Botanical art and food in Transylvania

...with particular attention to the wildflower meadows

Mamaliga, aka northern Italy’s polenta prepared as a porridge with dried maize-kernels, was a storecupboard staple in the Saxon villages of Romania. The cobs, a fast-growing crop, provided grain-food for domestic animals as well as people. Nothing went to waste: the husks went to make mats and the cobs themselves, once stripped of their kernels, provided the households with cooking-fuel.

The wildflower meadows of Copsa Mare - one of the venerable Saxon villages abandoned piecemeal by the founders, German-speaking settlers, after the fall of the communist dictatorship in 1989 - continue to provide fodder for cows, sheep and buffalo, and inspiration for botanical artists. 

The artists themselves are dependent on other activities of their companions in the meadows, the herds and flocks that maintain the grasslands at exactly the right level of height, density and fertility to allow flowering plants to flourish. This may not last.  After the Saxon villages emptied, the fortified churches were left without their congregations to store the hams in the tower and the stone-built farmhouses were abandoned or an easier life in the cities of Germany, where winter was no longer a threat to the old and young, where water came from a tap and food could be bought in a supermarket every day of the year.

The villagers never returned, unless perhaps for a summer visit for memory's sake. Their houses fell into disrepair or acquired new owners, some of whom converted the farmhouses into summer homes, while a few others continued to work the land and pasture their flocks in the meadows.  

Among those who have settled in Copsa Mare to bring new life and enterprise to the village, James and Rachel de Candole have established a botanical artists' retreat in what was once an imposing Town Hall, their home, an elegant reminder of the Austro-Hungarian Empire set face to face with the brick-built battlements of the Saxon church. 

James spent much of his career advising politicians in the Czech Republic so is well-used to the convoluted processes required to establish a business in Eastern Europe, while Rachel was a show-level horsewoman in the Austro-Hungarian discipline. Horses, she says, as we watch a beautiful dappled grey stabled beneath the artists' studio, are her raison d'étre. 

And now that the couple's two children have just left home, there's more time and space to  develop the floral record, a herbarium masterminded by a local biologist with illustrations by, among others, the Botanic Garden at Kew's Lucy Smith, our tutor on the retreat. For me, as a natural history artist in an earlier life, birds and botany were a love-affair that never really went away.  Although I now learn my living as a foodwriter and illustrator, my interest is always in the plants that deliver what we - and all other living beings - depend on for our existence on the planet.

Meanwhile, with James is in charge of the organisational side of things for the botanists, Rachel's other interest, preparing ingredients direct from her own garden and produce from her neighbours, delivers delicious meals much appreciated by hungry guests (me too).  As was necessary in the days when self-sufficiency was not a life-style choice, Rachel stocks her cellar with pickles, jams and relishes and gathers apples from the semi-wild orchards that edge the flower-meadows to slice and dry for storage. Home-grown maize-kernels are ground for flour in a table-top mill, lightened with baking soda and whey, and baked into a dense-textured, richly-flavoured bread to accompany home-made yoghourt and brinza, fresh curd-cheese.   

As a break from the microscopes and measurments that are essential to any serious botanical study, James takes us to fetch milk in the hills from herdsman Viorel and his herd of brown and white cows. The milk that's not sent down to village when fresh is rennetted and drained in a lean-to beside the herdsman's thickly-insulated sleeping-shack. This simple dairy-food, mild and fresh, is the traditional fresh curd cheese that’s layered with mamaliga, enriched with butter and baked for festive occasions when the Saxons still lived in the villages.  

The initial process of rennetting warm milk straight from the cow produces a fresh curd-cheese with a limited shelf-life.  "I send it to my sister who makes matured cheese, cachcaval."  Cachcaval is the generic name for any feta-like cheese that can be salted and preserved for travel.  In the market in Sibiu, before Brussels decided what was proper, cachacaval was sold direct from the traditional container, an emptied-out sheepskin complete with woolly fleece.

First thing in the morning in the high-tops above the village, snowy-fleeced sheep are cropping the wildflower meadows under the watchful eye of shepherd Attila and his youngest daughter, just released from school for the summer. Attila's enclave, a cluster of lean-to's in which orphaned lambs are being bottle-fed, is guarded by wolf-like yellow-eyed sheepdogs.     

There are bears in the forests, says James, but no wolves.  Attila, continues James, is not as talkative as usual: yesterday he sheered a hundred and twenty sheep by hand, and has already, that same morning, milked his flock of three hundred ewes.  A mulberry tree, sometime food for silkworms, provides shade for a long wooden table, a tattered old sofa and a couple of arm-chairs - a touch of domestic comfort for a weary shepherd.

Meanwhile, our small group of botanical artists search the wildflower meadows under the equally-watchful eye of tutor Lucy - a brilliant teacher who instills her pupils with her own quiet confidence while delivering, along the way, the most useful instruction I've ever received. Who would have thought than an i-phone is almost as good as a microscope for those who wish to spend their waking hours peering, as great biologist Miriam Rothschild put it when she employed me to draw butterflies for her work on wildflower meadows, at the reproductive organs of plants.  Why wouldn't you?

For how to get started as a botanical artist (or reach perfection), go to www.lucytsmith.com and buy her new book.

For James and Rachel de Candole's website and how to get in touch, go to Transylvania School of Botanic Art and Illustration.

p.s. Beloved paid subscribers will shortly be in receipt of a recipe for baked mamaliga with butter and brinza.