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”)
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
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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).
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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 …
I love it. When we least expect it, my wife and I stumble across something that is just wonderful and we give thanks to the mysterious ways of the universe that led us to this pleasure. Looking back through my posts, I would say the last time this happened was quite recently, when we visited an exhibition involving dragons back in February.
It happened again a few weeks ago, when we visited Los Angeles’s California African American Museum. We had been using the LA Metro Rail to go downtown. Each time we got to the Expo Park/USC stop, the recorded announcement would tell us that this was the stop for, among other places, the museum. After the third or fourth time we heard the announcement, I suggested to my wife that we should visit it on our next free day. And so one Sunday we found ourselves on the Metro Rail heading for the museum.
Neither of us had done any research beforehand, so we didn’t know what to expect. I half thought we would get to see exhibitions on the history of African Americans in Los Angeles and California – that’s pretty much what we got at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, which we visited several years ago. Well, we got none of that. Instead, enveloped in our blissful ignorance, we wandered into a wonderful exhibition of works by an African American artist we had never heard of: Willie Birch. Here is a recent photo of him. He’s 84 this year.
A thumbnail biography: he was born and raised in New Orleans, moved to New York in the mid-1970s after getting a Master of Fine Arts in Baltimore, lived in the Big Apple for 20 years, before returning to New Orleans in 1993. Surprisingly, this is his first-ever career retrospective, bringing together works from 1968 to the present. His style has evolved dramatically over the years. At some point in the exhibition, there was a comment to the effect that whenever art critics proclaimed he had finally found his style he promptly changed it. An artist after my own heart! Many exhibitions of modern artists get so tedious: they find some signature style, and then they repeat it over and over again with small variations for the rest of their careers.
Reflecting these changes in style, the exhibition was broken down into three sections: early, middle, and late years. What follows is my purely personal selection of likes from each section.
Early years
Willie Birch tried out a number of styles in his early years. The one I found most catching was his use of found wood to carve sculptures. Here is his piece Ancestors Calling “inspired by Southern Black craft traditions, African spirituality, and the symbolic and sculptural forms of Ancient Egypt” (I’m quoting the text panel).
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And this piece is titled Passages.
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The “work addresses both the threat and survival of his ancestors and the customs of Black Americans in New Orleans … The layout of the sculptures resembles a New Orleans second line parade, the traditional processional after a funeral service … but the representation of water imparts another, more somber, meaning to the work. The word “passages” in [the] title can refer to the transition from life to death, but also to the Middle Passage, the forced transition across the Atlantic Ocean by Africans”. Here is a close-up of some of the wonderful faces which Birch has carved.
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A few years later, Birch pivoted to a new style, creating his so-called Folkloric series. This wonderful piece, Music under the El, reminded us so powerfully of our days in New York that for a few mad minutes we discussed the possibility of buying a print version – a discussion, however, that came to nothing because prints don’t seem to exist.
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Here are a number more from the same series.
A Prayer for Latin America
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La Cueva de Brujo VooDoo
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Martin Luther King, MacDonald’s, and Miami’s Burning
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Graduation Day
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Middle years
In the early 1990s, Birch switched style again. He started creating sculptures out of papier-mâché, apparently after seeing a papier-mâché crucifix in New Orleans’s cathedral. Here is a selection.
Memories of the ’60s
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Here, a quilt maker is creating a quilt celebrating Malcolm X and Martin Luther King while commemorating scenes from the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
Going South
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The commentary is now on the persons being sculpted. The comment I find most heartbreaking is on the boy’s T-shirt. He holds a gun, helpfully signed as a toy gun, while on his T-shirt it says “White kids commit suicide. Black kids shoot each other”.
Knowing our History, Teaching our Culture
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The commentary here has a political sharpness to it. I encourage readers to look carefully at the various statements written on the children’s clothes as well as on the blackboard.
Uptown Memories
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To a person like me who loves books, I felt a great tenderness for this young man who was plunged so deeply into his reading.
Birch didn’t just prepare these large-scale sculptures. He also made small, intimate sculptures that would fit in a shoe box. Here is what I consider to be the best example in the exhibition, Subway Scene, Vietnam Vet.
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Later years
When Birch left New York to return to New Orleans, his style changed dramatically once more. He started creating large-scale charcoal and acrylic works on paper, initially in colour and later in black and white only. Here are two of the works in colour.
Street Musician with Guitar
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Batty Moves III
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The works in black and white have focused mainly on scenes from the part of New Orleans he lives in, the Seventh Ward, with him working off photographs he has taken.
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This work, however, The Chef with the Knife, is more of a formal portrait.
