The Healing Qualities of Beetroot

People have known for some time that raw beetroot is good for you, which is why it is often included in fruit juice mixtures. This is because raw beetroot contains a variety of compounds that improve your health, including betaines, resveratrol and quercetin.

Recently researchers have found that athletes running 1,500 metre trials performed better after drinking raw beetroot juice than athletes who drank raw beetroot juice that had had nitrates removed. The beetroot juice containing nitrates did not work for athletes running long distances.

But perhaps more interesting is the research carried out by Meredith Petrie of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolinas, in 2016, that demonstrates that beetroot juice is good for the brain. He gave beetroot juice (or placebo) to 26 older men (average age 65.4 years) for six weeks. All the men exercised every day during the six week trial. The scientists scanned the brains of the men before and after the trial. They found that the men who drank the beetroot juice had formed more new nerve cell connections than the men who drank the placebo. They formed these new nerve cell connections in an area of the brain that controls motor signals to the muscles.

The researchers concluded that the people taking beetroot juice with exercise had brain networks that were more like those of younger adults.

References

Larsen FJ, Weitzberg E et al. Effects of dietry nitrate on oxygen cost during exercise. Acta Physiol. 2007; 191 (1):59-66.
Petrie M et al. Beetroot juice: An ergongenic aid for exercise and the aging brain. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2016. doi: 10. 1093/gerona/glw219.

Mural in San Frediano, Florence

Piazza Tasso, San Frediano, Florence

Mural in Piazza Tasso

Bollo was a young man living in the San Frediano quarter of Florence, who died of an overdose. The local people painted a mural in his memory. Then one night a man came (apparently he was German and apparently someone took a photo of him) and painted grey paint over the mural with a roller on a long stick. He completely covered the whole mural.

A few days later the local people came back and and repainted the mural, following the lines of the original mural that showed faintly through the grey paint. Hundred of local people gathered in the piazza to watch the group of artists working on the mural, to encourage them and praise the finished work.

I asked one of them "Did everyone like Bollo?"

"Yes" he said, "very much." 

Visit to the Medici Park of Pratolino

In 1568 Francis de Medici, the grand Duke of Tuscany, asked Bernardo Buontalenti to design a villa and garden park for him on the hills north of Florence, where he could spend amorous time with his mistress. Buontalenti designed a fabulous palace, filled with grottoes, fountains, rivulets and pools, all supplied with water by an ingenious system of underground pipes and pumps. Buontalenti built grottoes and water features both inside the palace and throughout the park, statues spouting water, fish breeding in tanks, pools and streams. Francis held parties that were theatrical performances, all over the park, in amongst the trees and in the palace itself, with fire jugglers, fire sculptures intermingling with the water features and performers in outlandish costumes.

The very water features that made the palace and park enchanting ended up rotting the building so that it was eventually destroyed. Tantalising traces of the old water system still exist in the park, together with some of the old statues, now no longer sprouting water from fingers or toes.

The Appenine Colossus by Gianbologna

Buontalenti commissioned some of the best sculptors, such as Gianbologna, to create the many sculptures that adorned the park for Duke Francis. Over the centuries many of these sculptures were removed and transported to the Boboli gardens in Florence. But the Appenine Colossus, perhaps because it was too big to move, remained in the park. Originally Gianbologna sculpted it with a hollow interior filled with water features and surrounded by a fake mountain. In 1818 Joseph Frietsch was commissioned to redesign Pratolino. The park was turned into an English style garden. 

Statue of Jupiter holding lightning

La Maschera statue by the overgrown fish pond

In 1872 the Russian prince Paolo Demidoff bought the park and transformed the servants' quarters into villa Demidoff. He uncovered the Maschera statue, which had been covered in earth and dug out the pond. 

La Locanda, an old building from before Buontalenti's time.

This building was used as a carriage house and lodging for people travelling by carriage along the via Bolognese, the old road from Florence to Bologna. Later it was transformed into lodging for workers in the factories where sails and rope where manufactured. Today the ground floor is a restaurant and bar, while the first floor is used for meetings. 

Visit to Il Calicanto Florence

In the grounds of this wonderful restaurant, Chalet Fontana, in Florence, there is a vegetable garden where all the vegetables and fruit are grown biodynamically in raised beds.

There are flowers in among the vegetables and fruit and in another part of the green, sloping field flowers grow in pots for sale to the public. The Calicanto vegetable garden supplies the restaurant with fresh, healthy biodynamic vegetables. And no I didn't eat in the restaurant or even have a glass of wine in the bar - just a glass of water. But I did enjoy looking at the vegetable garden and talking to the gardeners.

Visit to the Herbarium at Kew Gardens

Wax model of an orchid

This weekend is Open London weekend, a time when all sorts of places not normally open to the public allow people to visit. I chose to visit the herbarium at Kew, a magnificent eighteenth century building with a high ceiling and a spiral staircase painted glossy red at one end that leads to the balconies stacked one above the other on either side of the room. These balconies house the upper layers of the collection in white painted floor to ceiling cupboards that jut out from the wall, forming internal walls which end abruptly just before the edge of the balconies. 

