"Una furtiva lagrima" Csruso,Bjorling,Schipa

from Donizzeti's "L'elisir d'amore"
Caruso, remastered. What an interpretation. He created the role of Nemorino.

"O Sole Mio" also sung by Caruso

Jussi Bjorling, such a gorgeous voice.


But my sentimental favorite will always be Tito Schipa.


In my mother's family, Beniamino Gigla was beloved:

need some good music to grade by

Grading, grading, grading... need some positive vibrations!

"Batida" from Angola via NPR's Alt.Latino music show.

Pulmonaria officinalis, or spotted lungwort.

 Georg Dionysius Ehret was one of the great botanical illustrators. He worked with Carl Linna German artist (1708-1770). This image is from the Fitzwilliam Museum collection. More images.

Vertical Gardens

In honor of Earth Day, an ambitious and beautiful project to help clean the polluted air of Mexico City with "vertical gardens."
VERDMX

Here's a hanging garden project in Detroit, using Wooly Pockets, a system I saw in San Francisco.

a rain garden!

It has been my desire for a few years now to put a raingarden in the space in front of my home, where the runoff has been causing erosion. A few years ago, I attended a workshop by Metro Blooms, and dutifully called the gas company to make sure that we didn't blow up the place by digging. We found out that the gas line ran diagonally through the space where the garden would be, under the silver maple where we have almost full shade for part of the summer.  These two obstacles combined were enough to stop me in my tracks for about two years. But with our early spring, my neighbor and I determined that we would do it now. We hired a friend of hers who is a gardener, and I'm thrilled that we now have a plan, and that the first stage of digging, percolation testing, and mulching is complete!


Now we just have to wait for it really to be warm enough to get the plants without worrying about them freezing; I'll go to Out Back Nursery in a few weeks for the perennial wildflowers. The concept for this shade garden is "forest floor" and here are the plants we are going to have.

For the shadiest spot, squill (Siberian scilla) are very hardy and are usually the first flowers I see bloom here in Minneapolis.  Periwinkle is also hardy, grows well as a ground cover in the shade and has lovely flowers. Although some people complain that it can be invasive, from what I have read, we probably won't have to worry about it too much in this spot. We'll have a variety of low-growing plants with beautiful leaves: Wild geranium also has light purple blooms; Canadian Wild Ginger is another hardy low plant with glossy leaves.

 Pasqueflower is called "prairie crocus" and is state flower of South Dakota.

 Jack-in-the-Pulpit grows well in the woods, and is a fascinating plant because what looks like the flower is actually a structure that protects the flower inside.



 I know that Maidenhair Fern will grow well here because there used to be some out in back in a similarly shady spot before they got removed in a building project. We'll also have Sensitive Fern.
Some of the taller plants are Virginia Bluebells with its pink to blue flowers. Jacob's Ladder  has medicinal properties,  Solomon's Seal is supposed to have many healing properties. Another medicinal plant is Lungwort, or pulmonaria; it comes in a variety of colors. Snakeroot, or black cohosh of the variety known as "hillside black beauty," has dark foliage.

I have admitted a single "Krossa Regal" Hosta (leaf texture described as "Glaucous Bloom") because it is one of the few hostas I like: big, big leaves and large, late-blooming flowers. I don't like the piddly little hostas that bloom early and leave dried out stalks all summer.

Adrienne Rich

 Adrienne Rich was 82 when she died this week of complications of rheumatoid arthritis. Her partner of decades, Michelle Cliff, and her children and grandchildren will miss her terribly, and so will many, many of her reader who, like me, were influenced tremendously by her words and ideas. Reading her essays when I was in college and graduate school shaped the person I have become. I was fortunate enough to see her read years ago, and I treasure her poems.


This video remixes a reading  by Adrienne Rich of her poem with music and images. Created by vlogger Syd the Skeptic.

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
abroad the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or week

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
and I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
Obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.