Nature – the heart thrills

OKRA

Los Angeles, 23 June 2026

The other day, my wife and I were doing our usual shopping in our daughter’s local supermarket, after having dropped off our grandson at the daycare. My wife had tasked me with getting the pickles – olives, capers, and anything else that might catch my fancy – which we could use to spice up our bland chicken. I was idly perusing the shelves when my eyes alighted on this:

“This”, as readers can see, is a jar of pickled okra.

My eyes lit up at this discovery, my heart rate went up, a thrill of excitement coursed through my body!

I need to explain this strange reaction.

Many decades ago, when my wife and I were living in New York, we discovered pickled okra in our local supermarket. Neither of us had ever eaten okra – it doesn’t grow much in Europe and our parents had never fed it to us – so we were intrigued: what was this American vegetable like? We bought a jar of the pickles and tried them. Delicious! Nice and crunchy with a vegetable taste steeped in vinegar. From then on, it became a staple of our diet in the Big Apple.

One day, the supermarket was also selling fresh okra.

We thought this would be an excellent occasion to try the fresh version of the vegetable. We took some home and cooked it. We thought that while we wouldn’t get the pickly taste we would at least get the firm crunchiness. What we got instead was a slimy mess.

What a disappointment! But our bad, I have to say, because we hadn’t done any research on okra and so had no idea that this sliminess is a key constituent. Since we found the slime quite revolting, we decided to just eat pickled okra.

Once we settled back in Milan after our New York stay, I spent some time searching the shelves of our local supermarkets for pickled okra. No luck. I was disappointed but not surprised: like I said, okra was not a thing in Europe. And that was the end of our relationship with okra. Until now …

At the table that evening, as I waxed lyrical about pickled okra and helped myself to one pickle after the other, my son-in-law shot me a glance and predicted that I would be writing a post about okra. How right he was! How could I pass up this chance to write a hymn of praise to this pickled vegetable? But of course I was going to need to do some research about it first – the research I never did some 40 years ago.

And the first thing I discovered was that okra isn’t American at all, as I had naively thought so many years ago! But excitingly, I also discovered that in all probability it originally came from my country of birth, Eritrea! Or rather, it came from the highlands where the Blue Nile rises; these encompass parts of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan. I’m afraid I can’t show a photo of okra’s wild ancestor, because it has no direct ancestor as such. It’s a naturally occurring hybrid between multiple ancient species. So I throw in a photo of one of its probable ancestors instead, white wild musk mallow.

As readers can see, the plant has a lovely flower. The domesticated okra plant also has a beautiful flower, although it’s the seed pods below the flower that really interests us.

To celebrate the long-gone Ethiopian farmers who domesticated okra, I throw in a photo of a modern Ethiopian farmer happily harvesting okra.

Of course, the peoples of the Ethiopian highlands couldn’t keep this vegetable to themselves. Through war, trade, travel, or what-have-you, its seed pods radiated out of the Ethiopian highlands in every direction. To the north, they travelled down the Nile river, to Ancient Egypt (where experts believe it was being grown and consumed by at least the 12th Century BCE, although unlike the lettuce there is no archaeological evidence of its use); from there, they went west into the rest of North Africa and east into the Middle East. To the east of the highlands, the seed pods went down to the shores of the Red Sea, and they were then ferried across the sea into southern Arabia, from where they moved on into the Middle East (like another product of the Ethiopian highlands, coffee). From the Middle East, the seed pods kept travelling eastward to the Indian subcontinent (with the net result that India is now the largest producer by far of okra, being responsible for 60% of global production) and eventually to South-East Asia and southern China. To the south and west of the Ethiopian highlands, the seed pods spread into the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

For reasons that will become clear in a minute, I want to go back to the Indian subcontinent, to discuss how okra got there. The most commonly-held theory on this is that it was brought by Arab traders; there was a lot of trade between the two regions, especially after the establishment of Muslim principalities in the subcontinent. But there is another theory, which holds that okra (also) arrived with the Siddi. The Siddi are an ethnic group of about 300,000 people living between Pakistan and India. They are primarily descended from enslaved Africans who were brought to the Indian subcontinent by Arabs as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Although they have maintained some African traditions, they have now pretty much adopted the local customs and languages.

In this reading of history, enslaved Africans brought okra with them to the Indian subcontinent, as a food they were familiar with and could grow themselves.

I bring up this alternative theory about the spread of okra to the Indian subcontinent for several reasons. First, I was really intrigued to find out about these pockets of ethnic Africans living in the Indian subcontinent, and I thought I would share this little nugget of information with my readers. Second, it serves as a useful reminder of the fact that the trade in enslaved Africans went east as much as it went west; in fact, about the same number of enslaved Africans were shipped eastward as were shipped westward, although over a considerably longer period of time.

Finally, it acts as an introduction to another dark chapter of okra’s history, its transfer to the one continent where it wasn’t yet present, the Americas.

When European traders arrived in Western and Central Africa to start shipping enslaved Africans to the Americas, they found okra being grown throughout the region. Either they brought okra seeds to the Americas as a food source for the slaves, or the enslaved Africans brought them to have a foodstuff with which they were familiar, or both.

Either way, okra arrived in the Americas on the slaving ships and took root there. Initially, the slave owners and free people kept away from okra, considering it to be a “slave food”. This view of the vegetable is reflected in many of the names it was given in the Americas. “Okra”, (or “ocro”, or “ocher”) – used in the US as well as in the ex-English and Dutch Caribbean colonies – derives from the vegetable’s name in Igbo, a language primarily spoken in the south-east of what is today Nigeria, in West Africa – where many of the enslaved Africans came from. A cluster of connected names – “quimbombó”, “quingombó”, “chimbombó”, or “guingambó” used in countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico; “quiabo” in Brazil; “gombo” in Louisiana and in the ex-French Caribbean colonies, – all trace back to the name of the vegetable in Kimbundu, a language spoken in what is now Angola – another African region where many enslaved Africans came from.

Well, the “slave food” eventually went mainstream. Okra is now a respected part of dishes in many countries of the Americas. For instance, there’s Brazil’s caruru, a dish where okra is stewed in a stock made up of palm oil, coconut milk, salted dried shrimp, onions, nuts, cilantro, and ginger.

Not only is caruru a staple in many parts of Brazil, it is also a ritual food in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion that blends traditional West African beliefs (especially Yoruba, Fon, and Bantu) with elements of Roman Catholicism.

Then there is callaloo, a soup which is eaten throughout the Caribbean islands. So integral is it to their culinary cultures that in at least two countries – Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago – it has been declared the national dish. While each island offers its own regional twist on the recipe, the soup is typically made by simmering indigenous leafy greens with okra, coconut milk, and various seasonings. Depending on the specific locale, it can be served as a vegetarian dish, or cooks can add crab, prawns, or salted meats.

Then there is gumbo, which is highly popular among the U.S. Gulf Coast community. Gumbo consists primarily of a very dark, very flavoured, roux, to which are added seafood or meat (or sometimes both), a thickener, and the Creole “holy trinity” of vegetables: celery, bell peppers, and onions. When seafood is used, the thickener is normally okra – all that sliminess makes for a good thickener! (which in all probability is a role it also plays in caruru and callaloo)

Gumbo is now so highly prized in Louisiana that, like Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago, the State’s Legislature has elevated the dish to the exalted status of being the official state cuisine.

Not to be outdone, the Oklahoma State Legislature has included fried okra in the Oklahoma State meal.

