Jann 18 2025 - Discontinued!

 

Hershey is discontinuing their chocolate Cherry Blossom novelty candy.  It is a syrupy maraschino cherry encased in milk chocolate.  While I've never had a Hersey version, when I was a child we made them for Christmas every year.  I expect I've eaten hundreds of these treats.  While ours differentiated from Cherry Blossoms by being  dark chocolate, they were certainly syrupy.  I don't seem to have copied the chocolate centre recipe anywhere, but I can probably reproduce it without any conscious thinking. To make the syrup, one mixed icing sugar and butter to make a paste dough. Then one made it into a little flat circle in one's palm, placed the maraschino cherry in it, then wrapped it up around the cherry, finishing it with a toothpick in the top to carry it around.  This was then cooled for a day or two.  Once cool enough, it would be dipped in chocolate and placed on a wax paper cookie sheet to harden. That took place in the Cold Cellar. A day or so later, the toothpick would be removed and a little dollop of chocolate replaced the tiny hole.  Then the cherries have to ripen for a week or 2 for the sugar paste to turn to syrup.  I can tell you they tasted good before and after getting syrupy.    It makes me realize that this is one thing I know about that has been discontinued.  There are 39 discontinued things on Wikipedia that  were discontinued in 2024. I don't know most of them.  Food items were: Diet Coke with Splenda, Coca-Cola Cherry Vanilla, Super Bubble (a bubble gum), the McDonald's Grimace Shake and Fruit Stripe.  The other items look like technology items that have been replaced - iPhones, AirPods, lots of video games.    We consider that things might be discontinued, and somehow they are not forgotten.      I am catching up with past posts - I found a picture of a clock - this one was in Half Moon Bay, California.  Below that is a garden view at Filoli Gardens - nearby to Half Moon Bay.

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Oct 8 2024 - What time is it, google?

 

That's one of the top 3 questions on a regular basis - what time is it google? The importance of time.  When did time become important?  Perhaps always.  So important that the Babylonians and Egyptians measured time at least 5,000 years ago.  Calendars organized communal activities and public events, scheduled shipments, and regulated cycles of planting and harvesting.  They used the solar day, the lunar month, and the solar year.   I guess I could manage the solar day - I have a few sundials in the garden as decorative elements.  It would take a lot of skill to accurately use a sundial.    There is so much invention in clocks and time pieces.  I read through the history in a breeze, but it is a substantial body of knowledge and engineering.  What is being worked on now?  NASA wants to come up with a way to keep track of time on the moon - an entire frame of time reference for the moon. " Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad quicker — 58.7 microseconds every day — compared to Earth. So the White House Tuesday instructed NASA and other U.S agencies to work with international agencies to come up with a new moon-centric time reference system."  And a funny thought: "Unlike on Earth, the moon will not have daylight saving time." From the New Scientist: "Any random sequence of events, such as the lapping of ocean waves on the shore, can become a clock – and physicists have now devised a mathematical procedure for making such an odd timepiece and for measuring its precision."  That article isHERE except you have to subscribe to read it. And from Euronews - Melting ice caps.  The human-caused consequence of climate change is slowing the speed at which the Earth rotates, increasing the length of a day... by a few milliseconds. And interspersed in the news about time is the news in Time Magazine.  It was going to be called Facts, but then the name was changed to Time with the slogan - "Take Time - It's Brief". That's the clock tower at Filoli Gardens, south of San Francisco.

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Mar 25 2024 - Puddings are Past Tense

 

Pudding comes to mind ia something in a little Jello box in the supermarket.  You would open the envelope and little crystals would come out to be mixed with milk.  And a magical instant pudding was the result.  There were flavours like chocolate, butterscotch, strawberry and vanilla.  Then there were home-made puddings from tapioca and rice but there was magic in the little Jello boxes. I see these various puddings are now referred to as "retro desserts".  Good point - they were popular in the early 20th century and at their height 1950s and 1960s.  They were advertised as a boon to the busy mother.   These don't seem to be related to puddings of the past. Ancient puddings were of two types: meat-based or sweet puddings of flour, nuts and sugar - think Christmas pudding - almost a cake.  Puddings have a long tradition in many countries.   The picture below shows the place of puddings within Sweet Royalty.  Doesn't Christmas pudding look like a king@ So it seems to me that it is in the 20th century where the food giants put the name pudding to little boxes of crystals that made gummy goo.  And then restaurants and diners with the glass-door fridges could display them. I remember that our mothers could let us girls make puddings as there wasn't much that could go wrong.  Packaged puddings are still on the shelf.  They came to my attention during COVID as I stood in the pudding aisle in a long line waiting to cash out.  There are a lot of flavours and boxes, but they have declined:   "Jello is high in sugar and low in fibre and protein and an unhealthy food choice."  I do think it is just the packages that changed and one can buy the little pudding cups in the refrigerated section now.   Isn't this a pretty scene - Filoli - one of those grand American heritage homes and gardens.  it is south of San Francisco.

