Garden Poetry

The kids and I went to a friend's house last Wednesday afternoon. This friend is a chef, and she and her husband have a wonderful garden. 

Part of the yard is a stretch of kid-friendly lawn with swingset, push toys, balls, and trampoline dotting the landscape.  Part of the yard is a beautiful gated pool with rock work surrounding it. Then, tucked away behind a gate is a secret vegetable garden.

The kids were allowed to pluck a Meyer Lemon from the tree to bring home; it smelled so much more lemony than at the grocery store.  They were asked to guess the fruit on the fig tree (ah, my uncultured babes did not know).  They eyed the peppers, the chard, the basil, the tomatoes (and in the summer the garden goes gangbusters; this is December, after all.).

Once when we ate a simple pizza dinner over there, my friend made the salad by walking out to the garden and gathering the goodies, whipping up some dressing once inside, and assembling a mouthwatering dish.

This all sounds so poetic to me, so connected to the earth and the creator.  It sounds like such a beautifully simple and honest way to live, to plant a garden and tend to a garden and eat from the garden. 

It reminds me of the inspiring Barbara Kingsolver book I read last summer, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which I highly recommend).  Kingsolver, whose fiction I hugely admire, spent a year living off of only what they grew or found from local farmers.  She and her husband and kids were already very handy in the garden before they began this experiment, but it was still a daring adventure which they chronicled beautifully.

I had been a reluctant (shy?) and confused organic food person before reading that book. I felt overwhelmed by the whole topic, but she brought it to a level that not only made sense scientifically, but completely fed my romantic notions of gardens and food.

I have talked about having an herb garden ever since I had a home, but I still haven't done it. I still aspire to the green thumb that my husband has. But I have taken more interest in digging in the dirt. I assembled my first collection of potted plants early fall, and it's time to change it.  And we had a tomato plant last summer that we actually ate from a time or two. It's a start. Thank God for those who inspire.

"Then God said, 'Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to the various kinds.'  And it was so. ... And God saw that it was good" (Genesis 1: 11-12).