Today's geranium. This is the true geranium, not to be confused with the widely cultivated pelargonium displayed in pots and window boxes.
It is called cranesbill in the wild because the shape of the seed head resembles the beak of a crane.
There are numerous wild varieties, all members of the geranium family, which includes the delicate Herb Robert, found in woody places at this time of year. This is one of many garden varieties of geranium. It is useful in partially shaded places, where it flowers prolifically as it does in our little patch of garden.
When I was writing regularly about wine, I did my best to encourage people to drink more rosé, and not to think of it as a pussy-footing wine, uncertain of its identity, half way between red and white. Today, in the sun, on the terrace behind the Black Pig, we thought to ourselves, a glass of the pink stuff in front of us, how right I had been. Light enough for lunchtime, pigmented enough to provide some substance to accompany a salad.
Jean Rhys' best know book, The Wide Sargasso Sea, is a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre. It is the story of how Rochester's mad wife in the attic comes to be in the fix, with which Charlotte Bronte confronts her heroine and the reader. In a review of a new biography of Jean Rhys, I read this quotation from her letters. She writes of how, when reading she looks for something that "...knocks on the heart, which means That is the truth, that it is final. That comes from an au delà." I know what she means.
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In less than a week we'll be drinking rosé from the Au vieux clocher vineyard just down the road, sitting on the balcony at St Jean de la Blaquière, watching the sun-touched spark of one of the satellites as it crosses the night sky. Rosé is the summer wine when you're that far south; the fact is we hardly drink any white wine there at all. And rosé is much more than many give it credit for; those from the Southern Rhone (Gigondas, Vacqueyras) have real body. Daughter M is so smitten with the one from Au vieux clocher, and its patron, she has promised to utter a tribute there in French, which we will rehearse on the way down.
I'm partial to the sweet stuff, the Anjou, even the Cabernet d'Anjou, since I first drank it at a riverside restaurant in Montreuil Bellay, with a chicken gizzard salad, and it tasted so like strawberries...
We had another in Australia, at the Coolangatta winery, which was really full of body. There really is a lot of variety in them, isn't there? Though I find some of the very thin dry provencal ones a bit dull...
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