Nature – the heart thrills

EXTINCTION IS FOREVER

Vienna, 4 September 2026

Well we’re back from Los Angeles, leaving our two bundles of fun – that is to say, our grandchildren – to grow and prosper. But I don’t want to use this post to drool over them, even though they are very droolable. I want to write about the monarch butterfly – and there is a connection between it and the grandchildren, as readers will see.

I think we can all agree that this particular species is a rather handsome example of the butterfly family. Subspecies of the monarch butterfly exist in various parts of the world, but the North American monarch is exceptional because it exhibits a wonderful trait. It migrates over thousands of kilometres every year, in what has been called “one of the most spectacular natural phenomena in the world”.

There are two branches to this migration.

In the first, the eastern branch, the butterflies migrate back and forth between central Mexico in the south and the Great Lakes region in the north, a distance of some 5,000 km. This is by far the largest branch, with millions of monarchs overwintering in Mexico, slumbering on oyamel fir trees.

The second, western, branch is more modest, both in distance travelled (500 to 1,500 km) and in the numbers of butterflies involved. The butterflies migrate between their overwintering sites in coastal areas of California to the south and the regions west of the Rocky Mountains all the way up to the Canadian border to the north. Here we have a photo of the butterflies overwintering in Pismo Beach, in California’s San Luis Obispo county.

Although more modest, this is the migration branch that interests me, because the monarch butterflies I have been seeing flitting around these last few months belong to this branch.

My interest in them was first triggered last year when we went to Los Angeles in July. Our daughter’s next-door neighbour had planted some tropical milkweeds in his front garden to support the monarchs – milkweeds are the only plants these butterflies will lay their eggs on. This particular species of milkweed also happens to have quite handsome flowers.

Last year, a number of monarchs had laid their eggs on the neighbour’s milkweeds, and he kindly allowed number-one bundle of fun to inspect the caterpillars and the pupae. The inspections stretched over several weeks as the caterpillars developed, pupated, and eventually emerged as butterflies, and I accompanied the little one on several of his expeditions. I was there primarily to ensure that curious little fingers didn’t damage either caterpillars or pupae, but I used the occasion to do some inspecting of my own.

I have to say, I am not generally a great fan of caterpillars. I have some rather negative memories of them from my childhood; they were black hairy caterpillars which gave you a rash if they crawled onto your skin. But the monarch’s caterpillars are really very handsome, with their white, yellow, and black transverse bands.

And the pupae are quite lovely, these little opaque green boxes with small golden dots near the bottom, and a gold-and-black rim around the top.

Fortified by his success, this year the neighbour planted many more tropical milkweeds. Alas! Not a single monarch butterfly laid its eggs on them. The fact is, the western monarch butterflies are under tremendous stress. The migrations used to involve millions of them, but the numbers are now terribly diminished. Every year, around Thanksgiving, devoted volunteers do a count of the number of monarch butterflies overwintering in California. Last year, 12,260 monarchs were counted at the Californian overwintering sites. As recently as the 1980s, which is a mere 40 years ago, the counts were in the low millions. So a 99% drop …

A host of reasons have been driving these huge die-offs: the use of pesticides, which kill both the butterflies themselves and the milkweeds on which their lifecycle completely depends as well as the nectar sources which they need to fuel their long, long migrations; destruction of their overwintering sites in the name of development – by a cruel irony, all the butterfly’s overwintering site are along the coast, where development is most intense; climate change; and on and on … We are nearing the point of extinction.

And our daughter’s neighbour, God bless his soul, and many others like him who plant tropical milkweed to help the monarchs aren’t actually helping at all. As the name suggests, this species of milkweed isn’t native to North America. In contrast to native milkweeds, it keeps flowering during the winter, which discourages the monarchs from migrating. Essentially, sedentary populations of monarchs spring up wherever a lot of tropical milkweed is planted. Subtle chemical differences in the sap of this milkweed reinforces the butterflies’ tendency to become sedentary. At the same time, caterpillars feeding on tropical milkweed mean that the butterflies into which they metamorphose tend to suffer from a dramatic buildup of a particular parasite, which reduces population numbers. It would be much better if he were to plant native species such as common milkweed,

green antelope horn milkweed,

or just plain antelope horn milkweed.

Admittedly, they aren’t as showy as the tropical milkweed, but if he really wants to help the butterflies he should accept a somewhat less pretty garden.

This catastrophic drop in the western monarch’s numbers and the probable end to its annual migrations – that “spectacular natural phenomenon” – reminds me of the fate of the carrier pigeon. When European colonists arrived in North America, they were awed by the annual migrations of this bird, which numbered literally in the billions. Here is a description by John James Audubon, the artist, naturalist, and ornithologist famous for his lifelike and detailed paintings of North American birds.

