Blogged again

Thanks to all you kind people who responded positively to my first ever attempt at blogging. You may have wondered what happened to me in that there was no follow-up. The answer is that I went to Sicily with the Mediterranean Garden Society and came back with pleurisy which wasn’t very nice but the effects of the antibiotic used to treat it were infinitely worse. All of which damped me down a bit and which  is my excuse for giving a dire presentation  on the history of Sicily from a horticultural perspective to the members in Palermo. I am trying to re-write it for  those still interested and  thought I would stick it on here as a “Blog of the Island” when it’s eventually done.

Sicily itself was great and the bugs in my lungs held off for most of the time and so I could enjoy the food, the hospitality of our hosts and the stupendous gardens without any problems. And the food really is all its cracked up to be, Italian with Arabic overtones though I expect for those who like their  salads without fruit, and veg without any sweetener it was pretty revolting, but fortunately habitués of the Little Chef weren’t among us and we unanimously enjoyed fusili in fennel sauce, shaved courgettes in mint, orange risotto and Cannoli which look like brandy snaps and are filled with ricotta, sugar, almond, eggs, orange zest and Pistachios.  And what they do with a mixture of mushrooms and aubergines (mixed, I suspect, with garlic, olive oil, sugar, capers and anchovies) is something offered to most people only when they get to Heaven ….so it’s probably just as well I experienced it the other day. The only sour note was on my final evening in Palermo when I took myself to the “Mensa del popolo”. When I was a student in Florence many years ago, the mensa was where the students could get a reasonably good meal cheap; the one in Palermo is where you can get a foul one expensively. It was abysmally served too. Never mind, perhaps they were protesting against the “our” Iraqi policy or something and didn’t like Brits.

Got back to find amongst the great pile of messages, a request for plants for a University Minoan garden. I know we specialise in historic gardens but this is the sort of query that makes my job both challenging and pleasurable. Obviously roses are the first plants that come to mind, but what sort of roses? Having just written something for the Historic Gardens Foundation about classical roses, my mind is more boggled than ever and did the Minoans use their plants medicinally or were they gourmets? Hurrah for Andrew Dalby whose “Siren Feasts” offer a few clues.

 On roses, a friend has become somewhat hissy about a Midlands stately home slagging off Eleanor of Aquitaine as a poisoner in an attempt to draw in the coach parties. OK it all happened eight centuries ago, but the publicist should know better than to inflict a form of  spinning more worthy of the late and thoroughly unlamented Blair on a historic garden. To ball-breaking feminists, Eleanor was, and is, the ultimate role-model,  a patroness of the arts,  a pious benefactor of repressed women, a valiant crusader and brilliant administrator both of her own and her husband’s domaines. She coped with one husband, Louis VII who,  in popular parlance wouldn’t get it up and another Henry 2nd of England who got it up all too frequently and not within the sanctity of marriage either, before chucking her in the slammer when she complained. Finally, her children married into every ruling house in Europe taking the glory of  Aquitaine and the Angevins with them. And god help the man to this day, who says any different, like for instance that Eleanor was a crazed tart who, inter al,  slept with her uncle, screwed half the Islamic Mediterranean fleet, wrecked her two marriages, forced poor little Rosamund Clifford to drink toads blood, encouraged her chaplain's sadistic fantasies about mistreating virgins and egged-on her creepy sons to destroy the Angevin empire.  So the point of all this is not whether  she poisoned the unfortunate Rosamund whose unflattering statue stands in the centre of the Rose garden, because she obviously didn’t, but  whether there is any justification in raking up some malevolent, politically motivated story, no matter how ancient, to flog more tickets to moronic tourists at the gate. Personally I think it is grossly unethical and  given the controversy already achieved, likely to prove an own-goal

All these crazy stories have a starting point and apart from my personal bete noir about the Romans using Lavender in their bath water, I have recently read of  Amazonian  explorers plucking pineapples from over hanging trees, that Charlemagne was a great horticulturalist and that the Arabic rulers of Medieval  Sicily grew their own tomatoes.  Doubtless all guaranteed a yet firmer place in posterity than they have attained already. Oh yes and  further on roses, since Rosamund was supposedly poisoned in 1176  and  Rosa gallica versicolor wasn’t recorded until 1583,  it is scarcely likely that the rose itself was named in her blessed memory. Sad to see an author as respected as  the late Roy Genders repeating the story, but like I say all these tales have to start somewhere, though we can’t blame Genders for this one, it seems to have been knocking around for a lot longer than him.

On the same theme, Sue Minter took on Sapphire Gin for their very beautiful but wholly inaccurate and misleading advertisement featuring the botanicals supposedly flavouring their version of “Mother’s Ruin”.  Trading Standards didn’t want to know, in fact in my experience Trading Standards don’t want to know about anything very much, and the gin people politely told her to get knotted.  My reaction is that if a gin company can’t recognise the plants it claims to stick in its drink, it will probably end up poisoning its punters and I for one will stick to whisky.

Anthony