46 animal, vegetable, miracleters that spelled out something, like “mow me.” But in the end, after
considering the fact that nobody can see our house from the road, I de-
sisted in fancying myself the Michelangelo of Kale. These greens would
go into the vegetable bed, though I’ll tell you I am not above tucking a to-
mato or two into a handsome perennial border. Vegetables are gorgeous,
especially spring greens, arriving brightly as they do after a long winter of
visually humble grains and stored root crops.
Bronze Arrowhead lettuces, Speckled Trout romaine, red kale—this is
the rainbow of my April garden, and you’ll find similar offerings then at a
farmers’ market or greengrocer. It’s the reason I start our vegetables from
seed, rather than planting out whatever the local nursery has to offer: va-
riety, the splendor of vegetables. I have seen women looking at jewelry ads
with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what
they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January. In
my mind the garden grows and grows, as I affix a sticky note to every page
where there’s something I need. I swoon over names like Moon and Stars
watermelon, Cajun Jewel okra, Gold of Bacau pole bean, Sweet Choco-
late pepper, Collective Farm Woman melon, Georgian Crystal garlic,
mother- of-thyme. Steven walks by, eyes the toupee of yellow sticky notes
bristling from the top of the catalog, and helpfully asks, “Why don’t you
just mark the one you don’t want to order?”
Heirloom vegetables are irresistible, not just for the poetry in their
names but because these titles stand for real stories. Vegetables acquire
histories when they are saved as seeds for many generations, carefully
maintained and passed by hand from one gardener to another. Heirlooms
are open- pollinated—as opposed to hybrids, which are the onetime prod-
uct of a forced cross between dissimilar varieties of a plant. These crosses
do rely on the sex organs of the plant to get pollen into ovaries, so they’re
still limited to members of the same species: tall corn with early corn,
for example, or prolific cucumbers with nonprickly ones, in blends that
combine the ideal traits of both parents for one- time-only offspring.
These whiz- kid hybrid seeds have slowly colonized and then dominated
our catalogs and our croplands. Because of their unnatural parentage they
offer special vigor, but the next generation from these crosses will be of
an unpredictable and mostly undesirable character. Thus, hybrid seeds