The lab at Washington Homeopathy Works, Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.















AMERICAN PASSION







Passiflora incarnata 'Maypop' is a native of the United States of America winters over in the outdoors as far north as New England. Last year, vision of passion fruit creme caramel dancing in my head, I ordered yet another Maypop from Logee's Greenhouse, in Connecticut.

Ir looked so vigorous on arrival I stuck into the vegge garden and forgot it. It was nowhere to be seen earlier this year.

Intensive planting made it possible for tomatoes, green pepper, beets, lovage, snow peas, pumpkins and beans to cover ever inch of the tilled space. I ordered the fourth or fifth Maypop and planted it in a half whisky barrel where it sulks and looks fit for killing. Imagine my surprise this afternoon, when I discovered a bedraggled Maypop flower among bean vines.

Jubilant, I told my daughter that I had finally succeeded in growing a maracuja vine, almost the same that grew wild in my native Brazil--the Brazilian variety of my childhood was Passiflora edulis, maracuja--and she remarked,



"Oh, I saw a weird flower there the other day."

Such lack of enthusiasm can only be attributed to her paternal Norwegian DNA.



Passion flower vines are valued throughout the Americas for the calming effect its fruit juice has on type-A personalities. Washington Homeopathic Pharmacies, http://www.washingtongomeopathyworks.com/ --located in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, recommends Passiflora incarnata for insomnia. The fruit and root of both Maypop and Passiflora edulis contain passiflorine, an alkaloid alleged to act as a mild tranquilizer effective in the treatment of dysentery, neuralgia, sleeplessness and dysmenorrhoea, as well as a possible, repeat, possible reigniter of the male libido. Considering the needs of Baby Boomers, I could probably get rich selling the the stuff, but I suppose that practicing medicine without a license is an incarcerable offense.

PHOTOSHOPPING WAR TOYS

Below, Asian radish pods.Below, johnny jump ups and Asian salad greens.

Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes

Below, Oaxaca tomatoes.

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Oh the shamelessness of the small Iranian chap, who allowed his underlings to Photoshop his missiles in order to give the impression that he can strike at Israel from the comfort of his office. The phallic war toys of his his are ugly enough in the singular; presented in the fake plural, they are ludicrous. Better that he should grow a garden--Iranians have a rich and ancient culture and gardens are very much part of it. Gardening teaches respect for human life and no one who has nurtured seedlings, amended the soil into which to plant a food crop, revelled in the pleasure of serving homegrown fruit and vegetables to friends and family contemplate the possibility of war without taking its long term impact into account. Maybe the little Iranian chap likes to spice his salads with enriched plutonium. Maybe he thinks that the entire Middle East should share his taste for hot hell. I happen to think that he is in error. I happen to think that imperialistic jihadism is the greatest of follies. Al-Andalus is lost to Islam, guy. Get over it. Grow tomatoes, grow daylilies. It is a more productive and honest occupation than trying to push Israel into a war the United States will be forced to support, Israel being our only democratic ally in the Middle East.

Our commander in chief would do well to plant a garden too. He might see the light then, bring the troops home and literally turn swords into ploughshares. Enough of this nonsense about being policeman of the world. We have enough to do home. Just the other day I met a family whose property is being foreclosed. Their material poverty is shocking. Our country has the resources to keep American families from homelessness and here we are frittering away these resources in Iraq. There four little children in this family I met and I will not go into detail about the way they are living because they have their dignity. They deserve justice, not pity. It ius enough to say that not since I left the Third World have I seen anyone struggle with such difficult living conditions.

Here is how I met these folks--I joined the local Freecycle chapter and posted a request for peonies and irises. Two people responded. The first lives in a middle class enclave; the other lives in a working class neighborhood. Both wanted to share their plants with a complete stranger because good gardeners practice generosity. Should not their example shame Iranian PM and our president out of their selfish warmongering? Isn't self-evident that kindness is better than war? Apparently not, therefore I have a proposition--let the Iranian PM and Mr. Bush trade places with lady whose house is being taken away by a bank. Let them learn the kind of courage it takes to lose everything but the ability to be generous. Gardening helps; killing people, on the other hand, is highly unproductive. Everyone knows that, right?

Kandahar and Isfahan readers, shalom and salaam.

OF FAVAS AND QUEENS

Census takers need not fear. My fava beans are in full bloom, but not only am I out of good Chianti, liver is not my favorite dish. I plant favas for their blossoms, arguably the most beautiful ever to grace a pedestrian vetch--for vetch is the family to which food old Vicia fava belongs. Think silk organdy, picture hats, elbow length gloves and you get an idea of how supremely elegant these five-petalled white and true black flowers are. Just look at the Worth silk chemise pictured above and you will agree that the designers who fashioned it must have had a potager in which favas grew. Not that John Frederick Worth' sons, Jean-Philippe and Gaston would have mentioned the source of their inspiration to the Marquise de Polignac, for whom they created the ethereal gown seen above. Favas might have seemed too proletarian. They were then and continue to be are the basis for ful medames, that most democratic of Middle Eastern concoctions. Try as one might, one cannot imagine the Marquise chomping on one of the staples of the average Egyptian's diet, though by the Second Empire many Parisians must have heard of the exotic tidibits Napoleon's troops tasted in Egypt.