(For those of my readers who are interested, the State meal also includes cornbread, barbecued pork, chicken-fried steak, sausage with biscuits and gravy, the vegetables black-eyed peas, corn, grits, and squash, with pecan pie and strawberries for dessert; all dishes which are typical of Southern cuisine). I read that this is a delicious way of eating the vegetable, although I also read that the result is a crisp exterior with a slimy interior. In which case, count me out …

And pickled okra, in all of this? Pickling is not a traditional way of preserving food in sub-Saharan Africa, so this must have been a process which enslaved Africans picked up from their owners. It’s particularly useful in the case of okra, because the harvest comes quickly and it spoils even quicker. Drying can be used, and dried okra powder is still common in many parts of the world. But, as my wife and I discovered all those years ago in New York, pickling retains the vegetable’s satisfying crunch while imparting a tart, zesty flavour. So pickling okra became a staple in family cellars and pantries all across the Deep South. But my wife and I have to thank a certain Dick and Mitzi Grimes from San Angelo, Texas, for finding pickled okra on our supermarket shelves 40 years ago and then again just the other day. This husband-and-wife team were the first to make pickled okra available commercially in 1950, through the company, Talk O’ Texas, which they set up.

They managed to secure a major contract with the luxury department store Neiman Marcus, which popularized mass-market pickled okra across the state and then the country. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Well, it’s taken me two jars of pickled okra to complete this post. My current jar has only few pickles left.

Time for me to pick up another jar tomorrow after we have dropped off our grandson at the daycare!

HUMMINGBIRDS

Los Angeles, 31 May 2026

Since the new grandson’s arrival, heralded in my previous post, my wife and I have been busy doing our grandparently duties. One of these has been to walk the baby around the back garden, the one that contains the whole wide world, tapping his back to make him burp or tapping his behind to get him to go to sleep. In my case, this has allowed me to watch the local hummingbirds flit around the flowers in the garden in search of nectar.

Hummingbirds are wonderful to behold. Watching them hovering in front of a flower which they are feeding from is magic.

But the way they dart sideways from flower to flower, or drop vertically, or soar upwards to sit on a branch for just an instant before returning to their search for nectar, is also a delight. Such neat, graceful birds. And so small! The ones I see are a mere 10 cm or so long. So small that my iPhone won’t capture them at all, even assuming that they were to accept to stay still long enough to allow me to fumble around with my iPhone and point it at them. 10 cm may be small to you and me, but this is a typical size for these birds. I read that the smallest species of hummingbird is half that size, at 5 cm! The length of my pinky finger. And their eggs are correspondingly tiny, the size of a pea.

As usual, my ignorance is vast. Before doing some reading for this post, I had thought hummingbirds could be found in all the tropical parts of the world. But no, they are only found in the Americas. And not just in the tropical regions, as I had thought, although it is there that one finds the most species.

Species of hummingbirds have ventured as far north as Alaska and as far south as Tierra del Fuego. As for Los Angeles, five species of hummingbirds can be found in its environs. I’m guessing that the species I see in the back garden is Anna’s hummingbird, for no better reason than it is the most common species in these parts. And on that hangs a tale. Before modern Los Angeles existed, Anna’s hummingbird ate the nectar from local flowering plants such as California gooseberry, Manzanita, Hummingbird sage, California fuchsia, Monkeyflower, Showy Penstemon, Climbing Penstemon, and Woolly Blue Curls.

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But then people flocked to Los Angeles after the Second World War, they built hundreds of thousands of houses – like our daughter’s house – in what essentially is a semi-desert, they surrounded the houses with gardens full of exotic plants from all over the world – like our daughter’s garden. Anna’s hummingbird thrived in this new environment, full of new flowers with yummy nectar. The ones that flit around our daughter’s house, for instance, have been particularly active around the neighbour’s bottle-brush tree, whose original home happens to be Australia.

The populations of Anna’s hummingbird have consequently seen a steady increase since the 1970s, reaching about 8 million today.

But not all the local hummingbirds have managed to adapt to the new conditions. For instance, Allen’s hummingbirds, another local species of hummingbird, have not been able to take advantage of this profusion of exotic flowers. They cannot tolerate all the buildings, the noise, the pollution. As a consequence, their populations have crashed, falling by some 80% since the 1960s. It looks like they will be displaced by Anna’s hummingbirds – until the water runs out and all the thirsty foreign plants in the gardens here wilt and die. Who knows what will happen then to the hummingbirds? And what will happen to the Angelenos?

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD IN THE GARDEN

Los Angeles, 6 April 2026

The day of the birth is coming soon! Keeping our daughter company as we wait for The Happy Event, we have been spending considerable time in the house’s backyard. It is, I’m sure, like many other backyards in this part of Los Angeles: a rectangle of lawn surrounded by various plants, some introduced by my daughter, some brought in by wind, birds, or squirrels, but the great majority, I’m sure, planted by previous occupants of the house.

In a moment of idle curiosity, I started looking more closely at all these plants. In most cases, I had no idea what they were. Luckily, though, my trusty iPhone helped me out with its plant identification app. And the picture that emerged is that the whole wide world has been brought into this little rectangle of Los Angeles earth.

The biggest contributor has been Asia, especially East Asia. The most showy of these Asian immigrants has been an Indian azalea – which, despite its name, is actually native to southern China as well as Viet Nam and Thailand. When my wife and I arrived, we were dazzled by the cloud of flowers on it.

Since that first day, flowering has peaked and the bush is looking less dramatic.

Across the lawn are a couple of camellia bushes, a plant which is native to China and Japan. They form a veritable wall.

The flowers, on one bush a deep pink and on the other bush a whitish pink, are a charming vista.

Another camellia down the house’s side alley gently rains white flowers day after day, lifting my spirits as I throw the trash out.

Hidden away behind some other bushes is an Indian hawthorn, which, again, despite its name, is native to southern China, as well as Japan and a number of countries in South-East Asia.

When in full flower, as is the case for this bush close to where we are staying, it’s quite a magnificent site.

From the bush’s position in a corner where no-one goes (except nosy parkers like myself), I suspect that it was a “gift” from another garden brought by wind, birds, or squirrels; it is a popular plant in the neighbourhood.

There is also a rose bush against the fence. Truth to tell, as this photo shows, it is a rather miserable specimen, with only one flower on it at the moment.

But its presence allows me to recount the interesting story behind garden roses. There are more than 300 species of wild roses; most of them are native to Asia, with smaller numbers hailing from Europe, North America, and Northwest Africa. Despite this global presence, it is the China rose, native to Southwest China, which has most contributed to today’s cultivated roses. For about 1,000 years, the Chinese had been breeding it into garden varieties, extensively interbreeding it as well with the giant rose, which is native to Yunnan as well as to northeast India and northern Myanmar. Then, from the 17th Century onwards, Europeans brought back a number of varieties from China and started the modern breeding programmes, which has led to the enormous range of domesticated roses that we know today.

East Asia keeps on giving, with a Chinese photinia in a corner.

As the name suggests, this plant is native to China, but also to Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and India.

Next to the Chinese photinia is the aptly-named red tip photinia.

As the photo shows, the top leaves turn bright red. When all the top leaves go red, it is a very handsome sight. This photinia is actually a hybrid, between the Chinese photinia and another photinia, the Japanese photinia, which is not only native to Japan but also to south and central China, as well as to parts of Thailand and Myanmar.

We’re not finished with East Asia yet! Tucked away close to the “Indian” azalea is a small bush of heavenly bamboo (which, confusingly, is not actually a bamboo). It is native to broad swathes of East Asia.

This particular bush is in flower at the moment.

But heavenly bamboo also grows bright red berries, as this specimen I came across in the neighbourhood shows.

