Begone Winter, Welcome Spring!

 It is spring. And here is a gift of quiet hellebores.

And pickled eggs, with a wintercress (Cardamine hirsuta) nest. They are destined for a picnic tomorrow in Prospect Park, and my first plant walk of the year, in the pale sunshine, with the singing of the hundreds of congregating American robins.

Here is our Begone, Winter Menu:

To Eat:

Beet-pickled deviled eggs with field garlic and garlic mustard root

Le grand field garlic aioli - baby carrots, pink chard stems, watermelon radish, Chinese broccoli stems, snap peas and field garlic mayonnaise for dipping

Endive and avocado bites with field garlic

Carrot-spicebush puff pastry vol-au-vents

Cattail pollen garlic biscuits with field garlic butter, juniper ham, and apple-spicebush compôte (from the fizz, below)

Spicebush chocolate truffles

To Drink:

Spicebush apple wild-fermented fizz (no ABV) with forsythia and spicebush ice

Fortified with an optional Calvados shot

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Forage Walks and Picnics

The citrus flock

On these coldest days - the coldest I can remember in my life in New York, and it's been more than half my life - I sometimes stay in the bedroom to work. It's where the sun and the citrus trees are. The Meyer lemon is in bloom.  

A new shoot. The word. Shoot. New growth and life, take a picture, and the intent to kill with a thing that is made only for killing.

Shoot. Like, darn, bother, dammit. Oh, shoot. 

In my eternal endeavour not to overwater my citrus trees I managed to underwater the Meyer lemon. I only discovered how badly it had been stressed when I pulled the rootball from its pot (in the bedroom, on the floor) about three weeks ago to try and figure out what was wrong. A mass of dead, dry roots about one third of the way down, but the rest healthy. It's a tricky balancing act. I removed the dead roots, added fresh soil mix (a blend of cactus soil and bark chips) and gave it a very good drink, sucking the excess out of the saucer with the usual turkey baster so that there wasn't a flood.

Its leaves have recovered, and are a good, rich green. There's that new shoot and there are hundreds of blossoms. So the bedroom smells wonderful.

The little bergamot tree has been flowering continuously for about six weeks. It won't won't stop. It has big blossoms. 

The tree is too small to support all the fruit as it has set, so if they don't abort naturally (which they often do, dropping while green), I'll have to grit my teeth and cut some off. When ripe the skin of the bergamots smell like Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet, a cologne. My father wore it. It's very disconcerting.

I've left many of the calamondin fruit on the tree, because they are pretty, and these are the fattest. But I should collect them soon and make something. Perhaps just salt them again, because I've used up last year's crop.

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Find me on Gardenista

Flars

 They help. In that moment when our glance falls upon them.

We are lucky to have them.

Going out

This New Year's Eve we treated ourselves to Champagne and a supper of smoked salmon on toast, with asparagus and a fennel slaw, followed by squashed, roasted potatoes topped with crème frâiche and salmon roe. The little jars of roe were $13. The next roe up, American sturgeon, was $80. After that Osetra sparkled at $180.

Salmon it was. And very delicious.

First, you boil little potatoes until cooked through. Then you squash each onto a lined baking sheet using something round and heavy. A wine bottle with a flat bottom is excellent. Roast them for about 45 minutes at 350°F. They don't require salmon roe, but it's very good.
 

Dessert was a beautiful galette des rois from a local bakery (Brooklyn French). My slice had the hidden "bean" but the bean was a tiny croissant, so I got to wear the provided crown. For a bit. I let the Frenchman wear it because he looked a little crestfallen. Childhood memories.

And now, in light snow, and sub-freezing temperatures, we walk to see the fireworks at Grand Army Plaza. Squirrels, raccoons, possums, birds, cats, and dogs, cover your ears. Poor things. When will we ever learn?

See you on the other side.

Snow Day

Snow began falling in the small, dark hours of the morning, and then it stuck. To branches and stems and leaves and blades of grass. To the ice on the lake in the park.

We went walking to see it, despite work to do and deadlines to meet. Wind was coming and would shake it off the trees.

The humans we saw were happy. 

Under our feet the snow squeaked and crunched as it compressed.

Every small hill was commandeered by sledders. Once, Washington commanded troops here. Fewer died on this snow day. One boy was rescued from the ice.

