An old friend, Madonna's lippy, a freshly creosoted fence, and a beautifully refreshing lassi

Abundance: Sunday 22 June 2025

15 years ago I had been commissioned to write my third book and the second I was writing for River Cottage - the Fruit handbook. The advance was miserable but I spent a sizeable wedge of it on a new camera. That camera was a Nikon D3s. It was heavier than Lou Reed’s Berlin and had the heft of a family-sized lardy cake. I bought a few lenses for it - an unspeakably fast 50mm and a 105 macro for closer in being my favourites.

Spending the money felt both scary and utterly delicious. It felt wrong; it felt right. And it was most certainly something that made me realise I was taking myself seriously for a change. Or perhaps it was something that made me take myself seriously for a change.

It became like an extension of me - my fingers knew the buttons and dials without me looking; it felt like I could change any parameter almost by thinking of it, so instinctual were the movements required.

I used it to shoot three River Cottage Handbooks - Fruit, Chicken and Eggs, Herbs (for Nicki Duffy) - A Year at Otter Farm, The New Kitchen Garden, Sour, Ferment, Herb, Spice, and half of Vegetables; as well as My Cool Allotment, My Tiny Indoor Garden, Petal Leaf Seed, The Speedy Vegetable Garden, and My Tiny Veg Plot for

Lia Leendertz

and The Book of Preserves by Pam Corbin. 17 books plus all those features and blog posts brought to life by the snap of its shutter, the crazy sensitivity of its sensor and the brilliance of those lenses. The images almost took themselves. The camera body has worked out at £250 or so for each book. As bargains go…

I used it until around two years ago, with the macro lens began to stiffen and slow and the camera got a little cranky here and there. The Fujifilm I got to replace it is fun, and films exceptional quality video too. But this week I got the urge to get the old heavy lump charged up and see if it still worked well enough. I missed it without realising and now here it was.

I let it lead me around the garden. It’s so often a surprise what the camera sees and your eyes don’t. When I see comfrey I have eyes only for the light backlighting the leaves, their veins revealed; while the camera loves the pinks and purples of the flowers more.

The perennial kale too, with its Amazon-like network of purple veins, giving me every bit a much pleasure as when I eat it. The camera seems to love the symmetry of the stems at least as much.

While I am transfixed by the bulbils that form at the top of each stem of the Egyptian walking onions at this time of year, the camera somehow conveys that the stems are not thin, grass-like leaves, but hollow cylinders holding those bulbils aloft.

Buckler leaved sorrel¹ is a delight of a salad leaf - its grassy sourness the product of oxalic acid in its leaves. Let it flower and soon after it produces the most astonishing seeds. Madonna’s lippy and teddy boys’ socks in colour, and a lively burst of fresh lemon on the tongue, the seeds are SO good. I now almost never harvest the leaves; it is the seeds I’m after. Thrown into salads, leafy and fruity, or a few floating in a cocktail - a martini most certainly - bring delicious, sharp punctuation. If all you do is sit in the garden and pop a few in, one at a time and pull lemonade face, it’ll be worth your time. And yes, I hadn’t spotted the fly peering around a seed that the camera noticed.

There are two young mulberries in the garden. The white mulberry, produces short, creamy white fruit that are really good; the birds claim a heavy tax from them.

The second is Pakistan, the variety with the longest fruit I’ve ever seen on a mulberry. Most of the young fruit are tight, green and immature; here and there, the odd fruit is making a run for it.

Hidden to a degree by the glare of the sun, right at the top of the young tree, a few fruit darken to what appears to be a week or so from their peak. This is unusually early - 6 weeks or more until harvest is usual. I like that the camera noticed a few spider’s strings strung tight across the fruit and towards the V of the branches.

If you like lovage’s earthy bitter, savouriness but have neither the space or find its presence too large, Scots lovage is for you. A little more succulent rather than leafy, but with a similar flavour to the familiar lovage, its seeds are one of my favourites. I know this sounds peculiar, but they taste like a freshly creosoted fence smells. A handful cast into or onto a loaf before baking makes for a mighty special bread, and a syrup made with leaves and seeds makes a mighty fine cocktail. This rhubarb and lovage gimlet is a real happy-maker.

And yes, I had spotted the slightly out of focus fly but not the ant immediately above it, nor the lilac spider strung between seeds that it appears to be looking at, but the camera did.

There’s a patch of grass on the crazy slope that is the back garden that I leave unmown; little grasshoppers, the width of your little finger, alight on the slightest breeze, landing on your leg, shoe or even you hair should you be sat, as I was, giving the cameras lens and my own a rest. To my left, these filthy buggers were chewing up the afternoon, unless this was an original attack move about to be launched on the aphid my eyes hadn’t spotted but the camera had.

When I came to shift the images off the memory card, it seems the camera had lost the ability to record the date and time within the images’ data - a small tedium that prevents them being ordered by date/time; the latest minor Buckerooing from the camera’s range of functions that - I know - in time will take it from an emergency photoshoot back-up to redundant in the same melancholy way a pair of trousers goes from new favourites to ‘for gardening’ over time.

Until then, I think I’ll remind myself to let this old friend take me for a walk once in a while and see what it sees that I don’t.

Mango and turmeric lassi

Warm days were made for a lassi - the yoghurty drink of the Punjab in northwest India. I’ll be making another of these when I’ve had enough of popping the just-ripe the strawberries into my mouth straight from the plant, but until then this mango version has must to shout about. You may remember last time that, snowed under, the world came to me in book form when I couldn’t get out much in it. It did it in ingredient form too: I ordered lemons, olive oil, apricots (soon arriving) and turmeric from Crowdfarming², the direct-to-producer supplier that gets you organic ingredients from plot to plate quickly and without the supermarkets’ involvement. Turmeric’s rusty bitterness is such a fine thing, and while its hand is light here, it is present. It could go larger - maybe even two testicles, for the keen - but I like the subtlety of the balance here. I started with a little dusting of the spiced sugar and pepper but quickly topped that right up as it works so well. Seriously, this is the drink you need when the sun is high.

Makes 1 litre

400g Greek yogurt
1 very ripe mango, 320g whole, peeled, flesh only
2 testicles of stem ginger
1 stem ginger-sized testicle of fresh turmeric, peeled and grated
2 tbsp honey
a generous handful of ice
seeds from 4 cardamom pods
a wide blade of mace (a very generous scratching of nutmeg will do instead)
1 tsp caster sugar
a generous sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper

Add the yoghurt, mango, ginger, turmeric, honey and ice to a blender and whizz until smooth. Depending on your preference and the yoghurt you may want to adjust the consistency, wither with a little water or a handful of ice. Add a splash of water if you prefer a thinner consistency. Share between four glasses.

In a spice/coffee grinder, reduce the cardamom seeds, mace and sugar to an aromatic dust. Sprinkle each glass of lassi with the spiced sugar and a good grinding of black pepper.

1. It’s not available in many places, but you can get seed here

2. I have a delightful offer from Crowdfarming which gives you (and I) 10€ off an order by using this link