Funny fungi

I've done this a lot before, photos of fungi, it's that time of year. I've even got a tag for them. That's rather the problem with this kind of blogging, and of life in the countryside, I suppose. The seasons have a habit of coming round again and again with much the same features. Or perhaps it's not a problem. 

Anyway, fungi continue to be weird and wonderful, these were all found in the garden, a more appealing thing to be doing there than sweeping up leaves.

The above growths appear in the holes left in eucalyptus trunks, when branches split and break, as they often do. I wonder why a non-native species should so readily host passing fungi, but I don't really know anything about it.

The frilly orangey ones below, at different stages of their fruition (for mushrooms and toadstools are all fruiting bodies) are all over the ground among the leaf litter:

I've only tended to edit them a bit by deepening the shadows to accentuate the form, but with the two below, as I'd got a bit carried away with the digital zoom on the camera and they looked rather odd and fuzzy, I put a 'lomo' filter on them in Picasa, for fun: 

Change, death and decay, that's fungi for you.

Weirdest and most alien and macabre of all are these earth balls, puffballs' dark doppelgangers:

It's their planet really, theirs and the insects'. We're just passing through.

Autumn groundscapes

The kind of thing I used to do a lot, it's still good to do it.

The winds and rains blowing in, the edges of the storms which are wreaking havoc across the Channel are finally stripping the trees of their foliage, but it's been a very fine autumn.

11th November

The hedge man worked until late afternoon yesterday, and left his ladder in place.

In the twilight it looked a bit melancholy, with its broken bottom rung, and reminded me of The Draughtsman's Contract, which I hadn't thought about, or seen anything of, for many years, which seems odd since it was very popular when it came out, and the 17th and 18th centuries seem to be quite in vogue just now. In fact I rather wish I hadn't read the above-linked-to review, which contains spoilers, as it might be interesting to watch it again some time. One of the few things I do recall about it was the ladder was shaped like the one in the photo, rather elegantly splayed at the bottom, and I hadn't seen ladders like that, to my recollection, until we came to France, when I remember thinking they looked like the ladder in The Draughtsman's Contract. We have one too. It's a very practical design and safer than those which are parallel all the way, but I suppose they are more awkward for artisans to carry about with them on their vans and such like.

Today was a public holiday, Armistice, which was still, unconscionably, called Victoire 1918 when we first came to live here, when it was less than eighty years since the event and still within living memory for some of our neighbours.  The hedge man was keen to work for the morning, promising to start at the bottom of the garden so as not to disturb the rest of the village. When I came back from last night's concert* the new people next door appeared to be having a very quiet and decorous party with several cars parked around all carefully not blocking my way into our drive. So I was rather sorry to be the anti-social buggers with the noisy garden power tools going first thing in the morning disturbing everyone's day-off hangovers. But as Tom said, no one's permitted to object to hunter's guns blasting across the fields on Armistice Day, which we find ironically offensive. Didn't hear too many today though.

We got out after breakfast and raked and piled leaves and cuttings throughout the day, and now feel quite virtuously tired.

*remarkably, delightfully good, a very impressive foursome playing a string of short 19th century Russian pieces, including a couple of little known Rachmaninov string quartets and serenades, sarabandes, polkas and mazurkas by some other quite unheard of composers.

Peanut butter and toadstools

The clerodendron leaves, when crushed, have something of the smell of peanuts, but I wouldn't say it was really of peanut butter, that sweet, appetising, roasted aroma. I like peanut butter and I don't care if Elvis did die of it. I like that it is both sweet and savoury at once, and I also enjoy the quality in it that many people object to: the way it sticks to the roof of your mouth and your teeth. I call that good value in a foodstuff, it doesn't disappear too quickly.  On the other hand, I don't much care for whole roasted peanuts in any form; I resent that they make me eat them when I don't really want to.

No, the leaves have rather the less agreeable odour of raw peanut husks, or of that fine papery, bitter skin between the husk and nut, or or stale peanuts, the ones you feed to birds in winter. Some years ago, I remember hearing, there was a huge batch of bad, poisoned peanuts deemed unfit for human consumption in the UK. They were sold as bird food, with catastrophic consequences for the bird population for many years. Reminds me in turn of an occasion of a serious deadly outbreak of some kind of toxin in a popular brand of tinned salmon. My parents had Bob the painter and decorator working on the house at the time, who remarked he had thrown away a couple of tins from his cupboard. He could have brought them for our cat, remarked my mother. Do you want to kill him? asked Bob.

