When my wife and I are in Vienna, we always find time to go to one of my favourite haunts, the Dorotheum auction house. As I’ve explained elsewhere, the Dorotheum has a whole floor where you can buy pieces at a fixed price, and I like to wander through that floor to see what’s on offer. When I see a piece that pleases me, I dream of where I might place it in the apartment. My wife is strictly rationing my purchases – she thinks our walls are too cluttered as it is – and I can only really buy something as a birthday gift to myself. So it was that for my birthday last year I bought for myself a lovely Japanese coloured woodblock print.
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I liked the bold strokes of the man’s clothes, contrasting as they do with the delicate handling of his face and one exposed hand. I loved the way the colouring is delicately suggested. And I was really intrigued by his gaze: what was he looking up at so intently, I wondered?
The brief description given by the Dorotheum told me that this is a portrait of Kisen Hōshi, a Buddhist monk and poet who lived in the 9th Century CE. He is considered one of Japan’s six poetic sages, although only two short poems have been confidently attributed to him.
The writing on the right of course excited my curiosity. I learned later that this kind of calligraphy is known as sosho, or grass script, and it certainly looks like blades of grass scattered down the page. I initially tried using Google Translate to give me a translation, but the grassy calligraphy defeated the software. I turned to an old colleague of mine as well as to my brother’s wife, both of whom are Japanese, to see if they could decipher it. They both confessed to finding the calligraphy quite difficult to read, although they were able to read enough to make me understand that the bolder writing was the poet’s name, Kisen Hoshi, while the remainder was one of his poems. I looked around for translations of it and was astonished to find a good many quite different translations. I have to assume that the text is somewhat hermetic and can be read in many different ways. I have plumped for this translation, because it recognises the pun at the poem’s heart:
My hermitage is southeast of the capital [Kyoto], and thus I live peacefully;
Yet people call it ‘The Mountain of Worldly Sorrows’
(the poet’s hermitage was located on Mount Uji, and the poem relies on a pun playing on “Uji”, the place name, and “Ushi”, meaning gloomy or sorrowful.)
I throw in another early 19th-Century woodcut print, by the artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, depicting the hermitage and our monk-poet sitting peacefully on its verandah.
And this woodcut print, by Katsushika Hokusai (he of the “Great Wave off Kanagawa“), also from the early 19th Century, is of the same scene as my print.
I have to say, Hokusai’s version seems to fit the poem’s theme better, of someone living peacefully far away from the madding crowd. Why is the monk in my version looking up so insistently? My Japanese colleague thought that he was actually lonely and hoping to see some friends walk through the door, but that doesn’t really fit with the sense of the poem. I have my own theory, but before I propose it I will focus on who the artist of my version was.
All the Dorotheum allowed itself to say on the subject was that the piece is a product of the Katsukawa school. This is a school of artists which flourished for about a hundred years, from the 1750s to the 1840s. I certainly can see a relationship to other woodcut prints created by exponents of the school, particularly by Katsukawa Shunshō, probably its most well-known exponent. In 1775, he created a woodblock-printed illustrated book, “The Hundred Poets Brocaded in the Eastern Weave”, which as the title suggests illustrates one hundred famous poets, along with one of their poems. Here is one page out of a copy of the book in the British Museum.
The print on the left is of the monk Ekei Hōshi, the poem floating above him being one of his most celebrated poems:
In the loneliness of this desolate dwelling overgrown with thick, tangled weeds – where no human face is ever seen – autumn has arrived.
The print on the right, meanwhile, is Katsukawa Shunshō’s take on our friend Kisen Hōshi, with the same poem as before raining down gently around him.
I can be braver than the Dorotheum and give the artist of my print a name, because he stamped his chop mark in red in the top right-hand corner of the print. The name in the stamp reads Shaku Sessō. “Shaku” translates literally as Shakyamuni, an honorific title of the Buddha. In Buddhist art and calligraphy, Buddhist monks traditionally drop their secular family surnames and adopt “Shaku” as their spiritual surname to denote that they are followers or “children” of the Buddha. So our artist was a Buddhist monk. His name “Sessō” literally translates as “Snow and Frost.” In Zen Buddhist philosophy and classical art, snow and frost are powerful metaphors representing purity, mental clarity, resilience, and the transient, impermanent nature of life. I’m afraid that is as far as I have been able to go. I have found no information on the internet about an artist-Buddhist monk going by the name Sessō. Where and when he lived will probably remain forever a mystery.
