New York City is under a heatwave worse than I have seen all summer and I am not gonna lie: I am enjoying every second of it.
Why is that, you ask? After all, the excessive heat made you miserable in July and brought you to the end of your wits in August. Well, since you are so curious, it means it’s still summer, and all the autumn fanatics with their pumpkin lattes and terracotta aesthetics have to take a chill pill.
“Oh, what a joyful day to frolic and play!” - Snagglepuss
Only a week ago I was getting out the door in the evening and feeling chilly. Oh well, I thought, that’s it for summer this year. It's time to bust out my knitting needles and check my stocks of rooibos and mate tea.
So now I am back to blissfully cranking up the air conditioners and dropping yet another ice cube in my hipster jar-with-a-handle of soda flavored with homegrown peppermint and thyme blossoms.
(It looks like Bing AI doesn’t know that peppermint blossoms are lavender colored, but I will let this one slide because I have just run out of them, so I can’t take a photo.)
Ever since I started gardening I used an ecology-driven mindset: The Garden was not to be punished into submission. Like everything that piques my interest, I had to study things more in-depth, so I took landscape design classes at the New York Botanic Garden. I may be a raging francophile (mais ouis, je parle français couramment), however, to me, the English style of gardening is the ultimate.
While I am still wrestling with weeds and invasives (one must find the right balance between “abandonment and overengineering” - see quotation below), I listen to what the patch of land has to say. Each year comes with a new surprise. 2023 gifted me with a profusion of Phytolacca (pokeberry) and purslane (along with an embarrassment of pears, but that’s a story for another time). Both were unintended crops, which I welcomed instead of banishing.
One of the delightful books I read this summer is Jenny Odell’s misleadingly titled “How To Do Nothing”:
"Abandonment and overengineering are two sides of the same coin: both are symptoms of a failure to value what already exists. Abandonment is the act of discarding something that is still useful or beautiful; overengineering is the act of creating something that is unnecessarily complex or redundant. Both are forms of waste and disrespect, both are expressions of a lack of care and attention."
It’s serendipitous. I am fascinated with the tall grasses of the prairie and with edible wild plants. Pokeberry falls in the first category. Around the time I noticed it popping up everywhere in my backyard, the algorithms brought this book to my attention:
Hence, here I am, dreaming of the intense magenta dye I will soon store in a pipette bottle.
Check back to read about other “lemons” my garden finds fit to gift me.