A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food: finished

A while ago I wrote about A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food by Ann Hagan. At the time I’d finished the opening section, about the categories of food available at the time, and I was a little disappointed by it.

I have now finished the book, and I am anything but disappointed. This book was a great illustration of the maxim that you don’t know what you don’t know. I bought it thinking that the material of the first section was all that could possible be said about the topic, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The following sections include discussions of normal eating times and what was usually eaten at them, typical meals for different classes and categories of society, eating during times of fasting, feasting, and famine, and the many, MANY ways that people’s food made them ill at the time.

Of particular interest to me were the daily habits of eating. In short, people who were comfortably well off ate twice a day, often in the early afternoon and again in the evening. This was particularly true of monks in monasteries, whose mealtimes were 3pm and 9pm at most institutions. Poorer people, however, likely ate only once a day, at night. This seems like an awfully hard thing for agricultural laborers, the people most likely to live that way, but perhaps (maybe no one really knows) they could still grab a bowl of gruel or a few mugs of small beer earlier in the day to power them through.

Feasting and fasting was an unexpectedly interesting topic. Different versions of Catholicism have different versions of fasting rules, and the rules in Saxon England varied from place to place. Often all animal foods were off the menu on fasting days, which happened regularly throughout the week as well as in significant chunks during Lent and other special periods in the year, which you’ll know more about than I do if you know literally anything about Catholicism, because I knew nothing. In addition to limiting what foods were eaten, monks were often reduced to only one meal a day instead of two–or two monks were given a single serving of food to share, instead of each having their own.

One interesting point about religious fasting in this period is that absolutely everyone, everywhere took it for granted that being able to do your work was always more important than observing fasts, and that if fasting made you too weak to work, it was your duty to eat. It was also your duty to get as much meat, milk, and eggs as you could during periods when you weren’t fasting, to keep your strength up. Some monks needed a morning meal to do their work, and they were allowed it.

This led me to a lot of interesting thoughts about fasting and saints. The way a lot of them fasted–really fasted, eating hardly anything at all–was seen as admirable, but not aspirational. Their devotions did make them too weak to work, which meant, I have to conclude, that fasting saints-to-be were always people who didn’t have work to do.

This made me think of the late Hilary Mantel’s essay Some Girls Want Out, which I highly recommend. My own thoughts on fasting, just putting together the above information, is that becoming a saint was essentially a privilege. Only people who didn’t have real-world duties and obligations could afford to do the things that get one canonized. Mantel takes the idea of self-denying girls in other directions, and she was of course a lot smarter and better-educated than me.

The section on famine was hair-raising. Parishes kept records of such things, so a pretty comprehensive timeline of famine years in Saxon England has been drawn up, and it goes a long way toward illustrating just how hard life has always been. Gaps between famines can be as long as 40 years, but more often they happen every 3-7 years. Sometimes crops are destroyed, other times animals become sick and die. Sometimes they run on for multiple years. Imagine if all the cattle got sick and most of them died, how many years it would take to replace the missing animals, and all that time the availability of beef and dairy is compromised. Imagine how many people might die of starvation during a multi-year famine, and how long it would take the population to recover. I mean, the population of Ireland has never recovered from the Potato Famine and the ensuing emigration. Never.

Anyway, this book is edifying and also enjoyable, and I retract my earlier critique of it. There is a sequel to this book available, A Second Book of Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink, and the two have been combined into a single volume which I’m considering buying to replace the lone first.

Miss Marple’s Suitcase

Crump saw a tall, elderly lady wearing an old-fashioned tweed coat and skirt, a couple of scarves and a small felt hat with a bird’s wing. The old lady carried a capacious handbag, and an aged but good quality suitcase reposed by her feet.

Crump recognized a lady when he saw one.

I am obsessed with this passage from Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye which describes Miss Marple’s arrival at the scene of the crime, the sprawling suburban home of the Fortescue family. As Agatha’s books go this one is a banger, not so much for the mystery as for its sizzling (and sometimes, to Americans, puzzling) caricature of wealthy suburban life and those who choose it. In 1950s England.

