Category — Food plants

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how exuberantly beautiful a vegetable can be. This fading but vital red chard arrested me as I was passing through a friend’s garden, just at the moment when the sun backlit it.

In the past twenty years or so, there’s been a movement to get vegetables back into the ornamental landscape (or maybe it’s the other way around). Pioneers such as Rosalind Creasy an Robert Kourik proved that edible plants can be ornamental, and that landscaping can provide food.

This seems like a new idea (it’s still controversial for some zoning boards and neighbors), but it’s actually a very old one. Food plants didn’t get split up from other plants until the age of European colonialism.

Colonialism opened up new vistas of plants, and for the first time, it wasn’t just curators of botanical gardens who were plant collectors. Wealthy people became aware that they could show off their status by using exotic plants in their gardens. Though slow transportation and primitive shipping methods meant many foreign plants arrived dead, avid collectors were willing to pay the price. Wanting to be the first on your block to have something is not a modern phenomenon.

Neither is showing off  to your neighbors.  Wealthy Western Europeans started to display their substance to the world by planting only ornamentals in the visible parts of their gardens and landscapes; the vegetables and fruits were relegated to areas visited only by the servants.  To show only ornamentals was to announce that you were too wealthy to farm; someone else could do that work for you.

This trend only applied to the wealthy, of course.  Workers and farmers kept on doing what gardeners have done for millenia: they grew what they needed as near to the door as they could get it. Plants that provided medicine or dye or food or were just the gardener’s beautiful pets or breeding project were all grown in one place: the original definition of a cottage garden. For many people, the idea of edibles as ornamentals has never passed away.

But as time went on, Western Europeans (including the ones who emigrated to the what became the U.S.) adopted the styles of those who were wealthier than they were. This trickle-down or social climbing in styles is a very pervasive feature of Western European cultures. The styles don’t necessarily have to make sense for us to adopt them. The reason why Spaniards lisp, for instance, is because one of the royals a few hundred years ago had a lisp. In order to save him embarrassment, the courtiers-the wealthiest class-followed suit. Since the courtiers were wealthy and prominent (the equivalent of movie or rock stars today), people copied what they did. The lisp spread until now standard Spanish Spanish means lisping,  and not only on the “s” sound.

Our culture is full of stories like these. Many of our fashions are not only the sign of deep changes; they are part of creating them. On a larger scale, the separation of food and ornamental plants-something you see in most of the gardens of the modern-day U.S.-reflects the economics of colonialism. A garden that shows that you don’t have to work the land yourself, that unseen others do the dirty work for you, is the basis of colonialism, where far-off workers make cheap goods for our sometimes uneasy consumption. It’s  a knotty issue we’re still struggling with. Maybe we can begin to unravel that knot by appreciating the beauty of red chard.

The last time I wrote about cucuzzi, the edible gourd, I still hadn’t gotten any female flowers or fruits.

I do now. I went away for a few days. When I left, the biggest fruit was a few inches long, and no thicker than my finger.

When I got back, it looked like this:

The female flowers are a little different than the male ones; the petals are narrower, creating a kind of pinwheel effect. It’s a nice variation.

My cucuzzi didn’t really get going for a while. I did get a late start on my garden, what with one thing and another, and it could be that they don’t have quite as much sun as they would like (though I gave them one of the sunniest places I’ve got), or that I didn’t give them enough flower fertilizer to get them flowering sooner.

Or it could just be that they were in a mood. Plants are like that.

In any case, I’m going to be eating them soon, because cucuzzis are supposed to be harvested when they’re about six inches long. Since they are gourds, you don’t want them to  get mature. (Well, even if they were summer squash, you’d want to avoid that.)

As much as I want to see what they taste like–if they really live up to the great things people say about the flavor– I’m saving this first cucuzzi for seed. I’m not an expert at seed-saving, but one of the things I remember is that, if you want a plant to bloom earlier, it’s best to select seed from the first fruits that appear. And so far the main pleasures of cucuzzi have been in their exuberant viny growth, springy tendrils, and faintly scented evening flowers.

It’s okay. It looks as if I’m going to have more edible gourds in just a few days. Unless it freezes tonight.

I started out full of myself. And multiple enthusiasms. This would be the most unusual, fresh version of the Three Sisters the world had ever seen. And it was all going into my prize bronze-brown Vietnamese pot, the big one that I’d splurged on at the discount store (it was only a few dollars more than a plastic one the same size, I told myself). I had vague, secret-from-myself dreams of how I’d win the Fine Gardening container contest, with becoming modesty of course.

Then came the reality.

Those  yin-yang beans I bought to twine up the cornstalks? Well, as it happens, they were bush beans. They weren’t going to twine anywhere. And they didn’t seem to like the circumstances I’d put them in, either; I harvested two pods with two beans in them and that was it.  The leaves had a ratty white-spotted look, too, that I think was due to nitrogen deficiency. I did get enough beans to replace the ones I planted, though the ones I harvested were kind of scrawny.

OK, then there were the violetto trionfo beans that actually do climb. (I planted three of them, and three of the yin-yang beans. Six stalks of corn.) I’ve got at least one of them running up the cornstalk now. But they’re just blooming, and the way those corn cobs feel, the corn’s going to be long dead before the beans get ready.

And then there’s the corn itself. A Japanese exotic corn, striped pink, cream, and white. How cool is that? And it’s actually very pretty-but not nearly as healthy (or colorful) as I’d envisioned. I do admit to getting a laugh out of pruning corn, which has got to be the most Garden Society thing I’ve ever done.  The leaves would go dead, and the corn would look funky, so I’d cut off the dead ones. Pruning corn.

Even though it wasn’t what I expected, I have enjoyed seeing the corn evolve, from its first pale stripes to the dark burgundy color that’s spreading ever further along the stalk. And even though it’s not as tall and bushy and strong as I would have liked, I did get one small ear of wine-red corn on each stalk.

The cucuzzi climbed rampantly out of all the other pots I put it in-but it made a few pale leaves and petered out in this one. The Waltham butternut squash  I also put in there is just putting out its first blossom now. And the surprise Brown Sugar canna (deep brown foliage, pink flower, reputedly) I planted late? It did show a tentative green point a month or so ago. And then sank back into the earth.
I think this trio, or quintet, (or sextet, if you count the canna), needed a lot more water than they got in that pot. I put in a reservoir insert, so they did get some bottom watering. And I put in some water-conserving polymers into the soil. But  I think that reservoir just wasn’t big enough for such heavy drinkers. Especially in a ceramic pot that allows water to evaporate. It’s  a glazed ceramic pot, which is a lot less porous than unglazed. But still.

I think they all needed a lot more food than they got, too. Oh, I did use a heavy-on-compost mix for soil, and put in amendments, the way I do with all of my container plants. And I foliar fed them, the way I do my whole garden. But corn, beans, and squash are notoriously nitrogen-hungry. They are heavy feeders and drinkers, and I treated them like anorexics.

Recently, I also read that the Three Sisters idea was about handy harvest, as well as space saving. The corn would have been field corn-the kind you gather when it’s ripened hard, to feed to livestock. (William Alexander suggests a modern version: use popcorn.) The squash would have been winter squash or pumpkins–not harvested until their shells were hard. Late, like the corn. And the beans would have been dry beans, not ones you’d pick off the vine to eat fresh. Dried beans that get harvested when the pods dry.

I could look at this season’s formerly-known-as-star container and be disappointed. But you know what? I’ve enjoyed the little purple curling edges of the corn leaves, and I’m enjoying the purple bean flowers and vines spiraling around the almost-dead corn, and I enjoyed the magic of opening up my two little pathetic yin-yang pods and finding replicas of the little seeds I planted.
I even enjoyed pruning corn.

Reference:

The $64 Tomato, William Alexander, Algonquin Press, 2006

Places to get seeds:

yin-yang beans: Park’s
violetto trionfo beans (I  notice they are not in the current catalogue. They’d been sitting for some years): Pinetree Gardens
Japanese ornamental corn: JL Hudson
cucuzzi squash: JL Hudson
Waltham butternut: Pinetree Gardens

John Muir describes finding a manzanita whose trunk was four feet in diameter, but branched out at eighteen inches high. That was at 6,000 feet. The resulting tree-bush, as he describes it, formed a broad round head ten or twelve feet high. So obviously not all mountainous manzanita is petite.

I’m guessing that the manzanita he found was the taller, brighter-green manzanita that grows in the high mountains, Arctostaphylos patula. It doesn’t usually get as high as twelve feet, so the one Muir found was exceptional.

The ones I know go to about four or five feet.  I always find their bright green leaves a novelty, since the  manzanitas where I live are such a pale white-green. When the sun shines through the bright green leaves of mountainous manzanita, they are a stunning sight.

These manzanita leaves can be used in the same way as Arctostaphylos nevadensis. And there’s an additional use for them which isn’t needed in the high mountains: as a poison oak remedy. In my area, there are two commercial preparations for poison oak which involve manzanita-leaf tea. One is a spray; the other is a very effective clay concoction with manzanita tea in it.

Arctostaphylos patula bushes are also heavy bearers of berries. “Manzanita” translates to “little apple”; you can see why this name might have come to mind. This bush is loaded with berries which are the size of the berries on the taller manzanitas where I live. They’re food for a lot of wildlife. These lower bushes in the rocks are especially climbable for little critters without wings.