Next to the heavenly bamboo is a bush of hydrangea (or hortensia, as I’ve always called it).

It’s only just beginning to bloom, but my daughter tells me that its mophead flowers are pinkish in colour. This tells me that it is almost certainly a variety of Bigleaf hydrangea, which is a native of coastal areas of Japan.

In front of the Indian hawthorn – one of several plants screening the poor hawthorn from view – stands a Japanese cheesewood. It is native to the southern half of Japan but also to China, Taiwan, and Korea.

It’s not terribly interesting at the moment, but my daughter tells me that when it flowers the scent is heavenly.

The final immigrant from East Asia is a dwarf umbrella tree. As the name suggests, it is small, pressed down by the other trees and bushes around it.

It is native to Hainan province in China and Taiwan.

Asia has still not finished giving! Two final plants from this region come from South Asia.

Planted in front of the camellia “wall” is a lemon tree, which has been the subject of a past post. It is producing a satisfactory number of lemons at the moment.

As I mentioned in another post, on citron, the citrus family hybridises like crazy. The lemon is one such hybrid, of the citron and the bitter orange. The hybridisation event probably occurred in Northeastern India during the 1st millennium BC.

The second plant in the garden to have come originally from South Asia is orange jasmine.

This species of jasmine is native to South Asia, Southeast Asia and northern Australia. The flowers smell lovely, although their density on this particular bush is quite low compared to other species of jasmine my wife and I have seen.

I don’t know if readers have been counting, but that is 12 species to have come from Asia. Africa, however, is fighting its corner as a source. It has birthed nine of the plants which have put down roots in that little rectangle of Los Angeles earth – most of them, interestingly enough, from South Africa.

Currently, the most showy of these African immigrants is the Natal lily.

It is native to the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa, as well as to Eswatini.

From more or less the same part of the world comes the myrtle-leaf milkwort. It’s not as showy as the Natal lily, but it’s still very pleasant on the eye.

It is native to the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa.

The garden also contains an African lily, which is another native of the Kwa-Zulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa. The specimen in the garden is currently just a jumble of rather uninteresting leaves.

But it will soon have lovely blue flowers, mopheads like the hydrangea. Here’s an example from around the corner, where the flowers are just beginning to come out.

Poking out from a crush of bushes in one corner is the carnival ochna, which also is indigenous to the KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, and parts of the Western Cape provinces, as well as Eswatini and Lesotho. It has this small but rather lovely flower.

This flower gives rise to another, rather odd, name for the bush: Mickey Mouse bush. I report without comment the explanation I’ve read for this name: if you take the flower when the fruit is ripe (which is when those green spheres become black) and hold it upside down, those spheres resemble Micky Mouse’s head and ears, while the bright red sepals resemble his shorts.

Another plant from the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa (but also from Mozambique), a succulent this time, is the jade plant. It is growing in several different places in the garden This is the most handsome specimen.

I’m generally not a great fan of succulents, but I have to say, these jade plants are really quite eye-catching. This particular specimen has no flowers at the moment, but another specimen in another corner of the garden has come out with small pink and white flowers.

A final plant native to southern Africa, but also the more tropical latitudes of the continent, is the spider plant.

It does indeed have a spider-like look, of the daddy-long-legs variety. It comes out with a lovely white flower, but at the moment the specimen in the garden is flowerless.

So, many plants from southern Africa, and in particular from the Kwa-Zulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa – there must be a biodiversity hotspot in those two provinces. But the garden also has two succulents from the Canary Islands (which I include in Africa even if they are formally part of Spain; a glance at a map will show why). These two succulents actually belong to the same family. There is a giant velvet rose (although this particular specimen is not so gigantic).

And there is a tree houseleek or Irish rose.

The final plant from Africa is the fire stick, which has a wide distribution throughout Africa as well as being present in the Arabian Peninsula.

The topmost branches of some of the specimens we have seen here really are a fiery orange, living up to their name of fire stick.

But this specimen’s colouring is rather dull.

Latin America and the Caribbean also has a strong presence in the garden, clocking in at seven plants. The most showy of these is an amaryllis.

Most of the species are concentrated in eastern Brazil and in the central southern Andes of Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, with some species being found as far north as Mexico and the West Indies.

I prefer this plant, though, with its white, mauve, and purple flowers.

The flowers start as white and then shade off to mauve and finally to purple as they age. I suppose that explains its rather strange name: yesterday, today and tomorrow, as well as a number of variations on that theme of three. It is endemic to Brazil.

Against the fence is a young queen palm.

Its original home is the area which is comprised of northern Uruguay, northern Argentina, eastern and central Paraguay, and eastern and southern Brazil. My daughter tells me that this tree just appeared one day. She suspects – correctly, I think – that its parents are the mature queen palms one can see in the background, which grace the neighbour’s backyard. No doubt one of the squirrels which scamper along the garden’s fences brought over a nut which fell from those large, hanging clusters we see on the mature trees.

Close to the queen palm my daughter planted a couple of cherry tomatoes last year. I doubted they would take, but one of them has!

While we admire my daughter’s handiwork, it is good to remind ourselves that the wild ancestor of the tomato, the currant tomato or pimp, is native to Ecuador and Peru. It was domesticated somewhere between there and Mexico, where the Spanish conquistadors saw it in the markets of Tenochtitlan and started its global travels.

Talking of plantings by my daughter, she got the gardener to plant a monstera which had outgrown its pot. After a few days, it was looking miserable and in this case, too, I thought it wouldn’t last. But it has!

I had always thought that monsteras hailed from Africa. But no. They are native to tropical regions of Central and South America. For any of my readers who, like me, are interested in the etymology of words, they might be intrigued to know that the plant’s name comes from the Latin word for “monstrous” or “abnormal”, and refers to its unusual leaves with their slits and holes.

Cheek by jowl with China’s dwarf umbrella tree is a boldo.

This small tree is endemic to the central region of Chile.

The Caribbean islands have given the garden one plant, the variegated spider-lily. Right now, it is just a mass of unruly leaves. My daughter says the plant has been growing like crazy and she plans to cut it back.

With a bit of luck, we’ll see its rather lovely white flower before we leave.

The world still keeps giving! From Europe, we have the wild privet, which is currently flowering.

Unfortunately, Europe has also given the garden ivy, which I am currently hard at work trying to eradicate. It’s been taking over a whole section of the garden and threatens to throttle all the plants in its way.

The Pacific Islands are the original home of one plant in the garden, the Hawaiian hibiscus. The cultivar planted here is a beautiful yellow.

The Hawaiian hibiscus is actually the result an ancient hybridisation event, which took place before the Europeans discovered the Pacific Islands. Fascinatingly, the hybridisation involved a hibiscus found in the islands of Vanuatu and another hibiscus which hails from the islands of French Polynesia. These two sets of islands are more than 4,000 km apart! So how did these two species of hibiscus manage to hybridise? Since the hibiscus from French Polynesia was important in Polynesian culture and medicine, it is theorised that it must have been taken across the south Pacific as one of the so-called canoe plants which Polynesians carried with them when they undertook their long-range seafaring, a topic I’ve discussed in the context of the sweet potato.

Is California the source of any of the plants in the garden? As far as I can tell, no. The only American plant in the garden, a great rhododendron, actually comes from the Appalachians, some 4,500 km away.

Right now, the bush has exactly one flower on it, although there are signs (in the form of dead flowers which have not been removed) that it will be covered in flowers at some point – if the damned ivy doesn’t throttle it beforehand.

Well, since I started this post The Happy Event has occurred! My wife and I now have a second grandson. Over the next few months, we can take him out to the garden and show him the plants and tell him that he can already begin to explore the world he entered right here in his Mum and Dad’s backyard.

SPRING IS COMING!

Vienna airport, 18 March 2026

We’re off to Los Angeles, to stay with the little family of our daughter and her partner – about to grow by one more child!

We leave Austria with Spring timidly showing its face. On our last hike in the Wachau, we spied small drifts of pennywort pushing through the forest litter.

Their light purple petals were almost glowing.

Further on, on a dry, rocky outcrop overlooking the Danube river, we spied a little group of greater pasque flowers – well named, Easter is around the corner.

Their yellow hearts stood out against the dark purple of the petals.

The next day, in the woods covering the hills overlooking Vienna, we bumped into sprays of violets peeping up through the dead leaves.

So small, so delicate …

And yesterday, during our last walk around Vienna, which took us through the gardens of the Belvedere Palace, we passed a blooming cherry tree.

The next time we’re back in Vienna, it will be late summer. Who knows what flowers will greet us then?

SPINY PUMPKIN

Florence, 21 November 2025

A week or so ago, my wife and I were doing a gentle hike on Lake Como. We’ve both been a bit under the weather, so a hike with none of the brutal climbs required of many of the hikes around Lake Como were just what we needed. We had also done a few other, rougher hikes along the lake in the previous days and had discovered to our dismay that heavy rains back in late September had made a number of them impassable. So as I say, a nice gentle hike along a well-kept path was just what we needed. For any of my readers who might want to know which hike we did, it was the “Via Verde”, which runs between the villages of Moltrasio and Laglio (and is not to be confused with the rival “Green Way”, which runs further north along the same shoreline of the lake). Here is a photo of the typical view one enjoys along this path at this time of the year.

Towards the end, we were walking into the village of Carate Urio when we came across a table set up along the path and on which were placed two crates holding a dozen or so of these strange-looking vegetables – or were they fruits?

My wife trained her iPhone camera on one of these vegetables (or fruits?) and promptly identified it. In Italian, it is called “zucca spinosa”, or spiny pumpkin. They were certainly spiny, but the relationship to pumpkins wasn’t immediately obvious. And being a pumpkin, it’s sort of both a fruit and vegetable: botanically a fruit but culinarily a vegetable given the way it is eaten (as we shall see in a minute). For the purposes of this post, I will henceforth refer to it as a vegetable.

Different parts of the world have different names for this vegetable. It’s called chayote in the US. Here we have a lady from Louisiana showing off two of them (although, reflecting that State’s French heritage, they are often called mirlitons there, as they are in nearby Haiti).

The Americans have actually just borrowed the Spanish name for the vegetable; we’ll come back to the Spanish name in a minute.

It’s called chocho or chuchu or some variant thereof in places as varied as Mauritius, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and Jamaica. This is thought to be the Pidgin English version of chayote. Here we have a farmer in Assam with his crop of chocho.

The vegetable is called choko in Cantonese (am I wrong in thinking that this ultimately derives from chocho?), which later became the name used in Australia and New Zealand thanks to the Cantonese who emigrated there in the 19th Century. Here we have an Australian proudly showing off the chokos growing in his garden (note that his variety is without spines).

Meanwhile, in the islands of the eastern Caribbean, the vegetable is called christophine or christophene. Here we have early risers in a market in the island of Martinique searching for their choice christophenes.

There are more names used for this spiny pumpkin, but the ones I’ve cited give us an indication of where it originally came from. It is one of those foodstuffs which make up the great Columbian exchange: that massive movement of foodstuffs, people and diseases which occurred after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Americas. I’ve mentioned this exchange several times already in these posts, when writing about the prickly pear, the Jerusalem artichoke, vanilla, and turkeys. And now I can add to the list the spiny pumpkin, or christophene (which reflects the connection to Christopher Columbus), or chayote, which is a Spanish transliteration of the Nahuatl name chayohtli. In fact, modern studies indicate that the chayote was first cultivated in Mesoamerica, between southern Mexico (in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz) and Honduras, with the most genetic diversity being present in both Mexico and Guatemala. Here, we have a field of chayote in Mexico.

Just to finish my elongated riff on names, another name for the vegetable which is used in Guatemala and El Salvador is güisquil or huisquil, which is derived from another Nahuatl name for it, huitzli. Here we have a Guatemalan singing the praises of the güisquil.

But to come back to my wife and me, standing in front of that table on the Via Verde. The vegetables’ anonymous grower was offering them for free to passers-by. I was hesitant, but my wife was bolder. She reminded me that we were having some old friends over for dinner the next day, why not try the spiny pumpkins out on them? But we don’t know how to prepare them, I objected. My wife waved off that objection, immediately doing a search on the internet. Hey presto, she found what sounded like a pretty easy recipe, explained in a video by a lady from Calabria in southern Italy, who mentioned in passing that the spiny pumpkin was particularly popular in her region – readers should note this link of the spiny pumpkin to Calabria, as we shall come back to it in a minute. My doubts brushed aside, we picked up five of these little spiny pumpkins and loaded them up in our rucksacks.

The next day, preparations started early. As recommended by the Calabrian lady, I peeled the pumpkins with a potato peeler – the spines were a little annoying but no more than that. Then I opened them up to take out the stone, after which I cut the halves into thin slices. Then I could start on the other two ingredients, tomatoes and onions. I divided up six large tomatoes, and sliced up one small onion (the recipe called for more but I’m not a fan of onions). At which point, I handed over to my wife, who threw all the ingredients into a big bowl, added the herbs, salt, and oil, and mixed everything up thoroughly. At the right moment, she ladled the mix out into a pan and put it into the oven for 40 minutes at 180 degrees Centigrade. I throw in a photo of what the result looked like – this is actually from the Calabrian lady’s video; we forgot to take a photo since we were so busy with preparations of the dinner.

Because what we had prepared was a side dish. The main course, the pièce de resistance, was cotechino with lentils and mashed potatoes. Like that, if the side dish turned out to be a disaster, we still had the main dish to fall back on. Luckily, it all turned out well. When I carried in the side dish, I explained the whole back-story. None of our guests – three Italians and one American – had ever heard of zucche spinose (in the case of the Italians) or chayote (in the case of the American). We all tried the dish with a little trepidation, but luckily it tasted really good. To me, the spiny pumpkins tasted like a cross between zucchini and cucumber. They went well with the tomatoes.

We didn’t finish the dish, so my wife froze the remains. When we get back from Florence where we are at the moment (to see an exhibition on Fra’ Angelico), we’ll try it out on our son too.

I fear we’ll never make the dish again, unless our anonymous grower on Lake Como is kind enough to make next year’s crop available to passers-by, because you cannot grow spiny pumpkins in the north of Italy (except, as we have seen, in Lake Como’s microclimate). As a result, northern Italians have no culinary experience with it – which is why our three Italian guests, all from Milan, had never heard of it. Of course, we could travel down to Calabria. Because, I discovered, Calabria is a “hot spot” for the growth and consumption in Italy of the spiny pumpkin. This is a consequence of one of the many individual rivulets that made up the giant global flow of plants out of the Americas after the continent’s accidental discovery by Columbus. When, in 1502, the Spaniards took over the Kingdom of Naples, of which Calabria was part, they carried the spiny pumpkin from their new dominions in Mesoamerica to their new dominions in southern Italy. And the plant took particular root in Calabria.

