From yesterday, in the posting “nostalgie du ciel’, from an exchange with Hana Filip about nostalgia, with a reference to (from my father, long ago):
guidebooks [to Alpine flowers], including a Swiss one with gorgeous color plates. Which are now inestimable sources of delight but also symbols of great loss. As you say, nostalgia.
Now, an inventory of my postings about the one with those marvelous illustrations.
Yesterday on this blog — in the posting “Merest note” — I whined about, among other things, the incredibly tedious task of getting books organized in my new digs. Hana Filip’s comment on Facebook about my dismay evoked a complex moment of nostalgia for me:
— HF: I find it hard organizing, discarding all kinds of documents, books, letters from the past. Occasionally, there are wonderful surprises because I remember lovely things that I should have remembered, but forgot, but mostly it makes me nostalgic and sad.
Yesterday (in “A new leaf”) I reported on moving house, ending with
so, so tired — bone-exhausted — but extremely far from settled in [at Avant, my new place], just enough to take my meds and eat some food. Barely able to speak anymore. … Now it’s nap or pass out.
But I digressed long enough to comment on the pleasures that a wall of windows affords me, among them
… a beautiful big tree filling much of the space just outside my window
I then had one of the world’s great midday naps, long and deep, an immensely satisfying kaleidoscopic story dream with an astounding sound track. I was then equipped to get through the rest of it, during which I was unable to work through any of the routines of my daily life without strokes of great error, utter confusion, and incomprehensible ignorance. But persevered.
Meanwhile the number of things I have embarked on posting about has soared towards the triple digits (meaning that I will fail at a lot of it and will have to learn to live with that). But persevere. Have even experienced some periods of calm (while panic and despair clamor at my door) in which I appreciate simple pleasures. Like that tree.
(To the memory of Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, who was born Ann Walcutt Daingerfield on 5/9/1937. Her favorite flower was the Japanese iris and her least favorite holiday was (US) Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May.)
Found almost everywhere in today’s walk with my helper Isaac around a few blocks south of my house: a pretty plant growing in clumps, with narrow leaves, and at the tips of stalks, modest yellow (occasionally white) iris-like (but flat) flowers, with three petals and three sepals:
(#1) The flower of the month
Some digging around got it identified as the (yellow) African iris, Dietes bicolor. An excellent plant.
Three plants — all old favorites of mine — that have recently caught my helper Isaac’s attention on our walks around downtown Palo Alto: two because of their striking foliage and flowers, one because its multitude of yellow flowers seem to thrive everywhere, even in the most unlikely wastelands. Then the first two have remarkable — and, alas, similar — names: acanthus, agapanthus. While all three have odd common names: bear’s breeches / britches, lily of the Nile (not a lily, and from South Africa, far from the Nile), daylily (again, not a lily — and why day?).
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate the month of May — Mayday celebrating labor, spring (new growth, rebirth, fertility), and romance, in a variety of ways (parades, dancing, maypoles, bonfires, public displays of affection)
From Hana Filip on Facebook this morning:
May 1: Workers’ Labo(u)r Day (international) and the day of (romantic) love celebration (a kind of Valentine Day on May 1 in the Czech Republic). Two seemingly incompatible ideas. Karel Čapek sees a connection between the two: “It is love that wreaked / inflicted on us life and all its travails … and so, dear friends, on Workers’ Labour Day we must talk about (romantic) love.” [AZ: Čapek coined robot ‘humanoid machine’ from Czech robota ‘forced labor’]
Yesterday (4/14), my helper Isaac and I took a walk around the block (Ramona to Forest to Emerson to Homer and back to Ramona), taking advantage of the end of days of rain. Officially we were visiting the oregano plant on Emerson St. (see my 4/14 posting “Things I didn’t know”, in the section on “a labiate plant with fleshy leaves”), but we traversed a largely changed scene: the cat’s-claw creeper on the arbor over my entry was coming to the end of its 4 or so days of bloom; the calla lilies on Ramona St. had finished their days of blooming and dropped their flowers; the rose bushes in Forest Ave. that were all buds before the rain were now a solid mass of beautiful single white roses; there were big passion-flowers on Emerson St.; and the Chinese elms on Homer Ave., totally bare on our last walk, had fully leafed out in green, turning a whole block into a pleasantly shaded path.
And on the street strip on Forest, a bunch of bare 4-foot sticks had been transformed into a dense display of bright-white dogwood blossoms. Much like these:
Things I probably should have known, but didn’t, and have just recently discovered: one linguistic (on a pronunciation in BrE), one botanical (on the identity of a plant growing on the street a block from my house).
A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A penultimate shot of the developing scene:
(#1) A festival of spring flowers and cressheads
Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house). I noted how tough the plants were (with some moisture, they grow ferociously, and their stems are naturally coated with silica, so that the stems can actually be used to scour pots and pans). Unfortunately, I forgot the evocative names of the plant — common name horsetail, botanical name Equisetum (Latin for ‘horse bristle’) — or the significant fact that the plants had neither flowers nor seeds because (like ferns) they were modern plants surviving in much the same form as their ancestors from prehistoric times, before the invention of sex in plants, and produced spores rather than seeds.
An impressive stand, in the wild, of the species Isaac and I rested by at Joe and the Juice, Equisetum hyemale:
The prehistoric plants included gigantic horsetail trees
