Fruit of the Mediterranean

Checking where, which site, my blog visitors came from, I fell over gimcw??? Gardening in mediterranean climates worldwide. They have added me to the gimcw list of blogs. One of my earliest comments was from a Spaniard – ho ho ho a Mediterranean garden way down South at the bottom of Africa! So yes, thank you, for a lower-case-mediterranean!

For years, ever since it was just an idea, I have wanted to visit the Eden Project in Cornwall. Was fascinating to see mediterranean plants from around the world gathered together, where I could see the actual growing plants. Not just a dry list of names, nor even frozen pictures. There I learnt that my lemon verbena comes from South America. Mexican born Fer in Japan (currently hosting a blog carnival) has promised to find us some good South and Central American garden blogs. Company for our lemon verbena, granadilla (South American, that's why I can't spell it) and guava.

A sparrow and weaver sharing our figs

Admit it - a thing of great beauty!
No wonder Cecil John Rhodes brought us
European starlings

Sadly Australian plants mostly make me think of invasive aliens. There’s the waratah, an odd looking to South African eyes, protea. Geraldton wax flower is a pretty little thing beloved by florists. Oh and the creeping Australian violet my mother has been growing in her garden since I was a child.

The Californians I have only represented by some sulky thrift. We want cool sea breezes – it is too HOT here! THEY are awash with our invasive aliens, but we don’t seem to have acquired theirs for our gardens. Shirley poppy?

Lemons and olives

Citrus swallowtail
If you grow oranges and lemons you have seen the 'orange dog' caterpillars
Flashing their scented horns at you! 

And of course the true Mediterranean – figs, olives and lemons. Lavender, oregano, basil and my Dusty Miller. All present and correct.

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(Warning – rant coming!) Lately I have come up against depressing, despairing, demoralising posts about food, and farming, and if we are what we eat, WHAT are we? Buckets of poison, cruelty and suffering? Elephant’s Eye is vegetarian, but we sometimes eat eggs. Always free range, preferably organic. In our pushing 40C summer heat, we often drive past long metal sheds of battery chickens. The two of us have milk in our tea/coffee, yoghurt on our breakfast muesli, usually cheese for lunch, so we share some responsibility for veal calves and cows. However organic or free range the milk was, there are still the calves …

South American granadilla and guava

The bees destroyed by poison, save the bees? Pigs, pregnant and confined to pig sized cages for life. Their legs just pillars to stand on, no walking possible. What fish do you eat? Are you aware, do you care, that some species are endangered? And the seabirds that depend on your ocean fish leavings to survive? Big-fish-fight. The ultimate greenwash is biodiesel. How can we, in a hungry world, grow food crops and turn them into diesel to burn in a car’s engine.

Plums and apples from up North

What bemuses me is, if you look at lists for the main cause of death in people – half of us die of obesity and the dis-ease of too much, and the other half die of starvation and the dis-ease of too little. What a paradise our world could be, if we would just shift a little of the too much across to those who have too little. If that wasted food could have been diverted to the hungry instead? 'When the price of oil is high, it becomes economically attractive to divert crops from use in food to use in biofuels.'  Food inflation hits the poor hardest. The poor women who feed their families. Reduce your FoodPrint by choosing Cool Food - organic, local and seasonal - from Food-and-global-warming. 

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, 

words by Diana of Elephant's Eye
- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)