In possession of a potager...

Having a potager (food garden) has always been a primordial need for me. The first house I rented as a college student was plunked amid the cornfields of southern Indiana. I remember how ecstatic I felt when the landlord told me I could plant a garden at the edge of the field bordering the yard. Digging in the thick, exhausted clay at the edge of that cornfield with a cheap hardware store fork, I felt rich with potential. Today, I can't remember much about how that first potager turned out. It was a period of upheaval in my life, and I lacked the experience and concentration required to create a good garden. But what is as fresh as if it happened yesterday is the feeling I experienced when I learned I could have a garden. It was a feeling as deep and preFreudian as anything in my psyche. I not only could have a garden, but if I could, then I had to.

A few years later and newly married, I ventured into the postage-stamp backyard of our apartment in a Victorian house just off the panhandle of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. A disconsolate sight greeted my eyes. A few spindly weeds sprouted through the refuse littering the ground: broken glass, bits of plastic toys, sodden paper. Against the back fence grew a loquat tree, its leaves dark and shiny against the tired wood. I found a stick and poked around in the soil. It was dark--nearly black--and promisingly loamy. Within a few days I had planted some snow peas and lettuces. I do remember how this garden turned out: it didn't. The yard was dark and dank, and my plantings weren't helped by the buckets of soapy mopwater tossed on them by the upstairs tenant from her kitchen window.

I had my first really successful potagers when we moved back to Indiana. My mother, perhaps sensing a developing compulsion, gave me a book by a Chinese-American man named Chan on raised-bed gardening. That modest paperback was my epiphany. I've been gardening according to Mr. Chan's method ever since, and his know-how has never failed me. Yet, what I learned from Chan's book just provided the method to my madness, for I was becoming ever more possessed by my potager. The time I spent in and the money I spent on my food garden became a subtext in my first divorce, with my about-to-be ex adroitly pointing out that we could have bought 3 times the food it produced for what I spent on my garden. He was exaggerating, of course. But most important, he remained totally oblivious the compulsion that drove me to garden. As for me, I simply couldn't not garden as I did. It would have taken the world's best psychiatrist to "cure" me, and even then... What draconian means would have been necessary to expunge the urge to garden from my psyche? Probably nothing short of electroshock.

Needless to say, it wasn't long after my arrival in France that Denis found a vegetable garden growing at his country house. It didn't take him long to figure out that I was pining for a potager, and in the sweetness of his nature, he immediately called in a landscaper to help me. I explained to him what I wanted and exactly how I wanted him to do it: a modestly proportioned rectangular garden consisting of two long rows of side-by-side, unframed raised beds a meter wide, with a lozenge-shaped bed in the middle. I hinted to Denis that I would be needing a rototiller, fondly remembering my Troybilt Horse back in Indiana. But to my amazement, the landscaper and his crew created my potager entirely by hand, without the use of any power equipment. Remembering my enslavement to my huge potager back in Indiana, I congratulated myself on having this time created a garden of saner proportions.

Since then, the area of my Normandy potager has increased by a factor of three, and I'm planning the installation of a fourth quarter, which will give my potager a pleasingly French symmetry. And yet, I find my all-American "need" for a rototiller has evaporated. When the other day, Denis proposed that we buy one, I realized I no longer wanted it. During these 5 years of working this garden by hand, I've become attached to that rhythm. The soil--a rich loam to begin with--has become so loose and friable with ceaseless applications of compost that I can turn one of my 1 by 4 meter beds in 10 minutes. Now, when I imagine having a rototiller, my sensibilities rebel at the thought of its noise and its imprecision. I prefer the neat bite of my shovel at the edge of the bed. And turning the soil by hand effortlessly feeds a wealth of data to the processor that is my gardening brain. Without even thinking about it, I note which parts of the bed seem a bit shy of compost; where an arnica plant has overwintered and must be preserved; where there has been an infestation of the mulot, a small rodent who has munched his way through the overwintering carrots; where there is a clutch of poppy or coriander seedlings that I would like to keep.

We're all creatures of habit, and while I managed to unlearn my reliance on power equipment in the garden, I've been less successful at controlling my mania for the potager. My Norman garden is huge considering that I'm only there on weekends, and not all weekends at that. When I'm there, I work so hard that I have to spend Monday back in Paris at half-speed, recovering from the weekend. And yet, I find I never have enough space to grow all the things I want. I'm constantly discovering new herbs, new "old" vegetables or wild greens I want to try. Plus, the seeds I bring back from our international travels need to be grown out and tested. My culinary adventures are fueled by my garden, and vice versa, in my hunger for a diversity of ingredients that embraces the whole world. In short, I have an insatiable curiosity about plants which has increased in steady proportion to my age.

 

In spring, I'm particularly possessed by my potager. I go to sleep thinking with satisfaction of weeds vanquished and seeds planted. I wake up in the middle of the night strategizing about what to plant in the steadily decreasing number of beds remaining. And on my last trip out to the compost pile, after Sunday evening dinner and before we head back to Paris, I give my potager a last, fond, visual once-over. In the endless, late spring dusk, the garden is already receding away from me, into the secret life it lives when I'm not there. I can feel the wild inhabitants of the garden waiting in the wings for the door to close on my back for the last time. Then, the garden will belong to them for five long days--until the return of the Gardener.

All of the above were part of my musings while I worked feverishly in my potager this past weekend. The weather was fitful, with squalls of rain blowing through almost every hour, chasing the sunlight before them. I pondered what is so profoundly seductive for me about the spring planting season. The mute promise held in a seed, the sense of potential, the innocent hopefulness announced by a plant marker, the challenge of problem-solving and building on the lessons learned in prior seasons, the mental rotations of plants (for I write nothing down--no time!), the artistic delight of composing harmonious combinations of foliage textures and colors with flowers... All of this so intrinsically a part of me that my annual re-creation of this garden is as immutable and inevitable as the shifting of the tides or the bursting of spring buds. Quite simply, I'm possessed by my potager.

 

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