Article by
Elizabeth Fitt
Director – F for Flowers
Meredith Street,
London EC1
www.fforflowers.co.uk
Elizabeth@fforflowers.co.uk
Simple Ways To Brighten Up Your Home With Flowers #1
What’s behind the flowers in your garden?
Poppies – pretty little flowers with a big history – but it’s not how they look that counts, it’s what you do with them:
1. Fill a collection of small vases with water (they don’t all have to be the same shape or colour or size, variety is the spice of life!)
2. Line your vases up along a shelf, or mantle-piece – or down the centre of your dinner table if you are having people round for dinner.
3. Pop a germini or two into each vase – cut all the stems to allow them to drink and use different lengths to create height and interesting form.
4. Sit back and admire your handiwork!
5. Check out the Flowers & Plants Association at www.flowers.org.uk who use this style to good effect in their Spring Collection
Opium Poppies (or Papaver Somniferum), once processed, can produce some interesting narcotic effects. People have harvested these plants for thousands of years and wars were once long fought over the opium produced from them. In more recent years they have been processed to make heroin and more usefully the painkillers; diamorphine, morphine and codeine, but they still have associations with wars being fought today.
The Afghanistan climate (both in terms of the weather and politically) has provided near perfect conditions for the massive Opium Poppy boom that began after the Taliban were toppled from power in 2001. This reached its peak so far in 2007. Southern Afghanistan actually exceeded global demand with the 8,200 tons of illicit opium it produced that year, resulting in its massive export of 93% of the World's heroin. Another bumper crop is expected in 2008 – a large proportion of which will end up on our streets as heroin. Very little, if any, will be used in the production of medical grade painkillers and the proceeds will go largely to fund Taliban insurgency.
You may well have looked at this picture and assumed that it was taken in Afghanistan. Actually, it's a little closer to home... Didcot in Oxfordshire to be precise. Yes – behold, the opium fields of England – flourishing nicely thank you very much! But why? Well, NHS diamorphine stocks were getting a bit low, so the Home Office granted pharmaceutical company Macfarlan Smith a licence to harvest these poppies – which can be processed either into diamorphine, or into heroin (one would imagine they will be sticking with the former) and now tens of British farmers have allocated some of their land to the crop. We’re short of the stuff, while Afghanistan produces more than the world in total actually needs. The solution seems obvious and it does seem slightly unfair that, given our involvement in the difficulties suffered by the Afghanistani people, we’re not giving them a bit of a leg-up while simultaneously preventing large quantities of heroin from hitting our streets at knock-down prices. It would cost less than growing it ourselves, provide ligitimate income for struggling Afghanistani farmers and decrease the escalation of heroin availability in Britian and elsewhere.
Astonishingly, Tony Blair did consider this option in 2007 - but met with great opposition from the Bush Administration's "War on Drugs." That the need for the "War on Drugs" is due largely to the fact that Afghanistan is able to produce drugs on this scale because the Bush Administration (together with a little help from their friends) decided to wage the "War on Terror" is, I hope, an irony they didn't miss. Bush's solution is to eradicate the opium fields using pesticides sprayed from planes. Obliterating thousands of people's livelihoods and polluting vast tracts of land is apparently an acceptable consequence – while our nice, clean, British Opium Poppies continue to nod gently in the breeze...
That these beautiful fields, bursting with vibrant blooms, can have two such opposing, yet inextricably linked, connotations is a strange thing - Heroin and Opium can and have wreaked many lives, while painkillers can and have made so many lives more bearable (that the reverse is also true should provide some food for thought). How many visitors to Ikea ponder the dichotomy and turbulent history of this elegant flower while choosing from a range of pretty monochrome poppy prints to go on their living room wall I wonder…
Flower Food
You’ll be able to use my column to give both your eyes and your tastebuds a little bit of a HumanHi with a new edible flower recipe each month. This months’ is a real winner if you want to wow friends at a dinner party. It tastes great, it looks very pretty and it only takes about 15 minutes (plus 1-2 hours setting time) tops to make!
Sparkling Elderflower, Violet and Berry Jelly
You’ll need:
- Violet flowers – 1 handful – or as many as you can lay your hands on (just make sure there’s no risk of them having been sprayed with any sort of pesticide). You could alternatvely use primroses/viola/cornflowers/calendula petals – some specialist organic shops sell these, you can buy them here http://www.firstleaf.co.uk/edibleflowers_000.htm or simply pick them from your garden – but make sure you have identified edible varieties first!
- Gelatin – 1 sachet
- Elderflower Cordial – ½ a medium mug full (about ¼ pint)
- Proseco (not the expensive kind) – 1.5 mugs full (about ¾ pint)
- Berries (blueberries/raspberries/cherries/blackberries, any you like really) – about 1 mug full
- Sugar – 1tbsp
Serves 4
Method:
Choose four containers to set your jellies in – you could use ramekins, I have some coffee cups that work very well because they have a dome-shaped inside. Place these into your freezer. At the same
time put your berries of choice into the freezer and ensure that the proseco is well chilled (if it isn’t cold, just stick it into the freezer for 10 mins). This is because you need the jellies to set quickly in order that the proseco bubbles don’t escape!
Pour the elderflower cordial into a heatproof bowl and gently heat this over a pan of hot (but not boiling) water. Add 1tbsp sugar and stir until disolved
Empty your sachet of gelatin into the hot elderflower cordial and stir well – if it doesn’t all disolve at once, contine to heat very gently – it’s very important that no boiling occurs!
Leave your gelatin/cordial mix to cool for about 10 minutes, while you open the proseco and have a sneaky glass. You can also get your four containers out of the freezer and put five to ten small flowers in the bottom of each (saving a few for decoration), plus a few spoons full of the by now well chilled berries (again, save a few for decoration).
Next add 1.5 mugs of proseco to your cooled cordial mixture and stir gently. Then pour into your containers, over the fruit and flowers, making sure that they are as full as possible and that all the fruit and flowers are well covered.
Then simply put into the fridge for 1-2 hours, while you prepare any other food, or polish off the rest of the proseco.
To serve check that your jellies are completely set, then run some piping hot water into your sink – and put each container into this for a few seconds – making sure that the water is not deep enough for it to flow over into your jellies. This will melt the outer jelly layer and enable you to turn your jellies out onto individual plates – if they won’t come out at first, grip the container upside down onto the plate and shake vigorously and they should emerge.
Garnish with berries and scattered violet flowers and voila! – perfect jellies with a hint of fizz!