Interlude … Tamarisk, Old Man’s Beard … last of the summer …

 

Walking down to the lonely sea and sky, as the last of the summer unwound – before being brutally interrupted with the almost unannounced coming of an early winter … perhaps rough autumn would be a better description of the much needed torrents of rain and hail we had here …

Old Man's Beard

 … the hedgerows bubbled over with Old Man’s Beard and waving crusted salt cedar heather-coloured Tamarisk fronds …

 … gorgeous sight to the eyes framing the English Channel, with its rocky shore guarded by pebble embedded groynes …

 

Tamarisk fronds

I’ve been reading about Linnaeus … the great naturalist and taxonomer (Carl Linnaeus (1707-78), who invented the system of giving all living organisms two Latin names.

 

It was he who gave Tamarix Gallica, the French Tamarisk, its botanical classification in 1753, while it had been in cultivation since 1596.

 

Gaz Nougat from Isfahan, Iran

How do they know: I guess recorded as such … though, to me, of more surprise is that its juice is an ingredient for Gaz – a Persian nougat delicacy from Isfahan, central Iran.  (White nougat is delicious … )

 

Old Man’s Beard … what a name … for our only native clematis (Clematis vitalba), which in folk lore is also known as the baccy plant – not something I’d heard of before …

 

Looking down towards the seashore

… I spotted this (to me) anomaly when I read an article by one of our broadcasters, Monty Don, … known as ‘the nation’s gardener’ … he’d learnt as a kid from ‘an old boy’, a farm labourer, that Old Man’s Beard stems could be smoked, after they were peeled, showing the confined woody tubes, which could then be lit …

  

… bliss … the two kids could loaf with a smoke  under a hedge mulling over their future … before they became old enough for a proper ‘straight’ – as cigarettes were called.

 

Cuban cigar - showing rolls

It seems that once technology in the 1880s caught up … affording a packet of cigarettes led to smokers rejecting roll-ups.  Over the next 100 years we know what happened … yet in War needs must and at times the poor resorted to finding other ways to have a smoke.

I’m using this ‘interlude’ to post some photos before the ‘rough autumn’ really sets in … and to see if I can control Blogger – at least enough to not cause me any more ill-dressed posts … which I do not like!

 

Virginia Creeper turning - early September

As you might expect I couldn’t but help but add a few anecdotes in to the post … my mother, who would have been 100 in a couple of weeks, told me about this plant as we drove my grandmother around the lanes of Cornwall in the early 1970s …

 

… the other garden plant names I mainly remember by that osmosis of youth – growing up … but Old Man’s Beard (or Traveller’s Joy, as it was also known) has always stuck in my memory – as my Ma’s hedgerow plant.

 

One of the many paths going
down towards the sea

 

Here’s to a positive ending to this post … we shall see … as long as I centralise the photos 'we're' ok ... for today that will do ... the next one will be the last of my London visits - to the Tutankhamun exhibition: it was wonderful!

 

Hilary Melton-Butcher

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