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by Arianna Jakubowski
The Routes of the Bougainvillea
I have recently realised that the voice and expressions used in life by someone who has passed away remain more deeply imprinted in my memory than images. I don't know if this mechanism is similar for everyone, if somehow the nature of memory is more inclined to preserve verbal and auditory impressions than visual ones, like some kind of cerebral “microwave background”. 1I know that in my case, the most vivid and frequent reminiscences come in the form of sound. I realised this when I remembered my grandmother calling the Bougainvillea: "U' Bougainville" with a very particular and personal inclination, referring to the plant in the masculine gender in our dialect, rather than the feminine as its taxonomy would suggest. Her tone was always seasoned with a certain amount of respect and admiration for this genus, one of her favourites.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, just like me, and I believe that part of her admiration stemmed from the heights reached by this shrub when, as we say, “caccia” (hunts, shoots up) and reproduces vigorously. You have to raise up your head to stare it in the eyes. A "Madonn ci je bell" (My goodness, how beautiful) loaded with wonder would follow if the particular specimen was lush, strong and abundant with flowers, which technically are sepal-like bracts, a kind of coloured foliage that encloses the flowers. We have a couple of plants at home, still young and slender, with the classic purplish flowers, "Moneth" or "Purple Queen" variety, which is more common in Puglia. The bract resemble a bell, reinforcing the auditory journey that I embark on every time we encounter them around some enclosure, under the villas’ walls, at the threshold of their gates.
Arriving at the Oasis station in Casablanca, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Bougainvilleas, purple (Purple Queen), orange (African Sunset), and even the white ones (Show Lady). "Madonn ci so bell!" ("My goodness, they're beautiful!”), I glimpse my grandmother's wide-open mouth, hands on her hips to lift up the hump that accompanied her in her final years, sculpted precisely by the countless days in the garden. The strength with which they grow and spread here gives me shivers, just like remembering the dearest person in the world. All around me, I see nothing but Bougainvilleas and I hear my grandmother's voice. It is her voice that allows her faint image to resurface for a moment with closed eyes. In the flower beds of the villas, they peek out the walls like lion manes, countless bells reminding of the Ghungroo, the ankle bells bracelets from Indian dances and the Trinidadian Carnival’s costumes, the islands of their origins.
How to describe inaudible sounds? My grandmother's voice is no longer here, and the bells of the Bougainvilleas are silent to most yet, in my mind, they play a bizarre symphony, of which the only The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, CMBR) is a microwave radiation, an emission of a uniform black body 1 thermal energy, that fills all space inside the observable universe. THE ROUTES OF THE BOUGAINVILLEA Arianna Jakubowski audible partition is the rustling of leaves in the Atlantic wind and the honking of the nervous Petit Taxis. "Can't you see it? I'm taking you with me," I tell her. "Look, I'm taking you to see the Bougainvillea, look how many there are here!”, I am certain that her mercurial mind would already be scrutinising pruning, leaf health, soil and positioning, making calculations, predictions and judgments of which I remain profoundly ignorant. This would keep her calm and distracted from the thought of me travelling through unknown countries. I don't know the science of plants. My grandmother did, she knew it without too many names, notions, formulas and academicism.
The story of the Bougainvillea intertwines curiously at certain points with the story of my family, like in a crowded garden where its branches embrace and struggle with Hibiscus, Oleanders, hedges and other shrubs. If not pruned, it becomes “invasive” they say, like my endless talk. Its name comes from a French expedition in Brazil, where a part of my family resides and where neither I, nor my grandmother, have set foot yet. We can count eighteen different species, a recurring number in my travels. In the Marseille Tarot, it's the number of La Lune (The Moon), the nocturnal feminine energy that does justice to all the creatures resting under its pale rays, some members of my family worked for the Justice system and the feminine energy in my household was and still is always abundant. Once reached the Mediterranean basin, it felt incredibly at home, just like when I move along its coasts, between east and west, north and south: always elsewhere, always at home.
I write about plants, travels and my grandmother, almost obsessively. I draw emotional-vegetal maps, like my grandfather, the German cartographer I’ve never met. In his likeness, I am always a stranger, a camel in a gutter . I try to avoid the natural engulfing of the past and the present, imprinting on paper psycho-physical ruptures where sinking in this Sea feels sweet to me.A vegetal sacrifice. The cellulose body of a lifeless specimen consecrated to embalm the memories of the living and their dead. I don't write for the possib reader, but to record; like a photosensitive reel, I oscillate between time and space, between creatures and their conceptual boundaries, which crumble at the first contact, as if in a crowded wilderness.
Aristotle distinguished two types of memory: μνήμη, the memory as a notion, concept, mental-cerebral process, through which I remember that the Bougainvillea is named after a French colonialist navigator who, before embarking on the globe’s circumnavigation, had completed a treatise on integral calculus in his youth. Exactly twenty-four hours before stumbling on this study, I discuss on a rooftop in Casablanca about Emmanuel Kant's dedication to The expression is a quote from XI a.d. mathematician and philosopher Al-Biruni, also adopted by Italian composer Franco Battiato in his 1991 album “Come un cammello in una grondaia”. It is a nod to Giacomo Leopardi closing verse of his masterpiece L’Infinito: “Così tra questa/immensità s’annega il pensiero mio:/e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”. G. Leopardi, L’Infinito, Recanati 1826. Aristotle, Περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως, On Memory and Recollection, Parva Naturalia. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Traité du calcul intégral, pour servir de suite à l’”Analyse des infiniment-petits” de M. Le Marquis de l’hôpital, Desaint & Saillant, Paris 1754. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Algebra still appears partially confused and mysterious to me, just like botany, but I’ve always been studying constellations, as all three aforementioned subjects. If you look carefully, like in the underside of a star-embroidered desert, all the notions we memorise eventually connect to one another, as if per a plant, or the celestial telos. Following this same principle we keep on talking about Formula 1, music and Bernoulli, which now allows me to look at the sky from a different, yet always the same portion... always elsewhere, always at home.
Then there is also reminiscence, ἀνάμνησις, which according to Aristotle is a type of embodied memory, the impressions that experiences leave in our bodies and that, when subjected to the same stimulus or a similar one, reproduce the same original psycho-emotional effects. Reminiscence is the voice of my grandmother in front of a Bougainvillea, confusing Puglia with Morocco for a moment under the shade of a Bougainvillea, elevating a pink bract of theTemple Fire variety to the symbol of a meeting I don't want to forget. The resilience of these tropical and Mediterranean shrubs is synonymous with the stubbornness with which I write about plants, family and migrations. I try to root mnemonic notions and bodily reminiscences in a single, stable and stubborn trunk, capable of facing the most arid drought. I write about plants not as a science, or a "-logy," but as a sort of poetic cartography in which I can orient and organise the stages of my existence.
Plants, like stars, are clusters of knowledge and relationships. Their apparent - and only apparent - immobility allows us to use them as milestones of collective and individual knowledge. Each person knows plants according to their own skills and needs, to their geographical and epistemological point-of-view. My knowledge of plants corresponds to the understanding, each time, of where I am. I recall them as a sort of orientation device, in the manner of a earthly or celestial map. When I move, the first thing I do is look around me for plants and I immediately feel safe. The act of transplanting teaches us that roots are not found in a fixed and precise place, they are not in-place. Certainly, there are more nutrient-rich and compatible soils than others, but roots are parts of our own bodies. Roots move with us; they cannot be "left" elsewhere, behind the movement. That would result in the death of the creature that moves, the impossibility of movement itself. Ancestors are also part of our chromosomal, cultural and emotional roots, therefore they move with us, building up each individual as a caravan, a constellation, until the largest and most ancestral of all caravans, until we can reach our mothers ferns.
I don't want to delve into the complicated jungle of thoughts about the concept of identity, but the more I move, the more I transplant, the more I realise how identity constitutes a construct that is as vital, as it is suffocating. We must constantly reshape its parameters, just as we need to adjust the exposure to light and access to water for garden or indoor plants, because we This echoes some Donna Haraway’s theories, as those collected into 2019 Chthulucene. I have chosen to make them part of those enclosures to better define our existences. The way we design gardens and urban habitats mirrors the ways through which we shape all boundaries, identities included. Thinking about plants allows me to reverse these thresholds, like a Calvino’s Pendu, to bury my head in the soil and look at the world upside-down, to see the roots in the mind and the relationality, the nourishment, with the "outside" and "surroundings" of the limbs. It is the limbs, whether of flesh or bark, that allow us to explore solar spatiality, to reach new postures and eventually create shade, that in this context is, contrary to its slang denotation, a protective and refreshing space for others, that can now survive precisely because of our own principle of survival. The shade projected by a tree or a shrub, along with its clean air, is not a simple architectural coverage but a proper recovery. "As I rise, I expand and expanding, I encounter others" could be the thought of a climbing shrub, just like the background of a prayer. By venturing outside those private enclosures, Bougainvilleas become collective biological and urban spaces. While some creatures find nourishment by their colourful bracts, we find refreshment for a moment under their leafy canopies, seeking shelter from scorching streets, waiting for the bus, keeping an eye on a line of parked cars, or while talking on the phone with our mothers. The "upside-down" and "inside-out" become galactic, botanical, urban and social concepts. If it is true that the Universe in which plants and I find ourselves cohabiting is an explosive fragment of a larger cosmic design, I can only take immense pleasure in realising that this creative endeavour has taken the form, among billions, of a Bougainvillea, smiling at me at the exit of a railway station in a country where, once again, I would like to transplant my maps and caravans.
Perhaps, my inclination to better preserve auditory impressions comes precisely from my grandmother who, in the last days of her illness, often said she could hear some of her favourite youth songs playing in the background of her mind. This writing about plants becomes the tape recorder in which I try to engrave voices, soundscapes and incandescent reminiscences like the dazzling orange of this African Sunset. The day I fell in love, from the boiling concrete I picked up one of its bright flowers, adored by pollinating insects and there it remains, hanging on a white thread off the wall of my room, evergreen and fecund, se Dio vuole. Le Pendu is the XII Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot, this archetype reminds me of many characters depicted by 7 Italian author Italo Calvino in his novels, in particular Il Barone Rampante, from the 1957 trilogy I Nostri Antenati. Which is also the tile of Dolly Parton and James Ingram 1999 song: “People all say, love is wonderful/That the bells will 8 ring and birds will sing and skies will open/I wonder where's that great big symphony/Roll over Beethoven, won't you play with me?”. The English If God wills and Arabic Inshallah.
Taking care of a Bougainvillea:
Bougainvilleas prefer sunny and bright locations. The temperature should never drop below 10°C (50°F). They can be planted directly in the ground or in large pots. The latter option is preferable if you live in places with cold winters, as you can move them indoors.
During the summer and spring seasons, Bougainvilleas require more frequent watering. The soil should be kept moist in summer, but not overly wet to avoid water-logging, which can be very dangerous for the plant.
Repotting should be done in early spring, using a substrate mixed with expanded clay, pumice, or volcanic lapilli. This explains their affinity with Morocco and the Southern Mediterranean coasts.
Mature plants have maximum growth between May and June. Once the bracts appear, it is advisable to change the fertiliser, reducing the nitrogen content that stimulates flowering and preferring potassium.
When the first cold weather sets in, gradually reduce the watering to allow the plant to strengthen and withstand the colder months.
For climbing, this shrub needs a support structure to lean on.
Pruning is done by spur pruning, similar to vines and wisteria. The best time for pruning is between late winter and early spring.
The Routes of the Bougainvillea
I have recently realised that the voice and expressions used in life by someone who has passed away remain more deeply imprinted in my memory than images. I don't know if this mechanism is similar for everyone, if somehow the nature of memory is more inclined to preserve verbal and auditory impressions than visual ones, like some kind of cerebral “microwave background”. 1I know that in my case, the most vivid and frequent reminiscences come in the form of sound. I realised this when I remembered my grandmother calling the Bougainvillea: "U' Bougainville" with a very particular and personal inclination, referring to the plant in the masculine gender in our dialect, rather than the feminine as its taxonomy would suggest. Her tone was always seasoned with a certain amount of respect and admiration for this genus, one of her favourites.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, just like me, and I believe that part of her admiration stemmed from the heights reached by this shrub when, as we say, “caccia” (hunts, shoots up) and reproduces vigorously. You have to raise up your head to stare it in the eyes. A "Madonn ci je bell" (My goodness, how beautiful) loaded with wonder would follow if the particular specimen was lush, strong and abundant with flowers, which technically are sepal-like bracts, a kind of coloured foliage that encloses the flowers. We have a couple of plants at home, still young and slender, with the classic purplish flowers, "Moneth" or "Purple Queen" variety, which is more common in Puglia. The bract resemble a bell, reinforcing the auditory journey that I embark on every time we encounter them around some enclosure, under the villas’ walls, at the threshold of their gates.
Arriving at the Oasis station in Casablanca, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Bougainvilleas, purple (Purple Queen), orange (African Sunset), and even the white ones (Show Lady). "Madonn ci so bell!" ("My goodness, they're beautiful!”), I glimpse my grandmother's wide-open mouth, hands on her hips to lift up the hump that accompanied her in her final years, sculpted precisely by the countless days in the garden. The strength with which they grow and spread here gives me shivers, just like remembering the dearest person in the world. All around me, I see nothing but Bougainvilleas and I hear my grandmother's voice. It is her voice that allows her faint image to resurface for a moment with closed eyes. In the flower beds of the villas, they peek out the walls like lion manes, countless bells reminding of the Ghungroo, the ankle bells bracelets from Indian dances and the Trinidadian Carnival’s costumes, the islands of their origins.
How to describe inaudible sounds? My grandmother's voice is no longer here, and the bells of the Bougainvilleas are silent to most yet, in my mind, they play a bizarre symphony, of which the only The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, CMBR) is a microwave radiation, an emission of a uniform black body 1 thermal energy, that fills all space inside the observable universe. THE ROUTES OF THE BOUGAINVILLEA Arianna Jakubowski audible partition is the rustling of leaves in the Atlantic wind and the honking of the nervous Petit Taxis. "Can't you see it? I'm taking you with me," I tell her. "Look, I'm taking you to see the Bougainvillea, look how many there are here!”, I am certain that her mercurial mind would already be scrutinising pruning, leaf health, soil and positioning, making calculations, predictions and judgments of which I remain profoundly ignorant. This would keep her calm and distracted from the thought of me travelling through unknown countries. I don't know the science of plants. My grandmother did, she knew it without too many names, notions, formulas and academicism.
The story of the Bougainvillea intertwines curiously at certain points with the story of my family, like in a crowded garden where its branches embrace and struggle with Hibiscus, Oleanders, hedges and other shrubs. If not pruned, it becomes “invasive” they say, like my endless talk. Its name comes from a French expedition in Brazil, where a part of my family resides and where neither I, nor my grandmother, have set foot yet. We can count eighteen different species, a recurring number in my travels. In the Marseille Tarot, it's the number of La Lune (The Moon), the nocturnal feminine energy that does justice to all the creatures resting under its pale rays, some members of my family worked for the Justice system and the feminine energy in my household was and still is always abundant. Once reached the Mediterranean basin, it felt incredibly at home, just like when I move along its coasts, between east and west, north and south: always elsewhere, always at home.
I write about plants, travels and my grandmother, almost obsessively. I draw emotional-vegetal maps, like my grandfather, the German cartographer I’ve never met. In his likeness, I am always a stranger, a camel in a gutter . I try to avoid the natural engulfing of the past and the present, imprinting on paper psycho-physical ruptures where sinking in this Sea feels sweet to me.A vegetal sacrifice. The cellulose body of a lifeless specimen consecrated to embalm the memories of the living and their dead. I don't write for the possib reader, but to record; like a photosensitive reel, I oscillate between time and space, between creatures and their conceptual boundaries, which crumble at the first contact, as if in a crowded wilderness.
Aristotle distinguished two types of memory: μνήμη, the memory as a notion, concept, mental-cerebral process, through which I remember that the Bougainvillea is named after a French colonialist navigator who, before embarking on the globe’s circumnavigation, had completed a treatise on integral calculus in his youth. Exactly twenty-four hours before stumbling on this study, I discuss on a rooftop in Casablanca about Emmanuel Kant's dedication to The expression is a quote from XI a.d. mathematician and philosopher Al-Biruni, also adopted by Italian composer Franco Battiato in his 1991 album “Come un cammello in una grondaia”. It is a nod to Giacomo Leopardi closing verse of his masterpiece L’Infinito: “Così tra questa/immensità s’annega il pensiero mio:/e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”. G. Leopardi, L’Infinito, Recanati 1826. Aristotle, Περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως, On Memory and Recollection, Parva Naturalia. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Traité du calcul intégral, pour servir de suite à l’”Analyse des infiniment-petits” de M. Le Marquis de l’hôpital, Desaint & Saillant, Paris 1754. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Algebra still appears partially confused and mysterious to me, just like botany, but I’ve always been studying constellations, as all three aforementioned subjects. If you look carefully, like in the underside of a star-embroidered desert, all the notions we memorise eventually connect to one another, as if per a plant, or the celestial telos. Following this same principle we keep on talking about Formula 1, music and Bernoulli, which now allows me to look at the sky from a different, yet always the same portion... always elsewhere, always at home.
Then there is also reminiscence, ἀνάμνησις, which according to Aristotle is a type of embodied memory, the impressions that experiences leave in our bodies and that, when subjected to the same stimulus or a similar one, reproduce the same original psycho-emotional effects. Reminiscence is the voice of my grandmother in front of a Bougainvillea, confusing Puglia with Morocco for a moment under the shade of a Bougainvillea, elevating a pink bract of theTemple Fire variety to the symbol of a meeting I don't want to forget. The resilience of these tropical and Mediterranean shrubs is synonymous with the stubbornness with which I write about plants, family and migrations. I try to root mnemonic notions and bodily reminiscences in a single, stable and stubborn trunk, capable of facing the most arid drought. I write about plants not as a science, or a "-logy," but as a sort of poetic cartography in which I can orient and organise the stages of my existence.
Plants, like stars, are clusters of knowledge and relationships. Their apparent - and only apparent - immobility allows us to use them as milestones of collective and individual knowledge. Each person knows plants according to their own skills and needs, to their geographical and epistemological point-of-view. My knowledge of plants corresponds to the understanding, each time, of where I am. I recall them as a sort of orientation device, in the manner of a earthly or celestial map. When I move, the first thing I do is look around me for plants and I immediately feel safe. The act of transplanting teaches us that roots are not found in a fixed and precise place, they are not in-place. Certainly, there are more nutrient-rich and compatible soils than others, but roots are parts of our own bodies. Roots move with us; they cannot be "left" elsewhere, behind the movement. That would result in the death of the creature that moves, the impossibility of movement itself. Ancestors are also part of our chromosomal, cultural and emotional roots, therefore they move with us, building up each individual as a caravan, a constellation, until the largest and most ancestral of all caravans, until we can reach our mothers ferns.
I don't want to delve into the complicated jungle of thoughts about the concept of identity, but the more I move, the more I transplant, the more I realise how identity constitutes a construct that is as vital, as it is suffocating. We must constantly reshape its parameters, just as we need to adjust the exposure to light and access to water for garden or indoor plants, because we This echoes some Donna Haraway’s theories, as those collected into 2019 Chthulucene. I have chosen to make them part of those enclosures to better define our existences. The way we design gardens and urban habitats mirrors the ways through which we shape all boundaries, identities included. Thinking about plants allows me to reverse these thresholds, like a Calvino’s Pendu, to bury my head in the soil and look at the world upside-down, to see the roots in the mind and the relationality, the nourishment, with the "outside" and "surroundings" of the limbs. It is the limbs, whether of flesh or bark, that allow us to explore solar spatiality, to reach new postures and eventually create shade, that in this context is, contrary to its slang denotation, a protective and refreshing space for others, that can now survive precisely because of our own principle of survival. The shade projected by a tree or a shrub, along with its clean air, is not a simple architectural coverage but a proper recovery. "As I rise, I expand and expanding, I encounter others" could be the thought of a climbing shrub, just like the background of a prayer. By venturing outside those private enclosures, Bougainvilleas become collective biological and urban spaces. While some creatures find nourishment by their colourful bracts, we find refreshment for a moment under their leafy canopies, seeking shelter from scorching streets, waiting for the bus, keeping an eye on a line of parked cars, or while talking on the phone with our mothers. The "upside-down" and "inside-out" become galactic, botanical, urban and social concepts. If it is true that the Universe in which plants and I find ourselves cohabiting is an explosive fragment of a larger cosmic design, I can only take immense pleasure in realising that this creative endeavour has taken the form, among billions, of a Bougainvillea, smiling at me at the exit of a railway station in a country where, once again, I would like to transplant my maps and caravans.
Perhaps, my inclination to better preserve auditory impressions comes precisely from my grandmother who, in the last days of her illness, often said she could hear some of her favourite youth songs playing in the background of her mind. This writing about plants becomes the tape recorder in which I try to engrave voices, soundscapes and incandescent reminiscences like the dazzling orange of this African Sunset. The day I fell in love, from the boiling concrete I picked up one of its bright flowers, adored by pollinating insects and there it remains, hanging on a white thread off the wall of my room, evergreen and fecund, se Dio vuole. Le Pendu is the XII Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot, this archetype reminds me of many characters depicted by 7 Italian author Italo Calvino in his novels, in particular Il Barone Rampante, from the 1957 trilogy I Nostri Antenati. Which is also the tile of Dolly Parton and James Ingram 1999 song: “People all say, love is wonderful/That the bells will 8 ring and birds will sing and skies will open/I wonder where's that great big symphony/Roll over Beethoven, won't you play with me?”. The English If God wills and Arabic Inshallah.
Taking care of a Bougainvillea:
Bougainvilleas prefer sunny and bright locations. The temperature should never drop below 10°C (50°F). They can be planted directly in the ground or in large pots. The latter option is preferable if you live in places with cold winters, as you can move them indoors.
During the summer and spring seasons, Bougainvilleas require more frequent watering. The soil should be kept moist in summer, but not overly wet to avoid water-logging, which can be very dangerous for the plant.
Repotting should be done in early spring, using a substrate mixed with expanded clay, pumice, or volcanic lapilli. This explains their affinity with Morocco and the Southern Mediterranean coasts.
Mature plants have maximum growth between May and June. Once the bracts appear, it is advisable to change the fertiliser, reducing the nitrogen content that stimulates flowering and preferring potassium.
When the first cold weather sets in, gradually reduce the watering to allow the plant to strengthen and withstand the colder months.
For climbing, this shrub needs a support structure to lean on.
Pruning is done by spur pruning, similar to vines and wisteria. The best time for pruning is between late winter and early spring.
Arianna Jakubowski is a writer, teacher and editor.
