Potager passion

It's a warm June morning that promises to be a scorcher by noon.  A mother deposits a baby in diapers in the straw-covered pathway between a bed of trellised sugarsnap peas and a clump of dill.  She drops to her knees and and starts meticulously weeding the carrots nearby.  Meanwhile, the baby crawls toward the sugarsnaps.  Craning his head back, he reaches for a plump pod.  His baby fingers close around it and he yanks. Success!  He pushes himself back to a sitting position in the path and pops the end of the pod into his mouth.  With the other hand, he grasps a frond of dill hanging near his eyes. 

This scene took place 25 years ago, and yet I can see it in my mind's eye as if it were yesterday.  I can even smell the moist earth nearly steaming in the solstice sun and hear the liquid calls of nearby redwing blackbirds, because that mother was I and the baby my son Jesse.  To this day, Jesse is a voracious eater of vegetables, and he's a far better cook than I was at his age.   And at the end of this month, he'll graduate from the University of Michigan with a double master's in environmental science and public policy.  How much did his growing up around mammoth vegetable gardens have to do with the development of his adult values?  That's a question only he could answer.  But meanwhile, the proud mother in me crows, "At least a little!"

Even more than during the epoch of World War II victory gardens, I feel that we are entering an era when vegetable (and fruit) gardening is reaching a fever pitch.   And I'm talking not only in terms of numbers of family gardens, but in cultural terms.  The economic crisis--which is pinching all our budgets--and the shift in values it has triggred is only the most recent in a collision of factors that together are pushing potagers (food gardens) into the mainstream.  A growing awareness of the origins of our food and the concomitant desire for fresh, unpolluted (and unpolluting),  organic produce; the mainstreaming of ecological concerns with the reality of global warming; the ever-increasing sophistication of American cooks; the proliferation of self-described "foodies" and the demand for varied, "gourmet" produce; a desire for contact with nature in an increasingly frenetic world--all these factors have conspired to make food gardening a natural for increasing numbers of people.  (Even for Parisians!  The average waiting period for a community garden plot in Paris is now approaching 3 years.)



Add to this torrent of trends that America's coolest woman has dug up a potager in the White House lawn and declared that even the President will be required to pull weeds, and I think we can safely declare 2009 the Year of the Potager.  Not only is food gardening healthful, frugal, epicurean and ecological, but it's finally become that ne plus ultra of popular culture:  cool.  Parents, this could be the summer that your kids actually volunteer to work in the garden!

As someone who has never been without a potager (I prefer the use of this traditional French term to the frumpy "food garden" for a garden comprising fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers) since the age of 18, I have to say I'm feeling vindicated.  You might even say I'm preening a bit, for instance by writing this article.  But why not?  After a third of a century feeling like a fringe element, I figure I have the right to a bit of crowing.  After all, even my ex who before he divorced me complained constantly over the amount of time I spent gardening now spends most of his time doing just that.  Yes, I admit that being able to say "I told you so" can be an exquisite pleasure

2009 in my own life is the year of two potagers.  Those of you who follow these pages know that I've had virtually since my arrival in France a potager in Normandy.  There, I grow splendid peas, roots, and salads, but alas, no tomatoes or eggplants as the climate is too chilly.  Well, all that is about to change, as this spring saw the creation of a potager at our house in Provence as well.  In the photo at right, you can see half of this garden already carved out into the sort of raised beds and little pathways that are my hallmark way of gardening.  This garden will be in some ways the complement to the one in Normandy.  Here I'll grow lots of sun-gorged tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, melons, cucumbers and all the other fruits and vegetables that thrive in intense heat.  Yes, a garden this big (30 x 21 meters) is absolute madness for the weekend warrior I am condemned to be (for the time being), but then, I never claimed excessive sanity to be one of my qualities--especially when it comes to gardening.

I confess that I literally jumped up and down for joy when I was able to start planting this garden.  In fact, the potager--over more than 30 years spent cultivating--has become intrinsically entwined with my very essence--with who I am.  By planting a potager at our Provence home, I was not only staking a claim, but putting down real roots!

My intense joy over this garden prompted me to reflect in depth about why the potager has become so much of a personal totem for me.  And I realized it's because it serves as a confluence of nearly all of my major needs and values. Oh, potager!  How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways...   First and foremost, the presence of a potager in my life has always been dictated by taste.  The garden serves my unslakable thirst for cooking, for exploring  flavors and culinary techniques from around the world.  So, in a sense, you could say the potager is an exercise in gourmandise--sheer delight in eating delicious food.

But as a not-very-ex flower-child, I've always been drawn to gardening for reasons of health and of sound ecology.  All my gardens since the age of 18 have been organic.  Because I was "imprinted" with organics in the bud, you might say, for me, there's never been any other way to garden.  Without following any doctrines or dogma more complicated than nourishing the soil and embracing biodiversity, I've achieved a literally pest-free equilibrium in my potager (with the exception of a voracious species of vole that feasts on roots of certain plants).  My gardens always include a "wild corner" filled with native plants that serves to attract beneficial insects and pollinators--all while making me feel happy!  (I love wildflowers.)  Adjacent to the new Provence potager is an area half its size planted to petit épautre (an heirloom grain traditional in Provence), millet and wildflowers, for the pleasure of birds and insects as well as our own.

