Dedicated to the holy in nature. The life in the seed. The beauty that feeds the world.
IF CRISTINA GARCÍA RODERO has a motto for her 47-year-long career in photography, it may be something akin to what she told B&W Magazine in a 2017 interview about returning to her native Spain: “We roam the world and very often we don’t know our […]
A notoriously fickle vegetable to harvest, Yorkshire forced rhubarb is anything but easy to grow. It thrives in the county’s cold winters, but if the soil is too wet, it can’t be planted. If the temperature is too hot, it won’t grow; and 10 or more frosts are needed before a farmer can even think about forcing it. Only then can horticulturalists remove the heavy roots from the field, then clean and replant them inside the forcing sheds where photosynthesis is limited, encouraging glucose stored in the roots to stimulate growth. It demands patience, expertise and good fortune, and, ultimately, it is engineered for maximum taste: once deprived of light, the vegetable is forced to use the energy stored in its roots, making it far sweeter than the normal variety.
For a simple vegetable, rhubarb has come a long way since it was discovered growing wild on the banks of the River Volga. Cultivated from Siberia to China as far back as 2700 BC, where it was used for its healing properties, it was transported along the Silk Road to Italy in the 13th Century by Marco Polo. It once commanded three times the price of opium and saffron, and was weighed against gold.
It took another three centuries – up to around the 1620s – before it was brought to England by Sir Matthew Lister, royal physician to James I and Charles I, and used as a cathartic food to purge the body of illness. That would have been the end of the story if it wasn’t for scientists at London’s Chelsea Physic Garden, who discovered the forcing process by chance. Covering up leftover rhubarb crowns – the underground part of the plant – with soil in 1817, the gardeners were stunned weeks later when the robust plant produced a shock of sweet pink stems and frilly leaves.
A Thing First, it has to be a useful tool It is a biological human being, but it is not a political human being an economical human being the fact is a slave is acknowledged legally and socially is as a thing An ancient Greek […]
At dawn the beach of Oostduinkerke is abandoned, the seas calm. There is little wind, but the air is cool. The only sounds are the soft, distant creak of wagon wheels and the gentle lapping of the ocean. The shrimp fishermen are perched with slipshod ease, riding across the sand on the edge of their low wooden carts. As they pass, the hooves of their giant Brabant horses leave deep, half-moon impressions in the sand.
There’s a place in Mexico City that’s filled with thousands of musical instruments from all over Latin America — some of them more than 100 years old. It’s not a museum or music school. It’s an apartment. Actually, the collection’s grown so much, it now […]
I woke into world the bastard child of a slaughtering Empire. I woke into world in an old Shawnee town, but I am not Shawnee, and the town is their ghost. The town, in Shawnee, is called Chalawgatha, which is also the name of the band […]
Munich’s Kunsthalle is currently showing selected pieces from Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller’s Samurai Collection in Dallas, Texas. The selection includes armor and weapons as well as household items, but I was most impressed by the numerous helmets. Their design is often unique and highly elaborate, much more so than in medieval Europe. So here is a series pictures from the exhibition with an emphasis on the helmets.
Picture by Christoph Nahr.
