Spring Lilac. Granulate Nightshade, Solanum granulo-leprosum, Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The rain came down in Torrents today, so I stayed in except for a little historical round to admire the small placque just up my street dedicated to highly romantic but at the same time independent María Josepha Petrona de Todos los Santos Sánchez de Velazco y Trill de Thompson y Mandeville (1786-1868). It was in her salon here on Florida 271-3 that the national anthem of Argentina was first performed. A contemporary gushes about the ambiance and concludes with a telling fact of society at that time: 'numerosos esclavos que servían el chocolate', presumably as Liberty was being sung.
Her childhood sweetheart was dashing Martín Jacobo Thompson (1777-1819), founder of the Argentine Naval Prefecture. Their love was frowned upon by her parents not only was she not even 16 but also Martín ranked rather 'beneath' them with his swarthy complexion. Regardless, with her father dead they married happily. He died young; she remarried and continued a feminist avant la lettre. Their stories and lives are the stuff of which romances are made. There are a couple in Spanish but none, as far as I know, in English.
No, they didn't take to Nightshade, nor did they as Shakespeare's lovers in the Famous Play lick the poison from each other's lips...
She has that smallish placque; but he - a man, of course - a very handsome bronze bust opposite the Prefecture building.
Anyway, here's an endemic flowering shrub of much of South America. It's all over that great Costanera Sur as well: Granulate Nightshade, Solanum granulo-leprosum. Botany moves forward but still today the great authority on Nightshades is Michel Felix Dunal (1789-1856). He described this plant in 1852.
PS Please forgive my tardiness in comments. My web-connection in this hotel is quite awful... Thanks.
Spring Lilac. Granulate Nightshade, Solanum granulo-leprosum, Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The rain came down in Torrents today, so I stayed in except for a little historical round to admire the small placque just up my street dedicated to highly romantic but at the same time independent María Josepha Petrona de Todos los Santos Sánchez de Velazco y Trill de Thompson y Mandeville (1786-1868). It was in her salon here on Florida 271-3 that the national anthem of Argentina was first performed. A contemporary gushes about the ambiance and concludes with a telling fact of society at that time: 'numerosos esclavos que servían el chocolate', presumably as Liberty was being sung.
Her childhood sweetheart was dashing Martín Jacobo Thompson (1777-1819), founder of the Argentine Naval Prefecture. Their love was frowned upon by her parents not only was she not even 16 but also Martín ranked rather 'beneath' them with his swarthy complexion. Regardless, with her father dead they married happily. He died young; she remarried and continued a feminist avant la lettre. Their stories and lives are the stuff of which romances are made. There are a couple in Spanish but none, as far as I know, in English.
No, they didn't take to Nightshade, nor did they as Shakespeare's lovers in the Famous Play lick the poison from each other's lips...
She has that smallish placque; but he - a man, of course - a very handsome bronze bust opposite the Prefecture building.
Anyway, here's an endemic flowering shrub of much of South America. It's all over that great Costanera Sur as well: Granulate Nightshade, Solanum granulo-leprosum. Botany moves forward but still today the great authority on Nightshades is Michel Felix Dunal (1789-1856). He described this plant in 1852.
PS Please forgive my tardiness in comments. My web-connection in this hotel is quite awful... Thanks.