Ah, biodiversity!  Yet another virtue of the potager.  With only half of the Provence potager planted so far, I estimate I've already installed over 60 different plant species. (I'll update anyone interested with a planting list when the garden's complete.)  Diversity--bio or otherwise--is for me a fundamental value.  That's one reason my potagers are always so big--I've got to have it all!  Lots of heirloom varieties, a few promising new ones, and then...herbs and flowers in abundance. 


Abundance is another key value for me--one that is lavishly served by the potager and its adjacent orchard and wild hedge.  Maybe it's that flowerchild inside again, but I've always wanted to create a piece of paradise on earth--my earth, to be exact.  A place where boughs bend under the weight of fruit, where every vegetable is there for the plucking, where old roses breathe their fragrance into the air and offer their blossoms to bouquets, where autumn means harvesting nuts straight from the trees and stocking away the garden's goodness for hivernal feasts.  The walnut trees and hazelnut bushes planted this spring are just slender scions, but the almond trees planted two years ago are bearing their first blossoms.  Thus the potager is an exercise in patience, and the long-range perspective it requires a microcosm for better care of the environment.

Was it Marshall McLuhan who said "Think globally, act locally"?  Well, what are you waiting for?  Planting a potager is one of the best ways to put that great adage into practice.  With a garden bursting with succulent vegetables and fruits, you'll be less inclined to run off to the grocery store.  And how far have those vegetables traveled to your table?  Well, all the way from the backyard.  You enrich your soil with compost?  No hydrocarbon inputs there.  You're worn out from a day spent weeding and hoeing?  Great!  No need to drive off to the gym and climb aboard an electric exercise machine.

I've never been that interested in designer garments or the latest electronic gadget.  But, when it comes to cooking and eating, I like to sit in the lap of luxury.  Condemned to an over-sensitive palate, I'm never happy with anything less than the very best when it comes to what enters my mouth.  My potager  is there to ensure I can wallow in all the culinary luxury I want--luxury so exquisite that 99.999% of people have never even experienced.  I can gorge on a gigantic bowl of raspberries fit for a king--literally, a variety cultivated for Louis IV, berries so meltingly soft and so perfumed that I could swear they're unrelated to those that have traveled 1000 miles in plastic baskets to the supermarket shelf.  I know that asparagus just picked and rushed straight to the kitchen has nothing in common with the bundles of straw sold in commerce.

Yet my potager nourishes my soul as well as my body.  Every year, as I mingle flowers with food plants, I create a different and constantly evolving painting.  My potager  is a constantly renewable canvas which serves as a means of expression.  For instance, none of my gardens is ever without an entire bed devoted to sweetpeas.  Being envelopped in their heady vanilla fragrance as the sun warms them is a hedonistic experience I can't be without.  And I can have bouquets of these exquisite blossoms (unaffordable at a florist's--luxury again) in every room of the house.

My potager is also a rich repository of memory.  Every spring when I go out to plant, I am recreating a lost paradise--that of the garden of my Swiss grandmother near Zurich.  Her blossoms and prized fruit  comprised my primordial imprinting with that which we call Garden in the large sense of the word. From the ages of 3 to 5, I inhabited that paradise; it was my age of innocence.  And on a subconscious level, I'm eternally compelled to recreate it.  And then, as I touch the plants in my care, I relive countless more trivial memories that are none the less sweet for all that.  Nasturtiums bring back the hot sunny day when I first breathed in their scent and felt that their colors had captured the very sun.  And it goes without saying that every trellis of peas invokes a certain baby boy.

I spent my schoolyears in Indiana, and I must say that the vegetable gardens I saw around me were of the most prosaic kind.  Quite often, a corner of a cornfield had been left unplanted by the monotonous rows, so that the farmer's wife could plant her patch of vegetables.  Echoing the corn's regimentation would be a few rows of potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and--in an occasional burst of fancy--a row of gladiolas for cutting.  Of course, all received the effluents of the cornfield--the chemical fertilizer, herbicide drift, pesticides.  At the time, all these chemicals were considered "progress" in man's battle to subdue nature. (Of course, that destructive mindframe has unfortunately not disappeared. Just this morning I read that MidAmerica CropLife Association, a lobby for agricultural chemicals, has blasted Michelle Obama for creating an organic garden.  They've gone so far as to make public a letter they wrote to the First Lady imploring her to use "crop protection products" in her garden.  You don't have to read between the lines to get the real message.)  Even as a child, I was sensitive to the struggle of those vegetable plants in the exhausted, chemical-rinsed clay of those cornfields.  Meanwhile, the barnyard manure accumulated nearby, ignored, in an ever-growing mountain outside the farmer's barn.

As soon as I became old enough to have my own garden, I availed myself of such a manure pile.  And I began my lifelong experiment in creating a food garden that is a place of beauty.  As you may have guessed, I had acquired  a distaste for gladioli, for gardens in soldierly rows, for monotony.  I wanted variety, exuberance, color, imagination, personality!  I wanted everything that wasn't  in those miserable cornfield gardens!  Was I a rebellious teenager?  Oh, yes.  Hell, yes!  The potager was where I grew up, in a sense.  Where I found--and where every year I am still in the process of discovering--myself.

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