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The last work in the exhibition, which you pass as you leave, is Transiting.
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Given Birch’s age, perhaps it is fitting for the exhibition to finish with this work, reminding us that he is nearing the end of his life. What does that small detail of a pillowcase covered in dinosaurs tell us, I wonder, if anything at all? That we are all heading for extinction? Maybe I’m being too fanciful.
Well, if any of my readers happen to pass through Los Angeles over the next couple of months, I highly recommend that you take in this exhibition, It’s on until 21 October.
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:
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“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.
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.
(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.
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Time for me to pick up another jar tomorrow after we have dropped off our grandson at the daycare!
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.
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.
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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 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.
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Since that first day, flowering has peaked and the bush is looking less dramatic.
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Across the lawn are a couple of camellia bushes, a plant which is native to China and Japan. They form a veritable wall.
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The flowers, on one bush a deep pink and on the other bush a whitish pink, are a charming vista.
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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.
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When in full flower, as is the case for this bush close to where we are staying, it’s quite a magnificent site.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This particular bush is in flower at the moment.
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But heavenly bamboo also grows bright red berries, as this specimen I came across in the neighbourhood shows.
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Next to the heavenly bamboo is a bush of hydrangea (or hortensia, as I’ve always called it).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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And there is a tree houseleek or Irish rose.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
My wife and I recently had our annual check-up with our GP in Vienna. He’s been our doctor here for nigh on 20 years. The first thing he told us was that he was retiring at the end of the week. Tutto cambia, tutto su transforma, everything changes, everything is transformed, as I mournfully intoned in an earlier post. After he had given us our prescriptions for the routine blood and other tests we do every year (the results of which, though, will be reviewed this year by his partner in the medical practice), we chatted a bit about his retirement plans. He told us that he and his partner would be selling their apartment in Vienna (which is how we met him; they lived on the floor below ours), and they would be moving to a house which they have spent the last couple of years restoring, out in the countryside in southern Styria.
He was especially enthusiastic about its garden. He told us that he has filled it with all sorts of exotic plants, which have been flourishing. It doesn’t surprise me, he has exceedingly green fingers; we would gaze down with wonderment (and not a little envy) at the terrace of their apartment, a riot of flowers and plants, which he would lovingly curate in the evenings during the spring and summer. He told us with a note of pride in his voice that he had even successfully planted a pau-pau tree. A what tree, my wife and I both asked? After some toing and froing, we finally understood he was talking about a tree that produces a fruit called pawpaw. But the confusion wasn’t over yet. Since neither of us had ever heard of pawpaw fruits, my wife fished out her iPad and undertook a rapid Google search to see what they looked like. The search term “pawpaw” resulted in this image.
You mean papaya, we asked? This is what we call this fruit. No, no, our doctor said, not papayas; pawpaws. More Google searching and my wife came up with this.
Well, well, they say you learn something new every day (who coined that phrase, I wonder? Must Google it). My wife and I certainly did that day, along with the distressing news about our doctor’s retirement. After promising to visit the two of them in Styria one of these days, we said our emotional goodbyes.
Of course, I couldn’t leave it there. I was just like my little grandson picking at a scab (did I mention that he’s been staying with us?). I just had to find out more about this pawpaw. Which was fine, because it turned out to be a really interesting fruit.
First of all, as this map shows, pawpaws are native to the US, and more specifically to the eastern, southern, and midwestern states – the push into southern Ontario is probably man-induced, as we shall see in a minute.
It’s intriguing that the pawpaw tree is found this far north, in temperate climes, because it actually belongs to a family nearly all of whose members are tropical. It’s a nice example of environmental adaptation. It would seem that the ancestor of the pawpaw developed on what is now the North American continent when the climate was tropical. As the climate cooled, the plant reacted by adapting to the chillier temperatures. Nevertheless, it never quite lost its earlier tropical “look”. Its leaves, for instance, have drip tips, a typical feature of tropical plants which are subjected to heavy rains.
And the fruit itself looks quite tropical; looking at the photo above one could easily mistake it for a mango, for instance.
The name “pawpaw” is a bit of a puzzle. It seems that there was a confusion between the pawpaw and the papaya. Down in the British Caribbean colonies, the papaya was known as the pawpaw – and still today, in the UK and in many ex-British colonies, the papaya is called pawpaw. There was a brisk trade between the Caribbean and American colonies, and the thinking goes that when Brits coming from the Caribbean landed in the more southerly American colonies and first set eyes on this tree and its fruit they said “Ooh, look, those look like pawpaws” and the name stuck. Those Brits must have had very poor eyesight, though. In these next few photos, I invite my readers to compare various aspects of the two plants. Here’s what the tree looks like.
