A Book About a Botanist

François Botté's family have published a book about his life and passions, which includes several of my photos of him in full flow on botany outings. He truly was a force of nature and it was a privilege to have known him.

 

Front cover of the book.

He trained originally as an agronomist, then did his PhD in botany, on the phylogeny of wild leeks, to try to work out where domestic leeks came from. 

 

Back cover of the book.

 

I knew him in the last decade or so of his life, and loved to trail around after him as we surveyed the biodiversity of different sites.

 

My photo bottom left. He is explaining wild leeks.

My photo at the bottom.

My photo top right.

Walking from Yzeures sur Creuse

On Friday we joined a new walking group, les Galoches d'Yzeures, on a 6 kilometre walk along the river then a loop back into the village. It was sunny and pleasant, taking us an hour and three-quarters to complete. The sunshine was beautiful, the wind a bit chill, the temperature around 9°C. My friend Geneviève is the secretary of les Galoches and her husband Bruno led the walk.

 

Fancy vine supports at the Relais de la Mothe.

A 19th century roadside cross.

A farm feed preparation shed.

A farm shed.

I took this photo because it was Valentines Day and there was a metal heart stuck in a planter in this garden. The resident Australian shepherd decided to photo bomb.

Les Galoches cross the endless flat plain of the Creuse Valley...

Velpeau

Velpeau is the name of a district (Fr. quartier) in Tours and named after a 19th century doctor who trained here. He is one of a group of doctors, all contemporaries, who began their working lives in Tours and made their names here. Dr Velpeau has a type of heavy compression bandage used for burns and other mishaps named after him. He was known as an absolute stickler for best practice, a ceaseless worker who had come from very humble beginnings.

His last words were supposedly 'You must not be lazy, always work'. He was born in 1775 in a village near Tours, where his father was the farrier. This allowed him to gain some idea of veterinary practice. Because of the interest he showed in medicine, it seems a philanthropic neighbour sent him to be trained in the hospital in Tours in 1816. It was there he met Pierre-Fidèle Bretonneau, the head doctor at the hospital, and they remained associated until Bretonneau's death in 1862. 

In fact, it is really Bretonneau who introduced the compression bandage. He drew on the work of an earlier Prussian surgeon and advocated the use of such bandages, especially for burns. Velpeau in turn made the bandages better known, widened their usage and as a result this type of compression bandage now bears his name.

In 1820 Velpeau left Tours to graduate in Paris. We know a lot about what he got up to because of his extensive surviving correspondence with Bretonneau. With Armand Trousseau, another of Bretonneau's brilliant students, Velpeau was at the centre of a remarkable Tourangelle medical network who all published their research in leading medical journals. They became celebrities, being referenced by Balzac (also a native of the Touraine).

Velpeau was a researcher, practicing surgeon taking both private and public hospital patients, hospital administrator and medical training lecturer. He was the Chair of Clinical Surgery at la Charité Hospital in Paris for thirty years. He was interested in a wide variety of medical conditions, especially diphtheria, typhoid and other fevers, quinine, and compression. 

He was described as the clinical doctor who had the biggest following and was the best liked, open to new and progressive ideas but hostile to dangerous eccentricities. His strong character and unwillingness to accept poor unscientific practice did make him enemies early on in his career though. 

Sadly, although Tours has hospitals named after his colleagues Bretonneau and Trousseau, there is none memorialising Velpeau.

Further reading: An article in Gallica, the Bibliothèque Nationale (National library) newsletter (in French) https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/fr/html/velpeau-linfatigable-chirurgien

Blooming Vanilla

All the experts agree that vanilla pods that produce a white bloom or frosting are the top of the range. In French this is called 'vanille givrée'. The first time I noticed my vanilla pods from Réunion getting a white bloom I freaked out, thinking it was mould, but I was reassured when I found out it is quite the opposite, and a sign of the highest quality.

 

'Frosted' vanilla in my pantry.

Vanilla pods are the seed capsules of an orchid, cultivated in places like Madagascar and the French island of Réunion. It needs just the right balance of sun and shade, and is entirely dependent on man to grow and reproduce. The cultivation cannot be mechanised. 

Vanilla orchids grow up rainforest trees, seeking the light. The red palms on Réunion have spikes on their trunks when they are young. It is these spikes that the vanilla farmer will harvest first, to use to hand pollinate the vanilla flowers. When the vanilla flowers resemble cobra heads the farmer will insert the spike and force the pollenia down to the stigma. In the south of Mexico, where vanilla is native, this is done by a native orchid bee. But the bees are not present on Réunion. So in 1841 the method of manually pollinating the orchids was developed by a 12 year old slave, Edmond Albius. And now, manual pollination of vanilla is the norm wherever it is grown.

 

'Frosted' vanilla in my pantry.

A month after pollination vanilla pods are fully grown, so the farmer knows quite quickly if his pollinating technique is good or not.  The people who know how to do the pollinating are called 'marieurs' ('marryers'). The best are women and children, with small or fine fingers. The better the pollination, the longer the pod.

The pods are initially green, then they begin to get brown spots. Good pods are over 20 cm long.

 

Vanilla orchid plant.

Photo courtesy of Helen Devries, from her garden in Costa Rica.

The first harvest is the culmination of four years cultivation, while the plant climbs the tree and finally matures to flower and produce seed. Then there is another year of preparing the pods. In the workshop they are bundled together to cure. The frosting is not to be confused with mould, and the pods are carefully monitored, because they can go mouldy. 

The frosting is different flavour crystals, and they do take slightly different forms. Some look like hairs and some like wax. Once sufficiently cured the bundles of pods will be divided up and put into glass tubes for commercialisation.

 

Vanilla orchid flower.

Photo courtesy of Helen Devries, from her garden in Costa Rica.

Only 0.5% of the flavour compound vanillin consumed globally comes from the natural pod. 99.5% of  vanillin is synthetic. Most synthetic vanillin is extracted from lignin contained in the waste pulp from the paper making industry. But real vanilla has over 150 flavour compounds in addition to vanillin.

The Bredbo Pie Shop

I wrote yesterday about traditional Aussie meat pies. Thankfully these appear to be a thing of the past, replaced by well baked artisanal pies with good pastry, plenty of meat, and thick gravy.

The best we had were from the pie shop in Bredbo, on our way from Canberra to Cooma and then on to the South Coast. Big thick meat pies with nice flaky pastry, chunks of meat in a thick gravy, no sauce necessary. We didn't buy any to take away, but we had a pie each and shared a muffin for dessert. Excellent!!

Dog Eye and Dead Horse

When we were in Australia in 2017 I spent the whole holiday on the lookout for a real Four'n Twenty pie, the classic Australian meat pie. They're not the only commercial pie available, but they all seemed to follow the same formula.

These are not meat pies as your family knows them - these are two layers of lukewarm almost uncooked pastry, with a layer of mutton and beef gravy inbetween*. Vaguely pie shaped, they were somehow able to be heated up - or kept lukewarm - inside a plastic bag. They were standard fare at football matches, served with a squirt of tomato sauce injected through the top layer of pastry into the filling. If you were really brutal you could get more sauce in there than the gravy.

I never found a Four'n Twenty pie on our 2017 trip, nor on our 2024 trip. But I did find a Four'n Twenty pie warmer. 

* This is the impression the 10 year old me had, and I am yet to be disabused.