7/26/2005. Elegy for a potager

At the end of every July--just as my fruit and vegetable garden is approaching its zenith of the cool Normandie summer--I have to leave it behind, bidding it au revoir until September. Like just about the entire population of France, we go on vacation for the month of August. In our case, it's always to a farflung corner of the planet. This year I'll be in China while my potager bursts with bushels of delectable produce, a well-kept secret within the thick, inpenetrable hornbeam hedges of our country house.

Well, you might quite reasonably ask me, why do I bother with a vegetable garden at all, given that I leave every August, and do a lot of other traveling as well? Why spend weekends that are supposed to be a source of rest and relaxation perambulating my potager on my knees, waging war against the relentless tide of buttercups--that most implacable Norman weed? After all, I'm so tired from my weekend gardening that I need Monday to recover.

The answer is that I have the spirit of the potager in my blood. It all began when I experienced my grandmother's small garden in Switzerland, which consisted of just a few exquisite things--including an apricot espaliered against a warm wall. I was only four years old. But that image sort of gestated in my head while I was growing up--only to burst forth fully fledged the minute I lived in my first house during college. Immediately, in went a vegetable garden, and so began a lifelong passion. Since that first garden, I have rarely been without a potager for even a single year.

My potager has always fueled my culinary adventures, and vice versa. Its exquisite vegetables and fruits have stimulated my creativity in the kitchen, while my voracious cookbook reading and eating around the world have stimulated me to grow a huge diversity of otherwise impossible-to-obtain produce. Like a wisteria and a kudzu vine growing together, my cooking and gardening are rampant, vigorous, and intricately intertwined--you might even say entangled!

These twin loves are part of the reason I feel so at home in France, a country where many homes allot their entire yard--front and back--to food gardens, and where food occupies a front burner in most people's minds. They're also my favorite way to explore other cultures. While Denis wants to head to the nearest museum, my first destination when in a foreign country is always the market. There I can immerse myself in the very lifeblood of people's daily life--seeing, smelling, tasting the food they grow and eat. I always come home with suitcases loaded with seeds, spices, herbs, oils, and other exotica which find their way into my garden and my cooking. Even the Mexican folk art painted wooden ladybugs from last year's holiday ended up perched on top of a chimney pot in the middle of the herbs, where I figure they'll be mistaken for Godzilla by any approaching aphids (main photo above).



My potager in its current incarnation is in upper Normandie, where in spite of incredibly long hours of summer daylight, the pervasively cool temperatures make heat-loving crops slow to mature. Invariably, as August and its vacation approach, I am to be found fanning the flames, so to speak, under my bush beans and summer squash, trying to get them to produce before I have to leave. Last weekend, I must have watered these plants every couple of hours, hoping to swell the infant vegetables to harvestable size before I left. This year, as usual, the delicious 'Ronde de Nice' courgettes were just bearing their first crop, and the medley of delicate French haricots verts were just ready for picking...when I had to up and leave.



As much as possible, I adapt my choice of varieties and my planting schedule to my August absence. I always plant a lot of bean varieties that can be enjoyed fresh as pods, as succulent "shelly" beans, or dried for the winter. The vigorous vines of the creamy 'Tarbais' bean are just beginning their orderly progress up the trellis, not even flowering yet when I leave for vacation. Yet I'll return to find them festooned with big fat pods ready for shelling. Likewise, I favor bean varieties such as 'Nombril de Bonne Soeur' (Nun's Navel) which produce succulent pods yet, if I miss them at that stage, are perhaps even more delicious as shell-outs or dried. I also grow 'Flageolet', the small, pale green dried beans that are the classic French accompaniment to a leg of lamb. They can dry on the vine and be ready for shelling and storage when I come back.



