Unexpected Marvels
The garden is not about beauty. The garden is about creating a quiet, serene place of refuge and doing something purposeful as a family, with bonus points for helping the planet, living sustainably, reducing our carbon footprint, saving habitat, becoming locavores, doing the right thing in the great crisis of the twenty-first century. But a garden can't help being a place of beauty, both planned and utterly spontaneous. I didn't expect to marvel at the growing tip of a Trombetta di Albenga squash silhouetted against the sky like the prow of a Viking long boat. But there it is.
I did fully expect to admire the hollyhocks, but was completely unprepared for their collaboration with the morning glories in a spiral dance called "Rhapsody in Pink."
This random assortment of a single afternoon's findings ended up together in the same collecting dish merely by chance. Who knew that the volunteer blue potatoes, the sparking Sungold cherry tomatoes, the crinkled green pimientos, the purple plums, and the yellow plums would create a color palette to delight the eye?
And who knew that the same assortment -- well, almost the same, with zucchini replacing the plums -- coated with olive oil, garlic, and rosemary and gently roasted, would delight the eye all over again at the dinner table? Actually, that was not so much of a surprise.
The garden is not about beauty. The garden is about creating a quiet, serene place of refuge and doing something purposeful as a family, with bonus points for helping the planet, living sustainably, reducing our carbon footprint, saving habitat, becoming locavores, doing the right thing in the great crisis of the twenty-first century. But a garden can't help being a place of beauty, both planned and utterly spontaneous. I didn't expect to marvel at the growing tip of a Trombetta di Albenga squash silhouetted against the sky like the prow of a Viking long boat. But there it is.
I did fully expect to admire the hollyhocks, but was completely unprepared for their collaboration with the morning glories in a spiral dance called "Rhapsody in Pink."
This random assortment of a single afternoon's findings ended up together in the same collecting dish merely by chance. Who knew that the volunteer blue potatoes, the sparking Sungold cherry tomatoes, the crinkled green pimientos, the purple plums, and the yellow plums would create a color palette to delight the eye?
And who knew that the same assortment -- well, almost the same, with zucchini replacing the plums -- coated with olive oil, garlic, and rosemary and gently roasted, would delight the eye all over again at the dinner table? Actually, that was not so much of a surprise.
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