Reflections on 2014

This has been a great year for gardens and learning about gardening! In 2014, Eden By The Bay made a deep dive into gardening history by looking at ancient practices of the early Americans – botanical gardens, soil building, and terraced farming. We also studied four of Linnaeus’s "Apostles," who traveled with expeditions in the 1700s, collecting botanical information and specimens. Plants were on the move in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries as they were collected for gardens, and commerce. Many of the world’s cuisines benefited from this exchange.

Legacy trees	Drought tolerant ground covers
Plants (and people) on the move	Leaf peeping in Vermont

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Closer to home, we found more great places to view legacy trees here in the San Francisco Bay Area. We also learned more about drought-tolerant plants (especially for clay soil), viewed beautiful flowers in the desert and chaparral of Southern California (despite the drought), and looked for good examples of low-water landscaping. My husband and I visited historic gardens in Massachusetts and Vermont, and enjoyed leaf peeping.

Swedish Christmas Carol

The tree is decorated; the Christmas boxes have been sent to Alaska and Oregon; and the pantry and refrigerator are full of special ingredients. Everything is ready, but my husband and I are feeling a little blue. This is our first Christmas without our son, who is in Southeast Alaska with his bride (recall our pleasure last year, when they visited from University of Alaska, and announced their engagement)! We are also grieving the loss of a family member who recently succumbed to a rare blood cancer.

On the bright side, we just met my second cousin’s fiancé and like him very much; and we are grateful for friends and family, health, and Emmanuel (Hebrew for "God with us"), in the form of a baby in a manger.

After spending the year researching four of Carl Linnaeus’s “apostles” (Pehr Löfling, Pehr Kalm, Carl Peter Von Thunberg, and Daniel Solander), I wanted to learn more about how Christmas might have been celebrated in eighteenth century Sweden. What would these guys have been thinking about while on expedition over the Christmas holidays? What would they be missing, while their families missed them?

"Lucia-13.12.06" by Claudia Gründer
(Creative Commons)

Sweden would have been celebrating Santa Lucia and the festival of lights. When monks brought Christianity to Sweden, they brought the story of Saint Lucy who delivered food and supplies to Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs during the 300s. She wore a wreath of candles on her head, to light her path and keep her hands free for carrying supplies. Swedes merged the story with their traditional winter solstice celebration.

Today, Swedes celebrate Santa Lucia’s Day during advent. A young girl is chosen to play Saint Lucia. She wears a white dress with a red sash and a Lingonberry wreath of candles on her head; and leads a procession of children, or anyone who wants to join. They sing songs about Santa Lucia, and hand out holiday treats. To get a flavor of what our intrepid eighteenth century botanists might have been missing: http://youtu.be/Mk0FyZqNp5Q

Merry Christmas everyone!

Holiday Cooking – Bay Leaves

What could be homier than the fragrance of bay leaves wafting from the kitchen at Christmas? Bay leaves enhance broth and gravy, lace roast turkey and chicken, and add a rich flavor to stove top bread stuffing. A few bay leaves added to stew or soup provides a warm, pungent flavor.

Laurus nobilis (bay leaves) are used in marinades; and in bouquet garni (with parsley and thyme) to flavor bouillons, sauces and soups. Laurel belongs to the plant family Lauraceae, which includes the spices cinnamon and cassia. A native version, Umbellularia californica, grows in California and Oregon, and can also be used for cooking.

Botanical illustration of Laurus nobilis from Koehler's Medicinal Plants.
Published before 1923 and public domain in the United States.

According to J.O. Swahn, in The Lore of Spices, laurel originated in the Mediterranean (Greece and Syria). Its berries and leaves were included in the Roman cookbook Apicius in the first century A.D. The laurel was exported to northern Europe in the Middle Ages and used for healing, and by 1652 was included as a cooking spice in François-Pierre de la Varenne's cookbook, Le Cuisinier Français. He may have learned about it in Italy at the Medici court.

