Cornflower

The eagle and the dove

    More aquilegias, their common name - Columbine - coming from the Latin columba or dove, their proper one from aquila, Latin for eagle, as they are said to resemble eagles' claws.

More quaintly, perhaps, they are also commonly called Granny's Bonnet for the shape of the flower.

    Sarah Raven says they often appear in church carvings such as on the misericord supports at Ripon Cathedral in Yorkshire (some of which are said to have inspired Lewis Carroll), and I always look forward to their resurgence in my garden at this time of the year, though I note from these pictures that one is currently missing (I think I know who is to blame for that ...), while these shots remind me my spinning has stalled, and this one that they are more than just a pretty face.

Raindrops and rosemary

    We seem to have lost the very warm sun and clear blue skies we've been having recently, and it's cool and overcast and showery now, but here's another lovely idea from Laetitia Maklouf's Sweet Peas for Summer: How to Create a Garden in a Year especially for when the hot weather returns:

fill a misting bottle with water, add a sprig or two of your chosen herb - rosemary, mint or lavender would be perfect - and then chill until you need a cooling spritz. Sounds wonderful!

Heartsease

    These little Viola tricolor or wild pansies are a cheerful sight, I think, all so upright and alert-seeming. In Wild Flowers (and by the way there's a more affordable edition coming soon), Sarah Raven talks of her father's description of large drifts of wild pansies in Dorset and Devon in the 1930s, but sadly they are now much rarer.

    I can't see them without thinking of Love-in-idleness in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and of course Lucia's garden in the delicious Queen Lucia:

"Here, as was only right and proper, there was not a flower to be found save such as were mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare: indeed, it was called Shakespeare's garden, and the bed that ran below the windows of the dining-room was Ophelia's border, for it consisted solely of those flowers which that distraught maiden distributed to her friends when she should have been in a lunatic asylum ... Pansies, naturally, formed the chief decoration (though there were some very flourishing plants of rue), and Mrs. Lucas always wore a little bunch of them when in flower, to inspire her thoughts, and found them wonderfully efficacious."

Edited to add: In Sweetpeas for Summer Laetitia Maklouf (who is to be seen here with Kaffe Fassett) suggests making a viola cascade - getting three pots of different sizes (say 11cm, 21cm and 33cm), filling each with compost and stacking them firmly one on top of another and then planting up the whole 'tower' with pansies.

Garden dreams

    As I was watching the coverage of the show gardens at Chelsea last week I was wondering which designer I'd commission - assuming money were no object, of course - to transform my garden. I toyed with Cleve West and Andy Sturgeon but in the end I plumped for Arne Maynard whose Laurent-Perrier garden seemed to strike the perfect balance between elegantly defined structure and form and soft, romantic planting (you can see several short films about the making of the garden here). I've since spent hours on Arne's website admiring his work, but until a lottery win brings this notion out of the realms of fantasy I can enjoy the somewhat haphazard plant combinations in my own simple patch - I love this dark aquilegia in among the rosemary and ramsons, for instance.

There is nothing like a Dame

    Answers in the comments, please: what is the collective noun for Dames? Mr. C. offers "a distinction of Dames", which is good, I think, but whatever you call them, here are twenty four Dames from the arts world who were attending a Diamond Jubilee Celebration of the Arts at the Royal Academy in London yesterday, and what an impressive, inspiring group of ladies they are.

Back row (from left to right): Evelyn Glennie, Kiri Te Kanawa, Jillian Sackler, Vivien Duffield, Liz Forgan, Emma Kirkby.

Middle row: Jacqueline Wilson, Janet Suzman, Diana Rigg, Harriet Walter, Gail Rebuck, Rosalind Savill, Joan Bakewell, Felicity Lott.

Front row: Shirley Bassey, Beryl Grey, Penelope Lively, A.S. Byatt, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Antonia Fraser, Fanny Waterman, Janet Baker, Gillian Weir.

Click on the picture to enlarge.

On the 23rd. of May, 1987 ...

... at Dunkeld Cathedral, Perthshire,

Miss Karen Anderson and Dr. Gareth Howlett were married.

     Mr. C. and I went back to the cathedral this morning, the beauty of the day rivalling that of our special one twenty five years ago.

    The trees are a little taller, but we haven't changed much at all - or so it feels.

Mr. C says, for the record, that he didn't realise he was signing up to dog ownership that day, but he's adapted pretty well (even to having one who 'smiles'), so I think we both got a good bargain.

Sights and scents

    Seen at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh this afternoon: a mass of meconopsis (Slieve Donard, above) and Remarkable Trees - a most striking and evocative exhibition of black and white photographs of trees taken in the Victorian era by George Paxton.

    Smelt there: maianthemum racemosum or false spikenard, a plant I hadn't come across before, its lovely scent wafting through an area of woodland on the slight breeze.