I think my readers will agree that, with the possible exception of the whole fruits, the two really don’t look like each other at all. Maybe those Brits from the Caribbean were actually comparing the taste of the two fruits? For reasons that will become clear in a minute, neither I nor my wife have ever eaten pawpaw, so I am relying here on other people’s impressions of the fruit’s taste. This description, from its entry in Wikipedia, seems to summarise quite well various attempts I have found around the internet to describe the taste : “a flavour somewhat similar to banana, mango, and pineapple”. I haven’t eaten piles of papaya, but that description doesn’t fit with my sense of the papaya’s taste. I rather agree with one person’s assessment that the papaya tastes like a cross between a cantaloupe and a mango.
So the mystery remains: what the hell were those initial namers thinking?! They just created a big confusion. Why didn’t the colonists in the American colonies adopt the name given to the fruit by the local First Nations tribes? The Virginians did it with persimmons, after all (a transliteration of the Algonquian name for the fruit: “pessamin”).
The coureurs des bois (roamers of the woods), French Canadians who traded for furs with the First Nations and who were a key figure in the North American fur trade, were often the first Europeans to explore the part of the US which is the fruit’s natural range. They sensibly adopted the Algonquian name for the fruit, “assimin”, giving it a French twist, though, coming up with “asiminier”. Here we have an etching of a heroic-looking coureur des bois which appeared in a French Canadian magazine from 1871.
Taking a leaf from the Virginian colonists’ book, I shall start a campaign to have the fruit’s name changed to assimmon. Readers are welcome to join me in this futile tilting at windmills; just for the hell of it, I insert Picasso’s take on the original tilter at windmills, Don Quixote, with his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panchez.
I have to say, I do have a sort-of official approval for this effort: the plant’s proper botanical name is Asimina triloba, where the first part of the name picked up the coureurs des bois’s name. In fact, I shall start right now. I shall call the fruit assimon in the rest of this post.
As readers can imagine, the pawpaw – sorry, the assimon – was very popular with the First Nation tribes who occupied the fruit’s range. Here you have what turns out to be the largest edible fruit that is indigenous to the US, and it’s delicious to boot! The tribes loved it so much that they extended the fruit’s original range by carrying it with them when they moved into new territories (as they did with the Jerusalem artichoke – and of course maize). This most probably explains the fruit’s presence in Southern Ontario, brought there, it is theorised, by the Erie and Onondaga tribes. To bring us back to those far-off times, I throw in a photo of a figure that appeared in Samuel de Champlain’s books on his voyages in what is now Canada and the US. It relates to an attack Champlain carried out together with the Hurons on an Onondaga village, situated on what is now called Onondaga lake, close to the modern city of Syracuse in the northern New York State.
It’s lucky that the First Nations did move the assimon tree around, because it had evolved into a cul-de-sac. If readers go back to the photo of the open assimon fruit, they will notice its large stones. Fruit stones have evolved to be swallowed by the animals which consume the fruit, to be then expelled in a nice, fertilising pile of poo somewhere else as the animal in question wanders around. The bigger the fruit stone, the larger must be the animals eat the fruit – otherwise, they can’t swallow it. It’s been theorised that the assimon’s very large stone means that it evolved to be eaten by the American continent’s megafauna. Here is a photo of these large beasts, also showing humans, to give an idea of their enormous size.
Only the omnivores amongst them ate fruit, of course, but those which did spread the assimon around.
About 10,000 years ago, though, America’s megafauna died out. Quite why this happened is hotly debated, but the arrival of human beings, the ancestors of the First Nations, from across the Bering Straits was in all probability a big factor in this wave of extinctions. The modern bear is now the only animal big enough to swallow the stones of the assimon without choking. So it was just as well for the plant that humans stepped in and moved the plant around – and it was only fair that they did so, given the role they had played in the extinction of the megafauna.
As I said earlier, even though my wife and I lived something like eight years all told in the assimon’s range, we never tried it. We never even saw it being sold in supermarkets. How can it be that the US’s largest indigenous fruit is not readily available in every supermarket in the country? How can it be that enterprising Americans didn’t bring the plant to Europe, China, Japan, and anywhere else with the same temperate climate and establish assimon orchards?