 Wax model of an orchid

When I visited the herbarium twenty five years ago I was taken up the staircase to meet some of the old retired botanists who devoted their free time to the classification of specimens in the collection. Each man (for they were all men) sat  at a table between the cupboards, busy with his magnifying glass, pencils and paper. The whole building was suffused with a quiet air of concentration. This time I was in the midst of a group of people led by a Kew Garden expert botanist, all eagerly asking questions. There was no question of ascending the spiral staircase or meeting the old retired botanists.

The people working in Kew are seriously concerned about the tragic loss of plant species, for their work is to name and classify the world's plants. In addition to this they are actively engaged in plant and ecosystem conservation. 

Botanists from Kew are constantly discovering new plant species. It's very important that they collect specimens of these new plants, which they preserve in a press, together with a detailed description of the exact place where they find them.

I'm afraid I didn't manage to get the whole title in. It says 

28,187 plant species are currently recorded as being of medicinal use. 

https://stateoftheworldsplants.com/2017/useful-plants.html

In many parts of the world, especially rural Africa and South America, people still rely on plant medicine. In 2016 the Chinese government, who recognise the importance of plant based medicine, 

announced that they intended to incorporate Traditional Chinese Medicine into their healthcare system by 2020. In 2003 the World Health Organisation estimated that the annual global market for herbal medicines is worth sixty billion dollars. In China 10,000-11,250 plant species are used as medicine but only 563 are listed in the Chinese Pharmacopeia. Botanists at Kew are involved with the conservation of medicinal plants.

Summer Fruit

In the summer when the farm was bursting with cherries, strawberries, raspberries, black currants, red currants and plums my father used to bring boxes of fruit into the kitchen, so my mother was obliged to do something with it. She made huge saucepans of jam, using the same jam jars over and over again. This was not jam that you would recognise, nice, thick, spreadable jam, but rather thin, runny, over sweet jam that soaked into the bread, as long as you hadn’t spread too much margarine or butter on it, in which case it slid off onto the plate.  

“I make the jam runny” she said “to stop your father eating half a pot full on one slice of bread.” 

Dreaming of Fruit

I've been dreaming of fruit ever since Autumn began, which was half way through August this year, the ripening fruit dropping from trees onto foot paths, gardens, lawns and fields; such a bountiful harvest and so early that it caught us unawares. Yes I've been foraging every day for weeks now, but that's not enough to keep up with the wonderful crop that nature has decided to bestow on us this year. Last week I met a friend who begged me to come and pick some of his fruit. "I've got apples, pears, peaches and figs" he said. "Just come and help yourself, whether we're in or not." And so I persuaded someone to take me there in a car, plastic bags stuffed in my pockets. We left with bagfuls of fruit, enormous figs, juicy and ripe, tiny peaches, not ripe at all but fallen from the tree, and beautiful red apples. The pear tree was too tall for us. There was a net hanging strategically under the pear tree but we couldn't reach the fruit that had fallen into it. 

Foraging

I love foraging, especially this time of the year, when the hedges are bursting with fruit: blackberries, elderberries, sloes and hazelnuts. Apples drop from unowned trees, even from trees that belong to people who forget to pick them. I'm out with my containers, collecting glistening piles of blackberries, bagfuls of bruised apples to make into blackberry and apple pies, puddings and tarts: sacks of elderberries to add to my blackberries and apples to make hedgerow puddings, or to stew down to make elderberry juice for its healing properties. Elderberry juice (well cooked) will prevent you getting colds, coughs and flu and help to alleviate stress.

Earlier in the year I was collecting fallen plums and stewing them to make jam, carefully sieving out the stones and skins. Later in the year I will collect rose hips when they are soft and ripe and gently sweat them in a pan on a low heat, then sieve out the hairy pips through muslin and make a syrup for the winter when we need all the vitamin C we can get. Rosehips also have healing properties, helping arthritic joints become more flexible.

When we lived in Italy we went foraging for mushrooms: the yellow finferli, the wonderful porcini that the professional mushroom hunters almost always found first, getting up before dawn to climb the mountain slopes through the forests to the places where they knew they would find them. But we found many others that we knew were edible, carrying them home to clean off the pine needles and earth carefully with a soft cloth, before cooking them, each different type in a different way, some dipped in batter and fried, some fried in butter with parsley and garlic, some stewed slowly in olive oil and salt. But here in England I don't find them so often. Maybe I don't live near to the best places to find them and my foraging is all strictly within walking distance of my house. It's something I do almost on a daily basis this time of the year. There is something infinitely satisfying about finding and cooking wild food and sharing it with appreciative guests and neighbours.