Aug 12, 2023·edited Aug 12, 2023Liked by Rosie Whinray
"rewilded itself into a primordial swamp" is such a luscious turn of the phrase (also "token vertebrate")
I buy a flower nearly every Friday and put it on my windowsill next to Freyaskuchen, usually an apple pie or a fruitcake, although I get more inventive occasionally (all the non-wild flower macro shots, and all those roses in particular, are of my Friday flowers; there's probably one somewhere in your immediate vicinity).
Most of them last about a week; some last two. My rule is that if a flower's still fresh by next Friday, then its purpose is to serve for longer. The last one, though, did something no other cut rose ever did. Its leaves started growing, and I believe I'm seeing rudimentary roots. The flower has withered, but there are two branches with leaves that grow visibly and look very much alive. I've put it in a separate jar of water and added some glycine to it, and am waiting for the roots to get long enough to plant it.
(that glycine was purchased by mistake; I needed a completely different chemical called glycin, a development agent that goes into my one and only non-lith paper developer recipe, Ansco 130 with benzotriazole substituted for bromide)
I also have flowering basil on my non-witchy windowsill in my bedroom. You're not really supposed to let it flower if you grow it as a kitchen herb, but I got tired of pinching leaves, so it just grew. Got a few lovely macro shots of the flowers on that technical colour film.
So yeah. Really enjoying these excursions into your world. I must have told you that I was really eager to move to NZ circa 2010, but it was just a little above my means even then, and it has became prohibitively expensive for pretty much everyone since then, including, as I'm led to believe, a large proportion of the native population (please correct me if I'm wrong). I've watched every Kiwi movie I could get my hands on (I'd love to go on a journey from Kaitaia to Invercargill someday with my Bronica and a huge bag of film) and listened to pretty much the entire Flying Nun catalogue, with a substantial portion thereof staying among my perennial favourites (the song Big Dark Day by the bloody Chills, for one, is fucking exquisite, and captures a certain mood with blood-curdling accuracy).
But I believe experiencing those islands through the eyes, senses, and memories of this specific Wizard to be a rare and most precious privilege. As a macrocosm reflected in a highly intelligent, coherent, funny, and compassionate microcosm, if you will. As good as being there. Eyes and ears on the ground. And a whole interpretation apparatus I find highly relatable. Thanks a lot, and please keep them coming.
(wot Marc sez in the song; gender pronoun to be altered at will)
I spent the day today repotting nearly every plant I own... Mixing up bespoke cake mix for them to eat, playing musical pots. Once I started I couldn't stop! But now the sun's gone down
Aug 12, 2023·edited Aug 12, 2023Liked by Rosie Whinray
..smiling !! I just added my seaweed juice. Bedroom a bit pongo but the dogs loved it- the question is will my plants? Cakemix of stuff sounds fabulous. A pot alchemist!! And fecking Otago has had snow, totally freezing so I felt a bit of comradry
reading about Welly's moisture content! I always love getting an email notification saying you've just published. Normal but not normal observations of daily doings , you bring much to my day. Once things pick up financially I will be buying coffee. :)
That's the plan! But I was thinking the nascent roots were supposed to grow longer and stronger before I move it from water to soil. You mean pot it right now?
I think you can do a kind of intermediate stage, into perlite for instance: make a mini greenhouse for it by tying a plastic bag round the top of the pot- full of air like a hot air balloon. Then keep it moist by spritzing. This is just general cuttings procedure as far as I understand it, I'm by no means a rose expert. But I think you can do this in Autumn, keep it inside, and then plant it out into proper soil in Spring / Summer
Oh, I'm no stranger to cloning plants. There's root hormone and rockwool cubes (damn, I miss that). It's just that I have very little experience with roses. I haven't been as close to plants here in Serbia as I was in Montenegro for a variety or reasons. I hope to remedy that someday. I've got mint and basil and coriander. And now, possibly, also a rose if it survives.