Agatha Christie only wrote twelve Miss Marple novels, and it often seems to me that she kept back something special for them. They aren’t her most famous crimes (for that see all the titles that come straight to your mind when you think of her), but Miss Marple’s intense interest in other people and her parallels to her own village let Christie range through a depth of character that’s often missing in her other books. The Miss Marple books are undoubtedly the ones I re-read the most.

So what’s in Miss Marple’s suitcase? I’ve always been dying to know. Extra vests and knickers, but how many sets? How many spare blouses? Spare stockings? Surely she has brought a nightgown and dressing gown and bed socks and slippers, and shouldn’t all of that have pretty much filled up the suitcase?

In the 1980s BBC production, which I adore, she brings a sweater cardigan to swap out with her tweed coat while she’s in the house.

Her knitting must be in her handbag, I would suppose, so she could get at it on the train if she wanted (this passage is preceded by a description of all her changeovers on her journey that day). That means she isn’t knitting anything very big. She often knits matinee jackets for babies, which is a small project, but if she really intended to get stuck in at the Fortescue’s house maybe she brought some lace to knit. It’s very small and takes forever.

One interesting point is that because this is a newish suburban house and not a drafty old country house for toffs, it should have been comparatively warm, which I think Miss Marple would appreciate. Not 21st-century warm, but probably there was enough heating to keep the bedrooms in the 50s Fahrenheit overnight. Which means fewer scarves etc. for poor old Jane.

Anyway. It’s a pleasant problem that I think about a lot… and I think it might be almost time to re-read this one. Again. I do it on an annual basis.

Dos and Don’ts in the Upper Crust

It is late February and I am raring to begin the gardening season. I traditionally start cold-hardy seeds on March 1, so I’ve cleaned up the greenhouse, taken a lick at the potting shed, and upset my husband by implying that he should have power-washed the shade garden’s walk already even though it’s been cold and he had covid. Sorry sweetie, I didn’t mean it like that.

And it has been cold. So cold. Overnight lows in the 20s this week, and this morning we woke up to snow (snow! In late February! In Zone 8! Can you imagine!) I am angry and restless and also muddy-headed from allergies, so instead of doing sensible things like reading treatises on Saxon culture and practicing my lettering, I have been taking endless treadmill walks while watching The Crown, which is becoming something of an obsession.

The first almost-three seasons were enjoyable, and interesting, and to get to my point, looked like a historical costume drama to me.

And then near the very end of season 3, going right into season 4, we hit the year of my birth… and instantly, magically, it’s no longer a costume drama, it’s just rich people wearing rich-people clothes.

I guess as a child of the 80s, the old L.L. Bean, bloodsports-and-horses look will always speak of the ultimate in privileged living to me. I have spent my entire adulthood trying to figure out how to pull off cashmere twinsets and tweed skirts (it worked for a while in my 20s). The Crown’s episode about Margaret Thatcher visiting Balmoral hit me hard, though. The way she didn’t fit in there was exactly the way I wouldn’t fit in there. I live inside my head, am a physical coward with poor stamina, am almost certainly neurodivergent, and eternally stupid about appropriate clothing. I am middle class. Worse, I am American.

But I can dream. And I do dream, and over the years I have assembled a mental inventory of “at least I wouldn’t get THAT wrong” rules for how to look “right” among the Upper Crust (never mind that they’re all bollocks. If you aren’t one of Them, They know it and will instantly, without a word or a look, let you know they know it. I had An Experience once, so I know.)

Anyway, just for funsies and so I can talk about The Crown some more, I present my little list of collected rules.