The sad fact is that the assimon, in contrast to more popular – and non-American – commercial fruits like apples, pears, or peaches, stores poorly, primarily because the fruit ripens to the point of fermentation very quickly after it is picked. An assimon only keeps for 2–3 days at room temperature, about double that if it is refrigerated. This short shelf-life and therefore difficulty in shipping the fruit any distance means that the food industry is simply not interested in it. I have commented unfavourably in an earlier post about the fact that many of the foodstuffs eaten in the US are not native there, suggesting that native foodstuffs should be eaten. But in this case it really seems that the assimon is simply unsuited to our modern way of life. The best one can hope for is to find it in farmers’ markets held in the fruit’s range. And they will only offer it during the month of September, which is when the fruit ripens (there is a niche market for the shipping of the fruit over longer distances, but it must be a risky business).
Or you plant a tree in your garden if you live in the right climate. Which brings me back to my good doctor! We said we would go and see them. Maybe we could go and see them in September, when his assimons are ripe. But we need to know very precisely when they are ripe and then immediately go down to visit them and try this delectable fruit. But how to do this without sounding crass? “Hello, are your assimons ripe? If not, we’re not interested in coming.” I shall have to discuss this with my wife and try and find a more subtle way of doing this.
The area of LA where my daughter and her partner live can be characterised as one of neat lawns in front of the houses and well tended cars parked on the streets. This photo from Google street view sums up the general feel of the area.
So one of the odder things which my wife and I spot as we take walks around the neighbourhood are the occasional rusty old bangers parked among the gleaming new cars. These photos, taken on a neighbourhood walkabout with our grandson a few days before we left LA, show what I mean.
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Some internet surfing has told me that the first car is a Buick Wildcat. The second I know well. It is a Jaguar E-Type which I remember admiring on the streets of London in my youth.
As I say, this habit of having cars which would look perfectly at home in a junkyard sitting on neat, clean, well tended streets appears odd to me. That being said, oddity is in the eye of the beholder, to slightly distort an old saw.
One of the oddest examples of this sub-genre of urban decor is old pickup trucks. So that my readers can understand what I’m talking about, here is a photo I took of one such pickup truck parked some ten houses down the street from my daughter’s place. I have taken it from both directions so that readers can admire its well-worn features.
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As sharp-eyed readers can see, this pickup is a Ford. Our daughter’s next-door-neighbour has instead a General Motor’s Chevrolet pickup truck.
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Normally, he also parks it on the street, but he must have been away when I took this photo, because it’s parked in his driveway.
It doesn’t finish there. On a neighbourhood walk my wife and I took the last time we were in LA on the nearby hill of Mar Vista (View of the Sea, and indeed you can see the ocean from the top of the hill), I spied another such pickup truck parked on the street. I didn’t take a photo of it, so readers will just have to take my word for it. That’s three old pickup trucks in a radius of a couple of kilometres or so.
I’m no expert on pickup trucks, but Google searches suggest to me that these are all from the 1940s or ’50s. Here are photos of particularly fine examples, the first from 1940, the second from 1950.
What on earth is going on here? Allow me to try out some hypotheses on you, dear readers.
Given the obviously poor shape these pickup trucks (and the other old bangers) are in, my first thought was that their owners were indulging in a subtle piece of Keeping Up with the Joneses retro-snobbery: “The neighbours all have the latest in swanky Teslas and what not parked in front of the house? Peuh, we have a beaten-up old pickup truck. Beat that!” Just for the hell of it, I throw in a cartoon or two on the phenomenon of Keeping Up with the Joneses.
But I’ve decided that I am probably being unfair to the good folk who live in the neighbourhood.
I then thought that the owners of the pickup trucks in particular were making a political statement about the days when certain segments of American society were “eating bitterness”, as the Chinese say. Certainly, when I see these trucks, all beaten up, worn and weary, they make me think of a passage from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
The family in the story, the Joads, had to abandon their farm in the Midwest which had become part of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. They rode out West to California in a homemade pickup truck, a cut-down 1926 Hudson Super Six sedan, to try to find work and a new life.
“The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle. The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places – this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.”
This is what that pickup truck looked like in the film made in 1940 of the book, with Henry Fonda in the lead role.
And then I immediately think of that famous photo taken by Dorothea Lange of a mother and her children in a camp for migrant agricultural workers in California, where the Joads ended up.
But I suspect this is too high-falutin’ an explanation.
My internet readings in the little world of old car collectors suggests a simpler explanation. It seems that one important strand of car collection is made up of people who, once they reach a certain age and high enough income bracket, buy old cars and trucks to relive comforting memories of their youth (adding a little bit of political spice, when America was Great or something like that). In the case of pickup trucks, it could be youthful memories of Grandpa, and maybe even of Grandma, working on the farm with the family pickup, that spurs urban boomers of LA to buy these rusty old pickup trucks and have them quietly sit in front of their house on the street. The memories could be like this photo of a farmer in Texas unloading feed for his cattle, using what looks like a pickup truck from the 1940s or ’50s.