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April 20 2020 - Silly String Alive

I have to tell you about the silly string creature in the ocean off Australia.  It showed up on the Weather network a few weeks ago.  It is a giant siphonophore Apolemia, that looks like silly string.  It is 150 feet long.  New Zealand's common name for it is long stringy stingy thingy.  It is many thousands of individuals which form an entity on a higher level.  It is a string jellyfish.  You can see the video HERE. I don't remember having silly string as a child.  It is a mixture that is dispersed from an aerosol can.  It comes out as a a string.  It was invented in 1972. What Leonard Fish and Robert Cox were trying to invent was an instant cast.  When the string shot across the room about 30 feet, they turned it into a toy. Who owns it today? The Car-Freshner Corporation, the maker of Little Trees owns the Silly String trademark. We have a pretty rose arbour from Filoli Gardens, south of San Francisco near Half Moon Bay.

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The Restless Sun

The sun comes up every day - something  ordinary we don't think about much.  In the top stories today is a picture of the sun's surface - it looks like gold crackle paint.  Like something I'd find on an old rail car.   "The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope on Hawaii has released pictures that show features as small as 30km across. This is remarkable when set against the scale of our star, which has a diameter of about 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) and is 149 million km from Earth. The cell-like structures are roughly the size of the US state of Texas. They are convecting masses of hot, excited gas, or plasma. The bright centres are where this solar material is rising; the surrounding dark lanes are where plasma is cooling and sinking." See the convulsing sun picture HERE.  It made me think of California - land of sunshine inside the mountains on the coast. My father told me that you can plan a picnic for any day in the summer months in Fresno far in advance and always know it would be a sunny day.  He experienced the summer sun as unrelenting and he was happy to come back to Niagara. This is Filoli, south of San Francisco just inside the mountain range at Half Moon Bay.

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More Romance in the Garden

Here are a few more images of what to expect in a Romantic Garden.  These are from Filoli, just south of San Francisco, inland from Half Moon Bay.

Romance is a Feeling - Exploring Romantic Gardens

With my interest in gardens and all the garden pictures that I have, I've started doing presentations to garden speaking to garden clubs and horticultural societies.  The first is "From Snapshot to Great Shot - Explorations in Flower and Garden Photography".  The second is "Exploring Great Public Gardens of North America in Search of Magic and Mystery".  The third one is "The Romantic Garden is Alive in Great Public Gardens of North America". 

I just completed this last presentation for the Master Gardens of Niagara.  A lengthier version will be developed for the Toronto Botanical Gardens (TBG) Seminar series in February near Valentine's Day.  This longer version will delve into the romantic flowers as well as romantic garden design and elements.  

Certainly the romantic flowers are well known - we would all guess roses at the top of the list, and then there are daisies, irises, lilies, carnations, lilacs, wildflowers and sunflowers.  I would add the draping flowers like wisteria, laburnum, and jasmine.  Of course who would resist a field of lavender.

So today's image celebrates the romantic garden element of the bench on the path, draped in the soft colours of a romantic rose on a trellis.  This is at Filoli, a great historic house and public garden, just south of San Francisco.  I consider it one of the great Romantic Gardens of North America.

Filoli's Charm

Filoli is a beautiful historic site and garden located just south of San Francisco.  The first time I visited Filoli in the late 1990's, I had to make reservations prior to arriving, and it was mandatory to take the house tour before being allowed into the Garden.  Every time I was near a window to look out to the garden, I was told to get back with the group.

There must have been a crisis of funding as Filoli has since opened itself to the public in a gracious and welcoming way, with garden experts and docents everywhere to provide information and insight, a wonderful gift shop and a cafe under the trees for a relaxing lunch.   The garden is designed as a series of outdoor rooms on a grand scale, with infinity paths marked by tall Iris Yews and sculpture focal points.    

Filoli's story starts with with Mr. and Mrs. WIlliam Bowers Bourn, known for mining and the the SPring Valley Water Company.  The name Filoli was arrived at by combining the first two letters from the key words of Bourn's credo: "Fight for a just cause: Love your fellow man: Live a good life."

It was a beautiful sight when we were there, but I would suggest the most spectacular time is spring, and I've seen the house with the Wisteria in bloom along with the Montana Clematis hanging from the front porch. Here's a link with the front of the house shown in spring:

http://www.filoli.org/explore-filoli/the-house/