Bird Tour in Prospect Park

Another event I will be missing while I am away is Robb Jett's bird walk (not a jake walk and not a cake walk. Birds) this weekend in Prospect Park. It's happening this Saturday, starting at 7.30am. Don't be late. The birds will laugh.

You can read more about it over at City Birder.

Breyten Breytenbach book launch at Madiba, Brooklyn

Please join Archipelago Books tomorrow to celebrate the launch of ALL ONE HORSE by Breyten Breytenbach.

"Obviously the greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation... No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach." --The New Yorker

at Madiba Restaurant
195 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn
Thursday, September 4th
6:30pm - 8:30pm
subway: C to Lafayette Ave. or G to Fulton St.

This was forwarded by my friend Constanza, ex- New York, in Durham, NC. I will be winging my way - or almost - to Vancouver tomorrow evening, but I hope someone makes it on my behalf and downs a glass of good Safrican red. I'm not sure about the "greatest" Afrikaner poet? I mean, hello, Antjie Krog? Anyway, such labels are odious. And how did they know? - could the New Yorker reviewer read Afrikaans? There is a lot of beautifully written Afrikaans. If we are talking about his generation, still, Karel Schoeman is not to be sneezed at.

Jus' sayin'...

Madiba's food is not much to write home about, but then neither is South Africa's. In general. Exceptions, exceptions. But their wine list? Rocks!

And they know how to party...

September garden: anemones, calamintha and geraniums

While meeting this morning in a garden we planted a month ago I could not help snapping some pictures of the very happy anemones (Anemone tomentosa "Robustissima"). It is not a happy garden, I think, as far as people go - but sometimes that is just how it is. I felt a little silly capering like a baby goat amongst the bees and flowers while everyone else was fighting about sightlines. Guilty, somehow.

This picture is for my mother. Hello Mommy! Calamintha nepeta. It does not look like a weed! And it has been blooming like this for over a month. Which makes it outstanding, in my book. Bees love it. It has a penetrating pepperminty smell which would perk a bedtime bath up.

And here is Geranium 'Victor Reiter'. Blooming quite happily in September. It is a loose but ethereal perennial with these gorgeous, up-looking flowers, also much-visited by fat bees loaded with pollen. We have it in a couple of other gardens, too.

New York terrace garden

Planted two months ago on a high floor near Columbus Circle

Buddleja [apparently this is the preferred botanical spelling now after much back and forth] "Adonis Blue", doing well. It was requested for the scent, which is delicious, of course, and the owners have promised to deadhead the flowers before they set seed. That's a lot of deadheading.

Planting in July is not desirable, horticulturally speaking, but this is the city that never sleeps and we have to break such rules of refinement...With plenty of water, as in, more than one would think, everything is doing fine. Buddleja is considered invasive and escapes gardens easily, so I hesitate before using it. Still: it flowers faithfully and long, and smells dwonderful, and is very pretty when surrounded by butterflies. This colour is a knock-out, too.

We had one casualty, a little euphorbia, but otherwise, so far so good. I have had trouble before with euphorbias, which don't seem to like transplanting.

Above, Geranium "Victor Reiter", similar to "Rozanne" is blooming right now - a hardy geranium with delicate flowers, it doesn't appear to be tough, but survives our freezing winters well.

And Symphocarpus "Red Pearl". Symphocarpus, or Snowberry is native to the US and edible, though not pleasant-tasting. Birds eat the berries, though apparently it's not first on their list, either. Their main attraction is ornamental, and in spring hummingbirds are drawn to their flowers...

Now, above...this was new to me and I have, um, forgotten its name, so am contacting the nursery for ID'ing help. It is prostrate, with needly, rosemary-like, shiny leaves and these pure, gentian-coloured, minute flowers, blooming now in September and very happy.

Ed: 9/5/08: this just in from John at Atlantic Nursery:

Lithodora diffusa 'Grace Ward'
sun    Full sun
height    6-12 in.
width    1 ft.
water    Moderate
hardiness     0°

Low trailing perennial, with small hairy dark green leaves, covered in spring
and summer with azure blue flowers.

A little play area for the two small children, and, hidden in the shrubs on the left, a tap to turn on an arching set of water spouts to sprinkle them in hot weather

September's Concord Grapes

I was astonished, in America, to taste these grapes. Because the last time, the only time, I had eaten them was as a little girl, in one garden in Bloemfontein, in Marquard Crescent, belonging to my parents' very good friends Hendrik and Jean van Heerden. Hendrik, an imposing and rather frightening man to a small child was Oom Hennie, even though he was a judge. And Jean was Auntie Jean. He grew tulips, and she bubbled with laughter. They are both gone now.

They had a massive grape arbour over their stone patio, looking out of the lush, quiet, robin-speckled lawn. The grapes were called Catawbas, and were musky in way I had not tasted before nor again until the late 90's, in New York. Their skins popped the grapes into your mouth in a wonderful way. Like Mrs Newton's mulberries, their ripening was an event in my life, and never forgotten.

Finding them native to this coast was a delight, and I still get over-excited when I see how many loose-skinned kinds we have here at late summer and fall farmers' markets. I adore them.

Terrace edibles

I planted a zinc bathful of rainbow chard, which has Vincent dreaming of Al di La's malfatti. Maybe I will baste these stems with anchovies, lemon juice and olive oil when they are all grown up. Which would also be rather Al di La-inspired. To my delight I found a recipe for them in Richard Olney's Simple French Food.

Fennel flowers. For when I have fish to roast in a blanket of salt. Nay, eiderdown.

Summer savoury. I prefer the tougher winter savoury. Very good inside roast chickens.


And oregano flowers. I chop them up and tuck them under the chicken's skin.

[My 600'F porterhouse just set off the smoke alarm. Later.]

Eier im Glas

I am trying to read Paddy Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts as slowly as possible. It is the first stage of his 18 and 19-year old walk from Holland to Constantinople in 1934. I started with the second stage, and he died before writing the last. He wrote these memoirs after the age of sixty.

I am comforted by the thought that when I have finished it there will be more Fermor books to read. Once I start to read someone new, and this good, I hate to leave. So I tend to read everything they have written. And then sulk around afterwards, terrified to start something new and foreign. I find his writing wonderful, and am humbled and rivetted by his far-penetrating perception and analysis of landscape, through layers of history, art, architecture, lore, literature and language. Neither forgetting the physical beauty of, nor neglecting to describe - often with unaffected wonder - what he sees.

Which includes eggs. He desribes his arrival in Linz:

"When I got to the the fine sweeping piazza in the middle of the city I chose a promising-looking coffee house, kicked off the snow, went in and ordered two boiled eggs. Eier im Glas! It was my latest passion. The delight of tapping the eggs all over with a bone spoon before removing the fragmented shell and sliding the fragile contents into a tumbler intact , then a slice of butter...travellers' joys."


It makes me think of Hemingway's eggs in The Garden of Eden, a book not opened in perhaps a decade. Time.

To my Eier im Glas I added snipped chives.