Steamed Chiogga beets, golden beets, and carrots with a pesto of fresh basil, green cayenne pepper, green garlic, preserved lemon and olive oil. The confluence of garden and CSA produce was weird enough that I may never make this again, but it was awfully good.

Lovebirds again: as before, facing each other over an unopened blossom, suggesting that they wait together for a greater love. The flowers this time are drawn from the love-in-a-mist I photographed the other day, and sketched from various angles, and simplified until I could carve it.

Appalling as it is, Apple’s new ad is perfectly on-brand, and makes a nice bookend with their first famous effort, forty years ago: it is what you get when liberation becomes not a means to flourishing but an end in itself. (Or, more cynically, a means only to consumption.)

A mini-review: Henry Bosco, Malicroix by Henri Bosco, translated by Joyce Zonana (New York Review Books, 2020).

The protagonist, Martial, has grown up cosseted by his adoptive family and bourgeois convention, spending his free time in a greenhouse where he grows flowers with a combination of scientific precision and sentimental appreciation. On being named the heir of his mysterious (indeed, near-mythical) uncle, he must find within himself something entirely different. That something might be called wildness, and it is as you would expect a kind of freedom—but a freedom born of solitary devotion to a single small place, which demands of him a severe duty.

“Bosco’s novel is a work of tremendous lyricism, but his meditations can also grow ponderous,” observes Kirkus Reviews. “It is a slow and quiet novel given to long descriptions of wind and rain and the Rhône.” But what appears to be stylistic convention serves to make the point of the novel. Martial must inhabit his small island not only physically but spiritually before he can come into his inheritance—an inheritance that is largely the island itself, but also something much greater.

It is one of those books that I only really understood after finishing it and am going to have to read again. I realize this is not everyone’s cup of tea, but if it is yours, and you have a very large cup to last the slow passages, I recommend it.

Love-in-a-mist, another of those perennials I must have planted from seed last spring but is only blooming now. A lovey flower with a much lovelier name than, say, “ranunculus.” (Update: it is actually in family Ranunculaceae. I should finish my research before posting.)

In the wide world I find
Nothing but disturbance, war and strife.
In my little garden
Love, peace, rest, and unity—
My flowers fight nevermore.

—Francis Daniel Pastorius, 1651–c. 1720

Zwei verliebten herzen / Haben einen schmertzen (Two beloved hearts have one pining)

Blessed Pascha to the Orthodox in the room!

For those of you in NC, I’m at the Greensboro Curb Farmers Market spring craft fair today from 11-4. It’s indoors, great for a rainy day!