There was so much there that resonated so deeply - I’ve had the exact same feelings about my old pile at Moa Point. I so desperately loved it I fought the airport for almost a decade at great cost to my mental well-being to keep it (plus the whole smallest suburb of Aotearoa attached to it) alive... and in the last few years it just became more and more uninhabitable. I haven’t missed it since moving here and our brand new, energy-efficient, North-facing whare is too hot! Even in winter! It is exquisit though - and the plants love it so much more here too (both indoors and outside). We rescued a bunch of trees from Moa Point that had been fighting and struggling to survive the freezing Antarctic salt blasts, and we literally stuck them in the ground and they just grew and grew! One barely alive banana turned into 3 thriving ones! The feijoa that never made it past 15cm is now close to a meter tall! There’s something in the earth down here in Mohua, yes, special soil biology & geology & a subtropical microclimate. But something more magical too - I’d love to have you here soon to explore it with us!! Xxx
PS: real glad you’re in a healthier whare now. You know I do energy efficiency and the effect of poor housing on health in my energy hardship research, and yet (and despite having grown up in Austria where houses are warm no matter what) I froze almost 20 years in that icy uninsulated birdcage with 80% humidity or more... there’s something to be said about the power of habit & culture - my friend Prof Aimee Ambrose when studying our crazy inefficient energy culture in Dunedin, called it “the masculine pioneering spirit”. But really, “just put on another jumper” and “don’t be a sissy” is just a whole country gone mad from the black mould in their houses!
Oh my goodness I loved this piece so much! "Maybe those who continue along the road of art are simply those in whom the drive to self-actualise is stronger than the need for self-preservation" - your writing and thinking has already alleviated some shame here, thank you.
I found this quote by Thoreau, from On Civil Disobedience: “If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”
I hunted out the quote in full: "I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man."
What a lovely piece! Have you heard of the book "Poetics of Space"? I just found a pdf of it yesterday and It's very much in line with points you touch on here.
Thanks Jeremy! I have heard of it but I haven't read it- I will get it from the library. Another good book I read on architecture and its implications is A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander- that's a great book, but it's a mighty tome and hard to get hold of.
"rewilded itself into a primordial swamp" is such a luscious turn of the phrase (also "token vertebrate")
I buy a flower nearly every Friday and put it on my windowsill next to Freyaskuchen, usually an apple pie or a fruitcake, although I get more inventive occasionally (all the non-wild flower macro shots, and all those roses in particular, are of my Friday flowers; there's probably one somewhere in your immediate vicinity).
Most of them last about a week; some last two. My rule is that if a flower's still fresh by next Friday, then its purpose is to serve for longer. The last one, though, did something no other cut rose ever did. Its leaves started growing, and I believe I'm seeing rudimentary roots. The flower has withered, but there are two branches with leaves that grow visibly and look very much alive. I've put it in a separate jar of water and added some glycine to it, and am waiting for the roots to get long enough to plant it.
(that glycine was purchased by mistake; I needed a completely different chemical called glycin, a development agent that goes into my one and only non-lith paper developer recipe, Ansco 130 with benzotriazole substituted for bromide)
I also have flowering basil on my non-witchy windowsill in my bedroom. You're not really supposed to let it flower if you grow it as a kitchen herb, but I got tired of pinching leaves, so it just grew. Got a few lovely macro shots of the flowers on that technical colour film.
So yeah. Really enjoying these excursions into your world. I must have told you that I was really eager to move to NZ circa 2010, but it was just a little above my means even then, and it has became prohibitively expensive for pretty much everyone since then, including, as I'm led to believe, a large proportion of the native population (please correct me if I'm wrong). I've watched every Kiwi movie I could get my hands on (I'd love to go on a journey from Kaitaia to Invercargill someday with my Bronica and a huge bag of film) and listened to pretty much the entire Flying Nun catalogue, with a substantial portion thereof staying among my perennial favourites (the song Big Dark Day by the bloody Chills, for one, is fucking exquisite, and captures a certain mood with blood-curdling accuracy).
But I believe experiencing those islands through the eyes, senses, and memories of this specific Wizard to be a rare and most precious privilege. As a macrocosm reflected in a highly intelligent, coherent, funny, and compassionate microcosm, if you will. As good as being there. Eyes and ears on the ground. And a whole interpretation apparatus I find highly relatable. Thanks a lot, and please keep them coming.
