Something uplifting, amazing, inspiring to watch.
Something uplifting, amazing, inspiring to watch.
A medieval garden – from British Library MS Royal 6 E IX f. 15v
The Healing Power of a Garden – A Medieval View. Came across this article this morning and felt a surge of springtime joy, reading about Henry of Huntingdon’s Anglicanus Ortus, a Verse Herbal of the Twelfth Century.
“This is no ordinary herbal: the work is staged first as a discussion between a master and a student walking around a garden, inspecting the plants in their separate beds, and then as an awkward performance by the same master before Apollo and a critical audience, seated in a theatre at the garden’s centre. Beyond its didactic and performative aspects, the entire work is framed as a prayer to God’s generative capacity and the rational order of nature.” –http://pims.ca/pdf/st180.pdf
Enjoy the Guardian podcast above with Jane Perrone, Anni Kelsey and Martin Crawford Thanks to Anni for her wonderful blog where I first saw this. Inspiring and eas(ier) gardening, climate friendly and cheaper, plus interesting, tasty things to eat.
The Nettle Sorrel Soup was so delicious, I considered it a gateway to Schav, a purer use of sorrel that by never having sampled had become a little mythic. You eat it cold. And yes, that’s the true colour in the photo above, what we might have thought of as pea-green, a little dreary, a little khaki. I resisted the photoshop urge because I want to speak the truth about Schav. I placed the spoon in this position so you too could imagine picking it up and experiencing a spoon-full.
It’s what the real old-timers ate, the ones who gesticulated with their hands and ate intense, heavy food like … Liver and Egg Salad, or Chopped Liver in moulded, perhaps grotesque shapes, maybe with strawberries, maybe with pineapple. Or at least such recipes appear in my all time favourite Jewish cookbook Love and Knishes, along with loads of dishes with schmaltz and lima beans and kasha– these kind of ingredients. So the book was a natural first place to look for an “authentic” recipe for Schav.
Love and Knishes is a charming book. Read the rest of this entry »
Here I am in the ripeness of middle age, learning for the first time about Ruth Stout, practitioner of the “no-work garden,” and author of books with titles like How to have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back, Gardening Without Work, and Don’t Forget to Smile: How to Stay Sane and Fit Over Ninety. Since watching this video a few days ago, I’ve been completely inspired to do my own thing and be less vulnerable to other people’s opinions, and to let go of instructioning others (i.e. my kids) quite so much. Ruth Stout is hereby entering my Pantheon of Fabulous Role-Models. Read the rest of this entry »
I find this film about Sea Kale and Turkish Rocket entrancing– simultaneously soothing yet stimulating to watch. Found it on the great blog Paradise Lot. Just noticed they have a book I’d very much like to read.
As the days become longer, and we enjoy the remaining days of the winter season, we have this important time to reflect on the past year, and what the warmer days of spring and summer hold. Winter is a wonderful time to contemplate our lives, and consider the… read full article
This is almost so obvious I’m not sure it’s worth a blog post; but it’s so good, it’s worth a blog post! I’ve made this every day for several days, and we find ourselves snacking on it cold. Eating (local, seasonal) greens plentifully can only be a good thing.
Purple Sprouting Broccoli. Roasted.
I have a vision now of a calendrical-seasonal kitchen, in which I find uses throughout the year for ingredients I’ve made at a different moment in the wheel. I was so thrilled by the bright result of using Rosehip Syrup with Rhubarb. I’m looking forward to making little jam tarts with my vegetables marmalades and carrot jam for summer picnics. Mostly I have an array of maturing Scrap Vinegars to get creative with — Red Pumpkin, Pear, Rhubarb, Blackberry-Apple… Some are nearly a year and a half old, and still wonderful. Magical ingredients, for pennies.
Lately I’ve just been splashing a spoon’s worth or so of these in glasses of water, for a kind of body-alkalizing tonic. (Have I unabashedly revealed to all that sometimes I get kidney-pain that abates if I drink vinegar?)
This morning I strained and decanted a scrap Chaenomeles Vinegar I’d made in late November– from the scrapings and cores of the Japonica Fruit used for the very Christmassy Chaenomeles Preserve I wrote about here.
Do read about Chaenomeles — it’s inspiring to think about the illustrious past and possibilities of what we know as an ornamental in gardens.
And the vinegar is the finest perfume! It’s the fragrance of something you’d spray from a fancy bottle onto your wrist and neck before a date (if you did things like this, or had dates). I wish the internet had a Scratch and Sniff capability. Maybe I should put a vial in a Mary Poppins carpet-bag and start traversing Paris…