A Dying Breed
My first introduction to ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ was through Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of World. It was the wonderful roll of the name that struck me, aged seven or eight, for it seemed nothing like the anonymous cooking apples that grew in the garden (pictured) or the usual South African supermarket fare, which offered a choice of ‘Granny Smith’, ‘Golden Delicious’ and ‘red ones’.
I’m sure, however, that ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ is to be found in Britain’s National Fruit Collections on Brogdale Farm, Kent. Over 2 000 varieties of apple are grown there, yet Kent’s orchards have been reduced by over 85 per cent in the past 50 years, as Lara Barton explains in this poignant video clip in today’s Guardian online.
How many varieties of apple does one find in British supermarkets today? The variety is greater than that of my southern childhood, but I can think of only five or six, at most.
I expect the fall in number is a matter of commercial expedience combined with consumer demand, yet there is something to be said for a good apple with crunch and taste. It’s one of life’s finer things.
Last weekend I made a fruit tart – I say fruit, rather than apple, since I’d insufficient ‘Bramley’ apples and so topped up the filling with pears. The scent of a buttery case crisping in the oven and of the fruit collapsing in a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg and honey while the kitchen windows steamed up against the cold outside was delightful. With all the ghouls and beasties on loose, it was a reassuring way to pass Halloween.
Spring Forward; Fall Back
The clocks went back here last week but I’ve yet to change the time on my mobile phone. It’s not through negligence. Oh no. It is, in fact, a cunning plan through which I hope to deceive myself into going to bed at a more reasonable hour and waking earlier, in the hope of achieving a head start on the day.
Does it sound desperate? Probably. Admit me to the Maudsley if you wish; I do not care, since so far it’s working rather well, especially so in the mornings when, half asleep, I look at the phone and think, ‘Oh, goodness! It’s eight-thirty. Get-up-get-up-get-up’.
The shower is usually turned on by the time the cogs have turned sufficiently for me realise I’m an hour ahead, by which moment it’s too late – I’m out of bed.
Holy Cow
Ha! I knew I had a picture of a south Indian cow somewhere (see yesterday’s post) and after rummaging through my files found this one, which was taken in Mysore. Cute, isn’t she?
There is something rather flattering about a friendly cow and being able to pat one is the cherry on top, since they usually amble away or shake their heads before you reach them. I distinctly recall patting a similar but much more decorated cow in Mumbai – it left me with a charming deposit of saliva, cud and indigo- and magenta-coloured dye all over my arm for the rest of the day. Not what one expects from a well-intentioned scratch behind the ears. It does however bring me to this picture, also from Mysore:
And this one, from the market in that city:
Shoreditched-based designer Ella Doran has, I think, used a similar but better picture of bangles to good effect on a tray or cushion cover. I love the exquisite place mats, blinds, cushion covers, mugs and such she produces, and her shop is worth a visit. If you can’t travel all the way to east London, read her blog here.
Finally, just because I can, a garland maker in Pondicherry:
Happy Diwali, Everyone
The Hindu festival of light, Diwali, starts today. I used this as reason to walk along Tooting High Road last night to buy gulab jamen and a piece of almond and pistachio burfi from one of the sweet shops in what feels like microcosm of the Subcontinent.
Ok, so the sweetmaker was actually Pakistani, Muslim and keen to discuss the ascent of Western culture in Lahore, but the Diwali sentiment was there.
He explained that because cows are sacred in southern India, buffalo milk, rather than cow’s milk, is used to make sweets there. Does anyone know if that’s true? There are undoubtedly plenty of buffalo in southern India but I’ve never heard of that before. In Pakistan, obviously, it isn’t an issue.
He also muttered about the poor quality milk in England; poor man, he must be missing home.
I didn’t have my camera with me so no pictures of burfi. Instead, this one of a woman leaving an offering in the most important of Hindu sites, the Sri Meenakshi temple in Madurai, India. William Dalrymple wrote an elegant piece about it in the The Age of Kali. Do read it if you have a chance.
