Hello again! As my recovery progresses, I am dipping a toe back into the waters of blogging. Or perhaps that should be dipping seven tiny toes, as I present you with a bit of this and a bit of that, culled from what I have been reading and doing of late.
Speaking of culling, here’s something you can do with your prunings (beside compost them, chip them into mulch, or pile them up for critter habitat). The bulk of the above arrangement is from a branch of maukoro I recently had to remove. Its Latin name is Carmichaelia odorata – though I haven’t noticed any odours yet – and its English name is New Zealand broom, though it’s no relation to the European broom. Rosemary and lavender prunings add a bit of colour, foliage variety, and vertical interest.
Interesting Times
When one hears of legal fiction, one tends to think of John Grisham – but it turns out that the legal system is also capable of producing fictions, albeit not quite so gripping and bestsellery. For example, in English law, if two people in a family die and you can’t tell who died first, the legal fiction holds that the older died first, thus clarifying lines of inheritance.
This legal fiction is the cause of the record for shortest peerage: Wilfred Stamp, the 2nd Baron Stamp, died in the Blitz alongside his father, the 1st Baron Stamp. Since his father was, obviously, the elder, he was deemed to have died before Wilfred, and thus Wilfred technically became the 2nd Baron Stamp. However, as Wilfred had three daughters but no sons, the barony passed to his younger brother Trevor, who would have inherited it even if Wilfred had died first. The only differences were that Trevor became the 3rd Baron Stamp, not the 2nd, and had to pay two lots of death duties.
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