We received about four-and-a-half inches.

Not too much. 

Not too little.

Just right.

 

Daffodil hour

The Frenchman's birthday daffodils ablaze in the early afternoon sunlight, now bright through the skylight as that medium-size star climbs higher and higher in the pre-spring sky.

These were the first daffodils I have seen sold locally, and that means we'll have them for the next couple of months. In parks and gardens, they are already in bud, but still tightly closed.

The view from here

My digital image folder for our terrace is arranged by year and by month, with various category-folders for each month like Citrus, Sunny Pots, Shade Pots, Ramps, Birds, and Table. There is also a small folder for each month called, View. This is the view.

It's not much probably. But it's also a lot. It's not the ocean, or mountains, or Central Park. But when I saw this apartment for the first time, I knew enough about views in New York City to know that this was A Good View. Why? Because, instead of house-windows staring right back at us at the end of the lots below, or a massive building blocking the sky, there was a long northern view across a lowslung rooftop, relieved by old, industrial  skylights. And beyond that, mature trees in the gardens one block over. They were in leaf, that August. Very green. On either side of the skylit roof, were - are - more expanses of empty, low rooftop, all sheltering a laundry empire whose parking lot beside us houses fastidiously parked white trucks that are washed squeaky-clean every Sunday (I didn't know that, then).

These low, wraparound rooves (roofs, for Americans) gave us two things, no, three precious things, in terms of hyper-urban life: light, sky, and privacy. You jump on that when you recognize it, and I jumped. While we lost a marvellous in-ground garden, we also lost the ever-present sense of living in a fishbowl (as well as a bonkers upstairs neighbor). 

It is inevitable, in a city where there is a dramatic shortage of housing, and where fortunes are made in real estate, that this view could not last. But it's something I have made (some) peace with. At some point a very large building will rise all around us. Before it rises, the existing structures will be demolished. And then impressive holes will be dug. New and massive foundations will be laid. Ours, 100 years old, will shudder. 

I am not sure where we will be, when it happens, but not here. 

In the meantime, I will add more View folders to my monthly collections as the year unfolds, and we will watch the light on the skylights and rooftops,  the hawks and the woodpeckers in the old catalpa, the trees beginning to leaf out, and the occasional raccoons rambling on their twilit errands. 

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My Gardenista Column

The sill

Austere, like the flavor of autumn olives. Clear, tart, enough sweetness to keep your attention. But definitely autumn.

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daily posts at Instagram

@marie_viljoen

October

Is one morally bound to discuss acts of war, if one is a(war)e of them, while walking in the autumn woods of a Maine shoreline, Downeast? Disaster stalks us. 

Last night the wind let loose as a storm moved in and poised above us, and water rained so hard on the roof that clear rivers formed round the cottage that we are renting for a few days. Pools grew outside and I sent the Frenchman into the deluge to check our EV. Batteries and flooding don't mix well. We're just a week out from the flash floods that drowned our block and nearby neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, thousands dead; the story so complex, and terrible. And what is to come? War. What is it good for? It's good for politicians. For people in power. For certain kinds of business. For the makers and innovators of weapons and the technology that supports or thwarts them. For the contractors of conflict. And, rarely, for freedom.

The woods here are wet and very green. In some places the moss is elbow-deep (I know, I measured). Weaponless but for eyes and intuition and and not a little reading, we have hunted mushrooms, with success. 

Our suppers have been matsutake-filled, and tonight the stuffing for our little organic chicken, raised by a local farmer, is rice with girolles (yellow-foot chanterelles). 

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I'm mostly not here, but at Instagram:

@marie_viljoen

Delayed

When you transition across two hemispheres (south to north, east to west) by racing halfway across the globe in a matter of hours, you leave a part of yourself behind.  While you wait for the piece that is missing and trust, that despite the sense of emptiness,  it - and your luggage - will catch up, you go out on autopilot into the place that is part of you, to remember who and where you are.

Brooklyn Bridge Park on a cold Saturday was equal parts imposing and human. The usual freezing brides were posing against the buttresses and Manhattan skyline.

The day after the Wolf Moon the low tide water was slack, the East River calm.

The Manhattan Bridge was as raucous as ever, every time a subway thundered and beat over it.

