? That’s not the Donald Trump I know,” Kosta deadpanned.

“It’s just so peculiar that outside the courtroom, with his legal pads of notes, he just talks and talks,” he continued. “But then if you ask him to walk just a few feet inside the courtroom and to swear to tell the truth under penalty of law, suddenly he’s afraid to speak? I mean, what’s the difference? Is it the fluorescent lighting? I mean, I hate to even come to this conclusion, but … is it possible that Donald Trump is full of shit?”

When will the general election take place?

Rishi Sunak has called a UK general election for 4 July – a Thursday as is traditional. This is just inside the second half of the year, as he promised. However, the timing is not ideal for voters in some parts of the country, including Scotland and Northern Ireland, where school holidays will have already started and many people may be away.

Why is he calling it now?

The prime minister has been saying for some weeks that there was evidence that the economy was improving. In his speech outside No 10, Sunak said the government had “reached two major milestones” of reducing inflation and growing the economy faster than other G7 countries.

However, the opposition is likely to argue he is calling one now because the economy is stalling, and things are unlikely to look better for the Conservatives in the autumn – with small boat crossings expected to continue despite any deportation flights taking off to Rwanda, and very limited room for tax cuts.

What happens next?

Rishi Sunak has been granted permission from the king for the dissolution of parliament. The ability to call elections returned to royal prerogative after the period from 2011 to 2022 when MPs could vote on calling an early election outside a fixed five-year parliamentary term.

What happens to parliament?

There are usually several days after an election is called and parliament is dissolved, or prorogued before dissolution. Sunak said parliament would end on 30 May. Any last bits of legislation will have to be passed in the coming days, with bills that do not make it being abandoned as they cannot be carried over.

What happens to MPs?

After parliament is dissolved, MPs will return to their constituencies to begin campaigning: they will no longer be MPs but parliamentary candidates. However, government ministers still hold their posts and responsibilities. Government activity is restricted, though, during the campaign, so that public money is not spent on political purposes.

How long will the campaign be?

For the next six or so Sunak, Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, Richard Tice, the Reform leader, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, the Green party leaders, and others will tour the UK to make their case to be the UK’s next prime minister. They are likely to hold political rallies, climb aboard battlebuses, and give dozens of stump speeches.

When will the manifestos be launched?

The parties tend to publish their document setting out their policies about three to four weeks before polling day, to ensure they are fresh in voters’ minds.

Will there be TV debates?

Sunak and Starmer are expected to go head to head but they are likely to want to squeeze out the smaller parties and make it a two-way contest. In previous years, the Tories and Labour have sent deputies in their place when other parties are involved.

What happens on polling day?

The polls open at 7am and close at 10pm. At the close an exit poll is published, which tends to correctly predict the result. The results from each constituency start to emerge throughout the night. By morning, it is usually clear who the winner is, with the prime minister either resigning or staying in office.

On the outskirts of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, there is an unusual golf club with no greenery.

Golf Club Naba Gninbolbo was constructed and conceived in 1975 by the village chief (better known as the “naaba” in the More language) of Balkuy along with a German friend. The two decided to convert farmland into a golf course, which started with nine holes and later expanded to 18.

“Our green is brown,” says Abdoul Tapsoba, who is the son of the founder and director of the club. Tapsoba is proud that the course is approved by the French golf federation.

“We use between 200 and 300 litres of water a day to keep the club running smoothly,” says Salif Samaké, the president of the Burkinabé golf federation. “Burkina is a Sahelian country, water is a scarce commodity, we cannot afford a club with grass. We want to play golf, but in our reality.”

Golf courses are famously incredibly hungry for water. In 2013, for example, a review of US golf courses found that they were using 1.44% of all America’s irrigation water. They also have a reputation for heavy use of pesticides and herbicides, in order to keep those greens weed- and insect-free.

And in recent years many have called attention to the problem around their land use, including the argument that their footprint per player is higher than any other sport, which seems concerning when land, particularly in urban settings, is at such a premium.

In 2016, the architect Russell Curtis calculated there was enough space on London’s publicly owned golf courses to house 300,000 people. He also looked at the discrepancy in user numbers of these green spaces and worked out that an 18-hole course could accommodate 72 players at any one time, allowing a maximum of 216 players on a typical summer’s day. On that basis, if the 166 hectares (410 acres) of Regent’s Park were to become a golf course, it could be used by 314 people a day; the park averaged almost 22,000 a day in 2014, according to the Royal Parks.

In the past decade and a half, the industry has made more noise about its environmental impact, with courses announcing plans to become eco-friendly, to the extent that Golf World now publishes an annual Green 100, highlighting the greenest courses in Europe. The scale of the initiatives varies, from courses that make their own bread or have moved over to LED lights, to courses that have sheep maintain the grass, or have invested in solar panels or created large water and wild areas.

But Naba Gninbolbo has found its own way. In Burkina Faso only 47% of the population has access to clean drinking water close to home, according to the NGO WaterAid West Africa. There is rain, about 700mm to 800mm of rain a year, but the infrastructure for storage is poor, which means that women and children spend part of their day going to the nearest well to fill 20-litre water cans and then returning home with about 200 litres thanks to the pousse-pousse, a metal structure with two wheels.

