Plumcots, Nirvana, lavenders and a very good Eton Mess
Abundance: Thursday 4 July
I was 17 and in my mum’s front room, Friday night, the TV on: Gardeners’ World. Me thinking ‘If this is ever my Friday night, if ever I get into this nonsense, somebody do me in’. The greatest waste of life: people with time and money on their hands creating pretend places rather than getting out into the real ones; making jumbled floral mixtapes of their favourite tracks, and never getting to know to the albums they come from and that give them meaning.
And yet here I am.
Eating the first of the first fruit this young plumcot1 has produced reminded me of why I look beyond what the shops have to offer. Why I have a garden. Sweet, rich, luscious and giving, they have just a touch of almond to their flavour that rounds them off perfectly. Let’s hope the birds focus elsewhere, that the hornets - the first Lancastered past my ear this afternoon - take after the neighbour’s berries instead.
I’ve been away, and come back to a generous clutch of new plants in pots. It feels like Christmas. Someone, clonk me over the head with a shovel.
Skirret, mojito mint, woodland sorrel, oca, Japanese wineberry, serpent garlic, perennial kales, and more. Old friends and new.
The garden is calling my name: a few more pieces of the puzzle to slip into place.
It’s a peculiar garden. At times I see it as others might - untidy, a compromise of time and desire; immature - but mostly I love every glance from every angle because of what it means, what it gives and what it will be, as much as what it is.
I want it to be as close to a natural coming together of plants as possible - and by that I don’t mean their relationship is without a designing hand, or that they are interplanted slavishly to what might wildly occur - but that they are in balance, requiring little intervention. A little pulling back of this, a pruning of that, a shaping here and there.
Look at the Turkish rocket, flowering high and handsome in yellow; it’s encroaching on the Japanese plum. I haven’t the enthusiasm to knock it back - the plum can stand it, and the rocket will soon throw seed around and then shrink back a good degree - but where it looms over the daylilies like a bank of death eaters, I chop it back a little. This is my kind of gardening.
I never had the heart to eat daylilies when I first grew them. How can you eat a flower that only lasts a day? But it dawned on me that this is the perfect flower to eat, that once it’s had most of its day in the sun, it’s better to pick and eat it rather than leave it to wither. Will it keep body and soul together? It will not. But it feeds me - and a platoon of beneficial insects - in so many other ways too.
In front of the daylilies, in front of the Turkish rocket, in front of the Japanese plum - the last in a cascade of ever diminishing plants - Cassis Ice chives.
In almost every way no different to a familiar chive; it’s just the flowers - more deeply purple, more tightly held perhaps, and - peculiarly - their flavour is delayed, taking a long three seconds of ‘these taste of nothing’ time until they arrive, all lights flashing, on your tongue in glorious oniony technicolour. Broken into florets and sprinkled over a salad they bring a really special punchy punctuation.
And just a week later - the time I’ve been away - they stand heavy with seeds. A little rattle and more will spring to life in the months ahead.
And so in the gaps between deadlines and travelling about, I plant the new arrivals and hope that some, most or all are in the right place. And after this time away, returning frazzled, thinking about where they might go and getting some in the ground has settled me from being a hot air balloon bumping along the ground, to one that has come to rest, flame burning again, upright, and facing the right way.
And so here I am. I came for the potatoes and mulberries, and I found a sense of attachment to the planet, a reason to move into the days ahead. I found so much I wasn’t expecting. A joke I was let in on. Whatever I needed, growing and cooking food has given in abundance. Writing about it, yet more so.
The seasons have gone from what I saw as cold and wet or hot and dry, to numerous foldings and intersections of the four we are taught; lavender has gone from just ‘lavender’ to so many subtle and not so subtle variations on a theme. Bright and shade, shadow and light, things moving on whether I’m here to see them or not, flavours I’ve never tasted until today, changes that make me stop and notice. Now, I have a point.
I smiled a lot today, and yet I’m still not entirely rid of the feeling that there’s something faintly pointless about it, and I don’t know why.
Gooseberry, strawberry and lavender Eton Mess
For a few short weeks gooseberries shake hands with strawberries. Of the many ways of bringing them together, this is as good as I know; elderflower marrying them perfectly.
A tumble of seasonal fruit barely combined with meringue and whipped cream, Eton Mess is not hard to enjoy. The only way to go wrong is to make this too sweet: if the fruity combination is potentially too sweet, a little yoghurt stirred through the cream makes such a difference.
The lavender makes such a difference, somehow lightening and deepening the coming together. In the unlikely event you have any left for the next day, bear in mind the lavender will become more intense in flavour.
I have to tell you I couldn’t be arsed to make meringues; my need for the combination of flavours and textures was too urgent.
Serves 6
300g gooseberries, top and tailed
240g strawberries, halved or quartered depending on size
400ml double cream
160g yoghurt
4 tbsp elderflower cordial
10 small (approx 10cm) meringues, broken into pieces
2 lavender flowers, florets plucked from the stem
a little pomegranate molasses
Add the gooseberries to a pan just wide enough to take them in a single layer along with a lick of water just sufficient to reach its circumference. Over a low/medium heat, cook the gooseberries enough to encourage them to collapse and release their juice. Allow them to cool, then either leave textured or blend until smooth, and stir in the elderflower cordial.
Whip the cream until it holds a floppy quiff. Fold in the yoghurt.
Place the strawberries in a large bowl. Break the meringues into pieces and add them to the fold them into the yoghurt cream; stir this into the strawberries until semi-incorporated. Spoon over the gooseberry puree, dot with a little more meringue, zorro with pomegranate molasses and sprinkle with lavender flowers.
Serve with a big spoon and see how much people come back for.
a hybrid of a plum and an apricot with a leaning towards the plum, and yes, there is an aprium that is more apricot and very good it is too
Eton Mess. A dish or a political comment on the main topic of the day?
I made this Eton Mess for dinner and it is *delicious*, despite me over whipping the cream a bit. I made it with those red gooseberries that are a bit sweeter which were lovely when disintegrated into water but it’s the lavender and elderflower that are the stars of the show. Gorgeous stuff. There’s only two of us so I halved the recipe - how foolish, as once we’d eaten our portion we then looked very wistfully at the one small portion left!