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by Arianna Jakubowski
The Routes of the Bougainvillea
I have recently realised that the voice and expressions used in life by someone who has passed away remain more deeply imprinted in my memory than images. I don't know if this mechanism is similar for everyone, if somehow the nature of memory is more inclined to preserve verbal and auditory impressions than visual ones, like some kind of cerebral “microwave background”. 1I know that in my case, the most vivid and frequent reminiscences come in the form of sound. I realised this when I remembered my grandmother calling the Bougainvillea: "U' Bougainville" with a very particular and personal inclination, referring to the plant in the masculine gender in our dialect, rather than the feminine as its taxonomy would suggest. Her tone was always seasoned with a certain amount of respect and admiration for this genus, one of her favourites.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, just like me, and I believe that part of her admiration stemmed from the heights reached by this shrub when, as we say, “caccia” (hunts, shoots up) and reproduces vigorously. You have to raise up your head to stare it in the eyes. A "Madonn ci je bell" (My goodness, how beautiful) loaded with wonder would follow if the particular specimen was lush, strong and abundant with flowers, which technically are sepal-like bracts, a kind of coloured foliage that encloses the flowers. We have a couple of plants at home, still young and slender, with the classic purplish flowers, "Moneth" or "Purple Queen" variety, which is more common in Puglia. The bract resemble a bell, reinforcing the auditory journey that I embark on every time we encounter them around some enclosure, under the villas’ walls, at the threshold of their gates.
Arriving at the Oasis station in Casablanca, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Bougainvilleas, purple (Purple Queen), orange (African Sunset), and even the white ones (Show Lady). "Madonn ci so bell!" ("My goodness, they're beautiful!”), I glimpse my grandmother's wide-open mouth, hands on her hips to lift up the hump that accompanied her in her final years, sculpted precisely by the countless days in the garden. The strength with which they grow and spread here gives me shivers, just like remembering the dearest person in the world. All around me, I see nothing but Bougainvilleas and I hear my grandmother's voice. It is her voice that allows her faint image to resurface for a moment with closed eyes. In the flower beds of the villas, they peek out the walls like lion manes, countless bells reminding of the Ghungroo, the ankle bells bracelets from Indian dances and the Trinidadian Carnival’s costumes, the islands of their origins.
How to describe inaudible sounds? My grandmother's voice is no longer here, and the bells of the Bougainvilleas are silent to most yet, in my mind, they play a bizarre symphony, of which the only The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, CMBR) is a microwave radiation, an emission of a uniform black body 1 thermal energy, that fills all space inside the observable universe. THE ROUTES OF THE BOUGAINVILLEA Arianna Jakubowski audible partition is the rustling of leaves in the Atlantic wind and the honking of the nervous Petit Taxis. "Can't you see it? I'm taking you with me," I tell her. "Look, I'm taking you to see the Bougainvillea, look how many there are here!”, I am certain that her mercurial mind would already be scrutinising pruning, leaf health, soil and positioning, making calculations, predictions and judgments of which I remain profoundly ignorant. This would keep her calm and distracted from the thought of me travelling through unknown countries. I don't know the science of plants. My grandmother did, she knew it without too many names, notions, formulas and academicism.
The story of the Bougainvillea intertwines curiously at certain points with the story of my family, like in a crowded garden where its branches embrace and struggle with Hibiscus, Oleanders, hedges and other shrubs. If not pruned, it becomes “invasive” they say, like my endless talk. Its name comes from a French expedition in Brazil, where a part of my family resides and where neither I, nor my grandmother, have set foot yet. We can count eighteen different species, a recurring number in my travels. In the Marseille Tarot, it's the number of La Lune (The Moon), the nocturnal feminine energy that does justice to all the creatures resting under its pale rays, some members of my family worked for the Justice system and the feminine energy in my household was and still is always abundant. Once reached the Mediterranean basin, it felt incredibly at home, just like when I move along its coasts, between east and west, north and south: always elsewhere, always at home.
I write about plants, travels and my grandmother, almost obsessively. I draw emotional-vegetal maps, like my grandfather, the German cartographer I’ve never met. In his likeness, I am always a stranger, a camel in a gutter . I try to avoid the natural engulfing of the past and the present, imprinting on paper psycho-physical ruptures where sinking in this Sea feels sweet to me.A vegetal sacrifice. The cellulose body of a lifeless specimen consecrated to embalm the memories of the living and their dead. I don't write for the possib reader, but to record; like a photosensitive reel, I oscillate between time and space, between creatures and their conceptual boundaries, which crumble at the first contact, as if in a crowded wilderness.
Aristotle distinguished two types of memory: μνήμη, the memory as a notion, concept, mental-cerebral process, through which I remember that the Bougainvillea is named after a French colonialist navigator who, before embarking on the globe’s circumnavigation, had completed a treatise on integral calculus in his youth. Exactly twenty-four hours before stumbling on this study, I discuss on a rooftop in Casablanca about Emmanuel Kant's dedication to The expression is a quote from XI a.d. mathematician and philosopher Al-Biruni, also adopted by Italian composer Franco Battiato in his 1991 album “Come un cammello in una grondaia”. It is a nod to Giacomo Leopardi closing verse of his masterpiece L’Infinito: “Così tra questa/immensità s’annega il pensiero mio:/e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”. G. Leopardi, L’Infinito, Recanati 1826. Aristotle, Περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως, On Memory and Recollection, Parva Naturalia. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Traité du calcul intégral, pour servir de suite à l’”Analyse des infiniment-petits” de M. Le Marquis de l’hôpital, Desaint & Saillant, Paris 1754. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Algebra still appears partially confused and mysterious to me, just like botany, but I’ve always been studying constellations, as all three aforementioned subjects. If you look carefully, like in the underside of a star-embroidered desert, all the notions we memorise eventually connect to one another, as if per a plant, or the celestial telos. Following this same principle we keep on talking about Formula 1, music and Bernoulli, which now allows me to look at the sky from a different, yet always the same portion... always elsewhere, always at home.
Then there is also reminiscence, ἀνάμνησις, which according to Aristotle is a type of embodied memory, the impressions that experiences leave in our bodies and that, when subjected to the same stimulus or a similar one, reproduce the same original psycho-emotional effects. Reminiscence is the voice of my grandmother in front of a Bougainvillea, confusing Puglia with Morocco for a moment under the shade of a Bougainvillea, elevating a pink bract of theTemple Fire variety to the symbol of a meeting I don't want to forget. The resilience of these tropical and Mediterranean shrubs is synonymous with the stubbornness with which I write about plants, family and migrations. I try to root mnemonic notions and bodily reminiscences in a single, stable and stubborn trunk, capable of facing the most arid drought. I write about plants not as a science, or a "-logy," but as a sort of poetic cartography in which I can orient and organise the stages of my existence.
Plants, like stars, are clusters of knowledge and relationships. Their apparent - and only apparent - immobility allows us to use them as milestones of collective and individual knowledge. Each person knows plants according to their own skills and needs, to their geographical and epistemological point-of-view. My knowledge of plants corresponds to the understanding, each time, of where I am. I recall them as a sort of orientation device, in the manner of a earthly or celestial map. When I move, the first thing I do is look around me for plants and I immediately feel safe. The act of transplanting teaches us that roots are not found in a fixed and precise place, they are not in-place. Certainly, there are more nutrient-rich and compatible soils than others, but roots are parts of our own bodies. Roots move with us; they cannot be "left" elsewhere, behind the movement. That would result in the death of the creature that moves, the impossibility of movement itself. Ancestors are also part of our chromosomal, cultural and emotional roots, therefore they move with us, building up each individual as a caravan, a constellation, until the largest and most ancestral of all caravans, until we can reach our mothers ferns.
I don't want to delve into the complicated jungle of thoughts about the concept of identity, but the more I move, the more I transplant, the more I realise how identity constitutes a construct that is as vital, as it is suffocating. We must constantly reshape its parameters, just as we need to adjust the exposure to light and access to water for garden or indoor plants, because we This echoes some Donna Haraway’s theories, as those collected into 2019 Chthulucene. I have chosen to make them part of those enclosures to better define our existences. The way we design gardens and urban habitats mirrors the ways through which we shape all boundaries, identities included. Thinking about plants allows me to reverse these thresholds, like a Calvino’s Pendu, to bury my head in the soil and look at the world upside-down, to see the roots in the mind and the relationality, the nourishment, with the "outside" and "surroundings" of the limbs. It is the limbs, whether of flesh or bark, that allow us to explore solar spatiality, to reach new postures and eventually create shade, that in this context is, contrary to its slang denotation, a protective and refreshing space for others, that can now survive precisely because of our own principle of survival. The shade projected by a tree or a shrub, along with its clean air, is not a simple architectural coverage but a proper recovery. "As I rise, I expand and expanding, I encounter others" could be the thought of a climbing shrub, just like the background of a prayer. By venturing outside those private enclosures, Bougainvilleas become collective biological and urban spaces. While some creatures find nourishment by their colourful bracts, we find refreshment for a moment under their leafy canopies, seeking shelter from scorching streets, waiting for the bus, keeping an eye on a line of parked cars, or while talking on the phone with our mothers. The "upside-down" and "inside-out" become galactic, botanical, urban and social concepts. If it is true that the Universe in which plants and I find ourselves cohabiting is an explosive fragment of a larger cosmic design, I can only take immense pleasure in realising that this creative endeavour has taken the form, among billions, of a Bougainvillea, smiling at me at the exit of a railway station in a country where, once again, I would like to transplant my maps and caravans.
Perhaps, my inclination to better preserve auditory impressions comes precisely from my grandmother who, in the last days of her illness, often said she could hear some of her favourite youth songs playing in the background of her mind. This writing about plants becomes the tape recorder in which I try to engrave voices, soundscapes and incandescent reminiscences like the dazzling orange of this African Sunset. The day I fell in love, from the boiling concrete I picked up one of its bright flowers, adored by pollinating insects and there it remains, hanging on a white thread off the wall of my room, evergreen and fecund, se Dio vuole. Le Pendu is the XII Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot, this archetype reminds me of many characters depicted by 7 Italian author Italo Calvino in his novels, in particular Il Barone Rampante, from the 1957 trilogy I Nostri Antenati. Which is also the tile of Dolly Parton and James Ingram 1999 song: “People all say, love is wonderful/That the bells will 8 ring and birds will sing and skies will open/I wonder where's that great big symphony/Roll over Beethoven, won't you play with me?”. The English If God wills and Arabic Inshallah.
Taking care of a Bougainvillea:
Bougainvilleas prefer sunny and bright locations. The temperature should never drop below 10°C (50°F). They can be planted directly in the ground or in large pots. The latter option is preferable if you live in places with cold winters, as you can move them indoors.
During the summer and spring seasons, Bougainvilleas require more frequent watering. The soil should be kept moist in summer, but not overly wet to avoid water-logging, which can be very dangerous for the plant.
Repotting should be done in early spring, using a substrate mixed with expanded clay, pumice, or volcanic lapilli. This explains their affinity with Morocco and the Southern Mediterranean coasts.
Mature plants have maximum growth between May and June. Once the bracts appear, it is advisable to change the fertiliser, reducing the nitrogen content that stimulates flowering and preferring potassium.
When the first cold weather sets in, gradually reduce the watering to allow the plant to strengthen and withstand the colder months.
For climbing, this shrub needs a support structure to lean on.
Pruning is done by spur pruning, similar to vines and wisteria. The best time for pruning is between late winter and early spring.
The Routes of the Bougainvillea
I have recently realised that the voice and expressions used in life by someone who has passed away remain more deeply imprinted in my memory than images. I don't know if this mechanism is similar for everyone, if somehow the nature of memory is more inclined to preserve verbal and auditory impressions than visual ones, like some kind of cerebral “microwave background”. 1I know that in my case, the most vivid and frequent reminiscences come in the form of sound. I realised this when I remembered my grandmother calling the Bougainvillea: "U' Bougainville" with a very particular and personal inclination, referring to the plant in the masculine gender in our dialect, rather than the feminine as its taxonomy would suggest. Her tone was always seasoned with a certain amount of respect and admiration for this genus, one of her favourites.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, just like me, and I believe that part of her admiration stemmed from the heights reached by this shrub when, as we say, “caccia” (hunts, shoots up) and reproduces vigorously. You have to raise up your head to stare it in the eyes. A "Madonn ci je bell" (My goodness, how beautiful) loaded with wonder would follow if the particular specimen was lush, strong and abundant with flowers, which technically are sepal-like bracts, a kind of coloured foliage that encloses the flowers. We have a couple of plants at home, still young and slender, with the classic purplish flowers, "Moneth" or "Purple Queen" variety, which is more common in Puglia. The bract resemble a bell, reinforcing the auditory journey that I embark on every time we encounter them around some enclosure, under the villas’ walls, at the threshold of their gates.
Arriving at the Oasis station in Casablanca, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Bougainvilleas, purple (Purple Queen), orange (African Sunset), and even the white ones (Show Lady). "Madonn ci so bell!" ("My goodness, they're beautiful!”), I glimpse my grandmother's wide-open mouth, hands on her hips to lift up the hump that accompanied her in her final years, sculpted precisely by the countless days in the garden. The strength with which they grow and spread here gives me shivers, just like remembering the dearest person in the world. All around me, I see nothing but Bougainvilleas and I hear my grandmother's voice. It is her voice that allows her faint image to resurface for a moment with closed eyes. In the flower beds of the villas, they peek out the walls like lion manes, countless bells reminding of the Ghungroo, the ankle bells bracelets from Indian dances and the Trinidadian Carnival’s costumes, the islands of their origins.
How to describe inaudible sounds? My grandmother's voice is no longer here, and the bells of the Bougainvilleas are silent to most yet, in my mind, they play a bizarre symphony, of which the only The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, CMBR) is a microwave radiation, an emission of a uniform black body 1 thermal energy, that fills all space inside the observable universe. THE ROUTES OF THE BOUGAINVILLEA Arianna Jakubowski audible partition is the rustling of leaves in the Atlantic wind and the honking of the nervous Petit Taxis. "Can't you see it? I'm taking you with me," I tell her. "Look, I'm taking you to see the Bougainvillea, look how many there are here!”, I am certain that her mercurial mind would already be scrutinising pruning, leaf health, soil and positioning, making calculations, predictions and judgments of which I remain profoundly ignorant. This would keep her calm and distracted from the thought of me travelling through unknown countries. I don't know the science of plants. My grandmother did, she knew it without too many names, notions, formulas and academicism.
The story of the Bougainvillea intertwines curiously at certain points with the story of my family, like in a crowded garden where its branches embrace and struggle with Hibiscus, Oleanders, hedges and other shrubs. If not pruned, it becomes “invasive” they say, like my endless talk. Its name comes from a French expedition in Brazil, where a part of my family resides and where neither I, nor my grandmother, have set foot yet. We can count eighteen different species, a recurring number in my travels. In the Marseille Tarot, it's the number of La Lune (The Moon), the nocturnal feminine energy that does justice to all the creatures resting under its pale rays, some members of my family worked for the Justice system and the feminine energy in my household was and still is always abundant. Once reached the Mediterranean basin, it felt incredibly at home, just like when I move along its coasts, between east and west, north and south: always elsewhere, always at home.
I write about plants, travels and my grandmother, almost obsessively. I draw emotional-vegetal maps, like my grandfather, the German cartographer I’ve never met. In his likeness, I am always a stranger, a camel in a gutter . I try to avoid the natural engulfing of the past and the present, imprinting on paper psycho-physical ruptures where sinking in this Sea feels sweet to me.A vegetal sacrifice. The cellulose body of a lifeless specimen consecrated to embalm the memories of the living and their dead. I don't write for the possib reader, but to record; like a photosensitive reel, I oscillate between time and space, between creatures and their conceptual boundaries, which crumble at the first contact, as if in a crowded wilderness.
Aristotle distinguished two types of memory: μνήμη, the memory as a notion, concept, mental-cerebral process, through which I remember that the Bougainvillea is named after a French colonialist navigator who, before embarking on the globe’s circumnavigation, had completed a treatise on integral calculus in his youth. Exactly twenty-four hours before stumbling on this study, I discuss on a rooftop in Casablanca about Emmanuel Kant's dedication to The expression is a quote from XI a.d. mathematician and philosopher Al-Biruni, also adopted by Italian composer Franco Battiato in his 1991 album “Come un cammello in una grondaia”. It is a nod to Giacomo Leopardi closing verse of his masterpiece L’Infinito: “Così tra questa/immensità s’annega il pensiero mio:/e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”. G. Leopardi, L’Infinito, Recanati 1826. Aristotle, Περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως, On Memory and Recollection, Parva Naturalia. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Traité du calcul intégral, pour servir de suite à l’”Analyse des infiniment-petits” de M. Le Marquis de l’hôpital, Desaint & Saillant, Paris 1754. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Algebra still appears partially confused and mysterious to me, just like botany, but I’ve always been studying constellations, as all three aforementioned subjects. If you look carefully, like in the underside of a star-embroidered desert, all the notions we memorise eventually connect to one another, as if per a plant, or the celestial telos. Following this same principle we keep on talking about Formula 1, music and Bernoulli, which now allows me to look at the sky from a different, yet always the same portion... always elsewhere, always at home.
Then there is also reminiscence, ἀνάμνησις, which according to Aristotle is a type of embodied memory, the impressions that experiences leave in our bodies and that, when subjected to the same stimulus or a similar one, reproduce the same original psycho-emotional effects. Reminiscence is the voice of my grandmother in front of a Bougainvillea, confusing Puglia with Morocco for a moment under the shade of a Bougainvillea, elevating a pink bract of theTemple Fire variety to the symbol of a meeting I don't want to forget. The resilience of these tropical and Mediterranean shrubs is synonymous with the stubbornness with which I write about plants, family and migrations. I try to root mnemonic notions and bodily reminiscences in a single, stable and stubborn trunk, capable of facing the most arid drought. I write about plants not as a science, or a "-logy," but as a sort of poetic cartography in which I can orient and organise the stages of my existence.
Plants, like stars, are clusters of knowledge and relationships. Their apparent - and only apparent - immobility allows us to use them as milestones of collective and individual knowledge. Each person knows plants according to their own skills and needs, to their geographical and epistemological point-of-view. My knowledge of plants corresponds to the understanding, each time, of where I am. I recall them as a sort of orientation device, in the manner of a earthly or celestial map. When I move, the first thing I do is look around me for plants and I immediately feel safe. The act of transplanting teaches us that roots are not found in a fixed and precise place, they are not in-place. Certainly, there are more nutrient-rich and compatible soils than others, but roots are parts of our own bodies. Roots move with us; they cannot be "left" elsewhere, behind the movement. That would result in the death of the creature that moves, the impossibility of movement itself. Ancestors are also part of our chromosomal, cultural and emotional roots, therefore they move with us, building up each individual as a caravan, a constellation, until the largest and most ancestral of all caravans, until we can reach our mothers ferns.
I don't want to delve into the complicated jungle of thoughts about the concept of identity, but the more I move, the more I transplant, the more I realise how identity constitutes a construct that is as vital, as it is suffocating. We must constantly reshape its parameters, just as we need to adjust the exposure to light and access to water for garden or indoor plants, because we This echoes some Donna Haraway’s theories, as those collected into 2019 Chthulucene. I have chosen to make them part of those enclosures to better define our existences. The way we design gardens and urban habitats mirrors the ways through which we shape all boundaries, identities included. Thinking about plants allows me to reverse these thresholds, like a Calvino’s Pendu, to bury my head in the soil and look at the world upside-down, to see the roots in the mind and the relationality, the nourishment, with the "outside" and "surroundings" of the limbs. It is the limbs, whether of flesh or bark, that allow us to explore solar spatiality, to reach new postures and eventually create shade, that in this context is, contrary to its slang denotation, a protective and refreshing space for others, that can now survive precisely because of our own principle of survival. The shade projected by a tree or a shrub, along with its clean air, is not a simple architectural coverage but a proper recovery. "As I rise, I expand and expanding, I encounter others" could be the thought of a climbing shrub, just like the background of a prayer. By venturing outside those private enclosures, Bougainvilleas become collective biological and urban spaces. While some creatures find nourishment by their colourful bracts, we find refreshment for a moment under their leafy canopies, seeking shelter from scorching streets, waiting for the bus, keeping an eye on a line of parked cars, or while talking on the phone with our mothers. The "upside-down" and "inside-out" become galactic, botanical, urban and social concepts. If it is true that the Universe in which plants and I find ourselves cohabiting is an explosive fragment of a larger cosmic design, I can only take immense pleasure in realising that this creative endeavour has taken the form, among billions, of a Bougainvillea, smiling at me at the exit of a railway station in a country where, once again, I would like to transplant my maps and caravans.
Perhaps, my inclination to better preserve auditory impressions comes precisely from my grandmother who, in the last days of her illness, often said she could hear some of her favourite youth songs playing in the background of her mind. This writing about plants becomes the tape recorder in which I try to engrave voices, soundscapes and incandescent reminiscences like the dazzling orange of this African Sunset. The day I fell in love, from the boiling concrete I picked up one of its bright flowers, adored by pollinating insects and there it remains, hanging on a white thread off the wall of my room, evergreen and fecund, se Dio vuole. Le Pendu is the XII Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot, this archetype reminds me of many characters depicted by 7 Italian author Italo Calvino in his novels, in particular Il Barone Rampante, from the 1957 trilogy I Nostri Antenati. Which is also the tile of Dolly Parton and James Ingram 1999 song: “People all say, love is wonderful/That the bells will 8 ring and birds will sing and skies will open/I wonder where's that great big symphony/Roll over Beethoven, won't you play with me?”. The English If God wills and Arabic Inshallah.
Taking care of a Bougainvillea:
Bougainvilleas prefer sunny and bright locations. The temperature should never drop below 10°C (50°F). They can be planted directly in the ground or in large pots. The latter option is preferable if you live in places with cold winters, as you can move them indoors.
During the summer and spring seasons, Bougainvilleas require more frequent watering. The soil should be kept moist in summer, but not overly wet to avoid water-logging, which can be very dangerous for the plant.
Repotting should be done in early spring, using a substrate mixed with expanded clay, pumice, or volcanic lapilli. This explains their affinity with Morocco and the Southern Mediterranean coasts.
Mature plants have maximum growth between May and June. Once the bracts appear, it is advisable to change the fertiliser, reducing the nitrogen content that stimulates flowering and preferring potassium.
When the first cold weather sets in, gradually reduce the watering to allow the plant to strengthen and withstand the colder months.
For climbing, this shrub needs a support structure to lean on.
Pruning is done by spur pruning, similar to vines and wisteria. The best time for pruning is between late winter and early spring.
Arianna Jakubowski is a writer, teacher and editor.
by Arianna Jakubowski
The Routes of the Bougainvillea
I have recently realised that the voice and expressions used in life by someone who has passed away remain more deeply imprinted in my memory than images. I don't know if this mechanism is similar for everyone, if somehow the nature of memory is more inclined to preserve verbal and auditory impressions than visual ones, like some kind of cerebral “microwave background”. 1I know that in my case, the most vivid and frequent reminiscences come in the form of sound. I realised this when I remembered my grandmother calling the Bougainvillea: "U' Bougainville" with a very particular and personal inclination, referring to the plant in the masculine gender in our dialect, rather than the feminine as its taxonomy would suggest. Her tone was always seasoned with a certain amount of respect and admiration for this genus, one of her favourites.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, just like me, and I believe that part of her admiration stemmed from the heights reached by this shrub when, as we say, “caccia” (hunts, shoots up) and reproduces vigorously. You have to raise up your head to stare it in the eyes. A "Madonn ci je bell" (My goodness, how beautiful) loaded with wonder would follow if the particular specimen was lush, strong and abundant with flowers, which technically are sepal-like bracts, a kind of coloured foliage that encloses the flowers. We have a couple of plants at home, still young and slender, with the classic purplish flowers, "Moneth" or "Purple Queen" variety, which is more common in Puglia. The bract resemble a bell, reinforcing the auditory journey that I embark on every time we encounter them around some enclosure, under the villas’ walls, at the threshold of their gates.
Arriving at the Oasis station in Casablanca, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Bougainvilleas, purple (Purple Queen), orange (African Sunset), and even the white ones (Show Lady). "Madonn ci so bell!" ("My goodness, they're beautiful!”), I glimpse my grandmother's wide-open mouth, hands on her hips to lift up the hump that accompanied her in her final years, sculpted precisely by the countless days in the garden. The strength with which they grow and spread here gives me shivers, just like remembering the dearest person in the world. All around me, I see nothing but Bougainvilleas and I hear my grandmother's voice. It is her voice that allows her faint image to resurface for a moment with closed eyes. In the flower beds of the villas, they peek out the walls like lion manes, countless bells reminding of the Ghungroo, the ankle bells bracelets from Indian dances and the Trinidadian Carnival’s costumes, the islands of their origins.
How to describe inaudible sounds? My grandmother's voice is no longer here, and the bells of the Bougainvilleas are silent to most yet, in my mind, they play a bizarre symphony, of which the only The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, CMBR) is a microwave radiation, an emission of a uniform black body 1 thermal energy, that fills all space inside the observable universe. THE ROUTES OF THE BOUGAINVILLEA Arianna Jakubowski audible partition is the rustling of leaves in the Atlantic wind and the honking of the nervous Petit Taxis. "Can't you see it? I'm taking you with me," I tell her. "Look, I'm taking you to see the Bougainvillea, look how many there are here!”, I am certain that her mercurial mind would already be scrutinising pruning, leaf health, soil and positioning, making calculations, predictions and judgments of which I remain profoundly ignorant. This would keep her calm and distracted from the thought of me travelling through unknown countries. I don't know the science of plants. My grandmother did, she knew it without too many names, notions, formulas and academicism.
The story of the Bougainvillea intertwines curiously at certain points with the story of my family, like in a crowded garden where its branches embrace and struggle with Hibiscus, Oleanders, hedges and other shrubs. If not pruned, it becomes “invasive” they say, like my endless talk. Its name comes from a French expedition in Brazil, where a part of my family resides and where neither I, nor my grandmother, have set foot yet. We can count eighteen different species, a recurring number in my travels. In the Marseille Tarot, it's the number of La Lune (The Moon), the nocturnal feminine energy that does justice to all the creatures resting under its pale rays, some members of my family worked for the Justice system and the feminine energy in my household was and still is always abundant. Once reached the Mediterranean basin, it felt incredibly at home, just like when I move along its coasts, between east and west, north and south: always elsewhere, always at home.
I write about plants, travels and my grandmother, almost obsessively. I draw emotional-vegetal maps, like my grandfather, the German cartographer I’ve never met. In his likeness, I am always a stranger, a camel in a gutter . I try to avoid the natural engulfing of the past and the present, imprinting on paper psycho-physical ruptures where sinking in this Sea feels sweet to me.A vegetal sacrifice. The cellulose body of a lifeless specimen consecrated to embalm the memories of the living and their dead. I don't write for the possib reader, but to record; like a photosensitive reel, I oscillate between time and space, between creatures and their conceptual boundaries, which crumble at the first contact, as if in a crowded wilderness.
Aristotle distinguished two types of memory: μνήμη, the memory as a notion, concept, mental-cerebral process, through which I remember that the Bougainvillea is named after a French colonialist navigator who, before embarking on the globe’s circumnavigation, had completed a treatise on integral calculus in his youth. Exactly twenty-four hours before stumbling on this study, I discuss on a rooftop in Casablanca about Emmanuel Kant's dedication to The expression is a quote from XI a.d. mathematician and philosopher Al-Biruni, also adopted by Italian composer Franco Battiato in his 1991 album “Come un cammello in una grondaia”. It is a nod to Giacomo Leopardi closing verse of his masterpiece L’Infinito: “Così tra questa/immensità s’annega il pensiero mio:/e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”. G. Leopardi, L’Infinito, Recanati 1826. Aristotle, Περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως, On Memory and Recollection, Parva Naturalia. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Traité du calcul intégral, pour servir de suite à l’”Analyse des infiniment-petits” de M. Le Marquis de l’hôpital, Desaint & Saillant, Paris 1754. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Algebra still appears partially confused and mysterious to me, just like botany, but I’ve always been studying constellations, as all three aforementioned subjects. If you look carefully, like in the underside of a star-embroidered desert, all the notions we memorise eventually connect to one another, as if per a plant, or the celestial telos. Following this same principle we keep on talking about Formula 1, music and Bernoulli, which now allows me to look at the sky from a different, yet always the same portion... always elsewhere, always at home.
Then there is also reminiscence, ἀνάμνησις, which according to Aristotle is a type of embodied memory, the impressions that experiences leave in our bodies and that, when subjected to the same stimulus or a similar one, reproduce the same original psycho-emotional effects. Reminiscence is the voice of my grandmother in front of a Bougainvillea, confusing Puglia with Morocco for a moment under the shade of a Bougainvillea, elevating a pink bract of theTemple Fire variety to the symbol of a meeting I don't want to forget. The resilience of these tropical and Mediterranean shrubs is synonymous with the stubbornness with which I write about plants, family and migrations. I try to root mnemonic notions and bodily reminiscences in a single, stable and stubborn trunk, capable of facing the most arid drought. I write about plants not as a science, or a "-logy," but as a sort of poetic cartography in which I can orient and organise the stages of my existence.
Plants, like stars, are clusters of knowledge and relationships. Their apparent - and only apparent - immobility allows us to use them as milestones of collective and individual knowledge. Each person knows plants according to their own skills and needs, to their geographical and epistemological point-of-view. My knowledge of plants corresponds to the understanding, each time, of where I am. I recall them as a sort of orientation device, in the manner of a earthly or celestial map. When I move, the first thing I do is look around me for plants and I immediately feel safe. The act of transplanting teaches us that roots are not found in a fixed and precise place, they are not in-place. Certainly, there are more nutrient-rich and compatible soils than others, but roots are parts of our own bodies. Roots move with us; they cannot be "left" elsewhere, behind the movement. That would result in the death of the creature that moves, the impossibility of movement itself. Ancestors are also part of our chromosomal, cultural and emotional roots, therefore they move with us, building up each individual as a caravan, a constellation, until the largest and most ancestral of all caravans, until we can reach our mothers ferns.
I don't want to delve into the complicated jungle of thoughts about the concept of identity, but the more I move, the more I transplant, the more I realise how identity constitutes a construct that is as vital, as it is suffocating. We must constantly reshape its parameters, just as we need to adjust the exposure to light and access to water for garden or indoor plants, because we This echoes some Donna Haraway’s theories, as those collected into 2019 Chthulucene. I have chosen to make them part of those enclosures to better define our existences. The way we design gardens and urban habitats mirrors the ways through which we shape all boundaries, identities included. Thinking about plants allows me to reverse these thresholds, like a Calvino’s Pendu, to bury my head in the soil and look at the world upside-down, to see the roots in the mind and the relationality, the nourishment, with the "outside" and "surroundings" of the limbs. It is the limbs, whether of flesh or bark, that allow us to explore solar spatiality, to reach new postures and eventually create shade, that in this context is, contrary to its slang denotation, a protective and refreshing space for others, that can now survive precisely because of our own principle of survival. The shade projected by a tree or a shrub, along with its clean air, is not a simple architectural coverage but a proper recovery. "As I rise, I expand and expanding, I encounter others" could be the thought of a climbing shrub, just like the background of a prayer. By venturing outside those private enclosures, Bougainvilleas become collective biological and urban spaces. While some creatures find nourishment by their colourful bracts, we find refreshment for a moment under their leafy canopies, seeking shelter from scorching streets, waiting for the bus, keeping an eye on a line of parked cars, or while talking on the phone with our mothers. The "upside-down" and "inside-out" become galactic, botanical, urban and social concepts. If it is true that the Universe in which plants and I find ourselves cohabiting is an explosive fragment of a larger cosmic design, I can only take immense pleasure in realising that this creative endeavour has taken the form, among billions, of a Bougainvillea, smiling at me at the exit of a railway station in a country where, once again, I would like to transplant my maps and caravans.
Perhaps, my inclination to better preserve auditory impressions comes precisely from my grandmother who, in the last days of her illness, often said she could hear some of her favourite youth songs playing in the background of her mind. This writing about plants becomes the tape recorder in which I try to engrave voices, soundscapes and incandescent reminiscences like the dazzling orange of this African Sunset. The day I fell in love, from the boiling concrete I picked up one of its bright flowers, adored by pollinating insects and there it remains, hanging on a white thread off the wall of my room, evergreen and fecund, se Dio vuole. Le Pendu is the XII Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot, this archetype reminds me of many characters depicted by 7 Italian author Italo Calvino in his novels, in particular Il Barone Rampante, from the 1957 trilogy I Nostri Antenati. Which is also the tile of Dolly Parton and James Ingram 1999 song: “People all say, love is wonderful/That the bells will 8 ring and birds will sing and skies will open/I wonder where's that great big symphony/Roll over Beethoven, won't you play with me?”. The English If God wills and Arabic Inshallah.
Taking care of a Bougainvillea:
Bougainvilleas prefer sunny and bright locations. The temperature should never drop below 10°C (50°F). They can be planted directly in the ground or in large pots. The latter option is preferable if you live in places with cold winters, as you can move them indoors.
During the summer and spring seasons, Bougainvilleas require more frequent watering. The soil should be kept moist in summer, but not overly wet to avoid water-logging, which can be very dangerous for the plant.
Repotting should be done in early spring, using a substrate mixed with expanded clay, pumice, or volcanic lapilli. This explains their affinity with Morocco and the Southern Mediterranean coasts.
Mature plants have maximum growth between May and June. Once the bracts appear, it is advisable to change the fertiliser, reducing the nitrogen content that stimulates flowering and preferring potassium.
When the first cold weather sets in, gradually reduce the watering to allow the plant to strengthen and withstand the colder months.
For climbing, this shrub needs a support structure to lean on.
Pruning is done by spur pruning, similar to vines and wisteria. The best time for pruning is between late winter and early spring.
The Routes of the Bougainvillea
I have recently realised that the voice and expressions used in life by someone who has passed away remain more deeply imprinted in my memory than images. I don't know if this mechanism is similar for everyone, if somehow the nature of memory is more inclined to preserve verbal and auditory impressions than visual ones, like some kind of cerebral “microwave background”. 1I know that in my case, the most vivid and frequent reminiscences come in the form of sound. I realised this when I remembered my grandmother calling the Bougainvillea: "U' Bougainville" with a very particular and personal inclination, referring to the plant in the masculine gender in our dialect, rather than the feminine as its taxonomy would suggest. Her tone was always seasoned with a certain amount of respect and admiration for this genus, one of her favourites.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, just like me, and I believe that part of her admiration stemmed from the heights reached by this shrub when, as we say, “caccia” (hunts, shoots up) and reproduces vigorously. You have to raise up your head to stare it in the eyes. A "Madonn ci je bell" (My goodness, how beautiful) loaded with wonder would follow if the particular specimen was lush, strong and abundant with flowers, which technically are sepal-like bracts, a kind of coloured foliage that encloses the flowers. We have a couple of plants at home, still young and slender, with the classic purplish flowers, "Moneth" or "Purple Queen" variety, which is more common in Puglia. The bract resemble a bell, reinforcing the auditory journey that I embark on every time we encounter them around some enclosure, under the villas’ walls, at the threshold of their gates.
Arriving at the Oasis station in Casablanca, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Bougainvilleas, purple (Purple Queen), orange (African Sunset), and even the white ones (Show Lady). "Madonn ci so bell!" ("My goodness, they're beautiful!”), I glimpse my grandmother's wide-open mouth, hands on her hips to lift up the hump that accompanied her in her final years, sculpted precisely by the countless days in the garden. The strength with which they grow and spread here gives me shivers, just like remembering the dearest person in the world. All around me, I see nothing but Bougainvilleas and I hear my grandmother's voice. It is her voice that allows her faint image to resurface for a moment with closed eyes. In the flower beds of the villas, they peek out the walls like lion manes, countless bells reminding of the Ghungroo, the ankle bells bracelets from Indian dances and the Trinidadian Carnival’s costumes, the islands of their origins.
How to describe inaudible sounds? My grandmother's voice is no longer here, and the bells of the Bougainvilleas are silent to most yet, in my mind, they play a bizarre symphony, of which the only The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, CMBR) is a microwave radiation, an emission of a uniform black body 1 thermal energy, that fills all space inside the observable universe. THE ROUTES OF THE BOUGAINVILLEA Arianna Jakubowski audible partition is the rustling of leaves in the Atlantic wind and the honking of the nervous Petit Taxis. "Can't you see it? I'm taking you with me," I tell her. "Look, I'm taking you to see the Bougainvillea, look how many there are here!”, I am certain that her mercurial mind would already be scrutinising pruning, leaf health, soil and positioning, making calculations, predictions and judgments of which I remain profoundly ignorant. This would keep her calm and distracted from the thought of me travelling through unknown countries. I don't know the science of plants. My grandmother did, she knew it without too many names, notions, formulas and academicism.
The story of the Bougainvillea intertwines curiously at certain points with the story of my family, like in a crowded garden where its branches embrace and struggle with Hibiscus, Oleanders, hedges and other shrubs. If not pruned, it becomes “invasive” they say, like my endless talk. Its name comes from a French expedition in Brazil, where a part of my family resides and where neither I, nor my grandmother, have set foot yet. We can count eighteen different species, a recurring number in my travels. In the Marseille Tarot, it's the number of La Lune (The Moon), the nocturnal feminine energy that does justice to all the creatures resting under its pale rays, some members of my family worked for the Justice system and the feminine energy in my household was and still is always abundant. Once reached the Mediterranean basin, it felt incredibly at home, just like when I move along its coasts, between east and west, north and south: always elsewhere, always at home.
I write about plants, travels and my grandmother, almost obsessively. I draw emotional-vegetal maps, like my grandfather, the German cartographer I’ve never met. In his likeness, I am always a stranger, a camel in a gutter . I try to avoid the natural engulfing of the past and the present, imprinting on paper psycho-physical ruptures where sinking in this Sea feels sweet to me.A vegetal sacrifice. The cellulose body of a lifeless specimen consecrated to embalm the memories of the living and their dead. I don't write for the possib reader, but to record; like a photosensitive reel, I oscillate between time and space, between creatures and their conceptual boundaries, which crumble at the first contact, as if in a crowded wilderness.
Aristotle distinguished two types of memory: μνήμη, the memory as a notion, concept, mental-cerebral process, through which I remember that the Bougainvillea is named after a French colonialist navigator who, before embarking on the globe’s circumnavigation, had completed a treatise on integral calculus in his youth. Exactly twenty-four hours before stumbling on this study, I discuss on a rooftop in Casablanca about Emmanuel Kant's dedication to The expression is a quote from XI a.d. mathematician and philosopher Al-Biruni, also adopted by Italian composer Franco Battiato in his 1991 album “Come un cammello in una grondaia”. It is a nod to Giacomo Leopardi closing verse of his masterpiece L’Infinito: “Così tra questa/immensità s’annega il pensiero mio:/e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”. G. Leopardi, L’Infinito, Recanati 1826. Aristotle, Περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως, On Memory and Recollection, Parva Naturalia. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Traité du calcul intégral, pour servir de suite à l’”Analyse des infiniment-petits” de M. Le Marquis de l’hôpital, Desaint & Saillant, Paris 1754. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Algebra still appears partially confused and mysterious to me, just like botany, but I’ve always been studying constellations, as all three aforementioned subjects. If you look carefully, like in the underside of a star-embroidered desert, all the notions we memorise eventually connect to one another, as if per a plant, or the celestial telos. Following this same principle we keep on talking about Formula 1, music and Bernoulli, which now allows me to look at the sky from a different, yet always the same portion... always elsewhere, always at home.
Then there is also reminiscence, ἀνάμνησις, which according to Aristotle is a type of embodied memory, the impressions that experiences leave in our bodies and that, when subjected to the same stimulus or a similar one, reproduce the same original psycho-emotional effects. Reminiscence is the voice of my grandmother in front of a Bougainvillea, confusing Puglia with Morocco for a moment under the shade of a Bougainvillea, elevating a pink bract of theTemple Fire variety to the symbol of a meeting I don't want to forget. The resilience of these tropical and Mediterranean shrubs is synonymous with the stubbornness with which I write about plants, family and migrations. I try to root mnemonic notions and bodily reminiscences in a single, stable and stubborn trunk, capable of facing the most arid drought. I write about plants not as a science, or a "-logy," but as a sort of poetic cartography in which I can orient and organise the stages of my existence.
Plants, like stars, are clusters of knowledge and relationships. Their apparent - and only apparent - immobility allows us to use them as milestones of collective and individual knowledge. Each person knows plants according to their own skills and needs, to their geographical and epistemological point-of-view. My knowledge of plants corresponds to the understanding, each time, of where I am. I recall them as a sort of orientation device, in the manner of a earthly or celestial map. When I move, the first thing I do is look around me for plants and I immediately feel safe. The act of transplanting teaches us that roots are not found in a fixed and precise place, they are not in-place. Certainly, there are more nutrient-rich and compatible soils than others, but roots are parts of our own bodies. Roots move with us; they cannot be "left" elsewhere, behind the movement. That would result in the death of the creature that moves, the impossibility of movement itself. Ancestors are also part of our chromosomal, cultural and emotional roots, therefore they move with us, building up each individual as a caravan, a constellation, until the largest and most ancestral of all caravans, until we can reach our mothers ferns.
I don't want to delve into the complicated jungle of thoughts about the concept of identity, but the more I move, the more I transplant, the more I realise how identity constitutes a construct that is as vital, as it is suffocating. We must constantly reshape its parameters, just as we need to adjust the exposure to light and access to water for garden or indoor plants, because we This echoes some Donna Haraway’s theories, as those collected into 2019 Chthulucene. I have chosen to make them part of those enclosures to better define our existences. The way we design gardens and urban habitats mirrors the ways through which we shape all boundaries, identities included. Thinking about plants allows me to reverse these thresholds, like a Calvino’s Pendu, to bury my head in the soil and look at the world upside-down, to see the roots in the mind and the relationality, the nourishment, with the "outside" and "surroundings" of the limbs. It is the limbs, whether of flesh or bark, that allow us to explore solar spatiality, to reach new postures and eventually create shade, that in this context is, contrary to its slang denotation, a protective and refreshing space for others, that can now survive precisely because of our own principle of survival. The shade projected by a tree or a shrub, along with its clean air, is not a simple architectural coverage but a proper recovery. "As I rise, I expand and expanding, I encounter others" could be the thought of a climbing shrub, just like the background of a prayer. By venturing outside those private enclosures, Bougainvilleas become collective biological and urban spaces. While some creatures find nourishment by their colourful bracts, we find refreshment for a moment under their leafy canopies, seeking shelter from scorching streets, waiting for the bus, keeping an eye on a line of parked cars, or while talking on the phone with our mothers. The "upside-down" and "inside-out" become galactic, botanical, urban and social concepts. If it is true that the Universe in which plants and I find ourselves cohabiting is an explosive fragment of a larger cosmic design, I can only take immense pleasure in realising that this creative endeavour has taken the form, among billions, of a Bougainvillea, smiling at me at the exit of a railway station in a country where, once again, I would like to transplant my maps and caravans.
Perhaps, my inclination to better preserve auditory impressions comes precisely from my grandmother who, in the last days of her illness, often said she could hear some of her favourite youth songs playing in the background of her mind. This writing about plants becomes the tape recorder in which I try to engrave voices, soundscapes and incandescent reminiscences like the dazzling orange of this African Sunset. The day I fell in love, from the boiling concrete I picked up one of its bright flowers, adored by pollinating insects and there it remains, hanging on a white thread off the wall of my room, evergreen and fecund, se Dio vuole. Le Pendu is the XII Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot, this archetype reminds me of many characters depicted by 7 Italian author Italo Calvino in his novels, in particular Il Barone Rampante, from the 1957 trilogy I Nostri Antenati. Which is also the tile of Dolly Parton and James Ingram 1999 song: “People all say, love is wonderful/That the bells will 8 ring and birds will sing and skies will open/I wonder where's that great big symphony/Roll over Beethoven, won't you play with me?”. The English If God wills and Arabic Inshallah.
Taking care of a Bougainvillea:
Bougainvilleas prefer sunny and bright locations. The temperature should never drop below 10°C (50°F). They can be planted directly in the ground or in large pots. The latter option is preferable if you live in places with cold winters, as you can move them indoors.
During the summer and spring seasons, Bougainvilleas require more frequent watering. The soil should be kept moist in summer, but not overly wet to avoid water-logging, which can be very dangerous for the plant.
Repotting should be done in early spring, using a substrate mixed with expanded clay, pumice, or volcanic lapilli. This explains their affinity with Morocco and the Southern Mediterranean coasts.
Mature plants have maximum growth between May and June. Once the bracts appear, it is advisable to change the fertiliser, reducing the nitrogen content that stimulates flowering and preferring potassium.
When the first cold weather sets in, gradually reduce the watering to allow the plant to strengthen and withstand the colder months.
For climbing, this shrub needs a support structure to lean on.
Pruning is done by spur pruning, similar to vines and wisteria. The best time for pruning is between late winter and early spring.