1. Pearl necklaces must always have an odd number of strands. It drives me crazy when I see necklaces that break this rule, and I have been so glad that The Crown hasn’t.
2. No jewelry in the country. In The Crown they do wear their pearls at Balmoral, but I have also begun to suspect that pearls and metal without any stones doesn’t count as “jewelry.” So, no diamonds in the country.
3. Only tweeds in the country, never tweeds in town. I’m less sure of the second part than I am of the first. Truly, though, I expect they’d break this rule all the time just because it wasn’t convenient to follow it, and it wouldn’t matter because They are Them. They don’t care.
4. Something something about sober, muted colors, never bright ones. Diana has been breaking this on The Crown and is supposed to have passed “the test” with flying colors anyway… but Nigel Slater does go on about it in Toast. Not that his family was Upper Crust. But I think that muted colors probably are safest.
5. Here’s a thing: I am a stationery hound and I own a copy of The Crane Blue Book of Stationery, so I know that when you’re writing a letter you only use a personalized sheet for the first page, then plain ones for the rest… but the letter that Lord Mountbatten writes to Charles on The Crown was several sheets, and they were all personalized. Are they so rich they don’t care? Am I confusing American and British etiquette? Or did I know something The Crown didn’t? Impossible!
6. Is anyone else bothered by the handwriting on The Crown? It stinks. I have nicer handwriting and I’m a vile Gen X/Millennial Cusper. Every one of my American great-aunts had exactly the same beautiful spidery handwriting, none of this round scribbly nonsense on The Crown. Is this a cultural difference?
7. Eat your fish with two forks. The great Victorian Flatware Explosion didn’t reach these people.

Anyway. I have been looking longingly at L.L. Bean’s hunting boots, which is ridiculous because I already own a pair of Muck boots, which is what people who actually hunt actually wear. I am who I am and I live where I live and I wouldn’t even like riding or hunting.

But oh, that boot room at Balmoral. My goodness.

Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain

As I’ve mentioned before, I am in the middle of a first watching of The Crown, which is an interesting way to learn history but also a risky way to learn history, given that it takes liberties with known facts. Anyway, I’m almost finished with season 3, and throughout seasons 2 and 3 I’ve found it fascinating (as a person who has never lived in Britain) to note which events I had already heard about… because there’s only one place I would have heard about them, and that’s from previous watchings of Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain.

This five-part series discusses British history from the end of WWII through the time of the series’ release, which was 2007. The series was highly praised, though a couple of inaccuracies had to be withdrawn from re-issues of the book and DVD set, and as an outsider and a person too young to have witnessed any of this in an intelligent way, it’s so interesting to see this particular sweep of history put together and walked through in a way that makes sense.

The overlapping events between this series and The Crown piqued my curiosity because, interestingly, there are so few of them. The Profumo scandal is the big incident they both cover, and Macmillan being openly mocked in a theater is a minor incident in both; also just in the episode of The Crown I began to watch yesterday, a miner’s strike was mentioned, which Marr discusses in detail. Besides that the two series are completely separate, and the way various personalities–especially Prime Ministers–come across in each is certainly food for thought. In The Crown, as a person who doesn’t know anything about anything, I frequently get the impression the show is acknowledging something about the PMs, but I need Andrew Marr to spell those things out for me.

Of course, the two series aren’t necessarily at odds in any way (though they both have their points of view). There are just so many things to cover that neither one can cover them all. Thus, it’s interesting to see which things each one chooses.

Something I find especially interesting about Marr’s series, and which The Crown has failed to get across to me at all, is how Britain has had to hang on by its fingernails since WWII. There were a few, brief periods of economic reprieve, sometimes real and sometimes only in memory, but for the most part Britain has been in a constant state of economic crisis for decades now. The Crown tends to harp on the future of the royal family and whether the British people will continue to pay out for it, but Marr’s narrative–not at all concerned with royalty–covers the loans, the interest, the strikes, the exports, and the social malaise in a way The Crown just doesn’t. The Crown does mention the devaluation of the pound, including a recreation of Wilson’s infamous speech about how it “doesn’t mean the pound in your pocket is worth less at home” or whatever the exact nonsense words were. It also presents a situation in which Princess Margaret charms Gerald Ford into agreeing to another loan. But these situations, in The Crown, are presented as personal situations, overshadowed by the personal relationships between people, not as the crises of a nation.

Anyway. Ping-ponging the two series off each other has certainly been interesting.

Welsh III

I have a 60+ day streak on Duolingo Welsh now, so I suppose it’s time for an update.

I keep thinking of my first entry about learning Welsh, in which I was at sea in an absolute lack of cognates. That changed pretty quickly, and now, as I’m getting into a bit of grammar, not only are a lot of words direct cognates of English, but even the shape of the sentences and their connecting words is beginning to feel comfortable.

