12 April 2020

Des Pâquerettes pour Pâques





For years I've assumed that the little flowers called pâquerettes [pah-'kret] were named for the Easter holiday — Pâques [pahk] in French — because that's when they come back up and bloom. Now this morning I read in the French Wikepédia article that the name pâquerettes may well derive from the Old French word pasquier, meaning "pastures" or "pastureland" — which is where these little flowers bloom.







In the anglophone world, we call these flowers "English daisies" or, probably especially in England, "lawn daisies" — they are a European plant that's been naturalized around the world, including in North America. The flowers are tiny, at about two centimeters (less than an inch) across. At least the ones that grow here on the edges of the Renaudière vineyard are small like that.



The English daisy's leaves are edible raw or cooked when young, but I've never tried them. Put them in a salad. They can be slightly bitter, so it's better to mix them with some milder-tasting salad greens. If we needed to, I guess we could eat big no-cost salads of daisy leaves and dandelion leaves at this time of year. The flower buds and the petals can also be eaten raw in sandwiches, soups, and salads, the English Wikipedia article says. Or the flowers can be made into a tea.
BTW, I felt really lousy yesterday. In the afternoon I had a headache and I felt really hot. Uh-oh, I thought, am I coming down with la peste (the plague)? I felt weak and sort of feverish when I came back from my late afternoon walk with Tasha. After moaning and groaning for a while, I got up and looked at the thermometer up in the loft, where we were watching Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments movie on TV in honor of Easter. The temperature was above 25ºC — 77ºF! When you're used to inside temperatures of about 65ºC as winter ends, that feels hot. This morning I'm feeling fine.

12 comments:

  1. You had me worried for a second. Happy Easter!

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    1. It was probably my pollen allergies that were bothering more than anything else, along with the heat. Hope I can survive another summer here.

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  2. Sony does great >gros-plan photos.

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    1. Because the Sony camera has a much bigger capteur/sensor than (at least) my Lumix cameras have, the photos are sharper. One interesting thing is that the Sony (RX100M2) doesn't have a macro mode. I take photos using aperture priority and with the aperture set at f/1.8 (maximum).

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  3. I am not sure if they are the same but we call them Easter Daisies here and petals can be thrown into a salad. Maybe you should think about air con cooling for one area of your home at least.

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    1. The area to be cooled would be the loft, which is one large (60 m²) space, with no door between it and the main living area of the house. We might have to have the north end of the loft walled off in with a door and all to make it into a conventional bedroom. That would be a good space to cool using AC because it's the north-facing side of the house. And then again, we might end up having a damp, chilly summer. One never knows what to expect. It actually wasn't too hot for sleeping last night.

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  4. Beautiful little flowers, perfect for today!

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  5. Happy Easter 2020! It will be remembered for a long time.

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  6. lots of pollen here in western NC too.....Happy Easter

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  7. Oh boy, I hope you don't have those kinds of symptoms again. Allergies, though, geeee, tough this year.

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  8. Happy Easter! Hope you enjoyed watching the Commandments! Yvonne de Carlo, aka Lily Munster, played Moses' wife in that film.

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  9. Herbalists will tell you that dandelion greens are good for you in the spring, the bitterness helps perk up your system post-winter. Probably not a good idea to eat those, though, in places where poisons are sprayed on lawns for ultimate greenness.
    You could also grow nasturtiums as edible flowers.

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