Arianna Jakubowski is a writer, teacher and editor.
by Arianna Jakubowski
The Routes of the Bougainvillea
I have recently realised that the voice and expressions used in life by someone who has passed away remain more deeply imprinted in my memory than images. I don't know if this mechanism is similar for everyone, if somehow the nature of memory is more inclined to preserve verbal and auditory impressions than visual ones, like some kind of cerebral “microwave background”. 1I know that in my case, the most vivid and frequent reminiscences come in the form of sound. I realised this when I remembered my grandmother calling the Bougainvillea: "U' Bougainville" with a very particular and personal inclination, referring to the plant in the masculine gender in our dialect, rather than the feminine as its taxonomy would suggest. Her tone was always seasoned with a certain amount of respect and admiration for this genus, one of her favourites.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, just like me, and I believe that part of her admiration stemmed from the heights reached by this shrub when, as we say, “caccia” (hunts, shoots up) and reproduces vigorously. You have to raise up your head to stare it in the eyes. A "Madonn ci je bell" (My goodness, how beautiful) loaded with wonder would follow if the particular specimen was lush, strong and abundant with flowers, which technically are sepal-like bracts, a kind of coloured foliage that encloses the flowers. We have a couple of plants at home, still young and slender, with the classic purplish flowers, "Moneth" or "Purple Queen" variety, which is more common in Puglia. The bract resemble a bell, reinforcing the auditory journey that I embark on every time we encounter them around some enclosure, under the villas’ walls, at the threshold of their gates.
Arriving at the Oasis station in Casablanca, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Bougainvilleas, purple (Purple Queen), orange (African Sunset), and even the white ones (Show Lady). "Madonn ci so bell!" ("My goodness, they're beautiful!”), I glimpse my grandmother's wide-open mouth, hands on her hips to lift up the hump that accompanied her in her final years, sculpted precisely by the countless days in the garden. The strength with which they grow and spread here gives me shivers, just like remembering the dearest person in the world. All around me, I see nothing but Bougainvilleas and I hear my grandmother's voice. It is her voice that allows her faint image to resurface for a moment with closed eyes. In the flower beds of the villas, they peek out the walls like lion manes, countless bells reminding of the Ghungroo, the ankle bells bracelets from Indian dances and the Trinidadian Carnival’s costumes, the islands of their origins.
How to describe inaudible sounds? My grandmother's voice is no longer here, and the bells of the Bougainvilleas are silent to most yet, in my mind, they play a bizarre symphony, of which the only The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, CMBR) is a microwave radiation, an emission of a uniform black body 1 thermal energy, that fills all space inside the observable universe. THE ROUTES OF THE BOUGAINVILLEA Arianna Jakubowski audible partition is the rustling of leaves in the Atlantic wind and the honking of the nervous Petit Taxis. "Can't you see it? I'm taking you with me," I tell her. "Look, I'm taking you to see the Bougainvillea, look how many there are here!”, I am certain that her mercurial mind would already be scrutinising pruning, leaf health, soil and positioning, making calculations, predictions and judgments of which I remain profoundly ignorant. This would keep her calm and distracted from the thought of me travelling through unknown countries. I don't know the science of plants. My grandmother did, she knew it without too many names, notions, formulas and academicism.
The story of the Bougainvillea intertwines curiously at certain points with the story of my family, like in a crowded garden where its branches embrace and struggle with Hibiscus, Oleanders, hedges and other shrubs. If not pruned, it becomes “invasive” they say, like my endless talk. Its name comes from a French expedition in Brazil, where a part of my family resides and where neither I, nor my grandmother, have set foot yet. We can count eighteen different species, a recurring number in my travels. In the Marseille Tarot, it's the number of La Lune (The Moon), the nocturnal feminine energy that does justice to all the creatures resting under its pale rays, some members of my family worked for the Justice system and the feminine energy in my household was and still is always abundant. Once reached the Mediterranean basin, it felt incredibly at home, just like when I move along its coasts, between east and west, north and south: always elsewhere, always at home.
I write about plants, travels and my grandmother, almost obsessively. I draw emotional-vegetal maps, like my grandfather, the German cartographer I’ve never met. In his likeness, I am always a stranger, a camel in a gutter . I try to avoid the natural engulfing of the past and the present, imprinting on paper psycho-physical ruptures where sinking in this Sea feels sweet to me.A vegetal sacrifice. The cellulose body of a lifeless specimen consecrated to embalm the memories of the living and their dead. I don't write for the possib reader, but to record; like a photosensitive reel, I oscillate between time and space, between creatures and their conceptual boundaries, which crumble at the first contact, as if in a crowded wilderness.
Aristotle distinguished two types of memory: μνήμη, the memory as a notion, concept, mental-cerebral process, through which I remember that the Bougainvillea is named after a French colonialist navigator who, before embarking on the globe’s circumnavigation, had completed a treatise on integral calculus in his youth. Exactly twenty-four hours before stumbling on this study, I discuss on a rooftop in Casablanca about Emmanuel Kant's dedication to The expression is a quote from XI a.d. mathematician and philosopher Al-Biruni, also adopted by Italian composer Franco Battiato in his 1991 album “Come un cammello in una grondaia”. It is a nod to Giacomo Leopardi closing verse of his masterpiece L’Infinito: “Così tra questa/immensità s’annega il pensiero mio:/e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”. G. Leopardi, L’Infinito, Recanati 1826. Aristotle, Περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως, On Memory and Recollection, Parva Naturalia. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Traité du calcul intégral, pour servir de suite à l’”Analyse des infiniment-petits” de M. Le Marquis de l’hôpital, Desaint & Saillant, Paris 1754. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Algebra still appears partially confused and mysterious to me, just like botany, but I’ve always been studying constellations, as all three aforementioned subjects. If you look carefully, like in the underside of a star-embroidered desert, all the notions we memorise eventually connect to one another, as if per a plant, or the celestial telos. Following this same principle we keep on talking about Formula 1, music and Bernoulli, which now allows me to look at the sky from a different, yet always the same portion... always elsewhere, always at home.
Then there is also reminiscence, ἀνάμνησις, which according to Aristotle is a type of embodied memory, the impressions that experiences leave in our bodies and that, when subjected to the same stimulus or a similar one, reproduce the same original psycho-emotional effects. Reminiscence is the voice of my grandmother in front of a Bougainvillea, confusing Puglia with Morocco for a moment under the shade of a Bougainvillea, elevating a pink bract of theTemple Fire variety to the symbol of a meeting I don't want to forget. The resilience of these tropical and Mediterranean shrubs is synonymous with the stubbornness with which I write about plants, family and migrations. I try to root mnemonic notions and bodily reminiscences in a single, stable and stubborn trunk, capable of facing the most arid drought. I write about plants not as a science, or a "-logy," but as a sort of poetic cartography in which I can orient and organise the stages of my existence.
Plants, like stars, are clusters of knowledge and relationships. Their apparent - and only apparent - immobility allows us to use them as milestones of collective and individual knowledge. Each person knows plants according to their own skills and needs, to their geographical and epistemological point-of-view. My knowledge of plants corresponds to the understanding, each time, of where I am. I recall them as a sort of orientation device, in the manner of a earthly or celestial map. When I move, the first thing I do is look around me for plants and I immediately feel safe. The act of transplanting teaches us that roots are not found in a fixed and precise place, they are not in-place. Certainly, there are more nutrient-rich and compatible soils than others, but roots are parts of our own bodies. Roots move with us; they cannot be "left" elsewhere, behind the movement. That would result in the death of the creature that moves, the impossibility of movement itself. Ancestors are also part of our chromosomal, cultural and emotional roots, therefore they move with us, building up each individual as a caravan, a constellation, until the largest and most ancestral of all caravans, until we can reach our mothers ferns.
I don't want to delve into the complicated jungle of thoughts about the concept of identity, but the more I move, the more I transplant, the more I realise how identity constitutes a construct that is as vital, as it is suffocating. We must constantly reshape its parameters, just as we need to adjust the exposure to light and access to water for garden or indoor plants, because we This echoes some Donna Haraway’s theories, as those collected into 2019 Chthulucene. I have chosen to make them part of those enclosures to better define our existences. The way we design gardens and urban habitats mirrors the ways through which we shape all boundaries, identities included. Thinking about plants allows me to reverse these thresholds, like a Calvino’s Pendu, to bury my head in the soil and look at the world upside-down, to see the roots in the mind and the relationality, the nourishment, with the "outside" and "surroundings" of the limbs. It is the limbs, whether of flesh or bark, that allow us to explore solar spatiality, to reach new postures and eventually create shade, that in this context is, contrary to its slang denotation, a protective and refreshing space for others, that can now survive precisely because of our own principle of survival. The shade projected by a tree or a shrub, along with its clean air, is not a simple architectural coverage but a proper recovery. "As I rise, I expand and expanding, I encounter others" could be the thought of a climbing shrub, just like the background of a prayer. By venturing outside those private enclosures, Bougainvilleas become collective biological and urban spaces. While some creatures find nourishment by their colourful bracts, we find refreshment for a moment under their leafy canopies, seeking shelter from scorching streets, waiting for the bus, keeping an eye on a line of parked cars, or while talking on the phone with our mothers. The "upside-down" and "inside-out" become galactic, botanical, urban and social concepts. If it is true that the Universe in which plants and I find ourselves cohabiting is an explosive fragment of a larger cosmic design, I can only take immense pleasure in realising that this creative endeavour has taken the form, among billions, of a Bougainvillea, smiling at me at the exit of a railway station in a country where, once again, I would like to transplant my maps and caravans.
Perhaps, my inclination to better preserve auditory impressions comes precisely from my grandmother who, in the last days of her illness, often said she could hear some of her favourite youth songs playing in the background of her mind. This writing about plants becomes the tape recorder in which I try to engrave voices, soundscapes and incandescent reminiscences like the dazzling orange of this African Sunset. The day I fell in love, from the boiling concrete I picked up one of its bright flowers, adored by pollinating insects and there it remains, hanging on a white thread off the wall of my room, evergreen and fecund, se Dio vuole. Le Pendu is the XII Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot, this archetype reminds me of many characters depicted by 7 Italian author Italo Calvino in his novels, in particular Il Barone Rampante, from the 1957 trilogy I Nostri Antenati. Which is also the tile of Dolly Parton and James Ingram 1999 song: “People all say, love is wonderful/That the bells will 8 ring and birds will sing and skies will open/I wonder where's that great big symphony/Roll over Beethoven, won't you play with me?”. The English If God wills and Arabic Inshallah.
Taking care of a Bougainvillea:
Bougainvilleas prefer sunny and bright locations. The temperature should never drop below 10°C (50°F). They can be planted directly in the ground or in large pots. The latter option is preferable if you live in places with cold winters, as you can move them indoors.
During the summer and spring seasons, Bougainvilleas require more frequent watering. The soil should be kept moist in summer, but not overly wet to avoid water-logging, which can be very dangerous for the plant.
Repotting should be done in early spring, using a substrate mixed with expanded clay, pumice, or volcanic lapilli. This explains their affinity with Morocco and the Southern Mediterranean coasts.
Mature plants have maximum growth between May and June. Once the bracts appear, it is advisable to change the fertiliser, reducing the nitrogen content that stimulates flowering and preferring potassium.
When the first cold weather sets in, gradually reduce the watering to allow the plant to strengthen and withstand the colder months.
For climbing, this shrub needs a support structure to lean on.
Pruning is done by spur pruning, similar to vines and wisteria. The best time for pruning is between late winter and early spring.
The Routes of the Bougainvillea
I have recently realised that the voice and expressions used in life by someone who has passed away remain more deeply imprinted in my memory than images. I don't know if this mechanism is similar for everyone, if somehow the nature of memory is more inclined to preserve verbal and auditory impressions than visual ones, like some kind of cerebral “microwave background”. 1I know that in my case, the most vivid and frequent reminiscences come in the form of sound. I realised this when I remembered my grandmother calling the Bougainvillea: "U' Bougainville" with a very particular and personal inclination, referring to the plant in the masculine gender in our dialect, rather than the feminine as its taxonomy would suggest. Her tone was always seasoned with a certain amount of respect and admiration for this genus, one of her favourites.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, just like me, and I believe that part of her admiration stemmed from the heights reached by this shrub when, as we say, “caccia” (hunts, shoots up) and reproduces vigorously. You have to raise up your head to stare it in the eyes. A "Madonn ci je bell" (My goodness, how beautiful) loaded with wonder would follow if the particular specimen was lush, strong and abundant with flowers, which technically are sepal-like bracts, a kind of coloured foliage that encloses the flowers. We have a couple of plants at home, still young and slender, with the classic purplish flowers, "Moneth" or "Purple Queen" variety, which is more common in Puglia. The bract resemble a bell, reinforcing the auditory journey that I embark on every time we encounter them around some enclosure, under the villas’ walls, at the threshold of their gates.
Arriving at the Oasis station in Casablanca, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of Bougainvilleas, purple (Purple Queen), orange (African Sunset), and even the white ones (Show Lady). "Madonn ci so bell!" ("My goodness, they're beautiful!”), I glimpse my grandmother's wide-open mouth, hands on her hips to lift up the hump that accompanied her in her final years, sculpted precisely by the countless days in the garden. The strength with which they grow and spread here gives me shivers, just like remembering the dearest person in the world. All around me, I see nothing but Bougainvilleas and I hear my grandmother's voice. It is her voice that allows her faint image to resurface for a moment with closed eyes. In the flower beds of the villas, they peek out the walls like lion manes, countless bells reminding of the Ghungroo, the ankle bells bracelets from Indian dances and the Trinidadian Carnival’s costumes, the islands of their origins.
How to describe inaudible sounds? My grandmother's voice is no longer here, and the bells of the Bougainvilleas are silent to most yet, in my mind, they play a bizarre symphony, of which the only The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, CMBR) is a microwave radiation, an emission of a uniform black body 1 thermal energy, that fills all space inside the observable universe. THE ROUTES OF THE BOUGAINVILLEA Arianna Jakubowski audible partition is the rustling of leaves in the Atlantic wind and the honking of the nervous Petit Taxis. "Can't you see it? I'm taking you with me," I tell her. "Look, I'm taking you to see the Bougainvillea, look how many there are here!”, I am certain that her mercurial mind would already be scrutinising pruning, leaf health, soil and positioning, making calculations, predictions and judgments of which I remain profoundly ignorant. This would keep her calm and distracted from the thought of me travelling through unknown countries. I don't know the science of plants. My grandmother did, she knew it without too many names, notions, formulas and academicism.
The story of the Bougainvillea intertwines curiously at certain points with the story of my family, like in a crowded garden where its branches embrace and struggle with Hibiscus, Oleanders, hedges and other shrubs. If not pruned, it becomes “invasive” they say, like my endless talk. Its name comes from a French expedition in Brazil, where a part of my family resides and where neither I, nor my grandmother, have set foot yet. We can count eighteen different species, a recurring number in my travels. In the Marseille Tarot, it's the number of La Lune (The Moon), the nocturnal feminine energy that does justice to all the creatures resting under its pale rays, some members of my family worked for the Justice system and the feminine energy in my household was and still is always abundant. Once reached the Mediterranean basin, it felt incredibly at home, just like when I move along its coasts, between east and west, north and south: always elsewhere, always at home.
I write about plants, travels and my grandmother, almost obsessively. I draw emotional-vegetal maps, like my grandfather, the German cartographer I’ve never met. In his likeness, I am always a stranger, a camel in a gutter . I try to avoid the natural engulfing of the past and the present, imprinting on paper psycho-physical ruptures where sinking in this Sea feels sweet to me.A vegetal sacrifice. The cellulose body of a lifeless specimen consecrated to embalm the memories of the living and their dead. I don't write for the possib reader, but to record; like a photosensitive reel, I oscillate between time and space, between creatures and their conceptual boundaries, which crumble at the first contact, as if in a crowded wilderness.
Aristotle distinguished two types of memory: μνήμη, the memory as a notion, concept, mental-cerebral process, through which I remember that the Bougainvillea is named after a French colonialist navigator who, before embarking on the globe’s circumnavigation, had completed a treatise on integral calculus in his youth. Exactly twenty-four hours before stumbling on this study, I discuss on a rooftop in Casablanca about Emmanuel Kant's dedication to The expression is a quote from XI a.d. mathematician and philosopher Al-Biruni, also adopted by Italian composer Franco Battiato in his 1991 album “Come un cammello in una grondaia”. It is a nod to Giacomo Leopardi closing verse of his masterpiece L’Infinito: “Così tra questa/immensità s’annega il pensiero mio:/e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare”. G. Leopardi, L’Infinito, Recanati 1826. Aristotle, Περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως, On Memory and Recollection, Parva Naturalia. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Traité du calcul intégral, pour servir de suite à l’”Analyse des infiniment-petits” de M. Le Marquis de l’hôpital, Desaint & Saillant, Paris 1754. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Algebra still appears partially confused and mysterious to me, just like botany, but I’ve always been studying constellations, as all three aforementioned subjects. If you look carefully, like in the underside of a star-embroidered desert, all the notions we memorise eventually connect to one another, as if per a plant, or the celestial telos. Following this same principle we keep on talking about Formula 1, music and Bernoulli, which now allows me to look at the sky from a different, yet always the same portion... always elsewhere, always at home.
Then there is also reminiscence, ἀνάμνησις, which according to Aristotle is a type of embodied memory, the impressions that experiences leave in our bodies and that, when subjected to the same stimulus or a similar one, reproduce the same original psycho-emotional effects. Reminiscence is the voice of my grandmother in front of a Bougainvillea, confusing Puglia with Morocco for a moment under the shade of a Bougainvillea, elevating a pink bract of theTemple Fire variety to the symbol of a meeting I don't want to forget. The resilience of these tropical and Mediterranean shrubs is synonymous with the stubbornness with which I write about plants, family and migrations. I try to root mnemonic notions and bodily reminiscences in a single, stable and stubborn trunk, capable of facing the most arid drought. I write about plants not as a science, or a "-logy," but as a sort of poetic cartography in which I can orient and organise the stages of my existence.
Plants, like stars, are clusters of knowledge and relationships. Their apparent - and only apparent - immobility allows us to use them as milestones of collective and individual knowledge. Each person knows plants according to their own skills and needs, to their geographical and epistemological point-of-view. My knowledge of plants corresponds to the understanding, each time, of where I am. I recall them as a sort of orientation device, in the manner of a earthly or celestial map. When I move, the first thing I do is look around me for plants and I immediately feel safe. The act of transplanting teaches us that roots are not found in a fixed and precise place, they are not in-place. Certainly, there are more nutrient-rich and compatible soils than others, but roots are parts of our own bodies. Roots move with us; they cannot be "left" elsewhere, behind the movement. That would result in the death of the creature that moves, the impossibility of movement itself. Ancestors are also part of our chromosomal, cultural and emotional roots, therefore they move with us, building up each individual as a caravan, a constellation, until the largest and most ancestral of all caravans, until we can reach our mothers ferns.
I don't want to delve into the complicated jungle of thoughts about the concept of identity, but the more I move, the more I transplant, the more I realise how identity constitutes a construct that is as vital, as it is suffocating. We must constantly reshape its parameters, just as we need to adjust the exposure to light and access to water for garden or indoor plants, because we This echoes some Donna Haraway’s theories, as those collected into 2019 Chthulucene. I have chosen to make them part of those enclosures to better define our existences. The way we design gardens and urban habitats mirrors the ways through which we shape all boundaries, identities included. Thinking about plants allows me to reverse these thresholds, like a Calvino’s Pendu, to bury my head in the soil and look at the world upside-down, to see the roots in the mind and the relationality, the nourishment, with the "outside" and "surroundings" of the limbs. It is the limbs, whether of flesh or bark, that allow us to explore solar spatiality, to reach new postures and eventually create shade, that in this context is, contrary to its slang denotation, a protective and refreshing space for others, that can now survive precisely because of our own principle of survival. The shade projected by a tree or a shrub, along with its clean air, is not a simple architectural coverage but a proper recovery. "As I rise, I expand and expanding, I encounter others" could be the thought of a climbing shrub, just like the background of a prayer. By venturing outside those private enclosures, Bougainvilleas become collective biological and urban spaces. While some creatures find nourishment by their colourful bracts, we find refreshment for a moment under their leafy canopies, seeking shelter from scorching streets, waiting for the bus, keeping an eye on a line of parked cars, or while talking on the phone with our mothers. The "upside-down" and "inside-out" become galactic, botanical, urban and social concepts. If it is true that the Universe in which plants and I find ourselves cohabiting is an explosive fragment of a larger cosmic design, I can only take immense pleasure in realising that this creative endeavour has taken the form, among billions, of a Bougainvillea, smiling at me at the exit of a railway station in a country where, once again, I would like to transplant my maps and caravans.
Perhaps, my inclination to better preserve auditory impressions comes precisely from my grandmother who, in the last days of her illness, often said she could hear some of her favourite youth songs playing in the background of her mind. This writing about plants becomes the tape recorder in which I try to engrave voices, soundscapes and incandescent reminiscences like the dazzling orange of this African Sunset. The day I fell in love, from the boiling concrete I picked up one of its bright flowers, adored by pollinating insects and there it remains, hanging on a white thread off the wall of my room, evergreen and fecund, se Dio vuole. Le Pendu is the XII Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot, this archetype reminds me of many characters depicted by 7 Italian author Italo Calvino in his novels, in particular Il Barone Rampante, from the 1957 trilogy I Nostri Antenati. Which is also the tile of Dolly Parton and James Ingram 1999 song: “People all say, love is wonderful/That the bells will 8 ring and birds will sing and skies will open/I wonder where's that great big symphony/Roll over Beethoven, won't you play with me?”. The English If God wills and Arabic Inshallah.
Taking care of a Bougainvillea:
Bougainvilleas prefer sunny and bright locations. The temperature should never drop below 10°C (50°F). They can be planted directly in the ground or in large pots. The latter option is preferable if you live in places with cold winters, as you can move them indoors.
During the summer and spring seasons, Bougainvilleas require more frequent watering. The soil should be kept moist in summer, but not overly wet to avoid water-logging, which can be very dangerous for the plant.
Repotting should be done in early spring, using a substrate mixed with expanded clay, pumice, or volcanic lapilli. This explains their affinity with Morocco and the Southern Mediterranean coasts.
Mature plants have maximum growth between May and June. Once the bracts appear, it is advisable to change the fertiliser, reducing the nitrogen content that stimulates flowering and preferring potassium.
When the first cold weather sets in, gradually reduce the watering to allow the plant to strengthen and withstand the colder months.
For climbing, this shrub needs a support structure to lean on.
Pruning is done by spur pruning, similar to vines and wisteria. The best time for pruning is between late winter and early spring.
Arianna Jakubowski is a writer, teacher and editor.