The Botanic Gardens Again ..

Posted on 02/11/2024 by carolinemmurray

I am cheating, by using a lot of photographs, as my brain is still too full of mush to write coherently, but Cambridge University Botanic Garden Alpine House is now (as always at this time of year and in spring) full of goodies, and the whole of the outside is looking pretty wonderful too, so here goes:

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Lord Samuel’s Bequest

Posted on 19/08/2024 by carolinemmurray

It is far too long since I last managed to complete a blog. I continue to be permanently exhausted, and my brain is mush – so much so that when I wanted to add an updating link to my 2020 piece on Maarten van Heemskerck, I managed to delete the entire thing, and it took two days to reconstruct it. I have begun several pieces which remain unfinished through a lack of energy and the said mushy brain …

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Posted in Art, Belgium, Museums and Galleries, The Netherlands, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

The Eight Wonders of the World

Posted on 02/06/2024 by carolinemmurray

(NB: This is a blog which I posted in 2020 and managed to delete while I was trying update it today … another example of my current and continuing brain fog.)

One of the many ways in which my day job changed during lockdown was that instead of spending a lot of time being polite to people on the phone and via emails, I was doing lots of proofreading, and as a result finding out all sorts of new Stuff.

Self-portrait with the Colosseum, Rome, by Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574). (Credit: the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
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The Uses of Quercus suber

Posted on 08/01/2024 by carolinemmurray

I’ve been trying to remember when the first screw-top caps for wine bottles came in. First there were rigid plastic ‘corks’, and then aluminium screw-caps – sometimes even for wines which in our rather lowly circle might be described as posh.

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Plant of the Month: October 2023

Posted on 18/10/2023 by carolinemmurray

One of the plants continuing to flower in this most unusual October weather has been Ceratostigma plumbaginoides, or the hardy plumbago plant. It is native to western China, and seems to have been discovered on an expedition by the Russian scientist Alexander Andreyevich Bunge (1803–90), born in Kyiv to German immigrant parents.

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St Thomas’s Onions

Posted on 11/10/2023 by carolinemmurray

Part of my early morning routine (assuming I have the time to do anything except swallow my medication and dash out of the house) is to read the daily blog of the great and good Gentle Author: https://spitalfieldslife.com/. He posts every day without fail (don’t ask me how), usually on topics relating to the East End of London, but occasionally moving further afield. His posts are fascinating, full of information on the history, quirks and inhabitants of his patch.

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Plant of the Month, July 2023

Posted on 12/07/2023 by carolinemmurray

it is almost exactly a year since I last did a ‘Plant of the Month’ post, so I thought I had better get back into that particular delightful harness. In @CUBotanicGarden the other day, I was admiring the way in which the tiny individual flowers of teasels come out in bands around the spiky flower head, and remembering dimly that the ‘ripe’ brown heads were once used in the cloth trade.

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Knossos after Fifty Years

Posted on 07/07/2023 by carolinemmurray

No, we haven’t been to Crete after all our other recent jollies, merely (sic) to Oxford, to see the Ashmolean exhibition ‘Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality’. I have mentioned a few times recently the problem that I am having with my brain, but it was only when we were having lunch in the fourth-floor restaurant before going in that I realised that it is almost exactly fifty years since I last visited Knossos. (Disclaimer: I was about to write that we have been to Crete once since then, but more for a beach holiday with the children than for serious stuff; however my daughter informs me that she remembers going to Knossos, and that we went to hardly any beaches …)

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Posted in Archaeology, Art, Biography, Classics, Greece, History, Museums and Galleries | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Art and Algology

Posted on 22/06/2023 by carolinemmurray

A bit more about how everything is in fact connected to everything else … I first came across Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (née Watkins: 1804–89) early in 2016, when I was trying to find out about Armenian bole, and regretted that back in the day we had not reissued her works on art (mostly of the Italian Renaissance), which began with her 1844 translation of l libro dell’arte, which basically told you how to paint. Written by Cennino di Andrea Cennini (c. 1360 – before 1427), a pupil of Gaddi, who was a pupil of Giotto, it was rediscovered and published in Italian only in 1821.

Cennini’s original manuscript
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Sant’ Apollinare

Posted on 09/06/2023 by carolinemmurray

Winding back a bit from our recent trip to the Netherlands, we had the great good fortune to spend ten days in Italy at the end of April, of which three were in Ravenna before going up to Venice by train. This was before the disastrous floods in the area in the middle of May, when several people died and thousands were made homeless, and I am getting increasingly frustrated by the lack of information online about any damage suffered by the wonderful monuments in this UNESCO World Heritage area, where the potential for massive flood damage was outlined in an article back in 2018.

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Posted in Archaeology, Art, Biography, History, Italy, Museums and Galleries | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments