Tradescantia, pedal pushers, and Rx victory

Yesterday finally, after eight days of back and forth and checking and pushing, and my referring eye doctor, not the one who was supposed to call in the Rx,  sternly telling me to keep calm (!) the Rx finally arrived. 

At least two of the three did, one back-ordered. So I can start breathing again. After this the actual procedure will probably be a lot less stressful. Anyway, so far so good. Handsome Son will pick up the stuff. 

This is also showing up in the groundcover, lovely spiderwort, aka tradescantia virginiana

Sparks of brilliant blue flowers. It's one of those flowers, like daylilies, you can either spot everywhere growing wild, or buy and plant. It's also one of many discoveries aka thefts, from the New World, made by John Tradescant, here

I love how solemnly they say he's the father of JT jr !  Anyway I'm glad the namers acknowledged Virginia in the name since that's where he plundered it from, back when Europeans thought the Americas were there for their browsing benefit, rather than the native land of ancient peoples.

And yesterday, largely as displacement activity before the arrival of the text about the Rx, I finally did one of those jobs you think about for months, nay, years,  then polish off in twenty minutes.

These are supposedly capris, but on arrival turned out to be more like high waters, brushing the top of my socks. I've been wearing them while planning to fix them.

Simple enough. Cut off several inches, hemmed up, done.  Much more useful now.

Then I finished the second sock of, I think, Pair Seventeen, did the finishing, and started sorting colors for the next. 

These have  shaker stitch tops, and an elastic insert to keep the shape,  so it doesn't stretch out in use.

I always mean to take an interval between pairs but once the needles are vacant suddenly need to fill them again.

A passage from The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas in progress, struck me as so applicable to studying the technique of art

It's about  familiarizing yourself with any artwork in order to really experience it.

I know writers who make a practice of writing out passages of favorite authors just for the insight into how they did it. It's done to learn, not imitate, like playing scales to develop finger expertise.

I've done it by copying Picasso drawings just to get into the vision and it's very demanding. You come away with such respect for the artist. Even copying is demanding, imagine conceptualizing in the first place. 

During the Fischer Spassky chess tournament, the games were published as played and Handsome Partner and I, chess players back then, replayed them as they came out, marveling at the insight and anticipation of each player. We were plumb wore out just replaying, never mind doing the actual original thinking.

Copying art for learning now and then is fine, but not for thinking you're making art. The art, all its life and energy, lies in the maker's original concept.  

Dusting off the teaching soapbox now and retiring it to the corner of the stable where my hobby horses live.

Maybe I'll stitch a bit of my vest while listening to a Mrs Pargeter audiobook today

I love Mrs Pargeter, so funny, and the cast of characters never fails. 

Art also, never fails to keep a person on the rails. Drawing, the guardrail of daily life.

Happy day everyone! Grateful for guardrails and the ability to know they're there.

Soup, bread, and botanical history

Any break in the hot weather, and I can make soup.  So this week it was asparagus, broccoli and red lentil soup, using spearmint pesto. I really recommend spearmint as a flavoring in this soup, light, springlike, and very good. But you have to use farm fresh asparagus and broccoli.  And if you have any spearmint growing, you probably have too much anyway, plenty for making pesto.

Then, to go with, hot biscuits with walnuts and golden raisins, using half and half ap and wholewheat flour. Which makes these halfwheat biscuits, I guess..sorry, couldn't resist.

Then out in the patio, history and botany continues. I noticed a lovely little three petaled flower, blue, growing happily uninvited among the ground cover, and added it in to a pot on the fence, then noticed that the uninvited plant in there was the same thing. And  it was growing out of the drainage holes of the pot as well as upward.  

Turns out it's spiderwort, tradescantia virginiana, which pleased me no end.  For one thing, it spurred me on to find that this is a relative of the other tradescantia, the stripy one I grow as a houseplant, equally vigorous grower.  And the wild one is native to here, must have come with my long ago seeding of wildflowers.

The name is in honor of John Tradescant and his son of the same name, English botanists and plantsmen of the sixteenth century, who went through all sorts of hair raising adventures in search of plants to bring back from all over the world to English gardens. Including trips to the then English colony in Virginia.  Nowadays we look a bit more sceptically on moving plants out of their native habitats, but the Tradescants are still worth reading up, if botanical history appeals to you.

I'm a purist on moving plants, having turned down offers of cuttings from other states so that we don't inadvertently bring in more trouble than they're worth.  Also I like growing the native plants where I can, much less tiring to go with nature than against her. 

I noticed in the farmer's market recently, gooseberries on sale, and wondered how come, since it's illegal to plant gooseberries in NJ.  I had gooseberry bushes in the old house, but they had been there for decades, probably grandfathered in before the legislation.

The reason is that the white pine, a very tall, straight, tree, useful for all kinds of things, is a major product of the state. Yes, I know people only think of oil cracking plants near the airport, but this is the Garden State.  Anyway, gooseberry is a carrier of the white pine blister rust, a deadly disease, so they have to protect the white pine by banning the gooseberry.

If you've ever picked gooseberries, you have experienced the dagger like thorns protecting the fruit, which run right up under your nail as you pick, ow.  Birds probably have even worse trouble, their eyes being in direct contact, so gooseberries are typically left alone, in my experience.

Back to the garden, I don't like shopping for plants, though I have to buy herb plants, but the ornamentals I'd rather go from local cuttings and divisions and my own seeds.  I do have neighbors who only want the fullgrown plants, in flower.  For them it's more like home decor, for me it's more like what I think of as gardening, I guess. Such as the neighbor who got pachysandra, groundcover, from me, and complained after a week that it hadn't spread to cover the area yet, I must have given her bad plants!!

At a meeting last night of the artists' collective, I was reminded again that in art, too, there are shoppers and makers. People who buy materials and frames all the time, and people who try to make their own tools and materials.  Different strokes.