Cornflower

Home remedies

   

    "EGG EMULSION (For Sore Throats)

    Ingredients:

    Two eggs, perfectly new-laid, if possible warm from the nest.

    Juice of two ripe lemons.

    Squeeze the juice of lemons over the eggs, keeping in a basin until shells have dissolved. Beat up well with two large spoonfuls of thick honey and two of pure olive oil. Continue beating until a perfectly smooth emulsion results, then bottle it and cork well. The dose is a tablespoonful."

    (This sounds like a sweetened mayonnaise with added calcium, though as they say in Cold Comfort Farm, "it might be worth tryin' ". )

    "EGG NOGG (For Colds)

    Ingredients:

    Three eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately;

    One pint full milk;

    Half-teacup fine sugar;

    Half-glassful best brandy;

    Nutmeg to flavour.

    Beat eggs, stir in the sugar, make milk very hot and add it gradually, lastly the brandy and nutmeg. Drink as hot as possible."

    (That's more like it, I feel.)

    These recipes are from The Country Housewife's Book by Lucy H. Yates, first published in 1934, a charming glimpse of rural domesticity and a practical manual for those of the time whose fresh food came from productive gardens, the sportsman's bag, a house cow and some chickens. With much preserving of fruit and vegetables, butter-making, and keeping of "Furred and Feathered Folk", to name but a few of the many tasks covered,  one admires the industry and ingenuity of the ladies for whom this book would have been a vade mecum.

Lord of the Isles and Crimson Queen

    

    We're talking about orchards over the way today, and coincidentally tonight's episode of Rick Stein's Cornwall included a visit to a rather wonderful orchard.

    If you have access to iPlayer you can watch the programme here (that segment starts at the 17 minute mark).

Periwinkle's blue

    I brought this periwinkle in from the snow, and in the way of these things it led me back to childhood favourite Cicely Mary Barker. Her rendering is here.

    Edited to add: this is interesting.

Happy new year!

    A friend sent me this video with his new year wishes; made for French railway company SNCF, you can read all about it here.

    Let's hope 2021 is a year of beauty, joy and exuberance.

Look Spry

    If you're very quick you can catch floral designer Shane Connolly's talk on Constance Spry given recently at the Garden Museum but available to watch online for a small fee.

    I found it fascinating and would love to visit the forthcoming Spry exhibition at the museum (opening at the end of March, all being well) and read a biography or two.

Seasonal snippets

Viriditas

    "Highly respected as a composer and a theologian, as well as a medicinal herbalist, [the twelfth-century abbess Saint Hildegard of Bingen] developed her own philosophy based on the connection between the human spirit and the growth force of the earth which she called viriditas. Like the source of a river, viriditas is the font of energy on which all other life forms ultimately depend. The word combines the Latin for green and truth. Viriditas is the origin of goodness and health, in contrast to ariditas, or dryness, which Hildegard regarded as its life-defying opposite.

    The greening power of viriditas is both literal and symbolic. It refers to the flourishing of nature as well as the vibrancy of the human spirit. By placing 'greenness' at the heart of her thinking, Hildegard recognised that people can only thrive when the natural world thrives."

    Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well Gardened Mind.

(Pictured enjoying today's rain is Thalictrum delavayi or Chinese meadow rue.)

Along the garden path

    Along the Garden Path sock pattern by This Handmade Life; Luxury Plump cashmere sock yarn from The Wool Barn.

    (I thought I'd written about Beverley Nichols' Down the Garden Path here but all I can find is this little post from another of his books.)

All praise and all miracle

    "It was a sunny day in early July when I came to the Ripton farm. I sat on the rock outside Frost's writing cabin and listened to the whir of the poplar leaves at the edge of the woods and the sweet song of a hermit thrush. The tall grasses at the base of the apple trees were rich with wildflowers - pale yellow foxgloves, clover, flax, Indian paintbrush, Queen Anne's lace, daisies and buttercups. A robin perched in the branches of a tree above a cluster of small green apples.

    It was more powerful than I had imagined, finding Frost's last orchard still thriving, the trees with fruit on them. Everything was so alive in that little spot and I was struck by the continuum of life, by how the birds used the orchard as they probably always had, by how the apples reappeared summer after summer. It was all praise and all miracle. Edward Thomas was right about a line of apples being the same as a line of poetry in another language. And while Frost was no longer there to tend his orchard, it persisted. And because he had thought about it as it was in that moment, with fruit on the trees and the trees in full maturity, it still contained him.

    The poet may die, but the poetry continues."

    From The Ghost Orchard by Helen Humphreys.

    The photograph was taken yesterday in the newly reopened Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh - it was so good to be back there.

Tendrils

Blooming

    Syringa vulgaris 'Madame Lemoine'.

    In her marvellous book Scent Magic, Isabel Bannerman says this variety smells of Ambrosia Creamed Rice! She tells us, "In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the family Lemoine of Nancy, France, was gripped in a fever of breeding, creating, from the humble but delicious common lilac and its cousins, plants with shocking plumes of immense weight loaded with scent, the names redolent of a lost world: Necker, Lamartine, Vauban. They also extended the range of hue to depths of rich crushed mulberry and heights of iridescent stormy slatey-violet blues. Nineteenth century Europe's drawing rooms were entranced by the shrubs and, as Proust put it, the 'starry locks that crowned their fragrant heads'."

Blooming

    James Grieve in full fig.

Softer days

    A lovely film about photographer Andrew Lawson; from the Garden Museum*.

    *As is this one.

Blooming

    Snake's head fritillaries in the rain - and do have a look at Deborah's beautiful painting of these lovely flowers.

Blooming

    Hellebores various.