Late Summer Renewal
There is the bending over the garden bed in the spring, to closely examine the hopeful basil’s opposing leaves in shoot. Then, pulling the grass and weeds to allow the thing to move toward mature leafing, toward perpetuation of its aromatic species, toward that moment when one may steal its lovely leaves. Watch and wait. Ahh, life.
This summer, the basils are, well, GLORIOUS, for lack of a less haughty descriptive! A rather high-strung patroness of our farming establishment REFRAINED from her usual impetuous didactic last week, halted in her tracks and blurted, “I have NEVER seen basil as wonderful as this.” See what I mean? So glorious has been this verdant growth that you forget to be sullen, forget to be jealous because you are lost in wonder, drunk with awe like the heads-buried pollinating bees! You cut leaf after gorgeous leaf…
And so on, and so on.
Then, the heavy breath of dog-days-summer is interrupted by a gust of cool northwest wind and you look up to see what is happening, and the basil has gone to seed when you look down. THE END, in big letters, to lush basil leaves…but wait, there is one last hoorah, one last concentrated dash to harvest…
Snip and steal those flowering seed tops, raise them to that northwest wind and…run inside quickly! Lay them on your table, take pictures with your I-PAD and blog about them, hold onto them…slide your hand down the seed stem to release the flowering pods, chop them and cook with them, concentrated little seed tops that they are!
Yes. Even more wonderful, their flowering essence, than early leaves.
