Fleur-de-Sung

We haven’t put a spade in the garden and I’m already learning from Limerock Court community gardeners.

At our kickoff meeting this week Sung, one of our Korean gardeners, asked for help in identifying a flowering plant from a photo on her iPhone.  It was a dark pink, cup-shaped flower with lance-shaped leaves and surrounded by Korean calligraphy. Two words were written using the Western alphabet: Mimosa pudica, the only thing I could read.

Sung explained why she wanted to find the plant.  It is used in Korean culture for dying fingernails. Sung remembers as a child rubbing the flower mixture on each fingernail, wrapping fingertips in cellophane before bed, and waking up in the morning with orange-pink fingernails. Her mother did it as a child too, and now that Sung’s daughter Grace is 5, she wants to pass on the botanical tradition.

Hmmm.  This sounded like a tough one. I Googled images of Mimosa pudica,  but the photo she showed me was a different plant. Mimosa  has compound leaves—the photo of the mystery plant did not.

I started searching for “natural dyes for fingernails” and “Korean fingernail dying”.  Eventually, I hit the information jackpot: Bong Seon Hwa, the Art of Korean Finger Dye. And the best news, it is not a rare, exotic plant used in this process but Impatiens balsamina,  also known as Garden Balsam or Rose Balsam, and probably available at any big box store or nursery.

Impatiens balsamina  is native to India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar where it has been used as a medicinal herb to treat everything from snakebites and warts to constipation and hair loss.

The process of dying fingernails is pretty straightforward, Sung explains.  Gather some flowers and leaves, sprinkle with salt and “smush together”.  Then you put the resulting liquid on each nail and wrap.

“Usually we do it before bedtime because we can’t wait that long time while we are playing,” Sung says of the traditional event of summertime. She sent the accompanying photos—and there is even a children’s book describing the art. Laurie Lynch

Written on Slate:  “A children’s story which is only enjoyed by children is a bad children’s story.” C.S. Lewis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fleur-de-WinterSpring

Witch Hazel

After several blogs on books, I’m switching gears to write about a documentary. I’m no film critic, and the movie isn’t new—it premiered in 2012—but I heartily recommend it

In Happy Valley we celebrate Earth Day all month long, so two “green” committees sponsored After Winter, Spring at a nearby retirement community. Filmmaker Judith Lit, who grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, and her crew followed the lives of seven farm families over four years and through the four seasons in the Périgord region of France.

For pastoral scenery alone this film is worthwhile. But it is also the story of community and of farming, the pressures of change, vagaries of weather, life, death, and skies filled with migrating cranes. Viewers get close-ups of personalities and peasant life in southwestern France, and English subtitles.

Women lovingly raise goslings into geese and then force-feed them for the end result—foie gras and a livelihood.  An octogenarian gets help from family and friends to finish the grape harvest in his vineyard, knowing it will be his last. Another grumbles about his new neighbors who complain about the noise from his three cows wearing bells around their necks. A young dairyman joins in a protest over milk prices, dumping tankers of milk along a highway.  A woman expertly handles a sharp knife as she slices off the roots and the upper tough green stalks of the leeks she just pulled from the ground. Into the wire basket they go, then to the kitchen. A 60-year-old fellow harvests young oak saplings from his woodlot in fall and takes them to his workshop for winter work, shaving each into staves for wine barrels.

Paperbark Maple

That same man, Guy, also grows tobacco, raises livestock, and fields of hay.  His face exudes pride after growing, harvesting, and curing a fine crop of tobacco as he pats the bundle of dried tobacco leaves, eloquently saying he knows it’s good because, “It sings.”

After Winter, Spring provides a lyrical look at the passion of farming as it takes root in the soul. See it and celebrate the earth. Laurie Lynch

Back to Books: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard has become my struggle.

I just can’t relate to the male teen-age angst, no matter how hard I try.  And, where are the chapters?  I like a book with chapters, especially short chapters, to give me a good stopping point.

I got a notice from the library that Unto Us a Son Is Given, Donna Leon’s latest, was waiting for me.  I zipped through it.  Then, I returned to My Struggle—nothing but cold, Scandinavian melancholy sinking me into a funk after the sun and warmth of Leon’s Venice.

I’ve invested enough time.  I will leave My Struggle in Part Two, Page 230, and enter the Northern Irish countryside once again with An Irish Country Village. There I feel a connection and learn a delightful new expression: “Horse apples,” slang for horse manure.

Oriental Spicebush

Slow Spring:  The photos throughout this entry were not taken in France, Italy, Scandinavia, or Ireland. No, it is pure Central PA, April 4, 2019.  The Arboretum at Penn State has a main loop, .175 mile, with a smooth sidewalk and plenty of benches, perfect for my 90-year-old mother and my cane, camera, and rehabilitating ankle. Just call us Hobble and Wobble.