To take a sentence Duolingo really loves, “Dwi’n gweithio yn yr garej” means “I work in the garage.” “Garej” is a direct cognate, and “yn yr” sounds so much like “in the,” or maybe I’m finagling it as “in (that) there.” It’s nice. There are certainly prepositions that sound nothing like English’s–“mewn” means “as a,” as in, “Dw’in gweithio mewn mecanic,” or “I work as a mechanic”. Those require some help, but the Welsh grammar is still similar enough that I feel like it’s holding my hand more often than not.

The biggest stumbling block for me now is the construction of noun phrases with adjectives coming after their nouns rather than before. I ought to be used to this, because Romance languages do it too, but I’m still stumbling over strings of modifiers like “dillad gaeaf newydd Megan,” which directly translates to “clothes winter new Megan’s,” or in English order, “Megan’s new winter clothes.”

I’m figuring out more and more about Welsh phonology and how it’s, written. A single F is almost always pronounced like English V; if you want the voiceless F sound, you write it FF. Similarly, LL is the unvoiced lateral, a delightful sound that English doesn’t use… but DD is the voiced version of English TH. We don’t separate the voiced and voiceless versions of this sound in English orthography, though we do use them both. The vowel U in Welsh is often pronounced like EE in English, and W and Y are flat-out vowels in Welsh. I think, because I’m not coming up with counterexamples, that K isn’t used in Welsh orthography. Instead G, via phonological transformations, takes its place. A point I need to pay special attention to is in which situations S is pronounced as English SH, and when it is just S.

I am getting to the point, when Duolingo wants me to listen to a sentence, that I know what it means without turning on my English filter. I still have to translate it to prove to Duolingo that I know… but I can grasp the meaning without translating in my head. This is a key transition in learning a language.

Proud of myself as I am, I recently had a good kick in the teeth re. my actual proficiency in Welsh (after two whole months, poor me). I have been watching The Crown, and recently saw the episode in which Charles is sent to study Welsh in Wales. Friends, I did not understand one single spoken word of Welsh in the entire episode. The only thing I knew was “Croeso y Cymru,” which was written on a sign. So no, Duolingo at two months out still has nothing to do with actual functioning in the actual language.

Alas.

Forgiving myself while practicing insular majuscule

I am still practicing my lettering, and still using insular majuscule as my script of choice, because it’s what the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels are written in. In my last post about it, I expressed frustration about how my lettering just doesn’t look authentic. At the time, I pinned this down to a few tendencies about letter-shaping, which my own training in D’nealian and then in American Cursive had given me.

I am still getting better. My lettering, though still vastly imperfect, gets better every day that I practice it.

But, as I observed in a previous post, even the published calligraphers don’t manage to look completely authentic. Even they don’t reproduce those pesky letter shapes quite right.

And that, I have decided, I need to accept. In them and in myself. None of us are 10th century people, and all of us, no matter how talented we are or how much we practice, still have our own handwriting.

In college I took a class in biological psychology–maybe the most interesting class I ever took–in which the professor liked to say that any time you write your signature, no matter how you do it–with pencil or pen, on a screen, with your finger, while holding the implement with your hand or foot or mouth or butt-cheeks–that signature will be more similar to your normally-made signature than to anyone else’s. We don’t just have our own history of writing habits, we have our own particular physiology, and it affects the way we write.

So. I am still trying to emulate the script in the Book of Kells, but I am also accepting that I will probably never get there, certainly not without the same materials those scribes used (and while a quill pen might happen, I’m fairly certain vellum never will). I am myself and not someone else, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The names of dwarfs, from the Prose Edda

We’ve been watching through Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, which my husband and I hadn’t seen since the movies were in theaters, and which our daughter has never seen. She’s observed us watching Lord of the Rings often enough to be annoyed by it, but this is new and she is hooked.

It makes me think of the list of dwarfs’ names from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which I read recently. The list made me so happy that I’m copying it here. See how many of Bilbo’s company you can find (allowing for different spellings).

And these, says the Vala, are the names of the dwarfs:

Nye, Nide,
Nordre, Sudre,
Austre, Vestre,
Althjof, Dvalin,
Na, Nain,
Niping, Dain,
Bifur, Bafur,
Bombor, Nore,
Ore, Onar,
Oin, Mjodvitner,
Vig, Gandalf,
Vindalf, Thorin,
File, Kile,
Fundin, Vale,
Thro, Throin,
Thek, Lit, Vit,
Ny, Nyrad,
Rek, Radsvid.