And the view across New York Harbor as uplifting.

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Wild Walks

The view from here

10.55am

4.55pm

7.41pm

8.04pm

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Walk with Me in New York

 

The first to turn...

...are the ash trees. Fraxinus pennsylvanica. Their yellow leaves blaze.

The New York Tree Map still seems magical, to me. Every tree on the city streets, mapped.

We'll be celebrating New York's City of Forest Day on Saturday in the forest: Central Park's North Woods. And on the 16th, in the forest at the NYBG. Book here - there are some tickets left.

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Signs of September

September in Brooklyn. 

Small, wind-dropped pawpaws (Asimina triloba). Ragweed flower heads drying (for crackers). Sunflowers from the local deli, and books. Olia Hercules' Summer Kitchens has been a constant companion for months - an incongruously peaceful Ukraine spread across the beautiful pages. Food Plants of the World (under the pawpaws) by South African Ben-Erik van Wyk is a helpful reference for my own work (if you call delving into the edible uses of plants work; it sure is time-consuming) and for articles I might be writing.  

And Ethiopia, Recipes amd Traditions from the Horn of Africa, by Yohanis Gebreyesus and Keff Koehler is a wonderful resource that increased my spice shelf by a full row (six jars). I mean, I had used berbere (a fragrant, hot spice blend) for years, but this cookbook introduced me to ajowan, koseret, besobella, long pepper, the proper use of black nigella, and at last convinced me to acquire grains of paradise. What was even sexier was that the herbs' botanical names - with one vexing exception (tosegn, a species of thyme) - were included in a couple of explanatory pages. That never happens.

In the back, my old Margaret Roberts' Indigenous Healing Plants, consulted for a piece I wrote about black nightshade (you can read it on Gardenista). And my own two books. Forage, Harvest, Feast for a recent Pawpaw Spicecake for last weekend's forage walk and picnic with a group of 16 out on Staten Island. And 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life, because it's been years since I really dipped into it. It's almost a seasonal archive, in the age of global warming - every month's weather and moods charted and described, and its produce grown or eaten. Perhaps, in 50 years' time, it will all seem implausible.

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@66squarefeet

The Edge of September

The late August terrace in the late August light (from the late August rooftop!), after a brief rain shower. The terrace is watered by hand, and is not suffering in the way that street trees and other plants are in New York. Our drought is serious and I am seeing smaller shrubs and trees die on my regular walks through Prospect Park. 

It's still hot and has been very muggy, and evenings are now filled with cricket-chirps. By 8pm it is dark. It seemed to happen very quickly, but the incremental loss of light is perhaps something we deny until it is undeniable.

September is a good month, in this city, and I look forward to it. Crisp edges appear, summer's blur is lifted, and my walk schedule fills up again. I hate carrying a picnic backpack when it's sticky. Dry air puts a spring in my forager's step. 

Places to go. Spaces to explore!

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Late Summer and Fall Walks and Picnics

Iced in Brooklyn

In the morning, when we woke, the world was wrapped in ice. I decided to go out, and see. One's childhood still flows in adult veins. And I was a child in a city whose winters brought occasional, glittering freezes, helped by a garden hose left to sprinkle in a crabapple tree, overnight (whose idea was that?). When we moved, we didn't see frost again. And even though I have lived in the US longer than I lived in South Africa, that sense of awe at snow, ice, and icicles (especially), is as fresh as it ever was.

I walked through nearby Prospect Park. It was so beautiful that I continued to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, but that will be its own post.

I think a Viburnum, possibly prunifolium (black haw). This shrub has slipped under my ID radar.

Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas, native to Crimea,  and southern Europe; it doesn't know borders and has no soldiers)

Rose hips (Rosa multiflora)

Spicebush (Lindera benzoin)

                    Sweetgum, liquidamber (Liquidamber styraciflua)                                                 

Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis)

Hm, wasn't paying attention. Possibly a dogwood. And Traffic lightus.

A maple, maybe red. Acer rubrum.

Dogwood (Cornus...I think kousa)

                                                          Crabapple

Serviceberry. Sarvisberry. Shad. Shadblow. Saskataoon. Juneberry, beloved.

(Amelanchier spp.)

Pine, white (Pinus strobus). Prone to snapping, on days like this. 

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