Footnotes to a Conversation, November 11, 2024

“At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.” – Rose Macauley

Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging

I highly recommend reading Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee. It’s a fascinating combination of personal memoir as she travels between Canada, Germany, and the UK, sometimes looking backwards at her family history with a father from Wales and a mother from Taiwan. The book also looks at plants and how they travel around the world – some highly coveted such as tea, others deemed invasive and evil.

“What happens when a plant – or a people – moves from one place to another? We often turn to language to offer a frame. So we have introduced species, invasives exotics, and weeds. So we have ‘plant immigrants.’ Or indeed, too often when applied to people, just migrants.”

“The plants, here, are displaced in a range of ways: some are seen as weeds hitching a ride around the globe, some are valuable crops humans have intentionally extracted from one place to another, while others are cultural artefacts of human stewardship or technoscientific plant breeding.” [Jessica J. Lee]

Women & Algae

I particularly enjoyed the chapter of Dispersals that discussed the Victorian seaweed hunters. Botany became a fashionable pastime for women in the 18th and 19th centuries: “Plants were an ideal pastime, as it was often possible to gather, examine, and document specimens around or near the home – and it was largely encouraged socially, provided the species chosen were deemed ‘polite.’ Without showy sexualized flowers, seaweeds – like other nonflowering plants reproducing by spores – were considered particularly suitable for women to study.” [Jessica J. Lee]

Spicy

Do spices add any health benefits to our food or help us ward off illness? There are no simple answers. Chile peppers may reduce mortality, lower the risk of obesity, and assist with high blood pressure, but we may not be eating enough of them to make a difference. It won’t harm you to eat lots of turmeric, but there’s no substantial proof of any benefits. In fact, the health benefits of spices may lie in the legumes and vegetables that they accompany. [BBC]

Healthy

We often view art and nature as secondary to the economy. And yet, they sustain us not only mentally and emotionally but also physically. Paintings have been shown to reduce anxiety and depression and help us live longer. [The Guardian]

Blue Sky

I’m now on Blue Sky and hoping to post more frequently about books, nature, Victoria, and BC – @pennymck.bsky.social

Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.

If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.