But the following are also dwarfs and dwell in the rocks, while the above-named dwell in the mould:

Draupner, Dolgthvare,
Hor, Hugstare,
Hledjolf, Gloin,
Dore, Ore,
Duf, Andvare,
Hepte, File,
Har, Siar.

But the following come from Svarin’s How to Aurvang on Joruvold, and from them is sprung Lovar. Their names are:

Skirfer, Virfir,
Skafid, Ae,
Alf, Inge,
Eikinslgalde,
Fal, Froste,
Fid, Ginnar.

An American reads about the English Civil War

Hi-ho. I currently have a copy of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Kings and Queens of Britain sitting on my chair in the library (which is what I call our living room), and every so often I have some quiet time down there to read a few pages. Last night, I read the pages on the English Civil War.

Before I start to talk about it, let me do a good-faith summing up of absolutely everything I knew about the English Civil War before I read these pages.

1. Cannons were used and some castles were blown up
2. There were maybe some guys called Roundheads involved? Maybe?
3. England was a republic for nine years, then called it quits
4. Oliver Cromwell was in charge for those nine years
5. Then they brought back Charles II and Pepys wrote his diary.

Okay. Having gotten that out of the way: these were an INTERESTING few pages. As a person who has lived her whole life in the United States (aside from travel), I was taught nothing about English history in school, except the parts that bear directly on the American Revolution -or- were written into Shakespeare’s plays. I picked up the tiniest possible amount of information about Queen Victoria while getting my English literature degree, but that isn’t when the ECW happened.

If you don’t know the first thing, either, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

1. Queen Elizabeth was very smart and had very good manners.
2. Her successor, James I, was very smart but had very bad manners. But because he was smart, he got away with it.
3. His successor, Charles I, was not smart and also had terrible manners. When he decided to force Scotland to use the English Book of Common Prayer (I have to do a lot of mental work to be complacent when I read things like that), Parliament objected, and he objected to their objections, and eventually he was so offensive about it that they cut off his head.
4. Yes. Henry VIII had established the English monarch as the head of the Church of England, with a divine right to rule, but Parliament got sick of it, killed the monarch, and tried to establish a republic.
5. The problem was, this was the 1650s and they didn’t have much of a model of what to do next. How is government formed if not with divine right? Confusing. They made several stabs at it, which all failed, and eventually just begged Oliver Cromwell (a high-up in the military) to be king. He refused, but they were so persistent that to shut them up, he died.
6. I guess his son was thrust into the role of Ultimate Leader, but quickly crumpled under the pressure, after which Parliament voted to bring back Charles II post-haste, and everyone was very happy.

Okay. My thoughts about this.

First, it’s so interesting to see the inertia of centuries of monarchy collide with an early–so early–desire for a republic. So early that no one was clear on how to form an effective government or how to tolerate it when it did things one didn’t agree with. Cromwell, for example, dissolved at least one Parliament because he didn’t like what they were talking about. That is… not how it’s supposed to work, Oliver. 120 years later, the nascent United States might not have had much more to go on, but they were also founding a brand-new country in a place where English people hadn’t tried to form a unified government before. I’m sure that had a lot to do with the nation’s success, although I’m also not saying it didn’t all hang together by the skin of its teeth.

Second, I got the impression that Cromwell and his Parliaments and the people who cut off Charles I’s head because they wanted a republic were mostly Puritans. Puritans, this same book said when discussing the Pilgrims, didn’t like Henry VIII having made the monarch the head of the church. They believed that, religiously speaking anyway, every man (MAN!!!!) should answer directly to God, and not to a sovereign. Unfortunately, this idea hadn’t grown to the proportions it needed for it to take root–namely, in trusting people to make their own decisions wrt God. The Puritain Parliaments appear to have been deeply interested in imposing their own, unpopular agendas on the public. For example, Freedom of Religion! Just not Catholics. Or Quakers. Or any number of other groups they fought with in school. Freedom to be them. FREEDOM!

They closed the English theaters, too. After the reigns of Elizabeth and James, which was the heyday of Shakespeare and many others, the true blossoming of English literature, to close the theaters on a literate and theater-loving public just couldn’t possibly have been popular. Reopening them was practically the first thing Charles II did when he was restored. Because he wasn’t a zealot.