The greens at the golf course are not lawns, but are made instead from a mixture of sand and used motor oil, which prevents the sand from being blown away by the wind, making it more compact. The wildlife is all welcome. Cows, sheep and goats wander through the course as if it is their home, and during the rainy season (from June to September), they are responsible for eating the grass. They belong to a small fula village (an ethnic group historically known for their nomadic lifestyle and close relationship with cattle) that has become integrated into the golf club circuit.

The club has about 60 players, most of them Burkinabé, but it also employs a large number of local young people as caddies, such as Gilbert Kaboré, also born in Balkuy, who began caddying when he was six. “I came with my older brothers, I saw them play and work, I ran ahead of the patron to fetch the balls that went into the woods,” he says. Now he teaches foreigners living in Ouagadougou and beginners to make their first moves in this sport, which Kaboré learned by observing.

“The club is situated on a hill, we have views of the city and coexist with the animals that sleep on the greens at night,” says Samaké, adding: “We play with the earth, the dust, with the nature we have, we haven’t cut down a single tree.”

At least 1,000 paintings that the artist Damien Hirst said were “made in 2016” were created several years later, the Guardian can reveal.

Hirst produced 10,000 of the paintings, each comprising colourful hand-painted dots on A4 paper, as part of a project called The Currency that was born from the idea of creating a form of money from art.

The year 2016 was inscribed on the works beside the artist’s signature. Hirst and the authorised seller of the paintings repeatedly said the physical works were created in 2016.

When they went on sale in 2021, in a high-profile event at which buyers were given the option of acquiring a permanent digital record of the paintings in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT), Hirst said it was “the most exciting project I have ever worked on by far”.

The initial sale brought in about $18m. At the time, Hirst said of the project: “It comprises of 10,000 NFTs, each corresponding to a unique physical artwork made in 2016.”

The paintings were sold via a single authorised seller, Heni, run by Hirst’s business manager. It said at the time that the works were “created by hand in 2016”.

However, five sources familiar with the creation of the works, including some of the painters who put the dots to paper, told the Guardian many of them were mass-produced in 2018 and 2019.

Their accounts suggest at least 1,000 – and possibly several thousand – paintings in The Currency series were made during the two-year period. They were produced by dozens of painters hired at Hirst’s company Science Ltd at two studios, in Gloucestershire and London, in what one source described as a “Henry Ford production line”.

Each painting was marked with a microdot, an embossed stamp of authenticity and a pencil-written title, date and signature on the back. Dates attributed to artworks are widely understood to refer to the year they were completed.

Contacted for comment, lawyers for Hirst and Science did not dispute that at least 1,000 of the paintings the artist said were dated 2016 were painted several years later. They did not respond to questions about why Hirst had explicitly said the physical artworks had been “made in 2016”.

However, they denied Hirst had been deliberately misleading, arguing that it was his “usual practice” to date physical works in a conceptual art project with the date of the project’s conception, which in the case of The Currency was 2016.

Hirst and Science used a similar argument in March, after the Guardian revealed that several well-known formaldehyde sculptures made by pickling animals were dated by his company to the 1990s, even though they were made in 2017.

At that time, Hirst’s lawyers said he sometimes used different approaches when dating works, adding: “Artists are perfectly entitled to be (and often are) inconsistent in their dating of works.”

Several of the backdated formaldehydes had been exhibited with 1990s dates in galleries in Hong Kong, New York, Munich, London and Oxford. One, a 4-metre (13ft) tiger shark, was sold to Las Vegas billionaires for about $8m.

The Currency paintings, in contrast, were intended for the mass market when they went on sale in 2021. Sold for $2,000 each, they gave ordinary buyers an opportunity to acquire a genuine Hirst artwork or an NFT equivalent.

‘What if I made these and treated it like money?’

According to sources familiar with the production of The Currency series, dozens of artists were hired to assist with the factory-style production of the paintings in 2018 and 2019. Some worked eight-hour days for several months, wearing cumbersome masks to protect from the paint fumes.

Their workstations were long tables, spread across Hirst’s studios, with scores of pages laid out along them. Every sheet of paper was adorned with a hologram, watermark of Hirst’s head and a microdot. Artists moved carefully around each painting, adding a colourful dot to each page in turn.

“It was very, very tedious,” one artist recalled. Another said: “There were loads of sheets on these tables, and they were quite low so you had to constantly bend down to do the spots. After a while some people were getting repetitive strain injuries.”

Lawyers for Hirst and Science said they always adhered to relevant health and safety rules and practices.

In the workshops, paintings were worked on throughout the week and left to dry over the weekend, sources said. Special drying racks were bought to speed up the process. The Guardian has seen footage, apparently filmed in or after 2019, in which hundreds of the artworks are laid out on tables as artists paint dots on to them, before they are stacked carefully on drying racks.

Hirst and Science did not respond when asked precisely how many of the 10,000 paintings were made after 2016.