Kew Sights
To Kew a few days ago. It was falling leaves, squirrels manically preparing for hibernation, a woodpecker or two, chestnuts on the ground, long shadows – and these Rudbeckia, some of the last flowers to leave the summer party. They remind me a little of young celebs exiting West End clubs at three in the morning, the pictures of which one sees in the free-sheets, only the flowers wear their smudged mascara and crumpled dresses rather more elegantly.
And this detail on the outside of the Temperate House:
The angle is peculiar because, being shorter rather than taller, I was looking up at it. A step ladder might have been useful but who wants to lug a step ladder around Kew when there are important things like lemon drizzle cake to be had in the tea room.
Export Quality
Very pleased to see that the new Anthropologie store – it’s an American chain, it’s ok not to say shop, I think – on Regent Street is almost complete. I can’t wait for it to open, especially since one of my favourite ceramicists, Mick Haigh, has been working like mad since March to complete an order for it.
Mick lives with his wife, Sally, and young son in a hamlet surrounded by exquisite hills tattooed with forest and farmland in the depths of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, South Africa. He works from a tiny wattle-and-daub studio that he built at the bottom of the garden with his son and, if you look carefully, you can see their handprints on the mud walls of the building.
It’s about as close to stardom as anyone in the valley wants to get: property rarely comes up for sale and, if you didn’t know where you were going, you could miss the turn-off to the cluster of houses and paddocks and carry on driving for forty or fifty kilometres, before reaching a dead-end at the foot of the Drakensberg mountains without seeing anyone except, perhaps, a Zulu herdsman on horseback.
Yet over the past few years Mick’s ceramics have beaten a path from that tiny studio to the local post office and to the world beyond: Cape Town, Johannesburg, New York, Paris, Eindhoven, Stavanger, and now Regent Street.
In the small cafe Sally runs in the nearest village there is, propped up against some of some of Mick’s pieces, a note from Terence Conran inviting him to dinner, although Mick, I expect, would be happiest left to make pots in the valley.
“I work with mud: pale mud, dark mud, any kind of mud. I’ve never planned anything – it’s just kind of happened for me,” he told me in an interview I wrote for House and Garden magazine earlier this year. I think it’s an example of globalisation at its best.
So long, Sugar
A week or two ago I attended an Economist-hosted debate about the kinds of energy cars will be running on in the future. I drafted a post, made some weak joke about the lifespan of the back-seat snog – cars, especially electric ones, are expected to become smaller in order to meet emissions targets – and then abandoned it. Who really wants to read heavy material about hydrogen, biofuels and batteries in their leisure time anyway? And besides, I wasn’t sure if it was in the remit of this blog, which is supposed to be beautiful and uplifting.
This morning I changed my mind after reading a piece in the Guardian on the soaring price of sugar. You’ll know that, along with palm oil, sugar is a key biofuel, an energy source that at the debate Graham Sweeney, executive-vice president for Future Fuels and CO2 at Shell, maintained could be a major oil-replacement for cars. Countering him somewhat vociferously was Doug Parr, chief scientist and policy director for Greenpeace, who expressed concern about the increased risk of further deforestation in accommodating new palm oil plantations.
All well and good but no-one seemed to mention the weather and the effects of climate change, although I’m sure it was on the minds of many people there. Having grown up in a farming community, I know that it’s a brave person who tries to make a living off the land by gambling with the weather. An extra couple of months of rain or drought can ruin several years’ work and can cost a fortune. And that’s one farmer feeding his cows by drawing upon generations of received wisdom in a climate we understand. How about this, from that piece I read:
There are some solid underlying reasons for the upward lurch in the price of raw sugar. Heavy rain has disrupted milling in the world’s largest producer of sugar, Brazil, where a sizeable portion of sugarcane has been diverted from food use into ethanol fuel. Meanwhile the biggest consumer of sugar, India, has had a dismal monsoon season and has gone from being a net exporter of sugar to an importer.
