Dear Readers, if you saw my Sunday post you will know that I am once again completely in love with the early crocuses that are in bloom in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery. I am revisiting this post from 2016, if only because I love all three of the poems at the end of the piece, in particular the curmudgeonly offering from Edna St Vincent Millay.

However, I also wanted to look at a question raised by a good friend of mine, who planted a variety of crocus bulbs in her lawn, but over the years has been left with just the lavender ones (though whether Early Crocus or Dutch Crocus I do not know). However, the folks at New Scientist had noticed a similar thing, and had waded in with a variety of explanations. One is that birds, particularly sparrows, will peck at and eat the yellow flowers but ignore the other ones. It’s also said that the grey squirrel and some other rodents also have a preference for the yellow crocuses, though the furry chaps in my garden seem much less pernickety. However, a third explanation is that apparently the yellow ones flower before the others, and so are much more likely to be caught out by a sudden spell of wintry weather that ruins their reproductive ambitions for the year. Thoughts, people?

You can read the whole discussion here.

Dear Readers, close to the entrance of Coldfall Wood there is a tiny patch of Early Crocus (Crocus tommasinianus). How fragile this plant is, and yet how strong! It has burst through the hard-packed clay soil, sometimes lifting whole twigs and stones in its urge to reach the sunlight.

There are two very similar species of crocus that you are likely to see naturalised in the UK. The Dutch or Spring Crocus (Crocus vernus) looks similar to the Early Crocus, but it has a mauve or purple ‘throat’ which is never lighter in colour than the flowers themselves.

‘Tommies’ are native to Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia, and were named for the botanist Muzio G. Spirito de Tommasini (1794-1879), who was Mayor of the city of Trieste. They are relatively late arrivals, first cultivated in 1847, and not recorded in the wild until 1963, although this may have been due to confusion  with the Spring Crocus. The plant naturalises easily in lawns and churchyards, and there is a fine patch in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, which has no doubt grown from a handful of bulbs planted on a grave.

You might not think it to look at them, but crocuses (or, indeed croci) are part of the Iris family. The name is thought to derive from the Sanskrit word for ‘saffron’ (kunkuman) although it is the autumn crocus (Crocus sativus) that produces this spice, not these spring-flowering species. They do have the most intense yellow pollen, however, and you can see how the name has arisen.

In Greek mythology, Crocus was a human youth in love with a nymph called Smilax. Apparently irritated by his audacity, the gods turned Crocus into, well, a crocus. Smilax was turned into either a yew tree or bindweed, depending on your source. The Greek gods were certainly a touchy bunch.

In the financial world, a ‘crocus’ is a company or sector which recovers quickly after an economic downturn. The waxy cuticle helps it to survive even when there is late frost or snow on the ground, so you can see how the comparison has developed.

As I researched this piece, it became apparent that the poor old crocus had been the focus of some truly execrable poetry. Certainly, its bravery in sticking its petally head above the soil into the teeth of a snowstorm has been extensively celebrated, to the extent that Sherman Alexie, the editor of New American Poetry 2015, has this to say:

‘None of us ever needs to write another poem about crocuses, or croci, or however you prefer to pluralize it. Trust me, we poets have exhausted the poetic potential of the crocus. If any of you can surprise me with a new kind of crocus poem then I will mail you one hundred dollars.’

But, wait! I wonder if Mr Alexie has ever read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem ‘Spring’. I have to confess to loving this. It made me laugh out loud at the unexpectedness of the last few lines, for all their curmudgeonliness.  And if Ms Millay were still alive, I think she would deserve her prize.

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Ruth Fainlight’s powerful, disturbing piece on crocuses would surely also be a contender for a new way to look at the plant. I hadn’t come across the poet before, but I shall certainly be reading more of her work.

Crocuses
These crocuses are appalling:
pale, bare, tender stems rising
through the muddy winter-faded turf,

shivering petals the almost luminous mauve
of lurid bruises on the frightened faces
and naked bodies of men, women, children

herded into a forest clearing or
towards a siding where a train has halted
and the trucks are waiting.

