[Leica] Very green Wales

[tmanley at gmail.com (Tina Manley)]

Thanks, Larry!  I love the story about the leek and daffodil!

Tina

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Lawrence Zeitlin via LUG <
lug at leica-users.org> wrote:

> I?m sorry I missed the discussion about the overly saturated green in
> Tina?s slides. We were traveling and I didn?t catch up on LUG posts until I
> returned.
> The green in the images is correct. At least as correct as Kodachrome
> permits.
> Wales, particularly our home area of Anglesey for a number of years, is
> the greenest place I have ever been. A branch of the Gulf Stream washes the
> Irish Sea between Wales and Ireland and contributes to the warmth and
> humidity of the region. Palm trees grow in Bangor. Snow is a rarity except
> on the highest reaches of the Snowdonia Mountains. The down side is the
> rain. Bad for people but the botany loves it.
> Here is an excerpt from a short book about our several years at the Univ.
> of Wales (Bangor).
>         "The Welsh Giant Vegetable Fair was held last week. During World
> War II Welsh coal miners were encouraged to grow vegetables in their yards
> to ease the food shortage. After the war, the miners kept their gardens
> and, as so many gardeners do, started competing with each other to see who
> could grow the best crops. Things are now out of hand. At our town fair
> there were onions as big as footballs, a 19 and a half pound radish, two
> foot long string beans, 69 pound cabbages and a 343 pound pumpkin. The
> grand prize was won by a man who brought in a dozen three and a half foot
> long leeks. He said his secret was using beer as a fertilizer.
>         The leek, by the way, is the national emblem of Wales. No one
> knows quite why. One legend has it that St. David, the patron saint of
> Wales, advised Welsh soldiers to wear leeks in their caps when battling the
> Saxons to easily distinguish friend from foe. The story gets a bit confused
> because the word for daffodil and leek are the same in old Welsh. This
> suggests that the soldiers may have worn yellow flowers in their caps
> instead of green relatives of garlic, unless, of course the Saxons were
> from Transylvania. This confusion explains why both leek and daffodil have
> been adopted as national emblems.
>         My wife is constantly amazed at the intense color of flowers in
> Wales. They are far brighter than at home. At one point she suspected that
> they were dyed, but our neighbor, a dedicated gardener, says not so. One
> thing for sure, they certainly don't have a chance to bleach in the sun.
> Here it is December, at a Labradorian latitude, and some flowers are still
> blooming. Green thumbitis must be contagious. We just planted fifty
> daffodils and jonquil bulbs. Such is our faith in the growing power of the
> Welsh climate that we expect them to burst into brilliant bloom long before
> Easter.?
>
> Incidentally I am writing this on my new very portable laptop, an 11?
> Macbook Air running OS 10.10.3 (Yosemite). Everything is different. It is
> not your father?s Macbook. It is a wonderful laptop except for Photo,
> Apple?s replacement for iPhoto. That sucks and I have not figured out a way
> to get a decent replacement for the Mac Air.
> Larry Z
>
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