I'm fine, thank you Luca! Over my illness, whatever it was, and with no more excuse not to write about 'Giardinaggio a basso impatto'.
'Non vedo l'ora' can also be translated as 'I can hardly wait', which is more emphatic and less formal than 'I'm looking forward to':
I can hardly wait to begin digging in the garden.
I can hardly wait to see the peonies and the lilacs in bloom.
I can hardly wait for spring to get here!
I can hardly wait for school to end!
There are several viburnums that bloom in early spring with usually pink and white, very fragrant flowers appearing on naked branches, and I adore them one and all. My success rate with these is not good. I've found out the hard way that these types are often grafted onto a tough rootstock, either for economic reasons (faster propagation) or because the beautiful viburnum is a weak grower. My lovely Viburnum carlesii 'Aurora' has been slowly succumbing to the V. lantana on which it was grafted, which development I discovered rather late as they have similar foliage (the flowers are totally unlike, of course). I lost another which had been grafted on V. opulus, later losing the rootstock as well as the plant was in a terrible spot. These viburnums probably do better in areas with less heavy soil that that which characterizes much of my garden.
The real star of this group of viburnums, in my experience, is V. x burkwoodii. This is a V. carlesii cross, and it has that plant's fragrant pink and white flowers on naked branches in spring, followed by handsome summer foliage, which has evergreen tendencies but often colors brilliantly in fall, something not many plants do in my garden. The V. x burkwoodii plants I've bought have NOT been grafted, and it's a tough plant, growing in sun and shade, in poorish soil, and with no summer water. Really one of the absolute best shrubs in all my garden.
P.S. Reading the Hillier Gardener's Guide to Trees and Shrubs I see that there are various clones of this cross, all highly regarded. I don't know which clone I have.
Luca,
It sounds like you've had better experiences with foreign language study in school than my daughter has had. She finishes middle school this June and has had all her formal education (school) in the Italian public school system. I take education seriously and value foreign language study, and my daughter's foreign language classes have been a joke. She's bilingual--Italian and English--because my husband and I are bilingual and we speak mostly English at home, because I taught her to read English myself, working at it for a year when she was five and six, because I keep her well supplied with books in that language, because we go visit my family in the U.S. (She writes English as well, but not as well as she reads and speaks it, having had less practice.) She's had English in school ever since she started preschool, but in the eleven years she's been "learning" the language, she's had exactly one teacher who took seriously the task of teaching her pupils this foreign tongue. One teacher, for one year.
The story is the same for the French she's taken in middle school, which unfortunately is a language I only read and can't speak. The whole matter of language study is a comedy, but not a funny one. And the math-science high school she plans on attending starting this fall doesn't offer anything beyond English--and Latin, of course. I talked with the principal about the language study, and he says that there's just not the demand.
I've been thinking about starting a thread, in Italian of course, about how much time Italian schoolchildren waste sitting in classes supposedly learning subjects that no one takes seriously: not the teachers, not the parents, not the society, and certainly not the kids. They spend long, long hours and days in school, and the sole harvest is ignorance, boredom, and contempt for education. (I don't mean all subjects. But there seems to be a distinct division between subjects that matter and subjects that, really, don't. Italian grammar is taken seriously; so is math; languages, music, art are unimportant. Which doesn't mean that an excellent teacher can't come along who takes the "unimportant" subject very seriously indeed, and teaches it brilliantly. My daughter has had the extreme good fortune to have an outstanding art teacher the last two years, and has flourished with her.) My daughter's a good student, by the way: she's intelligent and curious, she reads, she thinks, and she does her homework. The fault doesn't lie with her.
Melissa
