bread alone

I.
Last weekend, we went to a new restaurant with a rooftop vegetable garden.  Roof-to-table has replaced farm-to-table as the ethos of the moment (presumably limited only by a citywide prohibition on raising swine).  A dramatic, mirror-lined staircase directed diners up to the roof, where a tidy vegetable bed was laid out in front of two benches and a sign asked you not to drink or smoke.  We had gone up in pairs while waiting for our food.  A couple was already sitting on one bench and the girl narrowed her eyes at me as though to indicate that they were having a conversation, so we went back down.  

For the record, the food was terrific.  If that roof garden produced the vegetables that led to my cavatelli with English peas and mint, then well done - it was delicious.  

But it was a plain vegetable garden - just a vegetable garden - that we were meant to admire, and after the prominent staircase leading upstairs, the flatness of the design disappointed me.  I thought of some photos I had seen recently of the gardens at Colonial Williamsburg.  It occurred to me that those early colonists - for whom famine was a not-unknown threat - nonetheless considered the design of their gardens to be important, and that they still donated valuable space in those gardens to flowers.  True, some of those flowers also had medicinal uses; but others, like the tulips, were grown merely for their beauty.

II.

We live in a time when chefs are celebrities, when food is a cult, when fellow diners instagram their entrees, when seemingly everything you put in your mouth, liquid or solid, has been analyzed, categorized and improved-upon.  Food is not merely sustenance but a demographic tell, a marker of refinement or rebellion.  Anyone who's been in New York restaurant at any point in the past few years can hardly have missed the sight of people avidly pinteresting their plates.  As a vegetarian, I'm often grateful to this cult of food, which has extended the reach of my diet far, far beyond tofu.  Other times the cult of food seems a bit tedious - exhausting, even.

The cult of food has, inevitably, spilled over into gardening.  I was speaking last summer with a family friend who owns a plant nursery, at one time little more than a roadside stand selling fruits and vegetables.  (This may shock those of you who think that the nickname "The Garden State" was ironically endowed, but central New Jersey used to be full of such stands: white paint slapped on wood, hand-lettered signs advertising cartons of tomatoes, corn and peaches.  In the past fifteen years, they've all disappeared under subdivisions.)   No one under forty is at all interested in gardening, he said mournfully, unless it is to grow vegetables and fruit: "Everything's about food these days."

Next to a recent article on the Waldorf Astoria's new roof garden (?!), the New York Horticultural Society blog had this to say: 

A beautiful bouquet of flowers is an endangered species, according to one of the nation’s leading experts, as gardeners throughout America devote almost all their energies growing vegetables instead of tulips, roses and a plethora of other flowers that formerly comprised a garden.

“Most urban agriculture projects consist mostly of vegetables and herbs with a few flowers on the side,” observed George Ball, a 35 year veteran of both the cut flower and vegetable business. The keynote speaker at the recent Urban Agriculture Conference held at New York University in Manhattan, Mr. Ball urged the more than 300 urban gardeners in attendance “to meet the great potential and pent-up demand for fresh flowers.”

Fresh cut flowers have almost vanished from urban homes, parties and other public and private events, according to Mr. Ball, past president of The American Horticultural Society and chairman and C.E.O. of the nation’s leading home gardening company, W. Atlee Burpee & Co.

Mr. Ball clearly has an economic incentive to fret about a declining interest in flowers, but alarms are coming from other quarters, too.  A biologist, responding to well-intentioned "Fruit Activists," pointed out that extreme piety regarding the use of urban outdoor space for agriculture could actually be counterproductive.  But what saddened me was this paragraph:

The crave for farms has even reached our urban parks.  When the High Line, the former railroad-turned-park, opened in Manhattan, the editor of the design magazine Dwell praised the park's sucess.  But he said nothing about the wildflower beds weaving through the abandoned tracks, yearning instead for the addition of 'vegetable gardens or chicken coops.'

Such a suggestion crosses a line into moralizing, and indicates a mistrust of, even a hostility to, plants that aren't somehow "productive."  (And a dreadfully narrow definition of "productive," for that matter: imagine the sensation of walking through this landscape, the feeling at dusk on this terrace.[1])  It is a profound misunderstanding of plants to equate the ornamental with the superficial.  After all, what drives the Slow Food movement may be concerns about sustainability and health, but no one suggests that the food shouldn't taste good, too.  Likewise, of course we should design gardens with an eye toward sustainability, and urban agriculture is important.  But beauty is no betrayal of the cause.

[1]On my walk home, over the past many months, I have watched the transformation of the greenstreets gardens near me.  In early spring, they flushed yellow with forsythia and swaths of daffodils, then blushed with cherry blossoms.  The chestnut tree greeted me with two weeks of white flowers.  Now it is the turn of the summer perennials: the red jester-caps of the bee balm (Monarda didyma), a smattering of flat-faced yarrow.