The Edible French Garden

"That my first garden should be in the south of France in an obscure village west of Avignon my seem a bit odd, but life can be like that..." – Richard Goodman, from French Dirt









It's been an ongoing temptation since my original reading of A Year in Provence to daydram away the stark reality of miserable weather here in the midwest by picturin myself inside some cozy village brown brick surrounded by what I now know is called a paterre, or formally designed kitchen garden, usually elevated to a level substrate and, wonderfully, picked at and seeded daily, depending on the soup of the day.

That last part probably captures the essence of the dream better than any other aspect – wild and fresh soups! The obvious visual beauty of the paterre, in all of its various design possibilities (arabesques, grotesques, escutcheons, and so on) is really quite the obvious part of it all. For this, I imagine the daily morning walk along the laced paths, perfectly rounded in spots, trimmed, flowering, and in perpetual harvest. And yet there is something about the strictly visual garden that never quite seems to add the needed motivation to garden.

Instead it's the very drawn out process of the planning of the menu that serves the gardener cum cook with the greates delight...I would imagine. Take your recipe that morning for a wedding soup and begin to assess what is and what is not on hand or by root or leaf. Pick the appropriate flowers and herbs for a garni; clip the single leek; dissect the basil if need be. You are now a full participant in the ways of nature and stove, all by your very own design and handicraft.

Then I realized that I have my own little paterre right outside my back door: a vestige of the design that was left us by the previous owner who had installed walls of the courtyard that held planting beds with its own little irrigation system. What wonderful insight! Along one portion, facing south and west, we have planted our cilantro, our basil, and our thyme; I have, as it turns out, clipped away at the leaves and plucked the lettuce for soups themselves.

Sometimes dreams can stand directly in front of your face. Maybe we spend far too much time assuming that they lie far away in other lands and that only if we had a place there, we would then come to recognize the insight of the paterre. A Year in Provence certainly charged the south of France with a brand new quality of draminess; Under the Tuscan Sun, although inspired by more hairy circumstances, shows us the story of a woman finding her truer self at her country house in Italy, no doubt with the kitchen garden looming somewhere out there on the outer rim of the imagination. Now, what do you do when it is indeed right in front of you?