But perhaps there is much to be said for ending with a poem that was chalked on a blackboard at Des Moines High School for all the children to learn. The sight of crocuses, for me, means that the world is still turning, in spite of all the things we are doing to it. The clock of the seasons ticks on, however erratically.

Daffodils and tulips
impatient underground
in March sent up a crocus
to have a look around.

She yelled, “It still is winter,
there is frost on everything.”
But a passerby who saw her said,
“A crocus!  It is spring!”

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Franz Xaver (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two –  By Vasile Cotovanu https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasile23/8606299884

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer

Dear Readers, I was so taken with this Paperbark Maple,  spotted in East Finchley earlier this week, that I had to find out a bit more about it. As you can see, it has bark that peels away in tissue-thin layers of of coral and blush pink. The effect was even more impressive when I looked up at the branches. This peeling bark first appears when the tree is 6 or 7 years old, and continues for the rest of the plant’s life.

While the bark reminds me slightly of when I got sunburn as a child, it’s also a quite extraordinary effect. In his book ‘London’s Street Trees’, Paul Wood describes Paperbark Maple as ‘occasionally planted’, but it seems like a good choice to me – the trunk is the one thing that everybody sees, and so you don’t even have to look up to be impressed. It’s also a tree that’s happy on clay soil (which is basically what London sits on).

Paperbark maple is a long way from home, though – a native of China, it’s usually found at altitudes of 1,500 to 2,000 metres. It was introduced to Europe in 1901, and to North America shortly afterwards: apparently only two trees reached the US, and all paperbark maples in the country are descended from this pair of trees. It is a difficult plant to cultivate – a lot of the fruits that develop are seedless ( a phenomenon known as parthenocarpy, another new word!), and  a joint American/Chinese expedition met up in China in 2015 to try to collect seeds to improve the genetic diversity of the plants in cultivation. This is not purely to enhance North American trees, either – the plant is considered endangered by the IUCN, with the populations in China increasingly fragmented and threatened. It’s quite something to find an endangered plant growing in a suburban street.

The bark isn’t the end of the story with Paperbark Maple, however: in autumn, the leaves flush orange/red. The leaflets are arranged in threes, as are the flowers (which turn into the typical maple ‘keys’). In spring, the leaves are dark green above, but decidedly furry underneath.

I wonder if it’s the difficulty in propagation that results in this amazing tree not being planted more often?

Why, though, would a tree lose its bark in this way? Many trees do this, the most familiar to us Londoners being the London Plane tree (Platanus x hispanica). In this species, the loss of bark is thought to be a way of getting rid of accumulated toxins from pollution, although in the very hot summer a few years ago I noticed that the plane trees were losing much more bark than usual, possibly from stress. However, it seems unlikely that a tree that evolved in China’s mountains would be doing the same thing.

Another possible explanation is that the exfoliation helps the tree to rid itself of unwanted parasites and fungi. Yet another is that trees at high altitudes actually have their bark damaged by the UV light from intense sunshine, and also that they might suffer frost damage, so getting rid of damaged bark makes sense. It can also deter climbers and epiphytes. So, who knows? One explanation that I have rejected for ‘my’ tree, as I’ve come to think of it, is that the bark cracks and peels as the tree grows, a bit like an insect growing out of its exoskeleton. In that case, why doesn’t it happen to all trees? And why doesn’t it stop when the tree reaches its full height? Let me know what you think, readers. I know that you’ll all have some native trees where the bark peels, but why? I know we won’t get to the bottom of it here, but it’s always good to ponder.

And finally, a somewhat tangential poem. It actually made me tear up, this poem: partly because I remember the sheer excitement of a library, and partly because of the destruction of the library system in the UK which means that so many children will never experience that excitement.

Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967
For a fifteen-year-old there was plenty
to do: browse the magazines,
slip into the Adult section to see
what vast tristesse was born of rush-hour traffic,
decolletes, and the plague of too much money.
There was so much to discover-how to
lay out a road, the language of flowers,
and the place of women in the tribe of Moost.
There were equations elegant as a French twist,
fractal geometry’s unwinding maple leaf;
I could follow, step-by-step, the slow disclosure
of a pineapple Jell-O mold-or take
the path of Harold’s purple crayon through
the bedroom window and onto a lavender
spill of stars. Oh, I could walk any aisle
and smell wisdom, put a hand out to touch
the rough curve of bound leather,
the harsh parchment of dreams.
As for the improbable librarian
with her salt and paprika upsweep,
her British accent and sweater clip
(mom of a kid I knew from school)-
I’d go up to her desk and ask for help
on bareback rodeo or binary codes,
phonics, Gestalt theory,
lead poisoning in the Late Roman Empire;
the play of light in Dutch Renaissance painting;
I would claim to be researching
pre-Columbian pottery or Chinese foot-binding,
but all I wanted to know was:
Tell me what you’ve read that keeps
that half smile afloat
above the collar of your impeccable blouse.
So I read Gone with the Wind because
it was big, and haiku because they were small.
I studied history for its rhapsody of dates,
lingered over Cubist art for the way
it showed all sides of a guitar at once.
All the time in the world was there, and sometimes
all the world on a single page.
As much as I could hold
on my plastic cards imprint I took,
greedily: six books, six volumes of bliss,
the stuff we humans are made of:
words and sighs and silence,
ink and whips, Brahma and cosine,
corsets and poetry and blood sugar levels-
I carried it home, five blocks of aluminum siding
and past the old garage where, on its boarded-up doors,
someone had scrawled:
I CAN EAT AN ELEPHANT
IF I TAKE SMALL BITES.
Yes, I said to no one in particular: That’s
what I’m gonna do!

– Rita Dove

Photo Credits

Photo One from https://treeheritage.co.uk/planting-trees-for-autumn-colour/acer-griseum-autumn-colour/

Photo Two By Bruce Marlin – Own work http://www.cirrusimage.com/tree_paperbark_maple.htm, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2988653

 

Dear Readers. there is something almost shocking about cutting into an orange and discovering flesh the colour of liver rather than the expected citrus hue. In fact, the marketing of the fruit has included changing the name to ‘Sicilian red orange’ and ‘ruby orange’, among other synonyms. It’s interesting that some websites refer to the orange having a ‘raspberry flavour’ – I wonder how much this is the influence of the colour, rather than the taste itself? I realise now that I should have done a blindfold taste test to see if there was actually any difference.

Blood oranges are red because they contain anthocyanins, the same pigments that we see in blueberries and black rice. They are protective against low temperatures, and blood oranges tend to be grown in areas where it’s cold at night. The flesh of blood oranges actually gets redder as the pigments accumulate during cold storage.

Blood oranges are thought to be the result of a natural mutation, and there are three main varieties. The Sicilian ‘Moro’ variety is thought to have originated originated in Syracuse at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and is said to be the reddest of all the red oranges, with flesh that is nearly black and pink rind. The variety has been given Protected Geographical Status, which means if you’re calling an orange a Sicilian Red Orange it had better come from Sicily or else. My oranges are the Sicilian variety, and very nice they were too, though my delight in them was tainted by the realisation that most Sicilian Red Oranges are harvested largely by immigrants from West Africa, who live in tin shacks on low wages and who are subject to constant harassment and ill treatment by their bosses and the local population. I shall be writing to the people who provide my fruit and vegetable box to ask about the provenance of the fruit.

Then there’s the Tarocco, also Italian but without such deep red flesh. The name is said to have come from an exclamation of wonder by the farmer who first discovered it. It’s said to the sweetest of the varieties, but I rather like the hint of sourness in the flesh of citrus. There is evidence that most fruit and vegetables have been bred to be sweeter during the past thirty years – who can remember the mouth-puckering sourness of old-school grapefruit? These days we barely need the brown sugar.