Inconsequential stuff. I only pledged I would sit down and post at a given time every day, I didn't make any promises as to its worth. I could plead that I've just written away a good part of my substance in a very enjoyable e-mail exchange with a lovely blogging friend who wanted to know where she ought to go and eat in Amsterdam, and I fell into a dream of Indonesian rijstafels and such like delights, but that would be a poor excuse.

But it's been a good day, I made myself go out and scratched up some weeds and the last dead stems of the butternut plants, and sowed phacelia, and, as always, wondered why I'd been so reluctant to kick myself out of the house. It wasn't so summery as it has been but was still warm, and good for the spirits. Joe once recalled how his mother used to chase him out of doors into the fresh air on sunny days, 'and to some extent she still does'. Which is, of course, spot on.

I took the camera out with me as resolved and took just a few pictures, not too many, as also resolved, and edited them directly on the notebook computer, which I'm getting used to doing now.

Fungus and decay,

the finches have finished with the sunflowers,

but there are still poppies.

No frost yet.

Clerodendron, and a calendar poem.

Clerodendron trichotomum, was in front of me while I was sitting out yesterday.

I've never troubled to find out anything about it before, simply enjoyed it for the fact that it is attractive and unusual in several ways at different stages, with bright pretty leaves in spring and autumn, dainty flowers with a heady jasmine perfume in the summer, and then these extraordinary bracts and berries in autumn, the latter a shade of blue rarely found in nature, and quite metallic in their lustre. I also learn from the wiki article, though, that it is sometimes known as the peanut butter tree, because its leaves smell of peanut butter when crushed, which I have never noticed but shall seek to confirm when I next go past it.

The person who gave it to us, as a sucker from his own garden, I do not recall with great affection, and sometimes when Tom refers to it, since the Latin will elude him, he does so as 'that thing what's-his-name gave us' in a tone of mixed embarrassment and contempt. However, it would be unfair to hold that against the shrub, and since in the histoire* of the estrangement I felt myself, for once, more sinned against than sinning, it is really not too much of a bad association at all. Indignation is really much less uncomfortable and persistent than remorse.

~

Jeff looked in last post, which was nice. Now his is a blog I've only discovered in the last couple of years, I think, which shows there are still unexpected treasures to be found in this sphere. He's a very erudite and talented American mediaevalist, which is a delight in itself, and a friendly, interesting all-round good egg, I reckon. He's just started posting monthly instalments of a long poem, inspired by his move from city to country and by mediaeval calendar poems. It's gorgeous: dense and mysterious but vivid and inviting at the same time, full of alliteration and figures and images calling up Anglo-Saxon verse and books of hours, but also telling of his own inner journey, memories and transformations. The latest has skies full of constellations and the figures that inhabit them, 'windows ... wicked with life', spiders and a salutary dialogue with a mantis, and this, which I hope might be true:

Whatever you’re certain won’t sing to you now
Waits to be witness to one formal act:
Recite the things you see and hear
Freely, even if others brand it
Daft enchantment or a children’s song,
And start simple. The sense can wait:
“She swept the ash from the iron grate…”
“Sage and parsley in pots left behind…”
“Three white horses on a hillside farm…”

A great friend suggested recently that if now is a time when the writing of poems has deserted me, it might be a good one to read some, and indeed, blogs are still where they may be found, I find.

* I use franglais carefully and for a reason, as I like to think I usually do; I am leery and rather disdainful of it otherwise. Histoire is story and history, but also a business, a matter, a fuss... covers quite a lot, and fits the bill.

First day of November

I'm going to try to post every day in November, how about that! ('try to', I'm told, is to set oneself up to fail).

I began this post with a rather Eeyore-ish, sic-transit, something-rotten-in-the-state-of-Blogland, I've-got-nothing-to-say-any-more, quasi-lament, but I wiped it and wrote (then corrected) the above line instead.

When I first started here, nine years ago now, I used to get up at six in the morning, come and sit in front of the computer and just write. Sometimes I took a bit longer over preparing special posts and editing photos and so on, but essentially it was a matter of regular practice. Things ebb and flow, come and go, of course, but perhaps there's still a value in setting a time and making a commitment; that I'll find something to say and to share by doing so, and if the Blogmuse has grown flabby, menopausal and sluggardly, eschewing flights of poetry and other raptures in favour of a comfy chair, knitting and endless repeats of Midsomer Murders, well it won't do any harm to make her take a bit more regular exercise, and maybe take the camera with her. Also, no excuses about the hassle of downloading and editing photos on the big computer, I shall just stick the SD card into this one and lift the odd picture straight from it, with only the minimal editing (cropping and a bit of instant polish) this machine enables. No 6 am starts though, but maybe 6 pm instead.

So, here we are at Toussaint, and you would think it summer, even now, at half past six in the evening, it feels more like June at midnight. A sudden recollection came to me this morning that I had let another birthday creep up without a card dispatched; I have been very hit-or-miss with them this year, but this is one I usually do manage. My apologetic e-mail brought a swift and cheerful reply, which spoke of moorland walks, brunches of scrambled eggs, Guy Fawkes Night fireworks at the local cricket club and pub meals, all of which induced a certain nostalgie de pays, in a nice way. I cleared my desk and undertook to finish a gift. A deckchair - already put away in the garage for the winter but easily retrieved - and knitting in the sun. What a bummer.

Even the a***hole (that's how we spell it in British English, with and 'ar') chasseurs were remarkably quiet most of the day, with just a few silly pooty noised on their little horns and a few bangs and barking dogs in the distance, presumably they had moslty been dragged off to the cemeteries to deposit chrysanthemums.

I was interrupted only by a late peacock butterfly, which landed and rested in the sun on the back of my hand, cleaned its front legs on its long curled tongue, and opened and closed its frayed wings while the breeze ruffled the soft, surprisingly long, brown fur on the back of its body, for at least five minutes. I decided the underside of its wings was really almost as beautiful as the colourful part, and would probably be my preferred choice for curtains, and offered it a lick of the butterscotch sweet Tom had just brought out to me (uxorious, see).  However, it declined, and only went on its way when I late blowfly alighted further up my arm and I made a reflex swat towards it.

I didn't have the camera then, and probably couldn't have photographed it if I had, but brought it out later and pointed it around a bit. But that will do for today.

Ovipositing swallowtail, another reason to have fennel in the garden

Fennel, dill, aneth, fenouil... it's a little confusing. I've never tried growing vegetable/bulb fennel, I don't care for it all that much, even veggie lover as I am. The herb one we have is the bronze one, and I think, like the bulb, it's called fenouil in French. I've always tended to think it very similar to all intents and purposes to dill herb, which is called aneth here. But then I asked Polish Chick, I think it was, or maybe Joe, who was also devotee of dill if not a fan of fennel, whether I couldn't substitute fennel for dill in a recipe - it might have been gravlax or pickles - as I didn't have any of the latter, and I received an uncompromising no, dill was distinctly different in flavour from fennel! (None of this alliteration took place at the time, whomever the conversation was with.)

So I tried growing some dill, and the germination was rubbish but then some of the seeds did come up eventually, and I've carefully nurtured the plants, but now they've grown big I can't honestly smell, taste or even see, once the dill plants grew beyond the early feathery-leafed stage, much difference between the two, and I haven't got around to making either gravlax or pickles with them.

However, they are both attractive to a somewhat unusual range of insects. Greenbottle type flies, which aren't very pleasant really but I suppose they have their place in the scheme, and also these curious leggy wasps:

They are the most unassuming and gentle creatures, showing no inclination to sting or bother one at all; in fact looking at the photo perhaps they don't even have a sting or aren't even true wasps. I'll try to find out.

[Edit: they appear to be paper wasps, polistes dominula. Some dizzyingly detailed facts about them in this Wiki link; how do people know all this stuff?]

The other insects which are drawn to it, not to feed but to breed, are the swallowtails. Not always, some years we see them often, others not at all, when they simply flutter through they are so rapidly moving and elusive I can seldom photograph them, but on this occasion one set about laying its eggs, or attempting to, on the plants, and being thus preoccupied, I was able to capture it on camera, with a lot of zoom.