People eat manzanita berries, too. They aren’t juicy, the way you usually think of berries. When manzanita berries are ripe, they are dry, a bit powdery, and astringent-sweet. When you’re walking in the woods, sucking on a manzanita berry can quench your thirst. Make sure it’s really ripe, though, or you’ll get a lot more pucker than saliva. And don’t crunch through to the seed: they’re astringent enough to dry your mouth up again.

It’s most likely that this thirst remedy was passed down by the Native Americans in manzanita-growing areas. Manzanita was a major food crop in the areas where it grows, since it’s abundant and easy to harvest.  The lower-elevation manzanitas had many names, since it was an important crop. I haven’t found names for Arctostaphylos patula, but since many Native Americans summered in the high mountains (and left their grinding holes to prove it), it’s likely they made use of the high-mountain manzanitas as well as the ones in their winter homes down the hill.

Manzanita berry powder was made into a sort of cider, or ground and cooked in hot ashes like mush. Some people ate the powder in cakes, or stirred up with dry powdered salmon–an early energy food.  There seems to have been a lot of celebration with the manzanita harvest. Manzanita berries are not only abundant, they’re sweet, and a craving for sweetness is not just a modern trait.

Sweetness is certainly what’s attracted me. Besides eating the berries straight, I’ve also had the pleasure of manzanita-berry lemonade, which is basically a tea of the powder soaked in cold water.

If you want to try the easy modern way, you can use a blender, as a friend of mine does. After you’ve blended them, though, you still have to find some way to sift or sieve the fine powder from the substantial seeds. Or you can just leave the seeds in and strain out the tea. The taste is a little less sweet, but doubtless there are useful nutrients in the seeds.

I had never thought of growing manzanita before I read up on it for this article. Manzanita is just there. But if you want to try it,  Chatfield recommends getting starts at a nursery. Like many wild plants, manzanita is hard to start or transplant, and like many shrubs, it’s slow-growing.  He says that, while they tolerate drought, watering them will make them grow faster, and bear more flowers and berries.  He also says they grow in sun and shade.

This may well be true. Since I haven’t grown them, I can only say what I’ve observed about seeing them grow: the few I’ve seen in shade look straggly and small and rarely bear anything. This Arctostaphylos patula is growing in the high part-shade of red firs (the little bush in front of it is a chinquapin). Obviously it does get some sun, but you can see it’s much skimpier than the ones in the sun; it’s got a lot of its elegant red-brown skeleton next to it. And there are no berries.

There are many varieties of manzanita, so it might make sense to look for one that lives in the climate closest to yours. And while watering may help them thrive, especially in the first couple of years,  I’ve never seen or heard of any manzanitas growing in any area except a dry-summer one.  And they tend to grow either on slopes or crushed granite or both, so: drainage drainage drainage.

Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy manzanitas in the wild. The ones in my area are long since over (they bloom in about February; the fruit’s ripe in early summer). But, in the moutains, Arctostaphylos patula is just getting to harvest season. The berries will turn dull red when they ripen.

They haven’t got long. You can get snow in September in the high mountains. Six weeks to two months after this picture was taken, things will start freezing up.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Kimball Chatfield, Medicine from the Mountains: Medicinal Plants of the Sierra Nevada, Range of Light Publications, 1997

LoLo Westrich, California Herbal Remedies, Gulf Publishing Company, 1989

I don’t know the name of this burgundy hollyhock, and neither does the friend whose garden I found it in. But I sure like it. It’s very similar to A. rosea nigra, but has just that little difference in color that makes it wine red instead of eggplant black. If anyone can give me a cultivar name for this, I’d be grateful.

It’s fitting that this post should start with a mysterious hollyhock. There’s a lot of mystery to the story of how hollyhocks became a part of European and British gardens.

Clearly, hollyhocks came to the Middle East early on. Several sources quote this area as the native home of the hollyhock. But since I’m working on the theory that they originate from China, my guess is that they got to the Middle East via the many ancient trade routes between the Middle East and China. (Besides the overland Silk Road, there were probably routes by sea as well.) The hundreds of years of the Caliphates and the Ottoman Empire were a huge influence in plant breeding and gardening; those of us of European heritage use many of their garden designs today.

Walled gardens, irrigation, fountains, and formal ideas about garden design originated in Arab culture. Even the idea of paradise as a garden did (remember Eden?). The very word “paradise” derives from an Arabic word for garden. And these garden ideas spread: the Caliphates and the later Ottoman Empire were vast enterprises which in their heyday spread as far as present-day Russia, Austria, Southern France, most of Spain, and pretty much the entire Mediterranean perimeter.

The sultans of the Ottoman Empire were so interested in plants that they had traders on the Silk Road collect promising bulbs for breeding, starting off the beginning of the modern tulip (you knew I’d work tulips in here somehow). So it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to imagine that they also asked their traders to come back with desirable plant seeds. One of those might have been the hollyhock.