Third, I did a little digging about the name Cromwell, and didn’t I find interesting things.

Because I’m reading this book in chronological order, and because I’ve made inroads on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, I know that there was a previous Thomas Cromwell, and I wanted to know if there was a connection between him and Oliver. And there is. From Oliver Cromwell’s Wikipedia entry, “The family’s estate derived from Oliver’s great-great-grandfather Morgan ap William, a brewer from Glamorgan who settled at Putney (at that time near London) and married Katherine Cromwell (born 1482), the sister of Thomas Cromwell.”

So Oliver’s Cromwells weren’t even properly Cromwells. They were Williamses. And if you look further into the same paragraph, “Morgan ap William was a son of William ap Yevan of Wales. The family line continued through Richard Williams (alias Cromwell), (c. 1500–1544), Henry Williams (alias Cromwell), (c. 1524 – 6 January 1604),^[b] then to Oliver’s father Robert Williams, alias Cromwell (c. 1560–1617).”

The writer of the Wikipedia entry wants to make it quite clear that they were all only alias Cromwells. They used the name because of its weight. And in fact, if you closely read the first quotation above, it says that Oliver’s “great-great-grandfather Morgan ap William … married Katherine Cromwell,” italics mine. It is not saying that Oliver’s Cromwells were even her descendants. Maybe Morgan had a previous wife who birthed them (maybe. I can’t find that out on Wikipedia.)

So the Cromwells were an ambitious bunch. Oliver Cromwell was begged to be king, wouldn’t do it because he was a Puritan and didn’t believe in a king that stood between people and his personal idea of God, but still named his (apparently incompetent) son as his successor.

He had to find a successor, by the way, because he had malaria but wouldn’t take quinine because a Jesuit had discovered it.

What a guy. Zowie.

When Oliver Cromwell died he was buried in Westminster Abbey, with a lot of monarchs, but it didn’t last long. After Charles II’s restoration, when the theaters were opened again and people remembered how to have fun, they exhumed Cromwell, posthumously executed him, and put his head on a pike outside Westminster Hall, where they left it for 24 years.

Never say the English can’t hold a grudge.

As an American, this entire interplay is so interesting. United States history is taught here with a lot of pomp and fanfare about how we’re free and freedom is wonderful and the Founding Fathers were so smart and democracy is the one true way, everyone living under monarchy is miserable… and in the English Civil War, in the space of a decade, a monarchy was trashed because it was too repressive and then the republic was trashed and the monarchy brought back, because the republic was too oppressive. Cromwell’s Commonwealth was often, after it was over, described as a tyranny. And that’s not about monarchies vs. republics, it’s about who writes history books and which history books are kept. And also about how much people like theater.

Isn’t it all awfully interesting.

Gardening already

Well it’s happened. I have had to garden.

We are from the American Midwest, where winter is properly winter. The ground freezes solid for months. One can stop gardening for something like 6-8 months of the year with no qualms whatsoever.

And then we moved here, to the Pacific Northwest. We came for the milder winters and summers, and we enjoy them mightily, but the cost is that there is no true dormant season in the garden at all. So I’m not growing crops in the winter? Well the weeds are still growing. Better get out there.

And so I’ve been out to deal with them for the first time this year.

When we first came here my husband did the comparisons and discovered that we have Cardiff winters and Majorca summers. Weeding, thankfully, stops in the summer because it’s so dry, though the effort to keep things watered is just as much. I had been keeping up with it, though, until last summer when we discovered that we have a sub-par well and that my gardens had grown to such an extent that the well really couldn’t keep up anymore. Not the way I had been doing things.

Fortunately, we had also been watching Gardener’s World for several years. Now now, wait: if you’re a British gardener I’m sure you have Things To Say about Gardener’s World, either good or critical, but please understand that we had both spent our lives in a completely different gardening environment. Total freezes in the winter, eliminating a lot of things that are perennials in milder climes, and boiling heat in the summer. It was great for growing tomatoes, okra, and melons, and absolute crap for growing all the familiar British crops like peas, potatoes, and lettuces, which do so very well in the Pacific Northwest. We didn’t know how to grow these things. We had to learn, and Gardener’s World taught us.