But I digress, as usual.

And finally we have the Spanish Sanguinello, which has flesh which is orange with red streaks. It can be harvested from February, but  can stay on the tree right through to May.

As you might expect, you can use blood oranges for all the things that you’d use a normal orange for, with the added bonus of that pretty pink tinge. You can make marmalade with them, although if you’re like me, you’ll add some Seville oranges to big-up the orange flavour. You can make orange and almond cake with them, or pop them into a salad. You can do what I just did and whoosh them up in a smoothie. I think they’re good with oily fish such as mackerel, although again they can tend a bit too much to sweetness. And I once had a blood orange icecream in Venice that was possibly in the top ten most delicious things I’d ever eaten. This website has some fabulous recipes if you find yourself juggling with some blood oranges in a hesitant way. I love the way that the author has added a lemon to the ice cream recipe to add sourness.

And finally, a poem. This is only tangential to a blood orange, though one is mentioned. It’s one of those poems that has an obligatory moment of silence at the end. See what you think.

The Park Drunk by Robin Robertson

He opens his eyes to a hard frost,
the morning’s soft amnesia of snow.

The thorned stems of gorse
are starred crystal; each bud
like a candied fruit, its yellow
picked out and lit
by the low pulse
of blood-orange
riding in the eastern trees.

What the snow has furred
to silence, uniformity,
frost amplifies, makes singular:
giving every form a sound,
an edge, as if
frost wants to know what
snow tries to forget.

And so he drinks for winter,
for the coming year,
to open all the beautiful tiny doors
in their craquelure of frost;
and he drinks
like the snow falling, trying
to close the biggest door of all.

·Photo Credits

Photo One from https://theviewfromgreatisland.com/blood-orange-ice-cream/

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, those of you who saw my birthday post last week will know that I got some unusual ingredients in my vegetable box: salsify (which I roasted and which was delicious) and some kumquats. The name comes from the Cantonese kamkwat ( 金橘) which literally means ‘golden mandarin orange’) and they are native to China, where they have been cultivated since the 12th century. In 1846 the plant hunter Robert Fortune brought them to Europe, and from there they soon arrived in North America.

The ones that I have are unbelievably sour – having had a little taste, I suspect that they will shortly be languishing in a bit of sugar syrup just to take the edge off. But the round kumquat (Citrus japonica) is said to have sweet skin and sour flesh, which must make for a most intriguing flavour. Some species have fruit which is eaten whole, probably by people that have a taste for bitter fruit. I’m sure that in the West at least, our taste buds have been corrupted by the lust for sugar (which would have been a very rare thing in the natural environment, probably limited to berries and honey). When I was in Pakistan for work, I sampled bitter gourd, which is a delicacy throughout the region, and the face that I inadvertently pulled was a source of great amusement to my colleagues.

One variety of kumquat, the Hong Kong kumquat (Citrus hindsii) has pea-sized fruits and enormous seeds, so unsurprisingly it’s grown mostly as an ornamental plant. However, as the kumquats are thought to be the earliest forms of citrus fruit, this species might be the closest we have to the ‘ur-orange’, the ancestral citrus from which all other kinds have evolved.

Kumquats can bear thousands of fruits and, unlike most other citrus, are frost-hardy, which means that they are popular in spite of their sourness. Turned into marmalade they are a useful source of vitamin C, and their fresh taste can be used to offset sweeter ingredients such as chocolate or vanilla. They can also be used in fruit sauces to cut through the fat of meat such as duck or lamb. Very helpfully, 14 chefs give their ideas here. I rather like Nick Leahy’s idea of making a compote to eat with rice pudding: maybe I could dollop some onto my morning porridge? If I don’t get the sweetening right it will certainly wake me up. Or here’s a healthy salad instead.