Cornflower goes up

    As I said yesterday, the oft-postponed balloon flight happened at last, and having been really quite nervous about it it was a relief to find it was actually very enjoyable - I did feel 'vulnerable' at times when I thought about being 3,000 feet up in an open basket with only a thin canopy filled with hot air (and of course the expertise of the pilot, Peter) keeping us there, but I'm sure we were very safe and so I concentrated on making the most of it, but yes I was glad to get back down to earth!

    What was wonderful though, apart from just being out in the stillness of the early morning, was seeing the landscape from above and the features that perspective brings out, e.g. the earthworks (below), which you might not detect from ground level.

    We took off from just outside West Linton and flew ten or eleven miles west over farmland and sporting estates on the edge of the Pentland Hills (for the literary connection look here) eventually touching down again in a field near Carnwath.

    The weather over the course of the hour we were in the air was mostly beautifully clear but for a sudden bank of cloud which engulfed us - disconcertingly - for a moment or two until we rose above it.

    As we landed and packed up the balloon prior to having a celebratory glass of champagne - in a field at 8 am - so the very smart University of Edinburgh balloon which took off from the same spot just after us made its descent and landed a short way beyond us.

    Would I do it again? Yes, I would, and I'd recommend Alba Ballooning who fly from Perthshire, Lothian, the Borders and Northumberland. It's a marvellous way to see the country, a unique experience, and I've lived to tell the tale. My thanks again to the very generous friend whose gift to us this was.

Aloft at last

    You may have seen this post of nearly two years ago; well, after many postponements due to unsuitable weather, we finally got aloft this morning.

    A full account to follow.

Books and cakes - 51

    As an accompaniment to our reading of The Good Earth I thought there could really be no more appropriate food than this 'creation', but in the end, as Wung Lung seems to like nothing better than bread with garlic, I took some wild garlic from the garden and used it for this recipe.

    From poverty to plenty, food is ever-present in the book, from the pork, pond fish and chestnuts for a wedding 'feast' early on to moon cakes for New Year celebrations and sugar cakes of glutinous rice on the streets of the big city in the south.

    In the end I wasn't confident enough about the recipes I found, nor of getting the special ingredients required for the Chinese cakes, so I took Wang Lung's simple staple, and though my bread is hardly Chinese in origin, it tastes very good and suits the spirit of the story.

Singing for Her Majesty

   

    Here's a story which brightened my breakfast this morning: in writing a song for the Diamond Jubilee, Gary Barlow took guidance from the Prince of Wales, and the eventual end product - 'Sing' - will feature more than 200 performers including a guest appearance by Prince Harry on tambourine!

    Read all about it here, and while we wait for its release*, just for fun watch Barlow and co.'s jaunty Shine (guaranteed to get your toes tapping, especially if wearing these Britannia pumps by Helen Bateman).

*Short clip here.

By the way ...

 

... we're having tea and bookish chat over here just now. Please join us.

Cookbook of the week - How to feed your friends with relish

    I said something the other day about cookery writers crediting their sources and recipes being passed on, and today's dish is a good example. This is Yogurt Cake with Pistachios from Joanna Weinberg's How to Feed Your Friends with Relish, but Joanna in turn takes it from The Moro Cookbook by Sam and Sam Clark (an earlier 'cookbook of the week' - see here and here, and by the way, I've made those flatbreads countless times since and we often have them with Monty Don's roast butternut squash salad).

    To get back to the cake, it's baked in a bain-marie and its consistency, Joanna says, should be a light sponge with wet custard underneath. It contains only a teaspoon of flour, and its substance comes from Greek yogurt and eggs, the yolks beaten with the yogurt, sugar and flavourings (vanilla and lemon) and the whites then beaten to the soft peak stage and folded in. After it has been cooking for ten minutes you sprinkle chopped pistachios on top and return to the oven to finish baking, and when done, leave it to come to room temperature before serving "scattered with torn rose petals" - ah!

    It's an unusual pudding cake, but the taste is good and it went down very well here, even without the rose decoration.

You shall go to the ball

 

     Opening soon at the V&A, Ballgowns: British Glamour since 1950.

 

    Click here for a short film "on the significance of the ballgown and what it is to be truly glamorous". One can dream ...

George Washington's Birthday is ....

    "... the time-honored day to prune roses back home," said the Doctor's amicable voice. "You should've asked Adele to step over and prune 'em for you."

    "Oh, she offered," said Judge McKelva, and dismissed her case with the slightest move of the hand. "I think by this point I ought to be about able to get the hang of it."

    Laurel had watched him prune. Holding the shears in both hands, he performed a sort of weighty saraband, with a lop for this side, then a lop for the other side, as though he were bowing to his partner, and left the bush looking like a puzzle.'

    That passage is from the CBG's June book; please come and read it with us - details here.