And now back to that insistent stare. If readers look closely at the photo of my print, they will see that the figure seems to be looking straight at the chop mark. So my theory is that what we have here is a self-portrait by the monk Shaku Sessō! I will in all probability never be able to prove it, but I find it a neat explanation.
In any event, I don’t really care that I’ll probably never know who the artist is. And I don’t care that, according to the Dorotheum, the print is heavily stained (yes, there are some stains, and what also look like scuff marks), it has two folds (yes, you can’t miss those; for some strange reason a previous owner had folded it in two, as if to put it in an envelope) and the top corner is restored (I see no sign of that). I just take great pleasure in looking at him while I eat my meals (we’ve hung him close to our dining table), and that is enough.
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”.
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.
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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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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Their light purple petals were almost glowing.
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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.
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Their yellow hearts stood out against the dark purple of the petals.
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The next day, in the woods covering the hills overlooking Vienna, we bumped into sprays of violets peeping up through the dead leaves.
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So small, so delicate …
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And yesterday, during our last walk around Vienna, which took us through the gardens of the Belvedere Palace, we passed a blooming cherry tree.
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The next time we’re back in Vienna, it will be late summer. Who knows what flowers will greet us then?
Of my very modest collection of paintings, this is the one I am most fond of.
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It is a view of the little town and castle of Dürnstein, which sit in a bend of the Danube river some 8 km upstream of the city of Krems. The town lies a little above the waterline, the castle sits atop the dry, rocky hill which rises behind the town. This photo, taken from the other side of the river, shows both the town and the castle very clearly.
But as the modern photo shows, it is a ruin now. Its downward spiral started in the final years of the Thirty Years’ War, when Swedish troops had captured the castle on their way to trying to take Vienna. That attempt failed and they moved on to Brno, now the capital of Slovakia. The Swedes laid siege to the city.
But that failed, too, and the Swedes retreated back into Bohemia. As they left Dürnstein castle, they partially blew it up to render it unusable. Later owners didn’t bother to patch it up and live there anymore, so it slowly fell to pieces.
In its early days, though, back in 1192-93, Dürnstein castle became famous throughout Europe as the place where Richard the Lionheart, King of England, was imprisoned.
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Richard was trying to get back to England from the Crusades. He had made a lot of enemies over the years, who were all intent on capturing him as he crossed their lands to get home. He chose to take a circuitous route, which saw him land on the northern shores of the Adriatic Sea, and then pass through the lands of the count of Gorizia, the Duke of Carinthia, and Leopold V, Duke of Austria – all enemies of his – before making it into Bohemia, whose king was an ally. From there, he planned to go on into Saxony, whose Duke was his brother-in-law, and take a ship over to England. By late December 1192, he had got as far as a village on the outskirts of Vienna, where he decided to hole up to rest for a few days. Unfortunately for him, Duke Leopold’s men got wind of his presence and he was duly arrested. Leopold held him for a few months in Dürnstein castle before passing him on to Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, who also had a few axes to grind with Richard. Henry imprisoned him in another castle and demanded a huge ransom for his release. By imposing a ferocious set of taxes on one and all, England’s regents, aided by Richard’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, managed to raise the ransom, and he was duly released. We have here a photo of one of the illustrations in the “Book in honour of the Augustus”, a propaganda piece for Henry VI, showing Richard humbly kissing Henry’s feet.
I’m sure Richard loudly denied that any such humiliating submission had taken place – although he did have himself re-crowned when he got back to England, to wipe away the shame of imprisonment and to counteract any whispers there might have been that his being imprisoned meant he was no longer king.
The good citizens of Dürnstein have milked this story for all it’s worth, littering the town with interpretive markers giving information on the main actors in the drama as well as a few more.
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To spice up the tourist experience, they give space to legends as well as to facts. In particular, they have a marker reporting on the minstrel Blondel de Nesle.
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A story was invented in the 18th Century, which went like this: no-one knew in which castle Richard was being kept prisoner, so Blondel, who knew Richard, went from castle to castle singing a song only he and Richard knew. Finally, at Dürnstein Richard sang along with him. At last, Richard had been found! Here’s a coloured lithograph by a certain Joseph Martin Kronheim from the mid-1850s, which has Blondel singing at the foot of the castle’s walls.
As I say, all invented. But, like all good legends, the story contains a kernel of truth. Richard was brought up in Aquitaine, the beating heart of troubadour culture.