Laurel is eternally green, starts as a pyramidal bush, and grows into a tree up to 40 feet tall. Leaves are dark-green and glossy, with lighter undersides, lanceolate to elliptic to four inches long, aromatic, and fairly hard. The leaves are used in cooking, and yield an essential oil used in perfume and medicine. Bark is soft, olive green or reddish. Flowers are small, yellow or greenish-white. Both male and female flowers grow from the tree's leaf folds. Fruit is a shiny, drupe about the size of a small grape or cherry, and may be green, dark purple, or black.

Holiday Cooking – Red Peppers

Another tasty flavor for Christmas is red pepper, which can take the form of bell peppers, spicy chili peppers, and a host of varieties in between. Tasty holiday recipes include red pepper jelly, sweet chili sauce on cream cheese and crackers, chili con carne, and spicy salsa for chips. Whether you desire sweet or heat, the range of flavors spices up any holiday spread.

Capsicum annuum (bell pepper, chili pepper) is in the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family. Capsaicin is the active component that causes the burning sensation for humans and other mammals. Birds are not affected, so are effective sowers of the seeds. Heat is measured in Scoville heat units (SHU), ranging from 0 for bell peppers to over 2,000,000 for the Caroline Reaper cultivar.



Botanical illustration of Capsicum annuum from Koehler's Medicinal Plants.
Published before 1923 and public domain in the United States.

Red peppers originated in Central and South America, and the Caribbean, and records show they have been cultivated since 3,000 B.C. According to J.O. Swahn in The Lore of Spices, Christopher Columbus’s physician brought peppers back to Spain, where they became popular ornamental, and then culinary, plants. Peppers spread throughout the Mediterranean and in countries further east, such as India, Southeast Asia, and China. They are now an important ingredient for spicy, regional cuisines all over the world.

Red peppers grow to 30 inches high; and are perennial, but often treated as annuals. They may be glabrous or pubescent. Leaves are lanceolate, one – five inches long. Flowers are solitary, rarely two at a node; calyx is rotate, five-toothed; corolla is white, five-lobed to ½ inch across. The fruit varies in shape, size, color, and pungency. Five main groups of peppers are included in C. annuum: (1) Cerasiforme (cherry peppers), (2) Conoides (cone peppers), (3) Fasciculatum (red cone peppers), (4) Grossum (bell or sweet peppers), and (5) Longum (chili or cayenne peppers).

Holiday Cooking – Mustard

Every Christmas I like to survey a few of the spices and flavorings that go into Christmas holiday meals, and learn about their origins and histories. Jan-Öjvind Swahn’s book, Lore of Spices, helps frame our research. It’s been a fun project, and, after this year’s theme of “plants on the move,” the project takes on even more meaning. Many of the ingredients we love and associate with holiday cooking and baking, actually originated somewhere else. This year I’m looking at some of the flavorings used in the savory dishes we love to serve and eat this time of year, starting with mustard!

Brassica nigra (or black mustard) is in the Brassicaceae family (formerly Cruciferae), which includes mustard, cabbage, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. Mustard adds flavor to honey-mustard glaze on ham, deviled eggs, savory dipping sauces, and sandwiches and hot dogs. Mustard seeds are tiny. In fact, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed in one of his parables – from its tiny form, comes a large, life-giving plant (Mathew 13:31-32). When you grind mustard seeds into a powder and add vinegar, you create a delicious condiment. The mustard seeds can be finely or coarsely ground.

Botanical illustration of Brassica nigra from Koehler's Medicinal Plants.
Published before 1923 and public domain in the United States.

 

According to Swahn, mustard originated in Mediterranean countries, and was initially regarded as a medicinal plant. In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras prescribed mustard as a cure for scorpion bites. Later, in the first century, the Roman cookbook Apicius includes mustard sauce recipes for game, sausage, and fish dishes. Mustard reached France in the ninth century A.D., and became an important crop in Dijon. It reached Germany and England in the twelfth century, and became widely used in cooking throughout Europe. Mustard plasters have also been used to treat respiratory ailments and toothaches (ouch).

Mustard plants are annual herbs. They are dicots, erect, tall to 6 feet high, many-branched, and glaucous. Leaves are small, pinnate, dentate, petioled, and often covered with short hairs. They have many one inch, yellow flowers, with four petals configured in many short racemes. Fruit is a silique, pressed close to the rachis, with multiple seeds in a chamber. The seeds are small, dark, and without aroma until crushed.