Hello,
As autumn approaches, I’m starting to feel that familiar tickle of back-to-school energy, a rhythm lodged in my body lo so many years ago. I know I’m not alone in this, but the feeling is especially keen this year because the littles are starting kindergarten -- how is that even possible? They were just tiny birds a minute ago! For that matter, just yesterday their shy mother was climbing the steps of the big yellow school bus driven by a kind man named Carl.
In addition to seasonal blooms, (never enough) berries and this year’s truly impressive crop of cherry tomatoes, my garden helps me keep track of time. The Eucryphia I planted when my son was just about kindergarten age now tops the roofline of our 2-story house and is the queen of the back garden. Now, in a few short weeks he’s getting married.
The countdown to our family celebration is accelerating, time is flying. So the time seems ripe to repost an essay I wrote last winter about transitions and tomatoes.
Love Apples
This recipe means the world to me and very likely is special to cooks and their loved ones the world over. The original is from the inimitable Marcella Hazan and is readily found all over the internet. This is my take on what has become a way to serve up "love on a plate.” I hope you’ll join me, all you need is an open heart, tomatoes, butter, and a single onion.
It was the summer of 2009 and we were getting ready to take our son off to college. I remember it was a glorious growing season because even though I should have been packing I was busy picking and preserving a bumper crop of tomatoes from my tiny back garden.
Truth be told, whenever I’m slightly overwhelmed, I take to the garden to “busy” myself, a practice that dates to when my son was a baby and I was more than a little bit overcome with parenting. Life improved when I convinced my neighborhood nursery to hire me to water plants which in turn launched my career in horticulture, but that’s a story for another day.
Fast forward roughly 18 years and that baby was leaving home. The car was full, as was this mother’s heart. Friends who were out of town let us stay in their house before the university’s official move-in day. An unfamiliar home is always still, but we were especially quiet as we looked ahead. Parents often center themselves when a child is in transition, I don’t want to do that. Our son was the one who was making a big leap, all my husband and I had to do was learn how to let go. It was very, very quiet in that beautiful home on a hillside overlooking Boise, my son’s new home.
So I did what I always do, I went to the garden where I found several perfectly ripe tomatoes on the vine. Did you know that tomatoes are sometimes referred to as love apples? I knew what we were having for dinner. I picked those tomatoes and went inside to find butter, an onion, and some dried pasta, pantry staples in most kitchens.
While the better part of a stick of butter was gently melting in a saucepan over medium heat, I cut an onion in half. Yes there were tears, but surely it was the onion. I sliced those hefty tomatoes and added them to the saucepan with the butter and a tiny splash of water. How many tomatoes? There’s no right number, go with what your heart feels is enough. Take care to not brown the butter, we’re feeling fragile, okay?
Cook the tomatoes, mashing them with a wooden spoon, until you get a coarse sauce. The smoother your sauce, the more it will cling to your chosen pasta, but no biggie. Place both halves of the onion cut side down into your tomatoes-turned-sauce. Reduce heat to a bare simmer — I know, one person’s simmer is another’s burble. The temperature markings on the knobs of my home stove have long worn off, so I just watch to make sure the bubbles are small and not angry.
I love my stove, a tiny Wolf model we purchased when my son was a baby, but admittedly it’s on its last legs. I’m always (pleasantly) surprised when I cook in another kitchen on a cooktop marked with temperature readings and burners that you don’t have to prime with a lighter like you’re camping.
Where were we? Place a lid on your lovely sauce and simmer on low for an hour or so until the sauce thickens, and the onion dissolves into individual petals. At some point you’re going to want to boil water for the pasta, but your work is essentially done. That is, except for the part about letting go.
Time travel to today. For the last 15 years life has been tumultuous, as I’m sure it has for so many. Hearts have been broken, healed, and filled to the brim many times over. The rest of it, sometimes so very messy, falls into place one way or the other. At the end of last year, our son asked his love to marry him. She said yes and now wears our family ring. I know this isn’t the end of life’s wild ride for them or us or anyone, but I know having love in our hearts is what makes it all worth living.