And it put me on to Beth Chatto, whose famous garden is in a dry area of England. In The Dry Garden she says that her area averages 22 inches of rain a year, and her goal is to water perennials for only one season to get them established, and then let them tough it out on their own.

You see how this appealed to me last summer, when I came to terms with the fact that my astilbes just weren’t going to make it.

I read her books, and also some Piet Oudolph books because his prairie-style plantings are also supposed to survive without watering. I made lists of the general kinds of plants I was looking for–to be watered for one season and maybe never again–and then I went to, and this will be controversial too, my local big-box-store’s garden center and I saw what they had.

People are critical of these generic, supposedly badly-thought-through garden centers, but having lived where I have I can make the broad observation that what’s sold here in the PNW is completely different from what’s sold in the Midwest, and that the centers therefore put some thought into what plants they sell people. The plants are at least somehow appropriate. And lo: mine did indeed sell a lot of drought-resistant perennials. Exactly what I needed.

In fact, going with what they provide is even more helpful than either Beth or Piet, because my areas are not exactly the same as theirs. People think of the PNW as a rainy place, and for three seasons it is, but in the summer it is absolutely normal to get no precipitation at all for 90 days. That’s unusual. My parents live in the American Southwest and they get more summer rain than we do.

So plants here have to be able to put up with that enormous, deserty-dry spell, but also to survive the sopping-wet winters. There are a lot of plants that can survive one or the other, but not so many that can do both, at least not without help.

So. This morning I went out to one of my gardens–the pretty one overlooked by the kitchen/dining sliding glass door and by the big picture windows in my bedroom–to pull dead foliage and hoe weeds and have a look at what the new, drought-resistant stuff had been doing. And it has been doing great. The upright euphorbias–which I’m scared of, but finally put on my big-girl pants and bought–have looked good nonstop, even through the early snow. The upright sedums are starting to grow. The shasta daisies are alive. The gaura is alive. The day lilies, I know because I already had some, will be alive. The only plants I’m not 100% sure of are the ornamental grasses, but it’s normal for those to not show growth until mid-spring.

This particular bit of garden went about six weeks with no water at all from me last summer, in between us doing a lot of traveling and me despairing over the well, and there are a lot of old things still alive, too, which impresses and annoys me in equal parts. The stupid acanthus, which never amounts to anything and which disappeared entirely last summer, is coming up. The hebe plant is blooming. The daphnes, surprisingly, are happy as clams, and my primroses are not completely dead.

So we’ll see how this summer goes. As a rule, the garden always gives me more than I deserve, but this summer anything that doesn‘t give will be promptly replaced. So there.

Finding watercolor equivalents for medieval pigments

Hello hello. I’m back again and still working toward the various skills & materials to make my own passable, to a modern non-specialist anyway, medieval manuscript.

I have a fine collection of Celtic decoration books by now, and I’ll be working on that soon (I played with it a little in college, so it won’t be totally new to me). I’d like to color my knots, and maybe even draw some cutesy marginalia, so I need paints of some kind.

Beginning Illumination by Claire Travers is a treasure of a book. It explains how to prepare actual vellum, mix up inks and paints, and apply gesso and gold leaf, for example. It’s a real grimoire. It includes a table of natural pigments, with the ones used by medieval painters marked with asterisks.

I am by no means up to preparing my own paints from pigments. I just want watercolors to match them. Real artist-quality watercolors often include these pigments, but getting a full set is expensive and I’m definitely not up to snuff for that yet. So I have two sets of watercolors by Prima Marketing, from their Watercolor Confections line: the Odyssey set, which has rich, bold colors, and their Woodlands set, which is designed to make it easy to paint, you guessed it, woodland scenes. Today I finally got around to swatching with them, and wow. I’ve never used anything better than elementary-student watercolors. These are very much a different beast. So saturated. So lively on the paper. Painting with watercolor is quite a sensory experience.

But on to pigments. I don’t want to include a photograph of Claire Travers’ pigment chart, because that’s her IP, but I’ll talk you through it. Though I propose what seems like the best possible substitute for each pigment, in all honestly I will probably not mix these watercolors, just use the appropriate ones as they are. That’s why I bought these fancy colors instead of just a few basics, in the first place.