But we can’t go to Calabria just to eat spiny pumpkin! I’ll have to come up with an exciting trip full of new things that we’ve never done before if I’m ever going to persuade my wife. I have one or two things in mind. There’s the Riace Bronzes in Reggio Calabria, which we’ve never seen. There’s some old Christian mosaics in a monastery up in the Calabrian mountains, mentioned by John Julius Norwich in one of his books, which we’ve never seen. I’ve got the whole winter to come up with some more things to see and do …

SPINDLE TREE

Milan, 15 October 2025

It was our last hike in Austria this year. We hiked across the hills between Sankt Veit an der Gölsen (another Sankt Veit) and Wiesenfeld, in the pre-Alps behind St. Pölten. During the final walk into Wiesendorf, I spotted this flowering bush on the roadside.

I’d seen the plant before, but this time I decided to identify it. I did my usual trick of using my iPhone’s plant identifier programme, but it was a complete failure. It first suggested “hawthorne”, which even I knew was wrong, and then, on two other try’s, it simply suggested “plant”, which was really not very helpful. So I turned to the internet. And there I got my answer: I was looking at a Euonymus europaeus, the European or common spindle tree (or bush to some people – it seems to fall between being a small tree and a big bush).

The plant has a rather lovely fruit, which is why I’d spotted the plant in the first place. I throw in a close-up of the fruit.

It is a lovely pink, and then, as the photo shows, when it ripens it splits open to reveal a bright orange seed (actually, what you see is an orange aril, a “fleshy” material in which the seed is buried; the edible aril attracts birds and other animals, which helps in seed dispersal).

To my eye, this combination of pink and orange is a bit jarring, but hey! that’s the colour combination the plant “chose” (is there some scientific reason behind the colours you find on plants? A question for another day).

The fruit’s pink colour, and the fact that it is four-lobed, has led to one of the plant’s French names: bonnet d’évêque, bishop’s cap. I don’t know if bishops wear them anymore, but the hat they wore in the past was four-sided and pink.

All very nice, but as I said in my previous post, while our ancestors might have admired the colours of nature, they were highly utilitarian in their approach to plants: how can I use them? Well, the fruits of the spindle tree are toxic – indeed, every part of the plant is toxic – so there was no nutrition to be had from this particular plant. But our ancestors did manage to eke various uses out of it. Two stand out for me.

As the plant’s English name indicates, the plant’s wood was used to make spindles. Women (for the most part) used spindles to spin wool or flax fibres into yarn or thread. In this picture, the spindle is in the woman’s right hand (and the distaff in her left).

And here we have a group of women all spinning together. I guess this was seen very much as a communal activity, the way women used to knit together.

Spindles are a very ancient technology. The oldest evidence of their use goes back 12,000 years. But at least in the developed countries, they were eliminated by the Industrial Revolution, when automation destroyed the cottage industry of spinning. Their use lingered on here and there; this photo, for instance, from 1901, shows a peasant woman in Greece still spinning by hand.

And I still remember watching a housewife in Eritrea, where I was born, sitting at the door of her house spinning with a distaff and spindle. This would have been in the late 1950s.

One of the plant’s French names – fusain – indicates the second of the plant’s intriguing uses. Fusain is a charcoal made from the wood of the spindle tree, which is used in drawing. It’s much appreciated by artists for its exceptional strength and density. This is a good excuse for me to throw in a few charcoal drawings by famous artists, although I will start with an artist I personally have never heard of, François Bovin, simply because the subject of his drawing connects us back to what I was just writing about, spinning.

Turning to other artists, these are preparatory drawings of Tahitian faces, by Paul Gauguin.

This is a drawing by a favourite artist of mine, Käthe Kollwitz, of a home worker.

And this is a drawing by another of my favourite artists, Egon Schiele, of a reclining model in chemise and stockings.

And finally, a cubist charcoal drawing by Pablo Picasso of a standing female nude.

A week after this hike, we were gone. We’ll be back next year, maybe early enough to see a spindle tree in flower.

GROUNDCHERRIES, OR CHINESE LANTERNS

Vienna, 28 September 2025

A week ago, my wife and I were passing by a florist during our afternoon walk down into the city centre when my eye was caught by one of the products the shop was selling.

It wasn’t just the pretty display that caught my attention. It just so happened that I had taken a photo of the very same plant growing along the side of the path during one of our earlier walks during the summer, in Vienna’s Tiergarten (a very nice area of woods and meadows on the edge of the city which used to be an imperial hunting ground).

Already when I had taken this photo, I had said to myself that I should look into this plant. The clever feature on my phone’s camera told me that I was looking at a groundcherry, so at least I knew what the plant was. But, as Samuel Johnson is reported to have said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions – I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything. But that second sighting in front of the florist got me going again. And now, finally, after a few days of rain, I have cobbled together my story.

I suppose I should start with the plant’s most conspicuous feature, its bright orange to red papery calyx.

It is this beautiful calyx that caught my eye and catches the eye those who decide to plant it in their gardens.

It’s also what makes people put the plant in arrangements of dried flowers.

These sometimes can veer towards the Japanese ikebana style.

Not surprisingly, it is also this calyx which gives the plant one of its more common names in English, Chinese lantern, in German, Lampionblume or lantern flower, and in French, lanterne or lantern.

If left on the plant, much of the calyx will decompose, leaving behind only the veins of the calyx in the form of a delicately beautiful, skeletal net and revealing an orange-red berry within.

The berry’s resemblance to a small cherry has given rise to the plant’s other common name in English, the groundcherry. Having a berry trapped, as it were, inside the calyx has also given rise to other common names, like the French amour en cage, love in a cage, but the one I like best is one of its Persian names: the puppet behind the curtain.

As I have noted several times in these posts, while our ancestors no doubt saw the beauty in the world around them, they were nothing if not profoundly utilitarian: how can this thing (plant, fruit, rock, wood, animal, whatever it is) be useful to me? So of course they explored whether or not the berry of the Chinese lantern was edible; there is evidence that our Neolithic ancestors were eating the berries. The internet is not very clear on how tasty these berries are. As far as I can make out, though, they are not very tasty, having low levels of sugar and being somewhat sour. But with the addition of a lot of sugar they can be made into scrumptious jams and marmalades. Apparently, the Italians also pickle the berries, although I’ve never, ever seen this in Italy.

Our Medieval ancestors, and very probably even earlier ancestors, were just as interested, if not more interested, in the plant’s use as a medicine, particularly the berry. And this interest explains the plant’s rather strange scientific name, Alkekengi officinarum. It’s the plant’s generic name, Alkekengi, that’s so odd. It’s not Latin, what is it? The answer to that lies in Persia. In Persian traditional medicine, the Unani system of medicine, the dried berry was used as a diuretic, antiseptic, liver corrective, and sedative. The Persian name for the plant is kākunaj (which, by the way, I think means “balloon” or “bladder”, another common description of the plant). I throw in here a photo of a 15th Century miniature of a Persian garden.

When the Arabs overran the Persian empire, they picked up the Persians’ traditional medicine and carried it westward. This included the kākunaj berry, whose name they arabised to al-kākanj. In turn, Arabic traditional medicine was carried into Europe, where the name of the berry, and the plant, was europeanised to “alkekengi”. Another small example of the way ideas were transmitted along trade routes, something which I have written about many, many times in these posts.

The plant’s medicinal role has now died away, although there are still a lot of articles written on its pharmacological properties. So we are left with its beautiful calyx, that orange-red lantern, to enjoy. Which leads me to one lovely traditional use of the plant, in Japan. During the summer Obon Festival, the Japanese remember their deceased ancestors, believing that their spirits return to visit them. They use lanterns to guide the spirits from their graves on the first day of the festival, and back to their graves on the last day of the festival. Normally, they use paper lanterns, but in many places they also drape strings of groundcherry calyxes – called ghost lanterns in Japanese – on the shrines in temple grounds that house memorial tablets for the deceased. This photo shows a market selling strings of grouncherry calyxes.