So that’s where my thinking currently stands on this intriguing LA phenomenon. If my readers have any better explanations, I would love to hear them. Of course, the next time we are in LA, I could just go up to the neighbour and ask him – but that’s so un-English …
The mention in my last post of a possible road trip down Route 66 has made me start thinking again about a road trip my wife and I did long, long ago – in 1979, to be precise – when were young and foolish and in grad school in the US. It was the Spring break, so about this time of the year, and we decided to do something crazy, namely drive down to New Orleans to visit the city. So I hired a car in Boston, where I was at school, drove down to Baltimore, where she was at school, and then off we drove, down the Interstate Highway 80 towards New Orleans.
As I said, we were young and foolish and hadn’t realised just how far it was to New Orleans – the US is just such a damned big country. Google Maps tells me it’s 1,800 km from Baltimore – and that’s just one way, and I would have had to drive another 650 km back to Boston. In the hours that passed as we drove mile after mile down the highway, we did some calculations and came to the conclusion that no sooner had we arrived in New Orleans that we would have to turn around and drive back. By this time, we had already spent one night in a cheap motel off the highway somewhere. Time to revise our plans.
The signs indicated that we were coming to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“You leave the Pennsylvania station ’bout a quarter to four
Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer
Then to have your ham and eggs in Carolina
When you hear the whistle blowing eight to the bar
Then you know that Tennessee is not very far
Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep it rolling
Whoo, whoo, Chattanooga, there you are
There’s gonna be a certain party at the station
In satin and lace, I used to call funny face
She’s gonna cry until I tell her that I’ll never roam
So, Chattanooga choo choo, won’t you choo choo me home?”
But I digress.
As Chattanooga got ever closer, a rapid decision was made. Instead of keeping going, we would take a left at Chattanooga and drive clear across the state of Georgia.
Georgia … that’s Ray Charles …
“Georgia, Georgia
The whole day through (the whole day through)
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind (Georgia on my mind)
I said Georgia
Georgia
A song of you (a song of you)
Comes as sweet and clear
As moonlight through the pines
Other arms reach out to me
Other eyes smile tenderly
Still in peaceful dreams I see
The road leads back to you”
Once again, I digress.
We would spend the night in Atlanta, we agreed, and then go on down the coast, to a place called Savannah.
So it was that a day later we found ourselves driving into the old centre of Savannah. We had no idea what to expect, we had never heard of Savannah until we decided to turn left at Chattanooga. What we found was magic.
The city was founded in 1733, and the old town, the so-called historic district, has kept the layout of the original town plan, with a grid of streets; the potential monotony is broken up by some 20 squares sprinkled throughout the grid. This old map gives an idea of what it looks like.
But what makes the historic district especially enchanting is the houses that were built along its streets during the 18th and 19th centuries by wealthy merchants, in a variety of styles: Gothic, Victorian, and Greek Revival. I throw in here a gallery of photos.
I could have put a whole bunch more photos, but I think readers should go and look for themselves.
And the cherry on the cake is the Spanish moss hanging down from all the trees along the streets. I find Spanish moss so … exotic, is the only word I can think of to describe it.
We spent several days in Savannah and the surrounding area. Then it was time to move on; like this singer, we were left with lovely memories which we’ve carried inside of us all our lives.
Our trip wasn’t quite over. On our way back to Baltimore, we passed through Charleston, South Carolina.
The older part of the city is actually quite eye-catching, but after our visit to Savannah it was just … nice.
Then it was a time to be getting back to Baltimore. I dropped off my wife, and then raced back up to Boston to be on time for the resumption of classes. All told, we drove a little under 4,000 km. Like I said, the US is a big country.
In my previous post, I wrote about the sad end of the earliest paleochristian basilica in Roman-era Milan, the basilica vetus or – as it later came to be called – the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. It was torn down to make way for an even more splendid – and bigger – cathedral, today’s Duomo of Milan. What is important for my story today, the basilica’s baptistery, the baptistery of San Giovanni alle Fonti, was also torn down. All that remains of it are a few ruins buried under the Duomo’s floor.
One of the most famous people to be baptised in that baptistery was Saint Augustine of Hippo. He was baptised on Easter Sunday 386 C.E., at the age of 32, by Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan. It was Ambrose who had finally persuaded Augustine to become a Christian after a lifetime of resistance. Here, we have a fresco painting of that scene by Benozzo Gozzoli from 1464, to be found in the church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano.
