Let them eat lotus

At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

But if you are in the mood for the aquatic flowers' interesting, edible rhizomes (or for pork buns, for that matter), you need to visit Chinatown. The seeds are edible too - I've seen recipes for their use ranging from soup [the link, Kitchen Tigress is worth a visit] to snacks, where they are puffed, like rice. They sound about as easy to handle as hominy (some of you may recall the epic, multi-day pozole I made, once, with heirloom, artist-grown Indian hominy): much soaking and cleaning.

The seed heads. Good design for shower heads.

A way to start

Good morning.

Gardening for cats

...my next book.

Not really. I think it should be a novel about the last days of the United States post office.

But I do garden for the cat. He has his little green carpet, with the creeping Jenny, where he likes to hang out during the day, under the shade of the Heuchera leaves, and he has his space between the pots on the side of the terrace, so that he can jump from the stone table to prowl on the roof. Or sit and stare down at us while we eat dinner.

The other night we heard the familiar and rare click of a katydid. Green cicadas, the cat calls them, and he says they taste like cat candy. His ears pricked up and he shot to the roof and began swiping at the climbing rose. We liked the katydid and did not want it to be eaten. The Frenchman shot off after him,  and performed a dramatic aerial rescue of the katydid, to the disgusted amazement of the cat. It was his birthday and we had just removed his present from the universe.

The katydid was equally unimpressed, rejecting its new housing in the middle tiers of the rose, and flying into an oak tree across the road, where we hear its chirruping clicks every night, while we eat dinner.

Summer roses

My August roses, picked yesterday evening. They make me very happy.

Munstead Wood (red), Abraham Darby (pink), and Lady Emma Hamilton (seen in the reflection, only).

I wish you could smell them.

I was going to work today, but I may play hooky. I have a mushroom feeling. We have had showers.

Chinatown's summer produce

After a trip to the East Village yesterday - my last visit to Izumi, who has been cutting my hair for ten years, now, in her little silver-painted back room salon, and who is moving to Hawaii - I walked south through Chinatown to collect my post office box mail, which accumulates every month for me. 

I haven't been to Chinatown in a while, and was thrilled by the summer  produce. It is a forager's paradise. I bought an armful of yard long beans, which hang from my bag like a coiled lasso.. 

Waterlilies! I learned only recently that they are edible - I've known about lotus root for a long time, but one seldom sees the waterlily stems.

I passed on the dragonfruit and the longans (should have bought those, though) and acquired instead 3 lbs of rambutans - the litchi-like fruit whose skin is covered in wiry prickles.

But I forgot that, once you get to the fruit flesh, there is persistent little layer of skin right beside the pit that sticks to the fruit. Annoying. Litchis and longans don't do that. There were mangosteens, too, the even more beautiful version of the previous three, but at $8 a pound they were not for me.

At home I Googled the words written above these green fruit: trai hoc. Hog plum. Spondias mombin.

Giant bamboo shoots. 

I was already lugging a green papaya the size of a football, my beans, the mangosteens and fresh galangal (above), which one does not see, often: it's usually wizened little stumps in the dried spices section of an adventurous shop.

The lady who sold me the leaves above did not speak English. I had no idea what they were but thought they might fragrant, a herb rather than a vegetable. At home, they turned out not to be, and a posting to a Facebook page for plant identification soon identified them as kangkong, Ipomoea aquatica. We had already eaten then raw - and washed very well - in a spicy salad the blanched yardlong beans and green papaya, dressed with fish sauce, lime juice, galangal and ginger (yum), but now I know they are usually cooked quickly with a little soy, garlic and shrimp paste.

I'm going to have to go back.

Working weekend

It was a working weekend. The joys of freelancing, as my friend Johan recently quipped. Ain't no weekends, sometimes. No boss, either. And you can drink at your desk. This gin and tonic was packed with mint. I recommend it.

I was happy to be designing a garden again - herbs, my first love - this time for print, a new magazine that will launch soon in South Africa. More about that when it happens.

And every now and then I dipped into the pages of my book, just to make sure it is real.

Pots of flowers

When Estorbo is tired of wandering the roof, but can't get back inside because the sliding door is closed, he will sometimes park himself here, in his well-used ford in the tide of plants.

The seed-grown purple basil is making me proud. It is so perfectly purple. Just looking at it makes me want tender mozzarella. And figs. And tomatoes.

There it is again. But I think the chives, back left, need renewing.

Surprise. After being cut back the newest of my four clematis made it to the top of the climbing Iceberg. But what's its name? I have forgotten - I know it's from Glover Perennials, on the North Fork of Long Island.

The Iceberg itself continues to recover. Leaf cutter bee action on the right.

The fall anemones continue to bloom in summer. (Gloriosa tendrils in the foreground.)

And the unveiling...

It lives. The fig. After The Pruning, I admit I was worried. Root pruning plus severe branch pruning. I think we'll have ripe figs by late September.

And I can't wait.

Actually, I can.

Sometimes waiting for the good things is the best part.