Maybe we should institute this practice at Halloween, when the spirits of the dead traditionally come back into the world of the living.

SAINT LEONARD OF NOBLAC

Vienna, 24 September 2025

My wife and I have just finished a long weekend in the little town of Waidhofen an der Ybbs. We were actually using it as a base from which to carry out a number of very pleasant hikes over the surrounding hills. These are impossibly beautiful: broad swathes of light and dark green draped over the hills, dotted here and there with farmsteads.

The weather was glorious, which certainly helped.

As I looked through the various brochures which we picked up to figure out what hikes to do, I came across the following brief write-up about the church in a village some 10 km away, the village of St. Leonhard am Walde:

“Fiakerkirche St. Leonhard/Wald: The traditional place of pilgrimage for Viennese hackney carriage drivers since 1826. St. Leonhard is the patron saint of cattle, sheep – and horses. In 1908, the Viennese hackney carriage drivers donated the Marian altar. A few decades ago, the Viennese cab drivers also joined the pilgrimage.”

Now that really intrigued me! Hackney carriages, fiaker in German, are a picturesque sight down in the centre of Vienna, although nowadays, of course, they are only for tourists.

But, being an early form of taxi, there was a time when hackney carriages were ubiquitous throughout the city, as indeed they were in all European cities. Here is a colourised copperplate engraving from the 1830s of a smart set of Viennese and their carriages.

I suspect, though, the carriages and their drivers didn’t look quite so smart when they were merely acting as taxis, ferrying people around town. This looks more like the typical hackney carriage driver; the photo is taken from an engraving in a book of 1844.

Hackney carriage drivers have always struck me as a hard-boiled lot, not taken to making pilgrimages. I have a hard time seeing them doing this (this is a modern pilgrimage, but I don’t suppose pilgrimages have changed much, apart from the clothes the pilgrims wear).

But it could be that I am being influenced by various books I’ve read and films I’ve seen where hackney carriage drivers seemed to be a sinister and semi-criminal lot. This is an example from one of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Maybe the majority were God-fearing, devout, family men.

Of course, given the way my mind works, I started wondering why hackney carriage drivers would have chosen a church dedicated to St. Leonard as the church to which they would make their annual pilgrimage. The little blurb I quoted above suggests an answer: he was the patron saint of horses, and of course horses were key to hackney carriages, being their motor as it were. But how, my mind was asking, did Saint Leonard become the patron saint of horses?

Since I knew nothing about Saint Leonard, I had to do some reading. I should note in passing that there have been various Saint Leonards over the centuries; the one we are interested in is St. Leonard of Noblac. Assuming he ever actually existed, his story is quickly told.

Leonard was a Frankish nobleman, coming from a family that was closely allied to Clovis, the first Frankish king of what was later to become France. Clovis was young Leonard’s godfather when he was baptised, along with Clovis himself and all his court, by St. Remi, bishop of Reims, on Christmas Eve of 496. As Leonard grew up, he became much exercised by prisoners, to the point where he asked Clovis to have the right to visit prisoners and free those he considered worthy of it. Clovis granted the request. We have the scene played out here in a French work from the 14th Century.

Many prisoners were thereafter liberated by Leonard.

Much impressed, I presume, by his holiness, Clovis offered him a bishopric, but Leonard turned the honour down, preferring to join a monastery near Orléans, whose abbot was another saint, St. Mesmin. After the latter went the way of all flesh, Leonard decided to strike out on his own. He moved to a forest in a place called Noblac (Noblat today) near Limoges, where he set up a hermitage. His preaching, good works, etc. led to a multitude of people flocking to his hermitage, including many prisoners whose chains miraculously flew off their hands and legs after they had prayed to St. Leonard for his intercession. Here, we have a print from 1600 giving us a rather fanciful vision of this scene.

I do believe that the monk working the land behind Leonard in the print is one of these prisoners now living an honest life.

At some point in all of this, the-then Frankish king Clotaire I (Clovis having died in the meantime) and his heavily pregnant wife came to visit Leonard in his forest hermitage – we have to remember that Clovis’s family and Leonard’s family were close. The royal couple decided – like the good aristos that they were – to use the occasion to go for a hunt in the forest. To get us into the spirit of things, I throw in here a miniature from the 15th-Century Book of Hours of Marguerite d’Orleans showing Lords and Ladies off to the hunt.

During the hunt, however, the queen suddenly went into labour. It was turning into a difficult and dangerous birth. Leonard rushed to her side and his prayers saved queen and baby. In gratitude – especially since it was a baby boy – the king wanted to shower Leonard with loads of money. But Leonard only asked for as much forest area around his hermitage as he could ride around on his donkey in one night. The king granted this wish. On the land that Leonard was subsequently given he built a church and monastery. He became its first abbot and died there peacefully, mourned by all. The Romanesque version of that church still stands, in a place called Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.

And that church contains what is purported to be Saint Leonard’s tomb.

Given his involvement with prisoners, it is not surprising to learn that St. Leonard is the patron saint of prisoners. Given that story with the pregnant queen, it’s also not surprising that he is considered a helper of women in childbirth. But patron saint of cattle, sheep and horses? How did that come about?

For that, we have to know that from the earliest times St. Leonard was often depicted as an abbot with a crosier and holding a chain or fetters or manacles, symbolising the liberation of prisoners achieved by him. In fact, in one of those serendipitous moments I love so much, I came across just such a representation of him in a church in Waidhofen, down the road from where my wife and I were staying.

Over time, rural folk mistakenly thought that the chains which St. Leonard was holding were cattle chains – these are commonly used to tether cattle or to control them during walks, or even to help birthing calves.

By extension he became the patron saint of all farm animals, which of course also included horses.

Given this swerve of patronage towards livestock, I suppose it’s not surprising that Saint Leonard became a popular saint throughout the Alpine regions of Europe. After all, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, cattle was pretty central to the rural economies of all Alpine communities. This devotion to the saint means that his feast day – November 6th – is celebrated with enthusiasm in many places in the Alpine regions, especially the German-speaking ones. Here, for example, are photos of the celebrations in Bad Tölz in Bavaria (which got a mention in an earlier post because of its rather naughty statue of St. Florian).

It also gave rise to the intriguing phenomenon of chain churches in the Alpine regions. These are churches dedicated to St. Leonard which have chains running around them, either put up temporarily on his feast day or mounted permanently. The Fiakerkirche is not a chain church, alas. Here is a nice example from Tholbath in Bavaria (the church also has a quite respectable onion dome, the subject of an earlier post).

But if we’re going to visit a church dedicated to St. Leonard, it won’t be one of the chain churches. It will be the one I’ve already mentioned in Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat. What a fine-looking Romanesque church! I have to say, I am partial to Romanesque churches. I’ve already inserted a photo of the church’s exterior. Here is a photo of its interior.

What a wonderfully bare church! No annoying accretions to cover the spare, simple lines of the architecture.

But the photo shows an additional reason why I will try to persuade my wife to travel all the way to France to see this church: the rucksacks and the walking sticks. This church is situated on one of the four Ways of St. James of Compostela through France. I’ve mentioned one of these, the Via Tolosana, in an earlier post. The church of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat is on another, the Via Lemovicensis, the Way of Limoges. There must surely be some good hiking to be done in the area.