On a visit to Corfu back when I was a young ‘un, I remember that there was a bright orange  liquor called Koum Quat, which was incredibly sweet and sticky. When I dug a bit further though, it appears that the fruit is also made into a clear spirit to be drunk after dinner. Kumquats were apparently introduced to the island in 1860 and have been grown ever since.

In China and some other countries in Asia the kumquat symbolises good luck, and is often given as a gift at Lunar New Year. It’s also a plant that seems to lend itself to being made into a bonsai, and, as people become more urbanised but still crave a bit of ‘nature’. they are becoming very popular. In Vietnam, many garden centres are turning away from selling the traditional trees and are turning to bonsai instead, although it’s an art that cannot be rushed. In the article here, I was amused to learn of the many things that unscrupulous gardeners try to sell their ‘bonsais’, from sticking on false fruit to inconspicuously attaching false branches. It reminds me a bit of the dyed heathers and ‘fake’ flowering cacti that were popping up all over the place a few years ago.

I must say that these bonsais look a bit bigger than I expected though. More like smallish shrubs.

It might also surprise you to know that there is a Kumquat Festival, not in Asia but in Dade County, Florida. Apparently St Joseph, Florida, a nearby town, is the Kumquat Capital of the World. Tens of thousands of people come to the festival, which, in addition to everything kumquat-related, includes an arts and crafts fair, a 5km race in aid of a cancer charity, wagon rides and antique fire engines. In Dade County, everything hangs on the weather – from November to April the blossom appears roughly every fortnight, so there can be almost continual picking. However, in some years a freeze in December or January can destroy the crop and damage the trees, which won’t fruit again for three years. Farming has always been a precipitous business, and with climate change things are more unpredictable than they ever were.

Now, I thought that finding a poem about kumquats was going to be a challenge, but here are the first few verses of Tony Harrison’s poem ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’. I have taken the liberty of editing it down a bit, because for me it says everything it needs to say in the first few stanzas. However, if you want to see if I’m right, you can read the whole thing here. See what you think!

from A Kumquat for John Keats

Today I found the right fruit for my prime,
not orange, not tangelo, and not lime,
nor moon-like globes of grapefruit that now hang
outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon’s tang
(though last year full of bile and self-defeat
I wanted to believe no life was sweet)
nor the tangible sunshine of the tangerine,
and no incongruous citrus ever seen
at greengrocers’ in Newcastle or Leeds
mis-spelt by the spuds and mud-caked swedes,
a fruit an older poet might substitute
for the grape John Keats thought to be Joy’s fruit,
when, two years before he died, he tried to write
how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight.* / /
and if John keats had only lived to be,
because of extra years, in need like me,
at 42 he’d help me celebrate
that Micancopy kumquat that I ate
whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin–
or was it sweet outside, and sour within?
For however many kumquats that I eat
I’m not sure if it’s flesh or rind that’s sweet,
and being a man of doubt at life’s mid-way
I’d offer Keats some kumquats and I’d say:
You’ll find that one part’s sweet and one part’s tart:
say where the sweetness or the sourness start.

I find I can’t as if one couldn’t say
exactly where the night became the day,
which makes for me the kumquat taken whole
best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul
of one in Florida at 42 with Keats
crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats
the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,
that this is how a full life ought to feel,
its perishable relish prick the tongue,
when the man who savours life’s no longer young,
the fruits that were his futures far behind.
Then its the kumquat fruit expresses best
how days have darkness behind them like a rind,
life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

*Cf. John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy,” lines 25-26

…

Tony Harrison 1981

Photo Credits

Photo One By Bernhard Voß – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10555646

Photo Two by Traci Des Jardins from https://www.foodandwine.com/chefs/how-to-cook-kumquats-chefs

Photo Three by Edal, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four from https://vietnamnews.vn/society/266434/clever-growers-switch-to-bonsai-kumquat-trees.html

Photo Five from http://www.kumquatgrowers.com/festival.html