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Turnip for the books
by David Hill
Why do vegetable fanciers languish in the land of the literary lost?
I like the Hamilton Gardens – the Cobham Drive ones, just over that scarily high bridge. I like the big aromatic bowl of Rose Lawn, with its memorial seat to a long-married couple: “She loved Life and Gardens; He was devoted to Road Safety and the Masonic Lodge.”
I like the noble working vege garden, the trees and statuary, the theme areas of the Chinese Scholar’s Garden, the Italian Renaissance Garden and three others.
I like the nifty little publication, Writers in the Gardens, that you can buy there for just $5. Elegantly edited by Gail Pittaway, it offers apposite quotations for each theme section. There’s Basho’s haiku for the Japanese Garden of Contemplation; Browning and Sitwell on the Edwardian Flower Garden; Tagore on the Indian Char Bagh Garden.
It’s worth the $5 just to read Marilyn Monroe’s life-changing summary of the whole botanical business: “I like playing around in the garden. It’s kind of fun.”
Yet Pittaway’s admirable anthology left me dissatisfied. All her pieces had a floral focus. There was absolutely nothing about the legumes, brassicae and main crops of Hamilton Gardens’ vegetable patch.
It’s ever been so. Lettuce get straight to the roots of the problem. It’s not that veges get a bad press compared to flowers. They get no press at all.
When have you ever read, “Oh spud, thou art sick/The invisible worm …”? Or “Consider the onions of the field, how they grow”? And why not? Simple – it’s the perennial blight of agricultural arrogance.
Think hard and long. Can you come up with any vegetable versifying other than “You say potayto and I say potahto/You say tomayto and I say tomahto”? Yet if that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, why don’t we call it an early season drumhead cabbage?
After all, vegetables have their own lyricism, their own symbolic significance and emotional associations. As the poet put it, “Breathes there a man with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said/‘This is my own, my native kumara patch’?” Yeah, he might have put it, but he never published it.
I accept that veges don’t always make the lyrical cut. I’m not pushing for “In Flanders Fields, the parsnips blow.” Or for “And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the late brussels.”
But vegetable fanciers languish in the land of the literary lost. You can bet that when Andrew Marvell recommended “green thoughts in a green shade”, he didn’t mean exhibition sugar-snap peas. And if “There is a garden in her face”, as Thomas Campion claimed, you can be sure there’s no kohlrabi up her nose or pickling gherkins in her ears.
Does anyone ever “say it with veges”, or sing of “the caulis that bloom in the spring, tra-la”, or ask “Where have all the tubers gone, long time passing”? How come the “Song of Solomon” never rejoiced that “My beloved has gone down into his garden, to gather scarlet runners”? It’s that horticultural haughtiness again.
Okay, Keats has Ruth among the alien corn – presumably a GE hybrid. Yeats promised himself nine bean rows at Innisfree. But apart from the feats of Keats and Yeats, poets are distressingly apathetic about artichokes, casual towards courgettes, somnolent about silverbeet.
Apart from “The Lady of Shalott”, all they’ve come up with is an effort by Anon: “Spinach is green./Tomatoes are red./I need you/like a hole in the head.” I reluctantly reject the suggestion that 19th-century writer/actress Maria Lovell meant to write “Two hearts that beet as one” for a fertiliser advert.
Yet with just a little inter-species inspiration, we could have had “Turnips are blooming in Picardy … My love is like a red, red pepper … tread the beetroot path of dalliance … take time out to smell the bok choi … the darling pods of May.”
Clearly, we need a bard of the broccoli, a muse of the mushrooms. If flowers can have their Basho, veges should have their Biffo.
It will be great if the first vege-versed Poet Floreate is a homegrown one. Then future editions of Gail Pittaway’s fine anthology can be full of beans.