The first mention of hollyhocks in English literature is in the John Gardiner’s poem “Feate of Gardenini”, copied into a 1440 manuscript. Since manuscripts were a lot rarer then than they are today, probabilities are good that this was an already-known poem already in circulation through the oral tradition. This means it might have been composed generations earlier.

Which fits in well with the accepted theory that the Crusaders brought back hollyhock seeds with them. Hoc is Anglo-Saxon for mallow (hollyhocks are closely related to mallows, and, until recently, they were in the same genus). Holy has the same meaning it has today: the whole name signifies “a mallow from the holy lands”.

The Crusaders weren’t happy with Arab rule of Europe, and their goal was a lot more expansionist than holy. In many areas of Europe, Moslems coexisted peacefully with Christians, and introduced many of the arts we now think of as European. But sadly, as so often, religion became the battle flag for cultural and political differences.  The Crusaders were looking for lebensraum, and they thought they knew how to get it: invade the Arab lands, as theirs had been invaded hundreds of years ago. They called it a war of Christianity with Islam.

Like many other wars, it became more complicated as it went on, because by this time Arab and European cultures had been entwined for hundreds of years. When you spend time in a country (and slow travel meant the Crusaders spend a lot of time in lands that were Arab-dominated, including their own), you begin to adopt its rhythms, learn its language, maybe even want to settle there. For some, it might have been a little like the influx of former colonists to the UK: the ruling culture becomes the culture of reference, and the colonized people are drawn to its center.

While it is true that the Crusaders committed many atrocities in their holy land-grab operations, it’s also true that some of the Europeans stayed, intermarried, and became traders in the Middle East. It was the start of a commerce that brought us many of the spices that are now considered common in European cooking. Pepper, for instance, was a great and expensive rarity in the 13th century. Maybe hollyhock seeds were another trade commodity.

Or maybe some of those Arab rulers of Europe longed for the hollyhocks of the Middle East, and sent for seeds. As with so many other plants, the gardeners of the wealthy take cuttings and seeds, and within a generation or two, exotic rarities become cottage-garden commoners.

However they got into European gardens, hollyhocks were originally grown there not as an ornamental, but as a food.

And if you look at the way they grow, this makes a lot of sense. They are easy to grow and have large leaves which come up in early spring, when food is in short supply. The taste of the leaves is actually quite good, and though the slight hairiness is a bit off-putting to modern palates, the basic texture is nice, also. I steamed some hollyhock leaves with fish to try them out. They were really pretty tasty. If you put hollyhock leaves in a soup or ratatouille, I think the hairy factor would fade, and the good flavor and nutrition would be left.

Chinese tradition says that hollyhocks should be cooked in the seventh month, which is equivalent to August, so I felt free to try their leaves in late summer. It does seem to me, though, that they would be tenderer and better earlier on. There’s also a reference to the flowers being prized in Chinese cookery, but no information on how.

Food wasn’t the only value to hollyhocks, though, in China or Europe. They were also medicinal. Being so closely related to the mallow, they were (and probably still are) used for many of the same illnesses: respiratory complaints and inflammation. John Gerard, who lived from 1545 to 1612, put them in his herbal. “The roots, leaves, and seeds serve for all those things for which the wilde mallows doe…”

But Gerard also was one of the many to note how pretty and easy to grow hollyhocks were. “Hollihocks with purple floures hath great broad leaves, confusedly indented about the edges, and likewise toothed like a saw…The floures are double, and of a bright purple coulour…The second yeere after they are sowne they bring forth their floures in July and August, when the seed is ripe the stalke withereth, the root remaineth, and sendeth forth new stalkes, leaves and floures, many yeares after.” So hollyhocks were a short-lived perennial in England, too.

It’s interesting to see that double hollyhocks were around this early. It seems that there was a huge variety of colors and shapes of hollyhocks available even in the 1600s. Parkinson, who wrote one of the early English gardening treatises , describes hollyhocks “both single and double, of many and sundry coulours, yeeld ouat their flowers like Roses on their tall branches, like Trees, to sute you with flowers when almost you have no other, to grace out your Garden.”

He even mentions one “of a darke red like blacke bloud”, which could be that very hollyhock that grows in my friend’s garden.

Next post: big fluffy hollyhocks, plus more hollyhock history

References:

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1971

Alice M. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1956, 1968

Mrs. C. F. Leyel, Officier de l’Academie Francaise, Fellow of the Royal Institute, Elixirs of Life, first pub. 1948 faber and faber London. pb reprint 1987

Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Great Confrontation: Europe and Islam Through the Centuries, Ivan R. Dee, 2003

John Gerard, Gerard’s Herbal, The Essence therof distilled by Marcus Woodward from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636, Crescent Books reprint, 1985