“The key premise has really come from Brazil and India,” said Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, a commodities analyst at Barclays Capital. “The bulk of the problem lies in inclement weather conditions.”
I’m not an energy expert and perhaps I’ve missed something, but it’s alarming and somewhat unbelievable that an energy company with tremendous muscle is prepared to attach crucial energy production to something as inconstant as farming in a changing climate.
This is quite apart from the issue of food availability: if we can’t distribute it evenly now, what chance have we in the future if energy and food are competing for the same limited arable land?
You can read the full Guardian article here.
Wallflowers
Beautiful wallpaper from Camilla Meijer, a super designer whom I met at 100% Design last week. Camilla aims to bring the outdoors inside, which, in case you were wondering, is not about wearing muddy boots on a thick pile carpet but is rather interiors-speak for introducing natural elements to decorating schemes.
Semantics aside, I love the fact that she draws inspiration from walks through London’s parks and gardens before drawing up her designs by hand.
I am astounded by the way plants and flowers find a way to flourish in such an enormous urban setting like London. London is a wonderfully green city thanks to the parks and other green spaces, but people’s gardens and other unexpected places produce yet more beautiful examples of flora. Everywhere I look I seem to find inspiration. I capture these images I see around me and use them to create my work.
Sky High
When I lived in Durban, South Africa, I was always intrigued by the speed at which plants would take root on buildings. Once I pulled from a roof gutter a fair-sized schefflera that was growing in the leaf litter there; elsewhere figs stealthily wrapped their roots around drains, pipes and brickwork in a process that was at once about decay and renewal.
On the other side of the world in New York, the same thing happened on a railway line last used in the 1980s. Called the High Line, the track was built to transport wholesale goods through Manhattan. It’s distinguishing feature was that it was above ground, elevated so carriages, cars and pedestrians could pass freely beneath it. When trucks superceded trains as the favoured mode of transport and the last cargo – Christmas turkeys – was delivered, the line was all but forgotten.
That is, until some locals began to mutter about it being an eyesore. In the intervening years, 25 in all, wind and small animals such as birds, bats and rodents brought seeds to the abandoned space. Leaves fell. Dust blew in. Water collected. In time plants took root in nooks and crevices between the tracks; they died, decomposed and formed humus which begets soil. More plants grew and in this no-man’s land of concrete and steel a green lung began to flourish on its accord. Some graffiti artists moved in. I expect it provided great habitat for urban wildlife but you can see why the locals didn’t like it.
The area was all set to be pulled down when it was rescued by a group called Friends of the High Line and was redesigned and replanted with species inspired by the self-seeded varieties that had grown there originally.
Piet Oudolf – one of my favourite garden designers and one known for informal, textural planting – was behind part of it. I expect it’s too early for an October Bloom List to have been put up but the September Bloom List , which you can find on the Friends site, is extensive and includes everything from echinacea to something called rattlesnake master to sweet black-eyed Susan.
On Saturday BBC News called the High Line ‘a masterclass in urban renewal, a kind of “strip-prairie” through the heart of the urban jungle’. Parts of it are still under construction but when it’s complete it will be a mile and a half long, running through the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen.
Access points will include stairs and lifts – expect you’d need to call them elevators out there – and the plans include plenty of places to sit and watch the world go by. It sounds fabulous and I can’t wait to see it myself one day, although when I do I’ll be sure not to pluck anything out of any gutter.
Pics copyright Clare Hambly.
On Yer Bike
Small diversion from the plants here – an uplifting, if possibly simplistic, video clip from Good about the effect of fair trade and appropriate aid on a Rwandan coffee-growing community. Instead of carrying heavy bags of coffee on their heads, farmers now transport them on specially adapted bicycles.
To Western readers, $120 for a bike might not sound like much but I expect it’s at least several months’ salary for some of those farmers. The CIA World Fact Book says 60 per cent of Rwandans live on less than $1.25 a day. What do we pay for semi-skimmed latte in London or New York? $3?
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