“In the autumn of 1813, I left my house at Henderson, on the banks of the Ohio River, on my way to Louisville. … I observed the pigeons flying from northeast to southwest in greater numbers than I thought I had ever seen them before … I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow, and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose. Before sunset I reached Louisville, distant from Hardinsburgh fifty-five miles. The pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers and continued to do so for three days in succession.”

The continuation of Audubon’s description explains why the pigeon was extinct within a century of him writing down this description:

“The people [in Louisville] were all in arms. The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys incessantly shooting at the pilgrims, which there flew lower as they passed the river. Multitudes were thus destroyed. For a week or more, the population fed on no other flesh than that of pigeons and talked of nothing but pigeons.”

Extreme levels of hunting, coupled with rapid deforestation, did it for the passenger pigeon. In 1914, the last member of the species died miserably in Cincinnati Zoo.

The same fate nearly overcame the bison, as I’ve written earlier. But luckily in their case there was a different outcome. From the brink of extinction, the bison has been brought back, not to its original millions but at least to numbers which will allow our two bundles of fun to watch them one day, hopefully with the same awe that engulfed the teenage me many decades ago in a Canadian national park as I watched a troop of bison graze on a prairie.

I have to really, really hope that the western monarch follows the path of the bison and not the passenger pigeon, so that our two bundles of fun will also one day be able to watch the monarchs wake from their winter slumber and flutter off from their Californian overwintering sites, if not in their millions at least in their thousands.

TITAN ARUM

Los Angeles, 18 July 2026

Serendipity has struck again!

I was perusing the Guardian newspaper a few days ago when my eye fell on the following title: “Thousands flock to see brief and rare blooming of corpse flowers in California”. Corpse flowers?! What on earth are they? It had me diving into the article to discover more.

It turns out that the corpse flower is the titan arum, or Amorphophallus titanum, which translates as the Giant Misshapen Phallus. This photo of the plant explains its scientific name.

This is a bit of a naughty name, and one of course that immediately brought out my extremely childish side. Readers might be interested to know that the plant’s English name, titan arum, is said to have been coined during the filming of David Attenborough’s 1995 documentary “The Private Life of Plants” because the genera’s name Amorphophallus was considered to be “too rude” for prim British TV audiences …

But why corpse flower? Well, that’s what the locals in Sumatra, which is where the plant comes from, call it. And they call it that because when the plant flowers, it emits a veritable stench. Scientists have analysed the stench and found it to contain dimethyl trisulfide (a component of the stink given off by the very smelly limburger cheese), dimethyl disulfide (garlic; anyone who has walked through a field of flowering garlic knows how pungent that smell can be), trimethylamine (rotting fish), isovaleric acid (sweaty socks), and indole (faeces). Eew!

The plant has evolved the ability to give off this stink so as to attract its main pollinators, carrion beetles and flesh flies; they lay their eggs in rotting meat. What a mean trick! When these insects arrive, expecting to find a nice chunk of putrid flesh they run into a bunch of boring flowers. It must be really frustrating for them.

The titan arum is in good company. Several plants worldwide have come up with the same smelly strategy: the South African carrion plant (“flowers that smell like roadkill”)

the Indonesian monster flower (“releases a highly pungent smell of rotting meat”)

the Mediterranean dead horse arum (“foul scent”)

the North American eastern skunk cabbage (“emits a strong skunk-like odour”)

Well! A must-see (and must-smell) plant! And it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience! The plant only flowers every five years or so and the flowers last just a few days. I read further into the Guardian article. It so happened that two of the plants were flowering at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Fantastic! My wife and I had been wanting to visit the Huntington again on this trip, but had never quite got around to it. Now we had our excuse. And our daughter wanted to come too! Time being of the essence (that short flowering period …), we decided to go the next day. Our little grandson would be coming with us – he needs to feed and sleep on a strict schedule.

And so the next day, we set off – a little behind schedule, but hey! the baby takes precedence. Once arrived, we hurried to the greenhouse where the two Giant Misshapen Phalluses were being exhibited. Luckily, there were no lines. So we were able to inspect the plants at our ease. The staff had named one Odora and the other Odorysseus (no doubt in honour of the film The Odyssey which has just come out and which we will be seeing next weekend). Odorysseus stood tall and proud waiting for its spathe to open up

while Odora’s spathe had fallen off, exposing the rows of flowers at the very bottom of the spadix (all terms I have since learned from the plant’s Wikipedia entry).

But wait! Something was missing, where was the foul smell? Alas, to my consternation, I discovered that the plant gives off its noxious scent only at night, because that is when its pollinators, the carrion insects, are active. So, short of ducking behind one of the greenhouse’s palms and staying hidden until after the museum had closed and night had fallen, I wasn’t going to experience its revolting odour. Sad! as the current inhabitant of the White House might say.

And our grandson in all this kerfuffle? He slept serenely through it all …

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.

Source Source Source Source Source Source Source Source

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.