Grape Harvest

I have a grape vine in front of my house, which provides dappled shade during hot days in the summer, not that we had many of those this year, but whose leaves fall in the Autumn, letting the winter sun through to warm us on frosty days. Last year a blackbird sat on the grape vine, eating the grapes and dribbling grape juice down the window, leaving long, sticky trails. This year the blackbird is gone, killed by pesticides? died of old age? and the grapes hung blackly from the vine, inviting us to pick them. They were very high up, so Manuel climbed the step ladder and dropped the grapes into the big, plastic bowl that I held below him.

I began squeezing the grapes through a sieve into a bowl. After an hour I had a bottle full of juice. There seemed just as many grapes in the big white bowl. I'll have to think of another way to do this!

Opera

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

I went to the Opera exhibition at the V and A museum, an exhibition that tries to cover the history of opera, far to large a subject for the time and space available. The museum has used clever techie stuff to beam the appropriate piece of music into the headphones of the person looking at a particular piece of information, picture or video, as they walk round. I was left desperately wanting to go to the opera to see something by Puccini, Verdi or Mozart's Magic Flute.

My first visit to the opera was in Paris, when my father took me to stay with his diamond merchant friends, who took us all to see Carmen. We walked into a warm, womb-like semi circular space, with plush red seats and red walls lined with boxes where the wealthy sat in glorious isolation. There was a low murmur of conversation and a rustle of programme pages turning as we walked to our seats. I was shivering with excitement, just listening to the orchestra in the pit tuning up and when the music began I was ecstatic. This was the beginning of a life long love of opera.

Later, when I was a music student, I used to hitch hike to London and go straight to Covent Garden to pick up a ticket to the opera from the box office, left there by my Uncle. I would sit in my scruffy student clothes in the back row, entranced by the music.

In my early twenties, when I went to live in Ferrara, Italy, some friends took me to the opera. Every town in Italy has an opera house and every opera house is full when they perform the well loved Italian operas. On this cold, foggy night the good people of Ferrara dressed up in their best clothes and glittering jewellery, then milled about in the foyer, chattering, the women inspecting each others dresses.

Once the orchestra struck up everyone quieted down until the first aria, when they sang along with the soloist. They burst into applause when it ended and demanded that the aria be repeated. This was nothing like the rapt silent concentration of the British audience in Covent Garden. Throughout that opera in Ferrara the audience sang along with the soloists, who frequently had to repeat their arias.

The last time I went to the opera was in Gran Canaria, where I could afford a restricted view ticket, four years ago. The performance was surprisingly good, with excellent soloists, fabulous costumes and scenery and even some wonderful dancers.

Autumn Harvest

It's time to harvest the pumpkins, before the first frost. Some of them were so big this year that I had to transport them in a wheelbarrow. It took two journeys. On the way to the allotment I met Jane
"Where on earth shall I put my pumpkins," I asked her.
"I keep mine on the stairs," she told me "because that's the coolest place in the house.
"Oh dear. My staircase leads up from the front door, which is glass and south facing."
In the end I cleaned all the mud off them and lined them up along the bottom of the patio door. My poor lodger now has to contend with pumpkins by the place where he sits to eat his evening meal and calendula, elecampane and bean seeds drying out on the kitchen table.

Maria Sibylla Merian 1647-1717 Botanical Artist

Musa Serapionis   Banana   

"It is used like an apple and has a pleasant taste, just as apples have in Holland."

Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfurt, Germany, developed a fascination with the life cycles of insects as a child. By 1679 she had combined her talents as an artist with her interest in insect life in her first book - The Caterpillar's Wondrous Metamorphosis and Extraordinary Nourishment from Flowers, an ecological depiction of insect and plant life, centuries before the science of ecology was defined. 

When her marriage broke up in 1685 she went to join a protestant community in the Netherlands. When missionaries returned from the Dutch colony of Suriname, South America, she was captivated by the beautiful plants and insects they brought back with them. 

Pallisaden Boom  Palisade tree

Erythrina fusca ( Fabacae)  Coral bean

"When the flower has fallen off the branch rises upwards, the seed case becoming like a stable broom. The inhabitants also use them instead of brooms."

In 1691 Merian and her daughters moved to Amsterdam and made a living giving painting lessons and selling watercolours. The Dutch natural history community commissioned her to paint the specimens in their collections. In 1699 she took her youngest daughter with her on an expedition to Suriname to paint plant and insect life for two years. She had her Suriname paintings engraved  to form a book that was sold by subscription because of the immense cost to print it.  The first edition of 'Transformation of the Surinamese Insects' was completed in 1705 and contained 60 plates, hand coloured by Merian and her daughters. 

She was exceptionally independent for her time and produced important, ground breaking work.

The captions include the Dutch or Latin name used by Merian, the current Latin binomial and the standardised common name as well as an English translation of her description from the 2016 facsimile of the 1705 edition of Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.

As a woman Merian could not join a painters' guild in Europe and therefore did not have access to oil paints, so she painted with water colours.