Garden Notes
This week's star native is Bee Balm (aka Wild Bergamot). This fragrant perennial comes in lots of colors, has spikey flowers, and it blooms for a long time. Right now, my native garden is mostly yellow and purple, with my Bee Balm providing the purple canvas on which the yellow blooms can shine.
Bee Balm is a perfect native alternative to the ever-popular Butterfly Bush, which is actually an import from Asia, which means it may look stunning, but it isn't helping the local ecosystem and is invasive.
Bee Balm is also an edible plant. John Forti, author of The Heirloom Gardener, says:
All aerial parts of the plant can be used fresh. The tender leaves can be chopped finely and added to salads and summer vegetable dishes or made into teas and balms. However, the flowers (particularly the red ones) are my favorite edible part of the plant; they are full of an Earl Grey–like floral nectar and offer a fun kid candy from the garden. They are beautiful frozen into ice cubes for summer drinks or turned into a simple syrup for refreshing cocktails and confections.
On to Books...
The Last Masterpiece, by Laura Moretti - Moretti is an art historian and historical novelist who focuses on the Renaissance and Italy, and I have read just about all of her books. This latest is set during WWII, featuring two young women, an Austrian and an American, on opposite sides of the war but both working to preserve the art treasures of the Italian Renaissance from destruction and looting during the war.
I loved it. In fact, I think it might be my favorite of Moretti's novels. The Nazi part of the story begins in Florence, with Eva, the Austrian woman, newly arrived with a job to photograph the paintings and sculptures that the German art historians are cataloging and putting into storage, with the help of the local Italian art historians. Her father is actually heading up the operation to store art from around Europe in the Austrian salt mines, and Eva truly believes that the Nazis are trying to preserve and protect the art for the Italians. Turns out she's wrong about that.
Josie is a WAC from Connecticut who is assigned to provide secretarial support to the Monuments Men. In the course of her duties, she comes to learn about and then love Renaissance art. She also learns to love Italy, particularly Florence.
Now I am all primed to finally read Saving Italy, by Robert M. Edsel, who also wrote The Monuments Men, the book on which the movie is based.
The March, by E.L. Doctorow - this is much-lauded novel is about General Sherman's 1864-1865 campaign in which his army of 90k+ subdued Georgia and the Carolinas and helped bring the Civil War to its end.
Definitely a 5-star book, and not just because of my abiding interest in the Civil War, but because of the breadth and scope of character and story, the insight and compassion, realism and historical accuracy, and eloquence.
Doctorow tells the stories of a cross-section of people involved--the generals and other officers, of course, a smattering of soldiers from both sides, both the brave and the not-so brave. He tells the stories of civilians whose towns, farms, and homes were invaded, sometimes burned, almost always violated. He tells the stories of newly freed African Americans as well those who had enslaved them, and those who are on the periphery of the fighting but still a part of it--the British war correspondent, the itinerant photographer.
My favorite story was that of a German doctor who came to America to find personal liberty and found himself tending the wounded and dying of both sides. I also loved the story of Pearl, an African American girl whose skin was so pale that she could pass but struggled with whether she wanted to live in the white world as a white woman.
Here's my favorite passage, which stopped me cold, near the end, when Sherman is negotiating terms of surrender with his Confederate counterpart, Joe Johnston.
And so the war had come down to words. It was fought now in terminology across the table. It was contested in sentences. Entrenchment and assaults, drum taps and bugle calls, marches, ambushes, burnings, and pitched battles were transmogrified into nouns and verbs. It is all turned very quiet, Sherman said to Johnson, who not quite understanding, lifted his head to listen.
No cannonball or canister, but has become the language here spoken, the words written down, Sherman thought. Language is war by other means.