It is actually the woman at the back who interests us. She is Saint Monica, Augustine’s mother. She was from Rome’s North African province, from a city which today is in Algeria. Christian from an early age, she was married off young to an older man who was violent and unfaithful. To make matters worse, she had to keep house with her mother-in-law, who was as dissolute as her son. But she bore all her trials and tribulations with Christian fortitude. She had three children who survived infancy, Augustine, Navigius, and Perpetua. She wanted them all to be good Christians, and tried to set them on the path of righteousness. But from an early age, Augustine caused her much anguish. He was wayward, lazy, loose in his morals – at the age of 17, he started living with a woman by whom he had a child but whom never married – and worst of all he joined a heretical sect of Christianity. At some point during all these trials and tribulations, she went to see her local bishop and poured out her heart to him. He consoled her with the words, “the child of those tears shall never perish.” Mark those words, dear readers, we will come back to them.
But Augustine had one thing going for him: he was intelligent. After studying in Carthage, he taught rhetoric there, then moved to Rome to set up a school of rhetoric, and then moved again to Milan when he was offered a professorship in rhetoric by the Imperial court. Monica, now widowed, followed him, pushing him to give up his “concubine” (which he did), get properly married with a woman from a good family (which he nearly did), and – last but not least – become a Christian (which, as we’ve seen, he did, thanks to Saint Ambrose). Having become a Christian, Augustine gave up teaching rhetoric and decided to return home. Monica of course accompanied him, but having finally achieved her aim and with nothing left to live for, she died in Ostia while they were waiting for the ship to take them across to North Africa. We see her death depicted here, in the same church in San Gimignano and by the same artist
Not surprisingly, given her history, Monica is the patron saint of difficult marriages, disappointing children, victims of adultery or unfaithfulness, and of lapsed Catholics (I wonder if my mother ever prayed to Saint Monica à propos of my lapsed status?). From the Middle Ages on, her cult grew and spread throughout Christendom. The story of her crying her eyes out over Augustine became part of the popular stories about her. In fact, one can still buy statues of her in tears; here is a modern example: yours, courtesy of the gift shop of the Norbertine sisters, for a mere $180.
In 1768, as part of its attempts to shore up its claims over the Pacific coast of North America, the Spanish government ordered an expedition to set out from Baja California and lay stake to all of the territories lying between San Diego and Monterey. The expedition set out from San Diego in July 1769 and reached Monterey in October. They actually failed to recognise Monterey (the bay had been previously described by a Spanish navigator sailing up the coast, but they couldn’t match his descriptions with what they were seeing) and kept marching northwards, which led the expedition to its most momentous discovery in November, the huge bay of San Francisco. Somewhat astonishingly, ships from various nations had sailed past the mouth of the bay in the past without ever noticing it – the fog which commonly envelops the area has been given as the reason. Its job done, the expedition marched back to San Diego. The Franciscans who accompanied the expedition used it to lay the groundwork for a string of 21 Missions which they built over the next several decades all the way from San Diego to Sonoma just north of San Francisco. Here’s a photo of the mission church in Santa Barbara.
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But it’s not these large-scale events that interest me, it’s a small incident that happened in early August 1769 as the expedition force moved northward. On 2 August, the force arrived at the confluence of the Los Angeles river and the Arroyo Seco, very close to what is now downtown Los Angeles. The next day, the men moved on and camped a mere 4 km from where I’m writing this, at the Tongva village of Kuruvungna. The village was located close to a pair of springs which were sacred to the Tongvta people. The village has vanished, as have all the villages of the First Nations who lived in this part of California, but the springs still exist, now located in the grounds of the University High School on Texas Avenue in Los Angeles.
Juan Crespí, a Franciscan friar who was with the expedition, renamed the springs San Gregorio. But the new name didn’t stick. Someone in the following decades, someone with a poetic bent, saw in those two springs the eyes of Saint Monica with tears continuously welling out of them, and so they became known as the fuentes de las Lágrimas de Santa Mónica, the springs of the Tears of Saint Monica. From there, by a sort of geographical osmosis, the general area around the springs became known as Santa Mónica. So when, in 1839, the Mexican governor of Alta California gave a certain Francisco Sepúlveda II a grant of 33,000 acres of land for a rancho, a grant which included the springs, Señor Sepúlveda called his rancho San Vincente y Santa Mónica (the San Vincente part of the name presumably came from another location on the rancho).
Fast forward another thirty years, to 1872 – California was now a US State – and the Sepúlveda family sold half of the rancho’s lands to a Col. Robert Baker, a businessman with a finger in many pies. In turn, two years later, Col. Baker sold three-quarters of his part of the rancho to another businessman, John Percival Jones, who had made a fortune in silver mining out in Nevada. In 1875, the two agreed to create a new town on part of their land holdings. Again, by geographical osmosis, they decided to call the town Santa Monica (even though the springs are not part of the township). Thus started the town which is now part of the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. My wife and I are on the bus from Santa Monica as I write this, having just visited the Cayton Children’s Museum with our grandson, where great fun was had by all. The bus is passing street after street of houses, which have all been built over the 33,000 acres of the rancho of Francisco Sepúlveda II. A lot of people have made a lot of money in real estate.
