Plantastic Voyage

I'm back in San Pancho with two new behaviors that I'm sure followed me home from Italy. It's like having a couple of stray dogs around the house who beg incessantly and refuse to lie down and rest.

The first behavior is, I can't seem to stop cooking. Visions of cacio e pepe and osso buco swirl through my head like caramel in a goblet of gelato. Sicilian pot roast, caprese salads, panna cotta...I need to see them, taste them, create them from scratch. The trouble is, it's too damn hot to cook. Yet I do. Cook and bake. And try to give it all away, as I'm still carrying the pasta and breads of Italy in an area just below my rear pockets.

The second is an insistent craving to grow more edible plants. The Banana Plantation just isn't doing the trick: now I want more herbs, fat ripe tomatoes, arugula, endive...peaches would be nice but I don't think they'll grow here.

A couple of days ago, I spent the morning cleaning my herb garden, potting the new volunteer tomatoes sprouting there from the compost I'd added a while back, grooming the soil to a lump-free smooth and planting seeds: bronze fennel, dill, chives, Italian parsley, and yet more basil.

I also started five varieties of heirloom tomatoes including Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, and Amish Brandywine. Will they grow here? We'll see, but I've got all kinds of faith, especially since Christopher Columbus himself (or possibly Hernán Cortéz) brought tomatoes to Europe and thus to Italy from guess where? Mexico! For a long time, tomatoes were grown in Europe as exotic ornamentals as everyone thought they were poisonous. It wasn't until the 19th century that Italians started making tomato sauce for their pasta.

I was amazed, while in Italy, at the plants these two countries have in common. Oleander, bougainvillea, hibiscus, jasmine, passionfruit, palms, and prickly pears flourish. Some days it looked just like home...mas or menos.

 

If you look closely near the lower left side of this palm in Salina, you might be able to see Stromboli, that volcanic marvel of the Mediterranean, puffing away on the horizon.

Bougainvilleas tumble over walls, twine through wild cypress and a tree that looks for all the world like a blue spruce, and color the view of distant peaks.

This firework of a flower which I photographed in Gioiosa Marea, Sicily, also grows right down the street from me in San Pancho.

And although it doesn't have the same Milazzo harbor backdrop, this thing, or a close relative, is growing in my front garden right this minute.

I saw glorious hibiscus (hibiscuses? hibisci?) growing in Taormina, Sicily, in one of the most delightful public gardens I've ever seen.

Florence Trevelyan, an English noblewoman whom I would've liked to have met, planned and built the garden in the 1890's. Apparently Florence was not only a wizard with plants and design, she also was an avid birdwatcher, and so built these fantastic structures in order to be able to sit at eye level to the treetops.

Nice places to sit and have a cup of tea and scribble in one's notebook about the latest migratory bird to land nearly on one's nose, don't you agree?

Florence donated the property to the town, and the resulting park is now called the Parco Giovanni Colonna Duca di Cesarò. It's just as fancy as its name, with a huge variety of both native and imported plants and easy, welcoming pathways and places to sit and enjoy her flourishing creation.

 

It also overlooks both the bay and magnificent Mt. Etna.

I've mentioned before my pleasure at discovering long-needled pines in Italy. Here in Florence's garden, they are as tall and stately as they are surprising. Are they Ponderosas? They sure look like it to me.

I found pines growing wild all over mainland Italy, in Sicily and on the Aeolian Islands.

Seeing them always delighted me, as did the endless variety of plants in the native shrublands of Sicily. Here I was able to meet the macchia mediterranea, the natural habitat of the seaside Mediterranean shores. It is made of wild thyme, rosemary, myrtle, laurel, broom, mint, verbena and wildflowers. It is studded with a shrubby oak and varieties of cactus, with olive and fig trees, and with needled evergreens stunted by the sea winds.

 

In Siracusa, I visited a Roman amphiteater, beautifully preserved and gently protected. Around the edges grow cypress and eucalyptus, the latter a tree introduced to Italy at the beginning of the 19th century and later planted with enthusiasm to dry up swampland, as apparently eucalyptus is a thirsty tree. It grows all over Sicily and other parts of Italy, where it now is drinking too much of what has become scarce water.

At the beach club one could bus to from my Taormina hotel, shady garden spaces offered soft shelter from the late summer sun.

Everywhere in Italy, people grow green plants and flowers.

The sign on that house reads "Monument to Nature" in three languages: Italian, English, and German.

And what about the edible plants? In Tuscany, grapes are cultivated in exquisitely patterned fields.

In Sicily, grapes grow in motley hillside gardens. All of it is made into wine, the Sicilian homegrown less elegant than the Tuscan, but equally perfect.

In Assisi, I saw olive groves 800 years old from the time of St. Francis, once tended by Sta. Clara and the Poor Sisters.

Oh, the olives. Made into fragrant olive oils, marinated with red chiles, cured in salt, large and small, green and black.

Along with the abundant vegetables, a hot loaf of bread, kitchen-made pasta, and wine from local grapes, who could ask for anything more?

Well, okay, maybe some shaved pecorino cheese and a hunk of fresh fish. And some mushrooms. And some fruit.

I guess now you and I both know from whence my two new obsessions spring. Yes, I'm back in San Pancho. There are certain adjustments to be made. My herb garden includes epazote, a native Mexican herb which certain guests prefer and which I grow to keep said guests from devouring the basil, the Italian parsley, the fennel, the tomatoes which I encourage daily.

In the meantime, I shall cook and I shall plant.

  

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Comments

[frannyb]

oh, the parallels with Mexico; what fun. this post of yours seems to summarize the high points of your travel experience: the history, the living things, the colors, and the FOOD...so many discoveries. now what's for breakfast? xo

[Candice]

That's a possibility, Jackson. Interestingly, in Roman times Julius Caesar's engineer Vitrivius warned against using lead in aqueducts as he knew it was poisonous. Another possibility is that, since both tomatoes and potatoes (potato being the food imported into Europe from the New World that took the longest time to gain acceptance) belong to the nightshade family, and are both poisonous to horses, there was an assumption that the same was true for humans. Actually, some medical literature suggests that some people are quite sensitive to the alkaloids in nightshade foods...which also include many hot peppers and eggplant!

[Jackson]

The pictures from your trip are awesome ! My understanding is that the pots Europeans cooked with and the plates they ate from had high lead content and the tomato with its acidic nature caused lead to leech out and cause lead poisoning .

[Char]

Indeed, who could ask for anything more. I love the similarities...perhaps it was your Sicilian blood that found it's way to it's likeness in Mexico...wonderful things happen when you follow your heart...

[Canela]

I read your blog and I am so impressed ....Not only do you write very well, you are a great photographer !!! thank you for I would not know what the land of my ancestors looks like if it wasn't for your blog ..mil gracias mi amora .....

[Fred Feibel]

Bravo!