As Duke of Aquitaine, he encouraged and supported the troubadours. He also wrote and sang his own songs, one of which – composed during his imprisonment in Dürnstein – has come down to us. He wrote it in Langue d’Oc, the old language of the south of France. I cite here the first two verses (it’s a bit too long to quote in full).
Ja nuls hom pres non dira sa razon
Adrechament, si com hom dolens non;
Mas per conort deu hom faire canson.
Pro n’ay d’amis, mas paure son li don;
Ancta lur es si, per ma rezenson,
Soi sai dos ivers pres.
Or sapchon ben miei hom e miei baron,
Angles, norman, peitavin e gascon,
Qu’ieu non ay ja si paure companhon
Qu’ieu laissasse, per aver, en preison.
Non ho dic mia per nulla retraison,
Mas anquar soi ieu pres.
Since I presume that, like me, most if not all of my readers do not speak Langue d’Oc, I give here a translation in English of these two verses.
No prisoner can tell his honest thought
Unless he speaks as one who suffers wrong;
But for his comfort as he may make a song.
My friends are many, but their gifts are naught.
Shame will be theirs, if, for my ransom, here
— I lie another year.
They know this well, my barons and my men,
Normandy, England, Gascony, Poitou,
That I had never follower so low
Whom I would leave in prison to my gain.
I say it not for a reproach to them,
— But prisoner I am!
He was clearly trying to guilt trip his vassals into paying the ransom. If any of my readers want to hear the song they can do no worse than go to this link.
My wife and I pass through Dürnstein at least once a year. There is a hike that goes all the way up the left side of Wachau river valley from Krems to Melk and then back down the other side of the river to Krems. The first stage runs from Krems to Dürnstein. The path hugs the hills between the two places.
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As you amble along, you get beautiful views onto the Danube River flowing below.
It was built in 1905, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the battle of Dürnstein-Loiben, one of the many battles of the Napoleonic wars. The fighting took place where those vines now peacefully grow their grapes. It pitched about 7,000 French troops against some 11,000 Russian and Austrian troops. Fighting went on well into the night before it ground to a halt with no obvious winner, although both sides claimed victory. The losses were heavy: about 3,000 men on both sides. This is the only illustration I can find of the battle. I suppose that is meant to be Dürnstein castle in the background.
The battle was completely overshadowed by Napoleon’s brilliant victory in the battle at Austerlitz three weeks later. Years ago, a friend of ours took my wife and me to one the annual reenactments of that battle, the one and only time we’ve ever been to a battle reenactment.
But no-one reenacts the battle of Dürnstein-Loiben. It resolved nothing and no-one remembers it anymore. The 6,000 soldiers who lost their lives did so for no good reason.
Ah, this land, steeped in history – and drenched in blood.
A few weeks ago, when we were down at the seaside, my wife and I went to the Palazzo Reale in Genova to see an exhibition on St. George. The excuse for the exhibition was that he is one of the patron saints of Genova (as he is of England and many other cities, regions, and countries). I’m sure many of my readers are familiar with the most famous story about St. George, his killing of a dragon to save a young woman. But just in case, I cite here the story as told in the Legenda Aurea, a compendium of hagiographies of saints and martyrs, written by one Jacobus de Voragine (who, it so happens, was a bishop of Genova). The original was written in Latin, so I give the 1483 English translation by William Caxton (I’ve cut it a little to focus on the essentials):
By [the city of Silene, in the province of Libya] was a pond like a lake, wherein was a dragon which poisoned all the country. … And when it came nigh the city it poisoned the people with its breath, and therefore the people of the city gave to it every day two sheep for to feed it, because it should do no harm to the people. And when the sheep failed … then was an ordinance made in the town that there should be taken the children and young people of them of the town by lot, and every each one as it fell, were he gentle or poor, should be delivered when the lot fell on him or her.
So it happed that [after] many of them of the town were delivered, … the lot fell upon the king’s daughter, whereof the king … began to weep, and said to his daughter: “Now shall I never see thine espousals.” … Then did the king array his daughter like as she should be wedded, and embraced her, kissed her and gave her his benediction, and after led her to the place where the dragon was.
When she was there St. George passed by, and when he saw the lady he asked her what she made there and … she said to him how she was delivered to the dragon. … Thus as they spake together the dragon appeared and came running to them, and St. George was upon his horse, and drew out his sword and garnished himself with the sign of the cross, and rode hardily against the dragon which came towards him, and smote it with his spear and hurt it sore and threw it to the ground.
