Thursday, March 8, 2012

Visibility

or The Spirit of Rosemary Present

Cleaning out a garden bed in late winter reminds me of cleaning out the garage, if cleaning out the garage were fun.  At some point in your efforts you reach the bottom of a pile of something or other and make a discovery: "So that's where (something or other else) ended up!"  Long-lost treasures emerge from the forgotten recesses of time, kind of thing.


Like the occasional rosemary bush.  I certainly wouldn't claim to have forgotten that one was growing in the bed with the 'Wild Thing' autumn sage; after all, I've been pillaging it for soups and stews all winter long.  It's small enough, however, that it normally has the added charm of invisibility.  When I'm looking by fading daylight for some rosemary for a recipe, I find it by feel and smell as much as anything.  I seldom actually see it, and never in its full glory.  Pruning 'Wild Thing' away revealed the rosemary in its visible form.  After all these months it's a little startling to remember that it has one.


The Arp rosemary is supposed to be (and in another couple of years will be) one of the anchors of this bed, along with a Mormon tea (Ephedra viridis) and the three autumn sage.  I'd found the combination in the Curandera Garden at the Albuquerque Botanic Garden.  Horsetail reeds were growing there in a water feature across the path from a shaggy beast of a rosemary, their twiggy and feathery forms making an intriguing counterpoint; the hot, neon pink flowers of 'Wild Thing' autumn sage (Salvia greggii) offset the other plants' muted greens; and the whole color scheme was sent soaring by containers of orange and yellow French marigolds.  The hot colors may have been a little...vivid, but in the equally hot September sunshine they radiated New Mexico flair at its most exciting and alive.  In my own garden I substituted Ephedra for the horsetail, and 'Mersea Yellow' pineleaf penstemon (Penstemon pinifolius) for the marigolds.  Then I added in some wine cups, a couple of gaura,  a Mojave sage, a Lady Banks rose, some marguerites...  But other than that, the combination is the same.

One reason that the rosemary startled me when it turned visible again is that in my head, it is already the four foot tall anchor of that bed.  I have a vision of Rosemary Yet to Come, and in some small, subconscious way I forget that it is, indeed, yet to come.   In addition to seeing some futuristic rosemary, I'm also recalling stems and greenery that are no longer there, and all the dinners they gave me:  the truly delicious chicken and barley soup on a blustery evening; the safe stand-by dish of baked lentils and rice; the uninspired but edible pasta sauce (it's hard to go too far wrong with pasta sauce).  The Ghost of Rosemary Past still glimmers happily in the present.

The parts that you don't see were really tasty.

I didn't exactly use a recipe to create any of those meals, unless you count the lentils and rice, which in their original form featured ginger and Thai red curry paste instead of rosemary, bay leaf, and garlic.  (I still think that at heart they're the same recipe:  lentils, rice, water, and flavorings.  It's just that the flavorings have been tweaked a bit.)  But you know how it is.  You substitute one thing here and another there; you find some sort of equivalent; and it all kind of works out, more or less, at the end.  Or so you hope.  The first taste of the finished dish once you're seated at the table is the moment of truth.  Then you discover whether what you thought you were cooking resembles what you actually cooked.  Visions of an ideal future dissolve in present reality.

The rosemary is still caught in that creative time warp, where its present is all wrapped up in an ideal future.    Its bed is in the "cooking" phase, its moment of truth Yet to Come.  In the meantime, until it winks back into invisibility behind the autumn sage, the Spirit of Rosemary Present isn't really about the present.  It's about creativity, possibility, hope—all kinds of things.

Just not about the small, evergreen plant that it is.

18 comments:

  1. I was cleaning out the garage the other day and found a long lost box of garden tools! That's the most fun I've ever had in a garage :-) Your bed transformation is awesome. I just love the texture/foliage contrasts in there - looks great even with nothing in bloom.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wow, Rebecca, you hit the garage-cleaning jackpot! I'm glad you think that bed looks decent--to my eyes it's very...shorn these days, poor thing. It was one of my favorite garden areas through the winter, though.

      Delete
  2. I find myself doing the same thing. I don't really see the present - I often see the future, and have to stop and look closely to see what others actually see! Your bed is looking gorgeous - isn't it wonderful what spring cleaning can do - and yes, I see it as a four foot anchor there, too!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Seeing your own creation the way others do is really, really hard! Spring cleaning is wonderful, though it all too often leads to the temptation to buy new plants, I find. I forget that the bare ground will all be covered again soon... I'm glad the four foot rosemary isn't just a figment of my imagination!

      Delete
  3. I am a huge fan of rosemary...the incredible aroma, the green in winter, the lilac blooms. I suppose I see the present and the future. Your garden bed is amazing. I love seeing transformation...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Michelle, rosemary has so much going for it. It's used heavily as a landscaping shrub in my neighborhood, and in the hell-strips next to the sidewalks it suffers all kinds of abuse and just keeps growing. It's one of my "I am in awe" plants.

      Delete
  4. My wild rosemary left but I have lots of the Salvia greggei. Looks as if I need to add that to my brutally overdue pruning list! My neon pink flowers are blooming up the orange tree. 'Tis a YOUNG orange tree, but still!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Growing up into a tree?! Yes, that does sound like a S.g. that's ready for some pruning... It must be spectacular, though! Your camera is also probably terrified of it--there's something about those hot pinks they just can't handle.

      Delete
  5. I love rosemary but it is not hardy here so I grow one plant as an annual and try to keep it indoors all winter. This winter under a grow light I kept it alive although it was not as green as I would have liked...but it is looking good...perhaps it will grow again outdoors this summer.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Donna, I think rosemary makes a wonderful houseplant--it's so nice to brush against the leaves on a cold, winter day. Something about that fragrance always says "warm" to me. Hope yours makes it through these last few weeks indoors so you can enjoy it this summer.

      Delete
  6. Love your comment about 'the bits you don't see were really tasty'. I could make a sign out of that and place it wherever the deer were snacking!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Karen, ha! I'm not sure I'd find that sign to be consolation!

      Delete
  7. What you said re: the spirit of the plant being about "creativity, possibility, hope" is so true ... but I never saw it until I planted and nurtured them myself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. b-a-g, your experience with gardening is one of the most beautiful I've encountered. You really know how to appreciate what gardening gives you (and what you give to it in return).

      Delete
  8. Hi Stacy - looks so familiar, I feel lucky to have been there, Hugs! -R

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. R, you also tasted two of the meals I mentioned, if I recall correctly! Hugs back, of course!

      Delete
  9. I hadn't come across Mormon Green Tea before. Does Mitt Romney drink it do you think? It doesn't seem to liven him up much...Rosemary is such a wonderful aromatic herb but never seems to survive the winter in our garden whether I have it in a pot or I take cuttings or whatever...I've just bought another one...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wonder if Mitt (and the Mormons in general) have moved on to other things by now, Janet. (Mormon tea grows in Utah and was made into a beverage by the early settlers.) Mormons do tend to avoid stimulants in any case... My sister always says that if you can just get a rosemary plant through its first winter, it seems to catch on from there. Maybe this new one of yours will be THE rosemary...

      Delete