Tag: Patchwork
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Attar of Roses
These perfumes: musk, clove… all from the hyacinthine shadows of those tresses. You think you hear a nightingale’s song… No. It is the voice of the Rose. – Fakhruddin Iraqi (1213 – 1289), Divine Flashes A classic theme within the Persian artistic tradition is that of the rose and the nightingale: the rose representing the…
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Roses of the Orient
The Persian poet Sheikh Saadi Shirazi in 1258 wrote The Gulistân, or Rose-Garden, whose leaves, as he said, “cannot be touched by the tyranny of autumnal blasts, and the delights of whose spring the vicissitudes of time will be unable to change into the inconstancy of autumn.” Saadi told how, after spending the night in…
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The Spice Trail
In this legendary tale of the Wedding of Andromache and Hektor, the Greek poet Sappho wrote of “myrrh and cassia and frankincense rode on the wind” to perfume the streets of Troy. As early as the 7th century BC, Far Eastern spices had already found their way to ancient Greece. For centuries, Arab merchants controlled…
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The Tea Route
Between the 1850s and 1870s, the clipper ships were the marvel darlings of the maritime trade route that brought tea from China to Britain. From the port of Canton, these magnificent vessels traveled over 16 thousand miles, crossing the Indian Ocean toward Cape of Good Hope on South Africa’s southern tip before heading north along…
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Food is Home
“A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.”– Eleanor Roosevelt High up in the Bohea Mountains of China, farmers cut terraces into limestone crags and built dikes and drains in order to grow tea. Endowed with fertile soil and a mild,…
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Food is Science
Legend has it that the panettone came into being from a forbidden romance in the 15th century. During a Christmas Eve feast hosted by the Duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, his head pastry chef burnt the dessert while stealing a kiss from a nobleman’s beautiful wife in the medieval passageway. A young scullery boy…
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The Song Bird
Each day as it dawns,Mother, I should walk in your footsteps.Swinging off branches, playing in valleys,I should be coddled in mother’s lap everyday.The nightingale that sings from behind the treeShould be with me as it reciprocates with a “koo” whenever I call her.– Komma Uyala It is remarkable that the birds which sing are rarely…
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Oranges and Lemons of St. Clement’s
Oranges and Lemons of St. Clement’s is a traditional English nursery rhyme which references the bells of several churches within the vicinity of the City of London. It is also a children’s singing game, in which two children place their hands together to form an arch to symbolize the arch of sanctuary while the others…
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The Reindeer
Long before the tales of Santa Claus, images of the flying reindeer had been etched onto the Bronze Age’s stones, scattering across the deserts and steppes of western Mongolia and stretching into the Altai Mountains and up to the border of Manchuria in the east. On these stones depicted the reindeer with its antlers reaching…
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The Juniper Tree
I was following the pack, all swallowed in their coatsWith scarves of red tied ’round their throatsTo keep their little heads from falling in the snowAnd I turned ’round and there you goAnd Michael, you would fall and turn the white snow redAs strawberries in the summertime.– Fleet Foxes, White Winter Hymnal Since it was…
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