Scrabbled Patch, Turn Thy GreenIn our corner of the state, we are lucky to have working for us an excellent conservation agency. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy's most famous charge is the magnificent Fallingwater and its surrounding grounds, but it would seem they will happily trouble themselves with any green space one would care to have them take the tending of. Our area is rife with these little flowered patches, decorated with color and heady with scent. They are most welcome pauses in between the thin lawns and the hard paving that are common under the foot.
This, too, is a place of food. Although the kitchens here are by convention cramped and sporting dubious topologies, more often than not lovely things come forth from them. On any given weekend, a church basement somewhere in this place is busy with the production of dumplings. I have mentioned our groceries; there are also farms, many surprisingly nearby, ready to sell actual things from the actual earth to come home and then turn into pie. A native friend of mine delights in far-flung vacations, but a corner of him is always anxious to return, in large part because of the food. In my experience they take the food seriously here.
My modest proposal, then, for the good folks at the WPC, is to put some herbs in there with the blossoms and the shrubs and flowering tree. Grow us basil, let thyme and lavender leak out of the plot onto the sidewalk to be trampled, perfuming the air. Bring out large clay tubs for the mint.
This is not to say that this would actually work. It is unfortunate that we live in the litigious way that we do, says my sinister self; were it a public herb plot for the public's consumption, I cannot fathom the combination of statute and spoiling stern sign that would offer any comfortable amount of indemnity, should anyone actually go and pluck the stuff for cooking in these troubled times. Come to that: what secret urban arts might be practiced upon the poor rosemary in the dead of night, under no eyes? It is unfortunate to think about.
(The WPC does have an active program in community vegetable gardens, and well worth investigation if only for that, though this is more a program of active participants set aside on ground under closer watch.)
But I would hope it to work, were someone to try it. It would be a solidly utilitarian gesture underneath the flavor and beauty, a not uncommon move on this part of the patch. Nothing builds a community like a garden, the quiet earth bound up in food. And they take the food seriously here.
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