I’m so glad you’re here.
xo Lorene (aka Gardener Cook)
2025 Calendar Presale Launch
With 12 unique color study images, accompanied by seasonal thoughts and markers, these limited-edition print calendars are my love letter to the natural world and an encouragement to pay attention to every passing moment.
A calendar and a keepsake postcard collection in one, the 12 pages (+ cover) are loose, unbound, 5” by 7” sheets printed on durable 18 pt. paper. Display on a desktop photo easel or hang on the wall using a humble binder clip. As each month is over, simply trim along the guideline to create a postcard or small print that will add a little color to someone’s world.
Presale orders are now open. Calendars will begin shipping in late October. Preorders save you money and they help me plot and plan. Email subscribers get first dibs and can save $5.00 by entering the code: YAY2025 at checkout on orders placed through the end of September.
Again, save $5.00 on every calendar you preorder between now and September 20, 2023.
Recent writing: A Greenhouse Rooted in History, in The Seattle Times. A chronicle of generational friendship and neighbors helping neighbors, a relationship that the gardener describes as “friends, helpmates, garden barterers, and still to this day the family we choose.”
Color stories: For more than 6 1/2 years I’ve been creating color studies, simple watercolor grids (or not) on small sheets of watercolor paper. In my heart I am a storyteller, so I decided to call these color stories. Each color story is a collection of nine original 4- by 4-inch watercolor paintings assembled in a unique color palette. That is, each one relates to the others in the set. Some of these color studies are several years old, others may be as recent as last week. These are not precious paintings; they are colorful remnants of my daily practice.
Let’s Color
With cooler days, fog and rain in the forecast the tomato countdown commences when every gardener’s prayer is simply please, please, please…
Begonia, a Love Story
Seduced by the promise of orange flowers, I picked up a weary pot of Begonia sutherlandii from a nursery sale table in late summer. A species begonia nearly unknown in the trade, the plant had few leaves and even less promise.
Surprisingly, the tiny begonia was with me for years. Until it wasn’t. Who knows what tipped my plant—now grown into a sizable clump—into the abyss? An arctic blast. A wet winter. Neglect. But once it was gone, I missed it. For years, I scanned plant sales and nurseries, looking for my darling’s lime-green foliage, fleshy ruby stems, and tumbling mass of simple blossoms.
Long story short—how other people’s love lives do drag on—I finally found another small plant. This time I value and tend to my treasure. One of the gifts of garden making is the possibility of joy and discovery, or rediscovery. Maybe especially rediscovery.
— from my book, Color In and Out of the Garden
I realize a fading liver-colored zinnia isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I find it to be exquisite.
If only I could learn to grant myself the same grace when it comes to aging. The garden teaches me life lessons, but sometimes I’m a reluctant student.
‘Dying Embers’ is a terrible name for a beautiful hardy fuchsia with moody eggplant and crimson ballerina-like blooms. Plants from friends are the best.
Geranium ‘Rozanne’ is a bit much. The plant begins blooming in May and never flags until frost cuts her down to the ground at which point she spends winter dormancy plotting her next garden incursion. Seeding about is not a problem. Honeybees love the nectar, but typically plants that bloom for months and months are sterile. However, ‘Rozanne’ has hybrid vigor in spades and this summer we’ve hit critical (purple) mass.
My plans for this weekend include imposing a few geranium guardrails and thinning the 8 plants that now threaten to swallow the garden whole.
For 11 months of the year my appleberry vine (Billardia longiflora) is a total snooze. Pale yellow bell-like blossoms in early summer are okay I guess and the wiry stems and lance-like evergreen leaves on the small vine are interesting if you stop and look very, very closely. But boy howdy, when the berries ripen in July, this shy, retiring plant commands center stage.
It doesn’t matter how big my cherry tomato has grown this year (ginormous — about 15 feet, thanks for asking), the floral abundance (almost too much so) of Geranium ‘Rozanne’ or the tidiness of the pleached crabapple hedge, it all fades to black in the face of these tiny metallic purple blue fruits.
It's rare that I get through one of your emails without a few tears, and this one was no exception. I echo Clarey's comment. You write exquisitely.
You always touch my heart with your beautiful writing.