Eden rose « Frances Mayes - Official Website and Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Eden rose’

Con Questo Caldo

June 30th, 2011

These days, when you say “How are you?” to someone in Cortona, the answer is usually, “Con questo caldo. . .” and a big shrug. In other words, “With this heat, what is there to say?” With the heat appeared the cicadas with their double-time racket in the pine trees. Their yammering accents the beating down heat. Oh well, under the Tuscan sun. What can I expect? With the heat also comes the great vegetable season. Our orto is beginning to give forth cucumbers, lots of lettuces, potatoes, and green beans. One tomato has ripened but the laden bamboo trellis promises a big crop in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, the roses continue to have their day. Along our upper terrace and our “Polish” wall are Pierre de Ronsard, called Eden in the U.S.

Here’s Pierre up close:

It’s my favorite, aside from the unidentifiable one we call Bramasole rose. Two of them survived the thirty or so years the house was abandoned and have continued to flourish for the twenty-one years we’ve owned the house. It has the most ethereal and deeply sweet fragrance of any rose I’ve ever met. Despite many trips to rose nurseries and consultations with gardeners, I’ve never come up with an identification. Here it is–a tight peony-like bud and a many petaled bloom when open. That color!

Against the house, it’s a climber and when in bloom we can smell the fragrance in the dining room and at the little outdoor table where we have dinner.

My other favorite is the rose named for Rita Levi di Montalcino, an Italian scientist who won the Nobel a few years back. She’s a plucky bloomer and a transcendent beauty:

After all these flashy blooms, you have to look closely in the orto to appreciate the lovely little purple eggplant flowers and the delicate yellow cucumber and the tiny white potato blooms. The orto has much interest for the eye, however. I love the inventive and natural constructs for supporting plants as they develop. Here, beans climb branches cut from the woods and stuck in the ground:

And below, here’s the whole orto, with the bamboo teepees for the tomatoes, and more branches in the ground for the cucumbers. At the far end, just out of sight are the strawberries and raspberries, both red and the even more delectable yellow. The basket is full of the first, just dug, potatoes. Simply boiled in big chunks then seasoned and given a few splashes of olive oil and some chopped parsley–nothing better!

To take that basket down late in the day and pick most of dinner is such a profound joy! Summer food! Kiss the ground!

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Back to Bramasole

June 17th, 2010

Returning to Bramasole, we found the garden in full frisson. This is an especially good year for roses, after all the downpours of May. The Edens on the herb terrace wall decided to run rampant and they are a joy. Sally Holmes I always refer to as a cheerleader and this year she’s doing the twist and shout. I love the full-bouquet blooms—a bride could not do better than three stems of these and a few ribbons. From the third floor, I can smell jasmine, the yellow ginestre (broom) on the hills, lemon and orange blossoms, and the roses. Soon the lavender will join the fray. Already white and blue butterflies are dancing around the hedges, waiting for the blooms. Here’s Sally with her apricot buds and pale pink-to-white flowers:

At this time of year the sun hits our house at five a.m. and for a half hour before, all the birds are awake and singing their matins. I can’t sleep because of their divine racket and find myself editing recipes at dawn. This morning I was in the garden at six, deadheading roses and pulling weeds out of the stone terrace walls. My sunflowers are ankle high; this time next week they will double. Bramasole’s herb terrace:

I wanted to write from the cruise but the Internet was spotty on the high seas and when we were in ports, we were out walking all day. I loved going back to Lerici and was about to write about it as a “hidden” place but Ed just told me there’s a recent article and a slide show about it in The New York Times. So much for hidden. http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/06/14/travel/20100620Lerici.html

The last stops: Nice, Marseille, Barcelona. Of these, Marseille was my favorite. Nice is just too choked with traffic. Barcelona, dreamy name, is a place I’ve never warmed to and I’m not sure why. In Spain, I’ve much preferred Madrid, Sevilla, Granada, and Cordoba. Walking down Las Ramblas in the rain was romantic and the market lured us until we had to sail away.

M.F. K. Fisher was right. Marseille is a considerable town. A day there is way short, but it was lovely to walk around the U-shaped port, so full of working boats, pleasure boats, service boats. A long lunch looking out over that lively scene was a highlight of the trip. We ate at Mirador, a lucky guess. My shellfish gratin:

Afterwards, we just walked and walked, marveling at all the gypsies dressed like your idea of gypsies, the Africans in their fabulous colorful fabrics, and taking in the handsome buildings.

We met many, many great people on the Corinthian II. The historian Lamar Cecil, the art historian from The Art Institute of Chicago Margaret Farr, and the three musicians Amy Cofield Williamson, Scott Williamson, and Scott Beard all enriched our days on board. The food was really good and not at all overwhelming, and we were lucky that the sea remained calm. During one of my lectures, there were a few rolls and I had to brace myself by holding on to the podium.

We’re home. Happy to be back with the flowers and birds. I can’t tear myself away from the novel Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, so Ed worked in the garden then roasted a chicken with some potatoes and made a zucchini gratin. When I finally came down to dinner, it was eight o’clock and a soft light suffused the garden and sky. Tiepolo would have hauled out his brushes. Jasmine is narcotizing!

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Roses and Apples

April 7th, 2010

Now, a few days at home in North Carolina, where the pollen is so intense that I seem to be looking through a golden veil. Everyone is mainlining Claritin. The wild wisteria ramples through the pines and white dogwoods peer out from the edges of the woods. With temperatures in the 90’s we’ve gone directly from winter to summer. Much madness abounds because Duke’s basketball team is rocking and rolling.

I have designed a post for pillar roses and just found my favorite Edens to make the climb. Also known as Pierre de Ronsard, Eden is a pink beauty with a peony-type cupped bloom. I have many of them in my garden at Bramasole. I hope you can almost catch the fragrance from this picture:

They climb and bloom to beat the band all summer! Here’s a picture of my pillar rose post, soon to be dripping with flowers:

It’s simply a treated 4 X 4, painted white and capped with a little pyramid of copper. The four arms I found at Home Depot are actually brackets for hanging baskets. When I looked for rose posts in metal, they were very expensive. Mine cost less than forty dollars and I like them better. We are going to set them in concrete this afternoon. Oh, and check that Carolina Blue sky.

My other project on this break from the action is planting apple trees. Mary, our gardener, has made wire surrounds to protect them from the deer who love to munch apple blossoms. Before I left, we planted two crabapples, two peaches, three pears, a white crape myrtle, and two dogwoods. She showed me how to plant them with a big dose of compost tea. In my book tour absence, my heritage apples arrived from Century Farm Orchards in Altamahaw NC. www.centuryfarmorchards.com

David Vernon there helped me select good pollinating varieties resistant to cedar apple rust in our area: Blacktwig, Enterprise, McIntosh, Roxbury Russet, Virginia Beauty, Gravenstein, Grimes Golden, Buckingham, Virginia Winesap, Mollies Delicious. This is a start toward a heritage orchard in a former cornfield. To Ed’s question, “What are we going to do with all those apples?” I don’t yet have an answer but I’ll think of something.

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