I've since looked for the eggs or caterpillars, but no sign. Other years we've had them on various other plants, mostly other umbelliferous ones like carrots or parsley, but also on some Mexican orange bushes where this butterfly was also prospecting, and I have even been known to take them off and overwinter them as chrysalids in a terrarium, with a small amount of success. Both as caterpillars and as butterflies, they are impressive creatures, I think, at least by the standards of this corner of northern Europe.

Pictures of things I find I have cropped into squares

Looking through the photos uploaded to the most recent web album, finding it difficult to find any common criterion by which to group them so as to make a coherent post, so I just picked out the square ones. I seem to have abandoned monthly collages but this is in the same line. Captions below, for a change.

Flower, always forget what these are called.

Echinaceas, one with bee, one with butterfly. The small tricolour bumble bees are probably the most frequent kind we get, I sometimes perceive they are nesting in areas of rough grass, generally in small colonies, I go easy with the mower but they seem quite docile. However, one rather ungratefully stung Tom on the hand the other day when, without thinking, he went to rescue it from drowning in a bucket of water. I gave him antihistamine tablets and he more or less slept for three days.

Dead head.

 

Courgette plant. These are very spiny. We get rather tired of courgettes quite quickly, even with just one plant, and they start looming into marrows.

I left a few leek heads; I've heard you can perennialise them. Ugly bug type of insects seem to favour them.

A jar of honey.

A bowl of mushrooms. They became curry, with cashew nuts, an unusual but good combination, more south east Asian than typically Indian.

Squinting. An octopus hat, rather large. Neck skin crêping. Latvian braid. Face must be the wrong way round, but that's mostly how I see it.

Looking in

Poor neglected blog, nearly a month gone by, time was I used to tell you everything. Then this morning a so kind e-mail from a dear old friend expressing concern for my absence here, which has brought home to me what I knew, that it really is important to keep up this practice, albeit not necessarily with the same intensity as I once did, and to stay connected with the people with whom blogging is still a useful and comforting form of contact.

I don't really have any good excuses at all for not posting, I have been away a couple of times, a trip to Kerbiriou in late June (where the goat was, above), and a south England trip from which I only just returned on Sunday, catching up with family members - brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew, some of whom I've not seen for a very long while, fortuitously gathered from far-flung corners of the Earth, which was lovely*, so you might say I'd been a bit busy, but in truth these occasions would at one time have provided good reasons to blog, not kept me away from it. The other thing is I've an editing project for a print-on-demand book/magazine on hand for my brother which I'm taking far longer about than I ought to be. The kind of thing I like to think I'd have dashed off enthusiastically in a jiffy at one time, it's required the use of new and unfamiliar software, which by all accounts is still really at the beta stage (I believe that's the term for using the unsuspecting public as guinea pigs on an unfinished product), which, combined with the slowness of the bigger computer which I have to use, means I'm making far more of a meal of it than I should. If I were doing it for myself I'd probably have abandoned it by now, if I were doing it for a for work or some other formal commitment I'd have knuckled down and got it sorted, but as it is my brother is apologetic and appreciative and anxious not to put pressure on me, and I have allowed myself to slide into a kind of ineffective limbo about it, getting computer-shy (another invalid excuse for not blogging) and when I do come to it sidling off into idle and treacherous surfing and drifting day-dreaming on Pinterest and Ravelry (while also not keeping up my project notes or useful discussions I've entered into there either).

In fact though, I see now I am in a fairly recognisable kind of seasonal malaise; it's that kind of tipping-point time of year, flowering and fruiting and going to seed and drying out all at once and mixed together, the days dwindle perceptibly and weeds grow up around things and obscure the view of them, and clearing them seems like dusty, uninviting, pointless work; projects lie unfinished though I'm pulling out bits and pieces to embark on abortive new ones, scribbling and doodling and swatching and scratching half-heartedly at things which will mostly come to nothing and just result in more mess; distraction and displacement and lassitude hold sway.

And summer dreamed sadly for she thought all was ended
In her fullness of wealth that might not be amended

Nothing for it but to turn to, make a list (with the first thing on it being something you've already done, and can therefore cross off straight away, that's always a good one), bargain with myself for the dubious rewards of distraction, pick the peas and beans and sniff the flowers, and just DO IT!