(wot Marc sez in the song; gender pronoun to be altered at will)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGWiuwA92h4
The rose print- with Orwell on the back- is on my fridge! I tried to attach a photo, but photos in comments are verboten
Pot it! She will grow.
I spent the day today repotting nearly every plant I own... Mixing up bespoke cake mix for them to eat, playing musical pots. Once I started I couldn't stop! But now the sun's gone down
..smiling !! I just added my seaweed juice. Bedroom a bit pongo but the dogs loved it- the question is will my plants? Cakemix of stuff sounds fabulous. A pot alchemist!! And fecking Otago has had snow, totally freezing so I felt a bit of comradry
reading about Welly's moisture content! I always love getting an email notification saying you've just published. Normal but not normal observations of daily doings , you bring much to my day. Once things pick up financially I will be buying coffee. :)
That's the plan! But I was thinking the nascent roots were supposed to grow longer and stronger before I move it from water to soil. You mean pot it right now?
I think you can do a kind of intermediate stage, into perlite for instance: make a mini greenhouse for it by tying a plastic bag round the top of the pot- full of air like a hot air balloon. Then keep it moist by spritzing. This is just general cuttings procedure as far as I understand it, I'm by no means a rose expert. But I think you can do this in Autumn, keep it inside, and then plant it out into proper soil in Spring / Summer
https://www.gardentech.com/blog/how-to-guides/growing-roses-from-cuttings
Oh, I'm no stranger to cloning plants. There's root hormone and rockwool cubes (damn, I miss that). It's just that I have very little experience with roses. I haven't been as close to plants here in Serbia as I was in Montenegro for a variety or reasons. I hope to remedy that someday. I've got mint and basil and coriander. And now, possibly, also a rose if it survives.
There was so much there that resonated so deeply - I’ve had the exact same feelings about my old pile at Moa Point. I so desperately loved it I fought the airport for almost a decade at great cost to my mental well-being to keep it (plus the whole smallest suburb of Aotearoa attached to it) alive... and in the last few years it just became more and more uninhabitable. I haven’t missed it since moving here and our brand new, energy-efficient, North-facing whare is too hot! Even in winter! It is exquisit though - and the plants love it so much more here too (both indoors and outside). We rescued a bunch of trees from Moa Point that had been fighting and struggling to survive the freezing Antarctic salt blasts, and we literally stuck them in the ground and they just grew and grew! One barely alive banana turned into 3 thriving ones! The feijoa that never made it past 15cm is now close to a meter tall! There’s something in the earth down here in Mohua, yes, special soil biology & geology & a subtropical microclimate. But something more magical too - I’d love to have you here soon to explore it with us!! Xxx
PS: real glad you’re in a healthier whare now. You know I do energy efficiency and the effect of poor housing on health in my energy hardship research, and yet (and despite having grown up in Austria where houses are warm no matter what) I froze almost 20 years in that icy uninsulated birdcage with 80% humidity or more... there’s something to be said about the power of habit & culture - my friend Prof Aimee Ambrose when studying our crazy inefficient energy culture in Dunedin, called it “the masculine pioneering spirit”. But really, “just put on another jumper” and “don’t be a sissy” is just a whole country gone mad from the black mould in their houses!
It's a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. I'm also happy that you and the trees are now in a more benign climate. Go us
Te piko o te rākau, tērā te tipu o te māhuri: As the tree is bent, so grows the tree.
Oh my goodness I loved this piece so much! "Maybe those who continue along the road of art are simply those in whom the drive to self-actualise is stronger than the need for self-preservation" - your writing and thinking has already alleviated some shame here, thank you.
I found this quote by Thoreau, from On Civil Disobedience: “If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”
I hunted out the quote in full: "I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man."
What a lovely piece! Have you heard of the book "Poetics of Space"? I just found a pdf of it yesterday and It's very much in line with points you touch on here.
Thanks Jeremy! I have heard of it but I haven't read it- I will get it from the library. Another good book I read on architecture and its implications is A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander- that's a great book, but it's a mighty tome and hard to get hold of.