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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Posted in Botany, Cambridge, Gardens, Natural history, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

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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Posted in Art, Botany, Cambridge, Gardens, History, Natural history | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

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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Posted in Art, Biography, Botany, Cambridge, History, Museums and Galleries, Natural history | 2 Comments

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

I’ve been to Haarlem …

Posted on 31/05/2023 by carolinemmurray

Haarlem was probably the first Dutch city I was ever aware of, through the unlikely medium of a sea shanty (?) that I learned at primary school (though whether directly in class or via one of the BBC radio schools music programmes of the 1950s, I can no longer remember):

I’ve been to Haarlem, I’ve been to Dover / I’ve travelled this wide world all over.

Over, over, three times over / Drink all you have to drink and turn the glasses over.

     Sailing east, sailing west / Sailing o’er the ocean,

     Better watch out when the boat begins to rock / Or you’ll lose your girl in the ocean.

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Posted in Art, Biography, History, Printing and Publishing, The Netherlands | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

George Claridge Druce

Posted on 04/02/2023 by carolinemmurray

As far as I was concerned, until a few days ago, ‘Claridge Druce’ was a hardy geranium (indeed, I have heard it referred to as ‘Clarice Druce’, though not ‘Clarice Drudge’). Then I came across his name as the author of some articles on Ulmus plotii in a box of offprints on elm that I was sorting through in one of my volunteer roles, and started looking things up …

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Posted in Biography, Botany, Gardens, Italy, Museums and Galleries, Natural history | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Stones of Lecce

Posted on 12/01/2023 by carolinemmurray

I think it is safe to say that 2022 was not a good year for the vast majority of people worldwide. My own issues will definitely sound pathetic by comparison with those of most people, not least the entire population of Ukraine and the women of Afghanistan and Iran, but it goes to explain my feeble output of blogs during the year (feeble in number, that is, rather than content – at least I hope so).

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Posted in Archaeology, Art, History, Italy | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments