apricots

July 14, 2003

Apricots are in season. Budapest is overflowing with apricots. The metro car smelled like apricots this morning as people boarded with huge baskets of them just purchased in the markets and destined for jam-making at home or just picked and destined for sale in the metro stations. Marti's family already had a big jam-making session and and I have a jar of it in the fridge. It's great on multigrain toast. At the Botanical Department, one of István's colleagues stopped by to give him a box of organically grown apricots from a supply given to her as a gift. Can there be too many apricots?

In Budakeszi, those small yellow plums are ripe. They're smaller than I remember them from 1999. Agi confirms that they're smaller than last year because of the drought. That cold front is coming through any minute now to bring rain. Any minute.

Much to my surprise, Li Aili is here. Either Zsolt didn't tell me she was doing another fellowship stint making illustrations at Budakeszi or else it slipped my mind. Her English is vastly improved since I last saw her in Beijing. Her illustrations are fabulous. She was working on drawing a cone that looks sort of like a rose or an artichoke or maybe both - very unusual cone morphology. Zsolt joked that she was drawing a rose for my arrival. Ha!

Agi showed me around the place while Zsolt and István worked on the grant application. The central portion of the planned star shaped greenhouse is built, the arboretum is planted in part, and the collection is finally stored in appropriate boxes, labeled, and arranged alphabetically. Several tables are setup in the long upstairs hallway for the illustrators to work on. You can see the central greenhouse from the hallway. It's starting to look like a real "institute". Agi has a made a scrapbook of photos of the place in various stages. I should send her some pictures of when we moved in back in '99. Egad, have I known these guys that long?

Finally we got a chance to show Zsolt the book design and attempt to get review comments over coffee and biscuits. Then I tried to find out why Aili's copy of Photoshop wouldn't run on the PC in the office. The ancient PC only has 128 MB of memory!

I got the team to pose in front of "the white house" for a group photo and then checked on the viburnum we planted in 1999 to sort of dedicate the place. The main shoot seems to have died off but there's a lot of new shoots coming up.

I brought home a small cupful of the yellow plums to have with breakfast tomorrow. They are very sweet.

Today's Reading
The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson

This Year's Reading
2003 Book List

Photos:

Zsolt & Agi reviewing our book design

Aili & Zsolt with Photoshop CD

The team