PHOTO ALBUM OF A HIKE

Vienna, 8 June 2025

My wife and I recently completed a four-day hike around the Danube, in the reaches of the river some 20 km upstream from Linz. We started in the village of Ottensheim, made our way to Eferding and then to Aschach, ending the hike in the village of Sankt Martin. I can’t resist inserting here a composite photo I’ve created of the hike.

As readers can see, we wandered rather drunkenly along the Danube.

The wonderful thing about hiking is that you move slowly across the landscape, which allows you to notice things which you probably wouldn’t notice on a bike, let alone a car. I give my readers here a taste of what my wife and I came across – quite serendipitously – as we slowly crossed this Danubian landscape.

Thursday

We arrive in Ottensheim, which sits on the Danube river, in the early afternoon. We take advantage of our early arrival to go for a walk on the high lands behind the town. Here is the view of the Danube which greets us at the top. You can see the hydroelectric dam spanning the river. We’ll be passing that dam tomorrow.

We have pizza at the place we’re staying the night, down by the river’s bank. We chat with the staff, all Neapolitans, who all left Naples because of a lack of opportunities there. A story we’ve heard so many times. Such a tragedy for Naples, this steady draining away of their youth.

Friday

We’re greeted at the exit of the hotel by this strange painting on the wall of a house.

Not sure what happened to the mermaid’s nose …

We’re waiting to board the ferry, which will carry us over to the other bank.

While waiting, we spy a statue of St. Johann Nepomuk, protector of those who cross streams and rivers, so common in this part of the world. This statue is coloured, though, which is rare.

The view from the ferry’s deck, looking upstream. The hydroelectric dam is in the far distance.

We can also see a peek of Ottensheim’s local castle in that last photo. We get a better view as we start walking along the river’s bank.

Its recent history has been quite eventful. Owned by a British family in the 1930s, it was confiscated by the Nazis at the beginning of the war. They used it as a forestry office for the Wermacht. After the war, the Soviets, who occupied that side of the Danube, used it as a barracks. After they left in 1955, when Austria got back its independence, the castle reverted to its pre-war owners. By then it was in a pretty sad state, but its owners didn’t have the money to restore it. It was only in 1988, when the castle was sold to a group of families with deeper pockets, that the castle could be restored. It is still in private hands.

Yellow irises blooming along the water’s edge, the first of many wildflowers we will be seeing on this hike.

Close by, a memorial on the side of the path.

It commemorates the nearly 30,000 people murdered through poisoning with carbon monoxide by the Nazi regime in nearby Hartheim castle, between May 1940 and December 1944. Once their bodies had been cremated the ashes were brought to this spot and dumped into the Danube. Until September 1941, it was a “euthanasia” centre, where 8,000 physically and mentally handicapped people, almost all from Bavaria and Austria, were murdered. After Hitler closed down the Nazis’ euthanasia programme (because of protests from the Roman Catholic Church in Germany), the centre quickly “pivoted” to become a centre for the killing of inmates from nearby concentrations camps, primarily Mauthausen or its satellite camps, who were too sick or injured to work any longer. By December 1944, they had murdered a further 12,000 people, most of them Soviet Prisoners of War.

Wildflowers by the side of the path

Outside a fire station, an intriguing monument to firemen and women, as well as to officers of the Austrian river authority.

An old farmhouse on the edge of the road.

Eferding, the end point of today’s hike, with the parish church’s bell tower dominating the town.

A photo of Eferding’s castle, taken by slipping my iPhone through the big gates that barred entry.

The castle is still owned by the Starhemberg family, who inherited it and the lands that came with it in 1559. Interesting family. They’ve been involved in Austrian politics for the last 1,000 years or so. The latest (in)famous member of the family was Ernst Rüdiger Prince von Stahremberg, who was born in 1899 in the castle and died in 1956 in Voralberg. He was a right-wing politician with great admiration for Mussolini’s fascism. He served in Austria’s right-wing governments from 1930 until 1936. Although fascistic, he really disliked the Nazis and made his dislike very public, so after the Anschluss of 1938 he fled to Switzerland to avoid vengeful retaliation by the Nazis (and perhaps also to protect his wife, who was Jewish). At the beginning of World War II, he served in some capacity in the British and Free French Air Forces, but he resigned in disgust after the UK and the US allied themselves with the Soviet Union in 1941 – he viewed communism and Nazism as equally evil. Thereafter, he and his wife left for Argentina; not unnaturally, he felt a great affinity with the politics of Juan Peron. In 1956, after Peron had been ousted by the army, he travelled to Austria for an extended visit, no doubt to explore the possibility of coming back. He was staying at a spa in Schruns (the bell tower of whose parish church I had so admired last year). During a walk, he was photographed by a journalist who worked at a communist newspaper. In a rage, he attacked the journalist with his walking stick, but this triggered a cardiac arrest and he died there on the pavement.

Turning my back on the Stahremberg castle, a view of Eferding’s main square

with its maypole still standing

and a magnificent copper beach at the far end.

Eferding’s parish church

with its beautifully carved pulpit (although not as beautiful as the one my wife and I saw in Traunkirchen several years ago)

and the tombstone of some long dead knight.

A Lichtenstein-like mural on the wall of a ruined house

An amusing ad for a shop offering orthopaedic services.

And so to dinner and bed.

Saturday

We start the day by walking over the rich farmland around Eferding. We pass these multicoloured rows of lettuces.

We go past a garden whose owner must be an amateur sculptor with a fondness for using scrap metal.

Nearby, beauty among the garbage.

We begin to climb a steep ridge. We pass a shrine on the side of the road.

Shrines are common throughout Austria, but I notice that in this region shrines – like this one – have an eye painted on them. I suppose it represents God, the “All-Seeing Eye”. But I find it rather unnerving: “You can’t hide from me, I can see everything that you do” – just like Big Brother in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.

A chapel at the top of the ridge.

A spray of daisies on the side of the road.

We plunge into the woods.

A view over the plain around Eferding.

We come down the ridge and pass the small airfield – literally, in this case – of a gliding club.

We have been watching the gliders soaring over us all morning; my iPhone, alas, cannot capture their ethereal beauty.

We look back at the ridge we walked along, with a castle ruin sitting on it.

We stop for lunch in the village of Pupping, finding a bench in the parish church’s garden to sit on. I, of course, cannot pass up the opportunity of visiting the church after lunch. I find a mix of old and new.

A statue of St. Wolfgang, who, it is said, died at the altar of the (original) church in 994 CE.

A statue of St. Christopher, looking less than pleased with having to carry the Child Jesus.

Four carved door lintels, displaying the symbols of the four Evangelists: clockwise from the top left, the lion of St. Mark (you have to look hard to see the lion’s face), the ox of St. Luke, the angel of St. Matthew, and the eagle of St. John.

It takes me a while to understand that Luke’s angel is represented by an eye – the eye again …

Rather pleasant stained-glass windows.

We continue the hike towards our end point today, Aschach, on the Danube. Quite by chance, our route takes us past a war cemetery.

It has the look and feel of the German war cemeteries which my wife and I had visited on the Western Front: tall oak trees, shading a lawn, in which are planted stone crosses.

But actually, although the cemetery is looked after by the German association for war graves (hence the look), none of the soldiers buried there are Austrian or German. And none of the dead who are commemorated fell on the frontline; they were all prisoners of war who died in a POW camp which the Austro-Hungarians built close by for use during the First World War. They were mainly Italians

with their memorial

and Serbians

with theirs.

After the Second World War, the Soviets put up a memorial to their POWs who had been murdered in Mauthausen and other nearby concentration camps.