White Lead: this is the white from the period, used for highlights. The only white in my sets is Calgary, so it’ll have to do.

Sepia: this is a dark brown-black derived from squid ink. Isn’t that interesting? I never knew. My watercolors include a color called Jordan, which is quite dark and browny-black, albeit with a touch of purple. It’s not a satisfactory equivalent but there’s nothing better, unless I mix Shadow with it, which I could certainly do.

Lamp-black: made from the soot that gathers inside lamps. A dark, true black. My closest equivalent in watercolor is Shadow, however I also have a bottle of India ink for my lettering. India ink is made from the carbon of burnt vines, apparently.

Burnt umber: dark brown. Bear is my nearest equivalent.

Naples yellow: a very pale, buttery yellow. I could use the barest touch of Inca + Sand Ridge in a lot of water, though this strikes me as a color for painting faces, which I’m scared to do.

Orpiment: canary yellow. No need to mix here; I think Inca, watered down, will do well. At the strength on my swatches it’s more like cadmium yellow, which is not period-authentic.

Yellow ochre: Travers lists two shades of this. They’re both brownish yellows. Cavern is very close to the darker one; Cavern with a lit of Inca might do for the paler one.

Havana ochre: what a great name. This is a warm, teddy-bear brown. Either Dubai or Cusco would do.

Burnt sienna: a darker, browner color. Still Dubai and Cusco are good candidates.

Cinnabar: ooh, I’ve heard of that. This is the closest to a nice, rich scarlet that the medieval palette has. Rome seems a little too cool. I would warm it up with something, perhaps.

Red ochre: a distinctly reddish brown. More color mixing; a healthy dash of Cusco in Rome I think.

Minium: a warm, almost orange-red. Maui should be the base, darkened and cooled with Rome.

Cochineal: to my eyes, this and carmine lake are indistinguishable when painted on darkly, but in the sheer wash (Travers shows both) the cochineal is very violet. So I vote Budapest.

Carmine lake: if cochineal is Budapest, then carmine lake has to be Foxberry.

Rose madder: this is a nice, coolish red, not very dark. Rome, watered down.

Brazil wood: this is pink when it’s pale, red when dark. I’ve finally found a use for Tokyo.

Indigo: bluejeans blue. Some of the other blues are cooler than this one, so I vote Mist.

Lapis lazuli: a real elementary-school blue. Either Stream or London.

Azurite: in a pale wash this is just the barest bit greener than lapis lazuli, but when they’re dark I can’t tell them apart. Again either Stream or London.

Woad: yeah baby. I love woad. It’s so dark that nothing here is a really good candidate. I would start with Mist and try darkening it either with Jordan or Shadow.

Verdigris: this is a lovely cool green. Pond is bang-on.

Sap green: verdant! I vote for Jamaica, whose name I smudged on the swatch card.

Green earth: darker and a little yellower than sap green. A touch of Inca in Jamaica, perhaps darkened with something.

Malachite: another delicate, cool green. I could repeat Pond, or I could carefully water down Deep Moss.

And that’s all for the pigments. I also have a palette of metallic watercolors, because I am not messing with gesso and leaf. They are the Coliro (formerly Finetec) Pearlcolors, in the Gold & Silver palette.

And these colors, unfortunately, weren’t quite as delightful as the Prima colors. Prima produced saturated payoff with the barest touch of my brush in the pans. Coliro was work. Even with two applications, having scrubbed the pans as much as I dared with my brand-new brush, the metallic is a wash rather than anything solid.

I think this is a matter of my approach. The next time I want to use these, I think I should put a lot of water in the pan and let it sit for 5-10 minutes before I try to paint anything. Calligraphers use this as metallic ink in dip pens, and it is widely regarded as one of the best if not the best metallic watercolor one can buy, so the problem is me. I just have to figure out how to handle it.

I did find that CSY, a new brand with listings only appearing last November, offers a 6-pan palette of golds and silvers, though, and since it’s cheap I ordered it. I will report when it arrives. Interestingly, the list of ingredients for this set (including honey, gum arabic, pearl powder, patience, and time) is similar to Travers’ list for her paints. Good omens!