sea rice and ice blossoms

In April 2021, I was very ill indeed. From time to time, I would start to do things, and then stop, defeated by the complexity of placing one thought in a sequence with another.

This post, abandoned in April 2021, consisted of two lines; the title, and this:

 Lockdown and illness have beaten the garden quite hard.  

It was interesting, trying to garden through the stroke. The damage to my vision had brought difficulties with light tolerance, with feeling confident in open spaces, with watering eyes that responded poorly to changes in  light. Things appeared at the wrong distance, or blurred. At the same time I was depressed. I'm a public health professional. I know the impact that having one stroke has on future likelihood of stroke incidence. My stroke had lost my faith in the future.

And it's hard to garden when you don't have faith in the future.

What about the title, though? What about the sea rice?  Well, that I tracked down relatively easily.

could this marine grain be edible?

A few weeks before I didn't write this blog post, I had read an article about Michelin-starred chef Ángel León and his interest in whether the grains of eel grass he had found growing in the sea could be eaten. I had read how it had been gathered by humans, maybe for a long time. 

I started thinking about Octopus Gardens, and how people have started farming coral in shallow water. 

These people are hybrid farmers, farming tourists, documentary makers, university staff and travellers alongside their coral. But all farms are human farms. That's how they exist. We are this era's megafauna.

Could we add Eel Grass into our commensurate species party? Have we done so already?

All this and more I couldn't express very well in words at the time. 

the flowers that look alive even though they are dead

As far as the ice blossoms go, I would not have been talking about frost flowers. I would have been talking about the slightly darker phenomenon, where an ice storm encloses blossom, and the flowers are encased in a vitrine of ice. 

You can tell by the time of year. April is the cruellest month.

The chrysanthemum above is dead I think. Two years of neglect and some sharp snaps of cold have done for it. It's a tough cookie, but not -10 tough.