Read Online Playing With Water by Kate Llewellyn - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kate Llewellyn
Ads: Link
Pacificregion. The flower buds are gathered before they show any colour and are preserved in salt. Maggie Beer says in her book, Maggie’s Orchard, that after the flowers die, berries form, and these too can be used in an antipasto or with pork. An old recipe for pickled nasturtium seeds comes from The Experienced English Housekeeper by Mrs Elizabeth Raffald, who was cook and housekeeper to Lady Elizabeth Warburton at Arley Hall in Cheshire. In 1759 Mrs Raffald ‘wrote down everything she knew’ and this book is the result. I do not believe it was everything that she knew, but that is what the authors of The Perfect Pickle Book, David Mabey and David Collison, say when they quote her recipes. Here is Mrs Raffald’s way of pickling nasturtium seeds:
M RS R AFFALD’S P ICKLES
Gather the nasturtium berries soon after the blossoms are gone off, put them in cold salt and water, change the water once a day for three days, make your pickle of white wine vinegar, mace, nutmeg sliced, peppercorns, salt, shallots and horse-radish; it requires being made pretty strong, as your pickle is not to be boiled; when you have drained them, put them into a jar, and pour the pickle over them.
Thank you Mrs Raffald.
Monday, 22nd May
Chrysanthemums need dark nights to bloom. A streetlight shining on the chrysanthemums will be regretted. I gleaned that from a book Peri lent me when I stayed with her this weekend. It was called Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perenyi.
Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum): a plant mentioned in the Bible, very pretty too, but a terrific weed once established. It invades all parts of the garden, and the slippery foliage breaks off when tugged and leaves the bulbs safely behind.
A friend who lives on a hill above Blackbutt Park brought home from Paris packets of seeds. Among them one of wild grasses. I think that could be the same as plague. But he swears he won’t plant them.
There are many kinds of ivy, but the dark green climbing one is a devil of a weed unless contained by cement walls and even then, when birds eat the berries, it is transported. Given time, ivy can kill a giant tree. I see trees being strangled in gardens where the owners, perhaps thinking it beautiful, let the ivy run. A great blue spruce in the garden next to me in Leura went that way. It remained, in the end, a dark thin finger pointing accusingly at the sky as the ivy abandoned it and crawled, with the fervour of a hunter, to a couple of fifty-year-old Japanese maples. I am gladthere is no ivy in this garden, and while I am here there never will be.
Heavy rain for two days and wind too. A leaf floats down as I stare out this window and the Claire rose waves and tosses in a green arch as if searching for an anchor in that sea, the air.
Bulbs are up. As I walked through the gate, holding an umbrella like a puppet being dragged along, I saw the first daffodils and irises are up. No sign of the liliums. I read, after they’d gone in, that these bulbs ought not to be planted deeply. Just under the earth, almost poking up, the book said. Too late. They’d been in for a fortnight, so it seemed best to leave them.
Tuesday, 23rd May
This is the land of rainbows, I thought and looked up and saw one. When I came to live here, there were rainbows almost every day. Jack and I, riding south, would see one sometimes with one foot on this house and the other in the sea. I leave it to you to imagine how we interpreted such rainbows.
I’ve been out in the back garden tangling great green rainbows, the climbing roses at the side fence, to each other to keep them from being blown to the ground.
The white dahlia is bowed down to the wet earth. Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist whom the dahlia is named after, procured dahlia tubers and, by his death, in 1789, had produced some hybrids. A celebration to honour the dahlia plant was held by the Spanish king at the Madrid Botanical Garden in that same year. Dahlias were discovered by Europeans in Mexico.
M RS R AFFALD’S P ICKLES
Gather the nasturtium berries soon after the blossoms are gone off, put them in cold salt and water, change the water once a day for three days, make your pickle of white wine vinegar, mace, nutmeg sliced, peppercorns, salt, shallots and horse-radish; it requires being made pretty strong, as your pickle is not to be boiled; when you have drained them, put them into a jar, and pour the pickle over them.
Thank you Mrs Raffald.
Monday, 22nd May
Chrysanthemums need dark nights to bloom. A streetlight shining on the chrysanthemums will be regretted. I gleaned that from a book Peri lent me when I stayed with her this weekend. It was called Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perenyi.
Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum): a plant mentioned in the Bible, very pretty too, but a terrific weed once established. It invades all parts of the garden, and the slippery foliage breaks off when tugged and leaves the bulbs safely behind.
A friend who lives on a hill above Blackbutt Park brought home from Paris packets of seeds. Among them one of wild grasses. I think that could be the same as plague. But he swears he won’t plant them.
There are many kinds of ivy, but the dark green climbing one is a devil of a weed unless contained by cement walls and even then, when birds eat the berries, it is transported. Given time, ivy can kill a giant tree. I see trees being strangled in gardens where the owners, perhaps thinking it beautiful, let the ivy run. A great blue spruce in the garden next to me in Leura went that way. It remained, in the end, a dark thin finger pointing accusingly at the sky as the ivy abandoned it and crawled, with the fervour of a hunter, to a couple of fifty-year-old Japanese maples. I am gladthere is no ivy in this garden, and while I am here there never will be.
Heavy rain for two days and wind too. A leaf floats down as I stare out this window and the Claire rose waves and tosses in a green arch as if searching for an anchor in that sea, the air.
Bulbs are up. As I walked through the gate, holding an umbrella like a puppet being dragged along, I saw the first daffodils and irises are up. No sign of the liliums. I read, after they’d gone in, that these bulbs ought not to be planted deeply. Just under the earth, almost poking up, the book said. Too late. They’d been in for a fortnight, so it seemed best to leave them.
Tuesday, 23rd May
This is the land of rainbows, I thought and looked up and saw one. When I came to live here, there were rainbows almost every day. Jack and I, riding south, would see one sometimes with one foot on this house and the other in the sea. I leave it to you to imagine how we interpreted such rainbows.
I’ve been out in the back garden tangling great green rainbows, the climbing roses at the side fence, to each other to keep them from being blown to the ground.
The white dahlia is bowed down to the wet earth. Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist whom the dahlia is named after, procured dahlia tubers and, by his death, in 1789, had produced some hybrids. A celebration to honour the dahlia plant was held by the Spanish king at the Madrid Botanical Garden in that same year. Dahlias were discovered by Europeans in Mexico.
Similar Books