It was difficult for the five sources, who witnessed the production process at different times in 2018 and 2019, to give an exact number of the total paintings produced in that period. However, their accounts suggest more than 1,000 were made then – the actual figure may have been several times larger.

Precisely why Hirst needed more paintings is unclear. One plausible explanation is that he needed to create 10,000 individual pieces to sustain a sale involving NFTs, which at the time were viewed as a potentially lucrative novelty in the art market.

Hirst conceived of The Currency paintings, which are reminiscent of his much larger spot paintings, in 2016. He has described starting with just a few hundred. “And then when I Iooked at them I thought they are kind of unique but they all look the same; they are handmade so they look like a print but they are not a print,” he said. “And then I thought, ‘What if I made these and then treated it like money?’”

Joe Hage, the artist’s longtime manager and founder of the Heni sales platform, told Bloomberg it was not until two years later, in 2018, that Hirst became aware of NFTs. “And so, he started planning an NFT project,” Hage said.

NFTs, which allow artists to sell digital artworks using blockchain technology, at the time threatened to upend the art market. In the previous year there had been the launch of CryptoPunks, in which computer-generated images of cartoon character heads, linked to blockchain-enabled tokens, were sold to buyers. The collection included 10,000 different NFTs, which were trading for huge sums.

Andrea Baronchelli, a professor leading on cryptocurrenices and NFTs at the Alan Turing Institute in London, said after CryptoPunks the issuing of 10,000 artworks became a standard copied by other future art projects. Jon Sharples, an art and intellectual property lawyer at Howard Kennedy, agreed that 10,000 was at the time “the magic number for an NFT art project”.

In remarks in 2021, Hirst appeared to suggest 10,000 paintings was, for some reason, the optimal number for the project. After making a few hundred, he said, he realised he needed more. “I thought what if I made more than 500, what if I made, like, 1,000 or 5,000? So I made 5,000, and then we looked at it and we realised that 5,000 wasn’t enough, we have to make 10,000 in order to have enough to move around in that way.”

When all the works went on sale in July 2021, the sole vendor was Heni. It, too, repeatedly referred to the physical creation of all the paintings as 2016. “The physical artworks were created by hand in 2016 using enamel paint on handmade paper,” Heni promotional materials stated. “Each artwork is numbered, titled, stamped and signed by the artist on the back.”

Contacted for comment about those comments, Heni’s lawyers said: “All artistic decisions are made by the artist. Our client follows his approach and logic.” Heni’s law firm, Joseph Hage Aaronson, also represents Hirst and Science. Hage is a partner in the firm.

Responding to questions on behalf of Hirst and Science, its lawyers rejected any suggestion that the artist’s dating practices were commercially driven. They said Hirst considered it “right” that physical artworks in a conceptual project should be dated with the year of conception, “which is not necessarily the date when any particular object in the project was physically made”.

However, that was not the approach Hirst adopted with two of the 10,000 paintings, images of which are available online. When the Guardian examined all 10,000 images, it discovered that while 9,998 were dated 2016, there were, curiously, two exceptions: a painting entitled 4778. It’s so heavenly, dated 2018, and another called 1321. I kept going up, which was given a 2021 date.

Hirst’s lawyers said these two paintings were anomalies that had been “erroneously misdated following later changes of the naming and titling of the works”.

Hirst’s paintings go up in flames in ceremonial burning

By July 2021, Hirst had amassed enough of the A4 paintings to sustain what would turn into one of the most talked-about art events of the year.

The artist’s works, which can fetch millions, are viewed as the preserve of the global financial elite. The Currency sale allowed ordinary art enthusiasts the chance to acquire an authentic Hirst painting – or its NFT equivalent.

But buyers could not have both. In an unusual twist, the physical paintings would be destroyed if buyers opted for the digital version in the form of an NFT.

In total, buyers chose to retain the physical versions of 5,149 paintings. Hirst kept 1,000 of the works, although he opted to retain the NFT versions. So too did the buyers of almost 4,000 A4 paintings who chose a blockchain-based token in the knowledge that its physical incarnation would be incinerated.

And so in October 2022, in one of the art spectacles of the year, Hirst and his team burned almost half The Currency paintings at his Newport Street Gallery in London.

Surrounded by cameras, he undertook a ceremonial destruction of some of the works. Holding up paintings for the cameras, he announced their titles before tossing them into a glass, wood-burning furnace. “I actually like it more than I thought I would,” he joked to an assistant.

It was a theatrical moment, provoking yet more debate about the Turner prize-winning artist and the questions he was asking about the nature of art. Yet at its core, The Currency project reaffirmed the authenticity of art. It was premised on the idea that unique pieces – whether in physical form or a blockchain token – were as immutable as money itself.

As Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, remarked in a video to promote Hirst’s project: “In the end, money is based on trust … and at the heart of this [art project] is also a sense of trust – trust in the underlying art.”

Thousands of buyers of The Currency works may now question whether they can trust the 2016 date inscribed on the back of their A4 multicoloured Hirst painting, which the artist said was part of a collection “made in 2016”.