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Over its lifetime, the town of Santa Monica has given its name to a variety of other things in the town. Perhaps the best known is the Santa Monica Pier, which has housed an amusement park out on the ocean’s edge since the 1920s.
Who hasn’t thrilled at the idea of travelling along Route 66? I certainly have. I’ve told my wife that one of these days, once we’ve finished visiting our daughter in LA, we’ll roar off down Route 66 all the way to Chicago. I think we’ll have to do this trip in a Corvette, a red one if possible.
And of course we’ll be listening to Nat King Cole’s “Route 66” on the radio.
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Although we’ll do the trip in the opposite direction to Nat King Cole’s lyrics: LA – San Bernadino – Barstow – Kingman – Winona – Flagstaff, Arizona – Gallup, New Mexico – Amarillo – Oklahoma City – Joplin, Missouri – Saint Louis – Chicago
“Get your kicks
On Route sixty-six”
At the end of October, my wife and I did a two-day hike from Gubbio to Assisi, along the Via di San Francesco. As the trail’s name suggests, it centres around the life and times of St. Francis of Assisi. As befits any saint from the Middle Ages, he was the protagonist of a great number of stories, many of which became the subject of the late 13th Century frescoes painted in Assisi and elsewhere after his death in 1226. I will choose some of these to illustrate stories which took place in the localities linked by the trail.
To the north of Assisi, the trail starts at La Verna, where Francis received the stigmata.
As for the southern portion of the trail, it starts in Rome, where Francis went a number of times to keep his movement on the right side of the Church authorities – this fresco depicts his critical first meeting with Pope Innocent III, to receive the pope’s blessing for his nascent movement.
It goes on to Rieti, where Francis came many times. His last visit was shortly before his death, to have an operation on his eyes – he had become nearly blind (the operation failed, alas).
Nearby, while resting and preparing for his operation, he worked on his Canticle of the Sun:
“Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.”
He goes on to praise “Sister Moon”, “Brother Wind”, “Sister Water”, “Brother Fire”, “Sister Mother Earth”. He completed the last verse on “Sister Bodily Death” as he lay dying in Assisi soon after.
In nearby Greccio, he created the first living crèche, using locals as the actors in the drama. It was his way of telling the Christmas story to rural folk, who couldn’t understand the Latin in which the story was normally told.
And it, too, of course ends in Assisi, where Francis’s spiritual journey began and ended. Of the many stories about him that happen in the town, I choose two:
His renunciation of his father and family, stripping himself naked in the town’s piazza and giving his clothes back to his father;
And then there is the tiny church of Porziuncola down in the valley below the town, which Francis had rebuilt and where he loved to spend time. Here is an artist’s rendering of what it looked like in his day. Those two rows of little huts are where the friars stayed.
It was in that church – chapel, really – that Francis heard the priest read out from the Gospel of Matthew the passage where Christ sends his disciples far and wide to proclaim the Good News, with the following instructions: “You received without charge, give without charge. Provide yourselves with no gold or silver, not even with coppers for your purses, with no haversack for the journey or spare tunic or footwear or a staff, for the labourer deserves his keep.” Then and there, he decided that he and his followers would do the same. Thus was born the order of mendicant friars which was to take his name, the Franciscan Order.
Funnily enough, this momentous decision doesn’t feature in any of the frescoes about him – at least, none that I have found. But other stories involving Porziuncola have been the subject of frescoes. I choose three:
His welcoming of Clare when she ran away from her family to join Francis’s movement and eventually established the Order of Poor Clares;
After our two days of hiking, my wife and I spent a day in Assisi. Alas, I can’t say that I liked the town in its modern guise. It’s just a tourist trap, crowded, full of shops selling tourist tat and restaurants selling overpriced food.
Francis would have been horrified at all these shops pushing tourists to consume – and in his name at that. I rather think – I hope – that like Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem he would have gone after all these sellers of tat. Turning once again to Matthew: “Jesus then went into the Temple and drove out all those who were selling and buying there; he upset the tables of the money-changers and the seats of the dove-sellers. He said to them, ‘According to scripture, my house will be called a house of prayer; but you are turning it into a bandits’ den.'” I throw in a painting by El Greco of Jesus wielding the whip in the Temple, one that always comes to my mind when I see these shops in places that are supposed to be havens of religion.
