Thursday, April 27, 2006

Dandelion salad, sea-gull woman, wood anenomes and cowslips

A salad of blanched dandelion (Loevenzahn) leaves by at the Zum Haering restaurant at Tutzing on lake Starneberg. Loevenzahn, like dent-de-lion, hence the English dandelion, means lions teeth and refers to the indentations of the leaves.

A woman friend, with whom we are dining, attacks the head of the fish, which she has been eating with repetitive, prods of her fork, neglecting the help of a knife, and devours every morsel of the content. Her face is lit by the fierce, sensual pleasure of a bird enjoying its prey.

Wood anenomes are, at this time, the dominant spring flower in the woods, road-sides and parks of Munich. The white, star-shaped flowers are ubiquitous, and are sometimes joined by the blue, which I have seen cultivated but never wild in England. I note, with pleasure, because they are now so rare in England, plenty of cowslips growing alongside the anenomes.

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