Of course, many of my vegetables can wait in fine form for my return. The stalwart beets, such as 'Rouge Crapaudine' (photo right) will patiently while away the month of August and be nice and sweet when I return. Ditto for the carrots. Turnips, however, I replant just before my departure so as to have sweet, young roots for fall eating. All the cool weather Italian chicories, bearing the beautiful names of Tuscan towns--'Palla Rossa,' 'Variegata di Lusia,' 'Rouge de Trevise,' 'Variegata di Chioggia,' 'Variegata de Castelfranco', I plant before my departure in August. Their tender young leaves will be ready for cutting for mesclun at my return, while the remaining ones will mature during the winter into luxuriously thick, succulent heads, resplendant in pale green splashed with crimson or deep wine red.



On my last July weekend in the potager, just before heading back to Paris, I wander its paths in the sunlight of the long evening, my heart heavy with nostalgia. How I love my potager--its beds an ever-changing tapestry of color, taste, and fragrance which is part design and part happenstance! Every bed whispers its history, is embroidered by the experiences which make up my life.

The California poppy sheltered by an artichoke leaf is a reminder of my ill-conceived idea of scattering around my artichokes the wildflower seed I had gathered on a trip up the coast of northern California a few summers ago. My thinking was that both the wildflowers and the artichokes like droughty conditions, and that aesthetically, the combination would be pleasing as well. Trouble was, the wildflowers quickly engulfed the artichokes, which were struggling against the ravages of a sort of underground French mouse called a which was devouring their fleshy roots. The wildflowers had to be transplanted elsewhere, but a poppy or two always turns up to remind me of my folly--and of the inimitable beauty of the north California coast.



Under the plum tree which became incorporated within the expanding boundaries of my potager a couple of years ago, a brilliant tangle of wildflowers is alive with the va et vient of hundreds of insects and butterflies. Their colors are a constant reminder of trips to Corsica and Auvergne with my son, during which I collected their seeds. As my gaze lands on the delicate blossom of a wild fragrant sweetpea, I am transported back to a sun-drenched Corsican roadside where we had stopped amid the brilliant flowers to devour some tiny apricots and hard dry sausage bought in the morning's market in Porto Vecchio. Will I ever get to take such a trip again with my son, who is now poised on the verge of his adult life? And while my gaze fixes on this simple plant, the reel of my life with my son unrolls at hyperspeed on the screen inside my mind--impossible to stop, impossible to relive, impossibly precious.



The airy, ferny wands of three licorice plants rise higher each year, and now, to my delight, are beginning to sucker a bit--a welcome development with this slow-growing plant. Seeing their foliage lit up by the sun, I'm reminded of the bearded, barefoot French hippie herb dealer who sold them to me at a garden festival outside Paris. I remember that his earth-stained, calloused hands inspired my confidence in his plants. I think that this year, for the first time since I planted them, the licorice plants will be able to spare a root or two to flavor my fall chestnut soups, a thought the balm of which, this evening, barely soothes the raw edges of my heart.



In the piercing, low, long light of a Normandie summer evening, even the flowers of the lowly potato look glamorous. But is it the light, or is it the knowledge of my impending departure, which is imbuing everying with such fragile beauty? Isn't it the very transience of the garden which is clutching at my heart with the knowledge that this particular garden in this particular moment will never again exist--just so--after I drive away from it through the gathering dark this evening?

I stop before a particularly tangled bed. At my feet is a mingling of potatoes and flowering sweetpeas-- a quixotic mixture of past and present. The sweetpeas I planted this year; the potatoes came up from the remnants of last year's planting in this spot. They sprouted with such alacrity that I couldn't bring myself to uproot them in the name of orderliness. And so, I have spent this summer delicately pulling the potatoes with my bare fingers from among the roots of the sweetpeas, my head filled with the vanilla clouds of their fragrance. My potager is a metaphor for my life, filled with emotion and not a little impetuous, not always--or even often--wise, where the past informs the present and whispers of the future. And where the future--yesterday just a distant horizon--is today just a step beyond the ground beneath my feet.

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