And after he said to the maid “Deliver to me your girdle, and bind it about the neck of the dragon and be not afeard.” When she had done so the dragon followed her as it had been a meek beast and debonair. Then she led it into the city, and the people fled by mountains and valleys, and said: “Alas! alas! we shall be all dead.” Then St. George said to them: “Doubt ye no thing, without more, believe ye in God, Jesu Christ, and do ye to be baptized and I shall slay the dragon.”
Then the king was baptized and all his people, and St. George slew the dragon and smote off its head, and commanded that it should be thrown in the fields, and they took four carts with oxen that drew it out of the city.
The story gave great opportunities to numerous painters to strut their stuff. Here is a selection of paintings.
This is probably one of the more famous paintings of the subject, by Paolo Uccello. It has St. George spearing the dragon, but unlike other paintings of the genre is has also included the scene of the young princess’s girdle being tied around the dragon’s neck.
To show that it wasn’t just Italian artists who painted the subject, here’s one from the other side of the Alps, by the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden
And just to show that St. George was equally popular in Orthodox Christianity, here is a Russian icon of St. George killing the dragon. Here, the damsel in distress has been eliminated; instead, we have the hand of God blessing St. George.
Quite honestly, the dragon is the most interesting part of the story; St. George and the princess are very virtuous and therefore boring. So let’s focus on the dragon. It’s quite obvious from the story that the inhabitants of Medieval Europe considered dragons to be Bad Creatures. And this particular dragon is especially bad. I was much struck by the detail that its breath was so poisonous that it killed people. It strongly reminded me of a boss I once had who had dreadful halitosis; it was dangerous to get too close. He was also quite reptilian in many other ways; I was very relieved when I got another job and left.
This typing by Europeans of dragons as bad has remained unchanged up to the present. The one big addition to their badness is that the pestilential breath became a fiery breath. In that iconic set of books about Harry Potter, for instance, dragons appear several times, and of course they are dangerous, fire-breathing creatures. Dragons grace the cover of at least one of the books.
By one of those acts of serendipity that make the world so interesting, while we were watching St. George skewer his dragon in Genova’s Palazzo Reale, up the hill from there – a mere 15 minutes’ walk away – the Museo delle Culture del Mondo was holding an exhibition on Chinese dragons. Here’s a couple of dragons on show there.
And here are a couple of dragons amongst our possessions.
A vase my wife picked up in Suzhou during our years in China,
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And a cushion cover made with a piece of fabric she picked up on last year’s trip to Kyoto.
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Although Chinese dragons are fearsome-looking, the Chinese consider them to be Nice Creatures. They believe they bring prosperity and good luck. In earlier times, they were also believed to bring rain and were prayed to during droughts. Here are a couple of dragons from a Song dynasty scroll flying through mist and clouds, an early form of cloud seeding as it were.
Dragons were considered such Nice Creatures in China that the emperors adopted them as their own. Already 2,000 years ago, during the Han dynasty, the emperors claimed to be sons of dragons. By the time the Ming dynasty rolled around in 1368, the dragon, specifically the five-clawed variety, was strictly reserved for the clothes and accoutrements of the emperor and his family. Anyone who transgressed this rule risked death (along with their whole family). We have here the Emperor Ming Yingzhong wearing his dragon robe.
And of course the Forbidden City in Beijing, the centre of later emperors’ power, is littered with dragons. I show here two examples, the first in the Nine Dragon Wall, the second a dragon statue standing guard before one of the temples.
The Emperors graciously allowed their nobles to avail themselves of the lesser four-clawed dragon for their clothes and furnishings, while commoners were allowed to use the vulgar three-clawed dragon (I only notice now that we are guilty of terrible lèse-majesté with our vase, where the dragon in question has five claws, while our cushion cover is within the norm for commoners like us since the dragons have three claws).
So, nice and simpatico, but also very noble, these Chinese dragons.
Well, this is a conundrum! Mad and bad, or nice and noble? Who is right, East or West? Let’s put aside the obvious response, which is that since dragons don’t actually exist the question is irrelevant. That’s just party-pooping. Let’s also ignore the response that it’s all in the wings: European dragons have wings, which makes them bad, while Chinese dragons do not, which make them nice. That’s just silly; wings can’t make such a difference. How about being Solomonic and saying that dragons can actually be both, just like us, depending on which side of the bed they get out of in the morning.
the heart thrills 