Egypt may well be the home of favas. We know that the humble vetch became part of Mediterranean diet around 6 000 BCE. For all we know, Cleopatra feasted on ful medames-- cooked fava beans seasoned with oil, garlic, lemon, salt and cumin. We also know that Cleopatra was an elegant woman whose family tree made most French aristocrat's look like a weed. Eating fava beans is a gastronomic a way of absorbing the strength of peasants without whose hard work the elegance of Egyptian and French courts would not have flourished. After all, gardeners are part peasant and part aristocrats, part food growers, part dreamers, part artists. They may be forgiven if they think of antique Egyptian trinkets--little alabaster makeup boxes, turquoise bracelets, carnelian necklaces--when they look at fava blossoms. If they place a drop of Worth's Je Reviens behind their ears prior to weeding the fava beds think not of it as extravagance. Hel Marts, the great equalisers, puts it within reach of the working classes. At the New York Metropolitan Museum all and sundry can see House of Worth gowns. John Frederick, a Lincolnshire lad of the people , would approve.

A friend sent me this link to Benjamin Zander's gig on on TED. Zander is one the foremost interpreters of Mahler and Beethoven. He is the conductor of the Boston Philarmonic and co-author with Rosamund Stone of The Art of Possibility. Enjoy! While you are on TED, do not miss Stephen Hawking in zero g and South African Vusi Mahlasela singing "Thula Mama."

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html

GOOD REASONS TO PLANT A BUTTERFLY GARDEN

These are some of the butterflies that frequent our neck of the woods. The zebra swallowtail is rare and so is the luna moth. Perhaps due to the clumps of mustard I have allowed to grow in sunny areas of the garden, cabbage whites are constant visitors. Monarchs come and go, looking for nectar and I make a note to myself,

"Plant more sedum. Plant milkweed. "

This quote should awaken one's sense of wonder,

"The best known migrating insect is the Monarch Butterfly of North America. These butterflies can fly for up to 3000 km in their lives. They spend the winter in Mexico and in spring they fly north to Canada. On their way the females lay their eggs on milkweed plants."

Above, Daniel Ridgway Knight's Maria on the Terrace
Below, Pan Yuliang's self-portrait.









BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS







A rainy Fourth is as the best time to dive into well-crafted stories. Elizabeth Cody Steiner's The Painter from Shanghai retelling of Pan Yuliang's life. Pan's transformation from foot-bound prostitute--she was sold to a brothel at age fourteen--to self-actualized painter is dramatic enough to inspire a Chinese opera. In did in fact inspire a movie, Soul of a Painter, featuring the ubiquitous Gong Li. But Steiner steer clear of make-believe. Her research into the many stages of that transformation is flawless. She weaves facts deftly, turning Pan's struggle and triumph into an impressive book. Pan's art work itself does not impress me as much as the book does. Her blending of Asian watercolor and western techniques comes off as a badly arranged marriage. Her renderings of the human figure may be laudable efforts, but they seem as lifeless as ancestor portraits. While much of her work in western museums--she left the bulk of her collection, four thousand paintings, to a museum in her hometown--recalls Cezanne, Matisse and other European artists, they are tentative, as if she were trying to find her own voice and failing. It is when she paints flowers that her work comes alive, but compare her paintings to Caillebotte and Berthe Morisot's and the stiff formality of Asian art becomes more painfully apparent, at least to my western eyes.

Floral themes are among most Impressionists' and Post-Impressionists' pictorial legacies, Renoir, who began his career as a china painter, just as Pan Yuliang began her artistic training as an embroiderer, left behind a wealth of flower paintings. Compared to Renoir's Daniel Ridgway Knight's have a sweetness that all but spells out Victorian parlor art. The less-is-more crowd certainly will not give it house and room. I happen to like them very much. They have a slightly overripe quality, much as some of the poems in Housman's A Shropshire Lad, which I have been rereading lately. I happen to like that nearly saccharine fin-de-siecle sensitibility and I like paintings of flowers and gardens almost as much as I like the real thing. Ridgway Knight has an enormous garden in Poissy, forty miles west of Paris. His paintings of local peasants in his garden with the river Seine in the background made him famous all over Europe. Today, he is nearly as Timothy: Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, by Verlyn Klinkerborg has less to do with flowers and much to do with a tortoise, the pet of 18th. Century British natiralist and curate, Gilbert White. Tomothy, who was captured in Turkey, is the narrator in this charming book. Read it and find out what she thinks of our unfortunate species, homosapiens. "...Great tottering beasts." that we are, only slightly less inclined to kill and catalog, to plunder and hoard as our Victorian ancestors did, we have a great deal to learn from this garrulous observer.

WHAT TO DO WITH HALF A DOZEN SMALL FLOWERS

Arrange them in an old egg cup. Place on a footed dish lined with moss and cover it with a glass dome. If you don;t have a dome--mine were a gift--try inverting an old blue Bell jar or a flass bowl over the flowers. Suddenly the little bouquet has stature. It catch the eye and lifts spirits. Seen here are a sicingle yellow nasturtium, four bachelor's buttons and a spig of lavender. Above, half a dozen red and orange Gleam series nasturtiums in a phoenix pattern egg cup.