But even the basilica of St. Francis, which one reaches after braving the tourist shops and overpriced restaurants, disappointed me. Yes, it is full of art whose creation supposedly kick-started the Italian Renaissance, and I’ve used many of its frescoes above as illustrations. But I was struck by something I read. In his testament, Francis had specified where he wanted to be buried in Assisi. It was at the far end of the town, its lower end. It was here that convicts were executed and the town’s lepers and other outcasts congregated. Its noisome reputation led to the area being called the “collis Inferni”, the hill of Hell. Francis had often spent time on that hill, ministering to the wretched who eked out a living there. It was of a piece with his beliefs to want to be put to rest in a humble grave among the lowest of the low. Yet, the Church authorities, actively supported by the Franciscan Order’s hierarchy, were having none of that. It was decreed that a splendid basilica would rise on the collis Inferni, turning it into the “collis Paradisi”, the hill of Paradise.
Poor Francis must have been spinning in his coffin when he was finally interred in that basilica, four years after he died. It was a betrayal of everything he stood for.
As for Porziuncola, that humble chapel so beloved by Francis, Pope Pius V in the 16th Century ordered a huge church to be built, Santa Maria degli Angeli.
The ostensible reason for building the church was to better control the flow of pilgrims. The guide books are at pains to point out the bareness of the interior of this mastodontic church, as proof of its respect for Francis’s vows to Lady Poverty. But, standing on the square in front of the church, it is difficult not to see this as one more example of the Church authorities glorifying themselves. I’m certain that Francis would have been horrified.
As I’ve said in an earlier post, I am a great admirer of Francis – not the religious side of him; as I’ve said in another post, I am an atheist and have been since I fell off the straight-and-narrow as a student at University. But his turning away from the material side of life – a core part of the Rule he wrote for his friars being that they should own nothing – makes him truly a man for our times.
I hardly ever allow my professional work to leak into my posts, but today will be different; I suppose it’s because I’m writing this post in Kyoto where I am giving my annual course to university students on precisely this: how we can build a society that has a much smaller footprint. What I tell my students is that after working for 45 years in the environmental field, I have become convinced that our excessive consumption is literally destroying our planet. Look at these photos taken by Peter Menzel. He travelled to different countries and invited households whom he met to put everything they owned out on the street in front of where they lived. This photo is of a family somewhere in North America, a place with one of the highest levels of per capita consumption in the world.
This is all worrying enough. But what’s even more worrying is that people who live in less developed countries, whose levels of ownership and consumption of stuff are still modest, like South Africa
they want to have the same levels of consumption as the richer countries.
That impulse is perfectly understandable. But it cannot be. We cannot all consume at the levels of that North American family, or even of that Japanese family. We must heed Francis’s call to adopt a life shorn of stuff. We must – we must – reduce our levels of consumption, or else we will face an ecological catastrophe. Here, too, Francis is a man for our times because of his views on Nature. Unlike most of his contemporaries, and indeed unlike most of humanity even today, he saw the rest of Nature as equal to us humans. His Canticle to the Sun is an ode to Nature, as relevant today as it was when he wrote it 800 years ago. Of course, his reverence of Nature sprang from his reverence of God – if God created Nature, his argument went, we should revere Nature as God’s work. My position is rather different. Whether we like it or not, we are an intimate part of the world’s biosphere, and if it dies we die. Yet, because of our huge levels of consumption, growing ever huger with every passing year, we are ripping our biosphere apart, one result being that the Earth is losing species at rates which have not been seen in the last 10 million years. Francis, I’m sure, would have been appalled. If we go on like this, we are going towards a general collapse of the world’s ecosystems, which will sweep away our civilisations – for all our cleverness, we will not survive breakdowns in our biological life-support systems.
And finally Francis is a man for our times because he felt closest to the poor, the outcasts, the lowest of the low. Today, we live in a world riven by inequalities. In the photos above, I showed one type of inequality, the inequality between countries. Seemingly, this type of inequality is narrowing, but only to be replaced by a much more insidious inequality, the inequality between the citizens of these countries. Already rich individuals are getting ever richer at the expense of everyone else and don’t care anymore about their fellow citizens. We have to change that. We must – we must – pay more attention to the greater societal good rather than to our own individual desires. Frankly, this is not – as was the case for Francis – a disinterested decision, an “act of love for our fellow men”; it is very self-interested. If we don’t look after those who have been left behind, they will eventually come for us with their pitchforks.
And this should not be an average. Every one of us should have this level of consumption, from the Bezoses and Musks of this world to the homeless that haunt our streets.
the heart thrills 
