Companionship and Capucine

Our fourth grade teacher, that would be when we were nine years old, instructed us each to stand up tell the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. I had absolutely no idea and was panicked at the thought that I would have to just choose something off the cuff like that when there was so little I knew about being a grownup. I was completely at a loss. My turn was coming up. I reached down within, the kind of reaching I used to do when I had to read sheet music to play the viola (which I wasn't very good at), and sought a word, a sign, anything from me to tell me what I was going to be. "A Botanist", I stated, surprising myself.

What was a botanist? I had absolutely no idea. "Very good, Lucy." I was off the hook. "A botanist is a scientist that studies plants." She moved on to the next person, and I pondered that thought. My mother always claimed to have a black thumb. Most plants died at our house, although there was a tangle of greens sprouting from dry prickly clumps of dead things in a perpetual state of thin survival on the second floor landing.

At recess, some different girls invited me to play with them, and one of them confided to me that she also wanted to be a botanist. She was new at the school, and I was happy to be her friend. In the years that followed, we ended up starting a secret picnic group together. This entailed getting permission from our parents to eat at each others' houses for lunch (for which you had to bring a note to school) and then taking off hand in hand into the woods near the watertower by the school, to eat a picnic we'd stashed there and look at plants. We felt so free and rebellious, sprawled on the blanket, sipping alternately from the jug of kool-aid and eating our bagged lunches, magnifying glasses tucked in our pockets.

The garden has still got me fascinated. Bed by bed, I put the plants in varying configurations. I don't like rows. Will this get me into trouble? I will plant groups of things. There is so much to learn. As always, when I am not there, I think about what I'm going to do when I get there. The seeds have all sprouted and it's interesting to see what baby this and baby that look like. The little rhubarb chard sprouts are bright fuchsia, the lettuce sprouts look like ethereal leaflets and the aromatics all look like little white worms squirming their way up into the light. The kohlrabi looked like a four leaf clover for awhile, then stretched out to more of an elongated shape. The beans, coriander and chervil were the last to make their appearance, each seed taking its own allotted time to open and for the shoots to push forth. The vegetable seeds, protected and warm in their little plugs in the city apartment window, have all taken much less time to sprout than the seeds we spread directly on the ground in the mountains last year.

I am focused on companionship. Garlic is something I should plant around the base of the apple tree, a good place too because it can also protect the picnic table from ants. Plants in useful places. I am putting an herb and salad clippings bed on top of a stacked flagstone platform in an awkward place for nibblers. I hope we'll get a chance to have at least a few fresh clipped salads. Herbs in the garden beds help the vegetables to grow and develop their best flavor. I plan to do some triangular beds and some kind of paddy like beds that will make use of a hill. That's where the cucurbits (my gourds and cucumbers) will hopefully cascade down from one platform to the next. There's a pretty flower called Capucine in French, Nasturtium in English, that when planted with my squash plants, will protect them from bugs that eat their stems. It doesn't hurt that the colorful red flowers and beautiful flat round eight segmented leaves are just my style. They'll also be a good addition to summer salads, a spicy cress. A pretty, lucky, spicy cress.