67 Blankets breaks World Record!

I was out of the country on April 21st this year but this was the scene on Freedom Day in the gardens surrounding Nelson Mandela's statue in front of the Union Buildings in Pretoria.

Caroline Steyn, founder of the 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day project, set the Guinness World Record that day for the largest area covered by a blanket - 3133 square metres of handmade blankets!

But the best part is that all these blankets will soon be distributed to the needy. Congratulation to Caroline and her dedicated knitters!

Southern (Hemisphere) Magnolias

A Star Magnolia outside Valley Lodge

The Magnolias are blooming in Sandton! In autumnal May!

Magnolias in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Magnolias do grow in the northern United States including New York and New Jersey where I lived. The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, the courtyard garden at the Frick, and Frelinghuysen Arboretum all have beautiful displays. My favorites though were the Magnolias in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. They have the most magnificent Magnolia Plaza there and you can smell its fragrant blooming trees from blocks away during Spring.

homemade magnolia wreath inside my conservatory

I even had a few Star Magnolia trees in my own garden. And one Sweet-bay Magnolia that I grew mainly for the fruit pods and waxy leaves I used in my Christmas decorating. But even so, Magnolias up north always seemed so out of place to me.

my front door

I think Magnolias look their best growing in the Southeastern United States. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Virginia and especially Northern Florida where I went to college.

photo of Susan by Esme

I do not have any photographs on Facebook or on my laptop of the gorgeous magnolias on the campus of the University of Florida. They are all in old photo albums back in storage. I do remember that there were some truly grand specimens growing all over the original parts of the campus.

But here is a photo of my Florida college friend Susan in front of one of the (younger) blooming Magnolias on the campus of Florida State University where her daughter is currently enrolled in their prestigious Music School. (Susan is on left; the Magnolia is on the right. Wearing that scarf and jacket, she could be mistaken for a young Magnolia herself!)

Like the Jacarandas, the Magnolias here in South Africa are certainly not native, but then again neither am I!

Whoops! See (I stand corrected.)

Beaded lampshades

Douglas, one of my go-to bead guys at the Bryanston Organic Market, has made beaded lampshades for us before.

He made this one for the side table in our guest bedroom.

















So when I needed another shade for our new Linnware table lamp, I knew who to call ... Douglas!

I love the way the glass beads reflect the light on the walls.

















The colors are perfect too. Thanks Douglas!

African Safari ... In Nancy?

We stopped over for a night in Nancy on our drive from Paris to Bavaria just so that we could eat our petit déjeuner the next morning in the city's gilded Place Stanislas, one of France's World Heritage sites.

But as we started walking from our hotel right off the Place to the courtyard cafe, we felt less like we were strolling down a cobblestoned street in Lorraine, France and more like we were embarked on a walking safari in Mpumalanga, South Africa.

The shop windows were filled with ...














Zebras ...

Elephants ...

An orange leopard ...

Even some pastel guinea fowl ...

It was wild!

South Africa's got Kin in Paris

au La Palais Galliera, La Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris

I chose not to go to see the highly publicized African Art exhibit of carved masks by the Masters of Sculpture from Ivory Coast at the Musée du Quai Branly while I was in Paris in April. I wanted to see Western Art in Europe. I was starved for it.

The National Portrait Gallery, London

Sargent at London's National Portrait Gallery. Matisse, Munch and Picasso at La Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Dürer and the Brueghels at Munich's Alte Pinakothek.

Jan Van Kessel, Africa (detail) from the cycle "The Four Continents", Alte Pinakothek, Munich

 a display of 900 buttons collected by Henri Hamm (1871-1961)

I also saw works by Yves Saint Laurent at La Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent; Jeanne Lanvin at La Palais Galliera, the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris; and a button exhibit called Déboutonner la mode featuring garments and accessories by emblematic couturiers such as Paul Poiret, Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier and Patrick Kelly at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. And the Treasury of jewels at The Munich Residenz. That's Western Art to me too!



And there are probably people who consider Currywurst to be a kind of art as well. I am just not one of them! But if you are, then Berlin's Deutsches Currywurst Museum is the place for you.

au La Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

So when I stopped in at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Montmartre, I was only looking forward to seeing his iconic photographs again as well as the gallery's other black and white images of street life in Paris.

Then I walked into an exhibition of contemporary photographs and saw this image.

And then I read the title. What's this? Hillbrow 2013. Wait a minute. Hillbrow is in Johannesburg, not Paris.

I picked up a catalog in the lobby and found out that the photographer, Pieter Hugo, is South African. His exhibition, called Kin, was made up mostly of portraits of South Africans of all ages and color, all living on the margins in post-apartheid South Africa. Pieter had set out to photograph the notion of "home" in order to consider one's place in its history. According to Pieter, home is where belonging and alienation coexist. To look at home critically is to look at one's self and one's fellow man.

These two aerial photographs of literal homes graphically articulated the divide between two very different Joburg realities, the Johannesburg township of Diepsloot and the suburban gated community of Dainfern. Note that the scale of the two photographs are the same. Illuminating.

Diepsloot 2013

Dainfern 2013

It was quite a timely exhibit to see considering the current xenophobic crisis happening back in South Africa. Pieter's exhibit did not provide any answers, but it sure gets you thinking.

(Pieter is associated with the Yossi Milo gallery in New York as well as the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town and Johannesburg.)

An Afropolitan in Paris

La Fondation Louis Vuitton

All you need to add to your African print cropped trench is Le Breton striped shirt and Voila! You are in Paris ...

















... where the leopards also come in Schiaparelli shocking pink!

La Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent

However I was certainly not the first Afropolitan en Paris. Yves Saint Laurent was doing it in 1971 when he put his models in African headwraps for his infamous Scandal collection, so named because it was universally panned and abhorred by the Paris fashion world.

I knew this not because I actually remember the 1971 collection - 'cause I don't - but because I had just seen the film Saint Laurent in Joburg in the cinema before I left for Europe. Happily for Yves, the collection did however conquer the streets. So there, critics!

And speaking of couturiers, I must give a shout-out for my Ralph Lauren-inspired African print cropped trench custom made for me by Victor Reed Couture. Victor's studio is in his house in Emmarentia but he is opening a new stand-alone studio soon in Linden. Follow him on Facebook for announcements on the official opening.

The cropped trench is perfect for an April in Paris ... and London and Munich and Berlin too. Bises Victor!

Happy May Day!

Marché Raspail

Ever since we started dating oh so very long ago, on the first day of spring in the USA, Vince would present me with a bouquet of daffodils. Later when I had my own gardens, I grew many varieties of daffodils and jonquils. Even so, he still continued the tradition on March 21st.

annual autumnal bulb planting @ Darlington House

May basket

Likewise, every May Day Vince would hang a little May basket filled with lilies of the valley on the door to my dressing room or on my dressing table mirror or on the faucet of the pedestal sink in our bathroom ... somewhere where I would be sure to find it when I awoke. (A few times, there was even a piece of vintage lily of the valley jewelry hidden in the basket!)

Lily of the valley is the birth flower of May - Vince and my birthday month - and it is my favorite flower. I love them so much in fact that I even had them in my wedding bouquet and flower crown even though we were married in September and not in May.

I grew pink and white lilies of the valley in my gardens in New Jersey too and they would bloom throughout our birthday month fillling the air with their delightful fragrance. But I have never seen lilies of the valley growing in South Africa or being sold in the flower markets here. Flowering bulbs and pips need cold winters in order to bloom in the spring and I guess it just doesn't get that cold here. Besides you wouldn't ever see them on May Day anyway since it is autumn in the Southern Hemisphere in May and not spring.

So when I found this French lady selling her bouquets of lilies of the valley at the Marché Raspail, I was ecstatic. It was late April in Paris and the city's gardens were blooming with all the May flowers I had been missing for the past few years in South Africa at this time of year - lilacs, irises, wisteria, peonies and lilies of the valley.

wisteria blooming on the Coulée verte

This year it was moi who bought the muguet de mai bouquet from the flower seller in the market and surprised Vince in the morning with a little May basket to celebrate May Day.

Happy May Day!

I love lilies of the valley!