However, before going away, and while sorting pictures for my brother's stuff, I did get as far as editing and uploading a fair number of pictures from the last month or so, here are a few:

Elderflowers. Rather than the rather laborious manufacture of heavy cordial involving large quantities of sugar, citric acid and days of standing, resulting in a product whose main aim in life seems to be to ferment dangerously, I used a much simpler recipe which involved boiling the flowers with plenty of lemons, much less sugar and smaller quantities of everything except the flowers themselves which yielded just one bottle of much lighter, fresher more stable liquid which is quite enough to give a taste of the season.

The remaining flowers and lemon I put to macerate in a Parfait jar with a bottle of vodka and one of sweet white wine, some sugar and a bag of last years white currants from the freezer by way of an experiment. White currants are rather eerily pretty things, though they still remind me a bit of frogspawn, which is quite pretty too in its own way.

A nice red nasturtium. Climbing annuals from seed doing well in the containers this year.

Finistère souvenirs:

The seaside at Carantec (where there was also a good market in the town with that rare thing in France, a really comprehensive spice stall):

A married couple were having their photos taken there, as is the vogue. It sometimes seems a bit strange, the spots they choose for this, as while they may be beautiful places in themselves, wedding dresses and suites seem rather incongruous within them. This couple had to negotiate the causeway with the seaweed and the old chaps going fishing, but all was done with good cheer.

Other sunsetty, seashorey moments in the same neck of the woods:

and rustic stuff too:

The goats are two still very young kids Paul at Kerbiriou bought for next to nothing when they were newborns from a more serious goat-raising enterprise than theirs, where even the females don't get to spend any time with their mothers, since the milk yield is the thing. They do however have a chance of life if someone like him will take them on and bottle raise them, which he did, so they are quite imprinted on and devoted to him and very affectionate and friendly with everyone. Every morning he'd bring a nanny goat or two down the road for milking, and the babies would trot alongside loose to get the special feed they're still having. They were quite mischievous and often skittered off, making winsome little caprioles and dashing off to eat the roses, Tom had to round them up a couple of times.

We came away this year with a big bag of very fresh green beans, a handful of home grown cucumbers and, special treasure, a fresh goat's cheese. With the rest of some cherry tomatoes from the market at Carentec, those we hadn't eaten like sweets, warm with the sun on them, as we were going around, and the last of the saladini and endives and some fresh oregano from the garden when we got back, and store cupboard olives, made an excellent Greek-style salad, being rather more like a good feta than a typical smelly French chèvre.

Also plenty of broad beans in the garden, these pink ones amuse me,

you can pretend to mistake them for your fingers, if you're silly,

They're usually more resistant to black fly than most varieties, but this year it's been a struggle. They go ordinary broad bean colour when you cook them.

And this was an oddity:

A light helicopter, sweeping back and forth quite low, one morning trailing this very long apparatus below it. I searched the internet for information in vain, but then spoke to a neighbour later who said he's seen it in the paper beforehand, and it was a radio-sonic device which was able to analyse the soil from above for minerals and such like. Most curious.

So, dear blog, apologies for my silence, but it's nice to talk to you again. I'll make sure to post more often ( and get round other people's too).

* apart from one of my rather too frequent attacks apparent food poisoning, the source of which was a complete mystery as I had eaten absolutely nothing that everyone else hadn't eaten, but which necessitated the total and violent expulsion from my body of all matter hitherto taken into it followed by a day lying around feeling as if my skin was on inside out, only to awake and emerge on the morning of my departure more or less as bright and chipper as if nothing had happened. I had to cry off a trip into London to meet yet another long-lost nephew and his new wife, but in fact the day of reconstitution passed surprisingly pleasantly (other than the skin-inside-out thing), since I got to hang out with my Aussie brother and sister-in-law and Zig the cat, reading, chatting a bit, not-really-watching tennis, dozing and finally enjoying a dainty little supper prepared by my brother. I've rather come to the conclusion that seeing and catching up with people consists far more of such moments than the planned events, exciting experiences and meaningful conversations, and they are often the more memorable.