Of course, the thousands of murdered Soviet POWs didn’t get an individual grave, their names were not even inscribed on a monument. But some Russian family had come and attached a photo of one Soviet prisoner to a stone cross, with the epitaph “We remember, we love, we grieve. The grandchildren”.

We walk on to Aschach.

Sunday

We start the day by once again crossing the Danube, but this time using a bridge rather than on a ferry.

Some purple irises catch my eye as we walked along the river bank.

We climb up to the high lands overlooking the river, past fields of wheat studded with corn flowers and daisies.

We enter the woods.

The path eventually leads us off the high lands and down to a stream at the bottom of a valley. We start following the stream towards its source. At first, the stream cheerfully burbles along.

But soon the stream bed becomes rough as stones from above have tumbled down, and the water jumps around.

The path mimics the roughness of the stream.

Once we reach the high lands, the stream quietens down, the path likewise.

We pass meadows along the stream’s banks. Some have been turned into lawns.

Here, another anonymous sculptor has turned a tree trunk into a whimsical totem pole.

One of the meadows is carpeted in pink flowers.

Finally, we leave the stream and climb up onto a ridge. An alpine pasture falls away to our right. It is impossibly green.

We pass through Sankt Martin and start walking along a main road. This is the only way to our hotel. We pass a building site, where a riot of poppies grow: beauty clothing the ugliness.

We reach the hotel. Our hike is finished.

NORFOLK ISLAND PINE

Sori, 15 May 2025
updated 21 November 2025

For some time now, I’ve been intrigued by this tree, which I see fairly regularly in gardens at our seaside place in Liguria. I see this particular example when we walk along the main road that runs through the village.

While another one, along the road to Recco, has long caught my eye.

I find the tree’s rigorous symmetry very pleasant to the eye, while the upward tilt of its fronds is most arresting – it looks like a pine tree growing upside down.

Up till now, my half-hearted attempts to identify it have been a failure. However, my wife recently discovered a plant identification service on our iPhone cameras. You take a photo of a plant and you will be told what the plant’s name is – not every time, I’ve discovered, but often enough to make such searches rewarding. I promptly trained my camera on the mystery tree and after a few goes it gave me a name: Norfolk Island pine. A couple of independent searches on “Norfolk Island Pine” confirmed the identification (one always has to beware false positives!).

Unsurprisingly, given its name, these independent searches also informed me that this tree hails from Norfolk Island, a dot of an island in the South Pacific Ocean. Although the tree has close-ish relatives in New Caledonia, the only place in the world where it is endemic is on this tiny island in the middle of nowhere. Norfolk Island is really very remote. It is pretty much equidistant between New Zealand to the south and New Caledonia to the north, with about 760 km of open water in either direction. And there’s double that distance between the island and the closest point in Australia, the country which oversees it.

The first Europeans to set eyes on the island were on James Cook’s ship during his second voyage to the South Pacific. I’ll quote what Cook had to say about the island in the published journal of this voyage.

“We continued to stretch to W. S. W. till the 10th [October 1774], when, at day-break, we discovered land bearing S. W., which on a nearer approach we found to be an island of good height, and five leagues in circuit. I named it Norfolk Isle, in honour of the noble family of Howard. … After dinner, a party of us embarked in two boats, and landed on the island, without any difficulty, … We found it uninhabited, and were undoubtedly the first that ever set foot on it.”

Cook was wrong about this. Archaeological surveys on the island have shown that Polynesians had already reached the island and lived there, but for some unknown reason they had all upped sticks and left several centuries before Cook hove to on the horizon.

Cook continues:

“We observed many trees and plants common at New Zealand; and, in particular, the flax plant, which is rather more luxuriant here than in any part of that country; but the chief produce is a sort of spruce pine, which grows in great abundance, and to a large size, many of the trees being as thick, breast high, as two men could fathom, and exceedingly straight and tall. … “

Cook wrote a bit more about the tree in a variation of his Journal (quite what variation this is I have not managed to ascertain – perhaps his handwritten journal?)

“[The tree] is of a different sort to those in New Caledonia and also to those in New Zealand, and for Masts, Yards &ca [it is] superior to both. We cut down one of the Smallest trees we could find and Cut a length of the uper end to make a Topgt Mast or Yard. My Carpenter tells me that the wood is exactly of the same nature as the Quebeck Pines”.

Luckily for the Norfolk Island pine, Cook was also wrong about the tree’s utility in the manufacture of masts, yards and spars. Quite quickly, it was found not to be resilient enough for the purpose, so initial plans to harvest the trees were abandoned. I say luckily, because if the wood had indeed been good for the task, I’m sure all the island’s pines would have been cut down by now.

As it is, the “great abundance” of Norfolk Island pines which Cook saw has been greatly reduced over the last 250 years. The UK government turned the island into a penal settlement for some 55 years, and the convicts cut down trees for their own use as well as to clear land for agriculture. Then, in 1856, the UK government relocated part of the population of Pitcairn Island to Norfolk Island because Pitcairn was getting too small for its growing population. After the grimness of the island’s use as a prison, this puts it in a rather romantic light: Pitcairn islanders were descendants of the mutineers on the Bounty and their Tahitian partners. I remember vividly the film “Mutiny on the Bounty”, where Marlon Brando plays the role of Lieutenant Fletcher Christian.

(the earlier version with Clark Gable in the role was not so good, in my humble opinion)

To these romantic new residents were added a few more people, people who jumped ship from visiting whalers or other ships which passed. All these new residents unromantically continued cutting down trees to clear land for agriculture. The trees also had to start competing with other, foreign species brought to the island. As late as the 1950s, some bright spark had the idea of turning Norfolk Island pines into plywood. A batch was exported to Sydney, and excellent results were reported of the trial plywood produced. Luckily, someone with some sense realised that this was not a sustainable business and the idea was dropped.

As a result of all this mismanagement of the island’s pines over the centuries, the stands have gradually shrunk, with the last remaining stands of any size now protected in a national park, on land which is too steep or rocky to farm.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has classified the species as “vulnerable”.

Someone – maybe several people – along the way also realised that this handsome tree had potential in the horticultural trade. Quite quickly, it entered that global trade in plants which I’ve written about earlier. From a purely selfish point of view, that was lucky for me, because otherwise I would never have seen this handsome tree on the Ligurian coast. I see no reason why I would ever visit Norfolk Island – I’m not the type to take part in a mutiny and I’ll never, thank God, work on a whaler (not a complete impossibility; some of my ancestors did).

Already by the late 19th Century, the tree had moved out of its native habitat. It seems to have been a popular tree to plant near shore lines because of its high tolerance to salt and humidity, as well as its ability to grow in sandy soil. It also always grows straight regardless of prevailing winds. Here’s a nice example from the city of Napier in New Zealand, where a row of Norfolk Island pines was planted along the sea front in 1890, to create the Marine Parade.

This particular photo was taken in the 1930s and later coloured by hand. The trees are still there, although recent articles say the trees are getting to the end of their lives and need replacing.

And then, in ways that probably no-one has studied, and probably never will (who cares about the history of a plant?), it reached the piece of Ligurian coast where my wife and I spend time, a trip of 18,300 km as the crow, or perhaps better the albatross, flies (nearly half the Earth’s circumference).

I don’t know how long the trees have been here. They are quite tall but Norfolk Island pines grow slowly. From information I’ve managed to glean from the internet, I’m guessing that these particular specimens are fifty or so years old, which means they would have been planted around the time I first started coming to this Ligurian village. With a bit of luck, they’ll see me to my grave.