I mentioned the Midsomer Murders series of made for TV mysteries in a recent post. Someone was kind enough to point me to "Rosemary and Thyme", another British-produced mystery series with a strong flower presence. Rosemary and Thyme are two sometime- gardeners turned sleuths: Rosemary has a degree in plant pathology, and Thyme (Laura Thyme) supplies a more down to earth interest in plants.. Even in the scenes shot in gardens, most of the flowers to me look as if they came straight from the florist or garden center. But with the weather we're having this year, I'll take whatever I can get. But some are as real as you can get: Ophrys sphegodes, the lesser spider orchid, figures in one plot.
These were originally shot for TV but can now be viewed on YouTube. There are several advantages to viewing them on YouTube: for one, when you can't understand something someone has said the first time, you can easily back up and try again. I have to do a lot of that.
Last night I watched S2E6 "TheItalian Rapscalion" and saw a plant which although I've known about it fora long time I had never seen in a modern photograph.
I have trouble enough understandingBritish English, but the British pronunciation of botanical names isespecially confusing. My Latin is Reformed Academic Latin, the Latin taught (according to the Wikipedia account) inBritish schools for over a century. Rosemary and Thyme Latin isthe Latin which was used over a century ago before it was displaced by ReformedAcademic Latin. Think everyday American gardener's Latin with a British accent (of the many choices to be made among British accents, take your pick). Thank goodness they did not use the nomenclature used backthen! (Have any of you actually tried to read Darwin’s The Origin of Species ?) Anyway, there is a scene where Rosemary is sitting in this garden with aspectacular view out over the Mediterranean, and she tells Thyme to measuresomething to the point where the "asamealy" is climbing up the tree. The what? I replayed that scene several times, listening very carefully each time withoutluck. Fortunately, the scene ends with a lingering view of the plant inquestion: it's Semele, as in Semele androgyna.
In my book that's pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. This particular tempest in a teapot occasionally gets new wind when there is a production of Handel's opera Semele. Do any of you grow this plant? It's not a bulb (by anyone's definition) but it was in the past placed in the Liliaceae, so extensive works on liliaceous plants sometimes mention it. Imagine a climbing form of Danaë racemosa with longer, larger cladodes or Smilax smallii from the southeastern US.It strikes me as the sort of plant our members would grow, but years of patiently waiting for it to appear on the BX have so far been in vain.
Jim McKenneyMontgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, definitely not Semele country.
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