Fleur-de-GardenTranslations

I remember Richard telling me the French word for sunflower—tournesol—literally means, “turn to the sun.”

“Isn’t that beautiful,” he said.

The poetry of nature in a word: Sunflowers really do turn their faces toward the sun.

My kids’ adventures with languages are something we share, although their fluencies are beyond my grasp. Words—I can deal with words—but complete sentences and actual conversations are another story.

On my last visit to Belgium, I got the bonjour and merci down pretty well for the French-speaking folks.  And in preparation for the Flemish next month, I’ve mastered hallo and dank u.

But the words I am finding most fascinating are the garden translations.

An East Indian cherry by any other name…

Marina and Koen have a garden plot not far from their home in Ghent. It was overrun by Jerusalem artichokes, or as Koen would say, aardperen—earth pears. They harvested kilos of aardperen last fall, preparing them in a variety of ways in the kitchen, just as they fix aardappelen—earth apples—or what we call potatoes.

Now I don’t know why we call garbanzo beans chickpeas, I mean, what are chick peas? But in Dutch, chickpeas are kikkererwten, literally frog peas. I can see more of a resemblance between frog eggs and chickpeas than chickpeas and chicken eggs.

To me, chickpeas look a lot like nasturtium seeds—and that’s where this word story gets really crazy.  Koen was insisting on growing East Indian cherries. Marina didn’t know how they’d grow a cherry tree in their small garden plot or their even tinier backyard. Lo and behold, Google Translate came to the rescue. Oostindische kers—East Indian cherries—translates into nasturtiums in English. Now I’ve read that unripe nasturtium seeds can be pickled as a substitute for capers—maybe that is where the “cherries” come in. There is also a Dutch painter born in Indonesia, Floris Arntzenius (1864-1925), whose artwork includes the recurring theme of ginger jars overflowing with “East Indian cherries”.  They sure look like nasturtiums to me.

Now all of this garden word play is pretty cool—or should I say kool?   There is witte kool (white cabbage) and rode kool (red cabbage) and savooikool (savoy cabbage) and bloemkool (cauliflower) and boerenkool (kale), so much kool that one day Marina said, “I’m going to make coleslaw with all of these kools.”  Then, she said, it finally clicked. The Dutch word for salad is sla. Kool+sla = our English coleslaw…cabbage salad.  Laurie Lynch

P.S. A few comments from Koen, my Dutch-speaking editor and champion English Scrabble player:

Although Marina made coleslaw with several cabbages and English speakers make plurals by adding an s or an es…not so with Dutch speakers. Normally, when a singular word contains a double vowel, such as kool, the second vowel is dropped and an en is added. The plural of kool is not kools but kolen.  The word for the Dutch singular of banana is banaan; a bunch of bananas is bananen. 

It is one thing to learn how to spell a few Dutch words…but it is time, Koen says, for Marina’s mom to move onto pronunciation…

http://www.digitaldialects.com/Dutch/Fruit_audio.htm

 

Fleur-de-Faith

It happens as the tail end of winter slowly creeps into spring.

I wake in the middle of the night, as the snow starts to recede and before birdsong lights the morning, with a haunting question: Did the garlic make it through the winter?

Oh ye of little faith.

The final pile of sanded, salted, and cindered snow melted last week in Centre County. It was time to trudge down to my garlic patch to check on my babies. Whew, every row was highlighted in evenly spaced green sprouts of garlic leaves pushing up through the mulch of straw and oak leaves. One young garlic plant actually skewered a brown leaf, piercing through its center.

As the soil heats up, I will gently pull the mulch back from the plants, allowing spring rains to enter freely, piling the mulch between each row, suffocating any weed seeds itching to germinate.

I Skype with Marina and breathe with relief. “My garlic’s up. It made it through the winter.”

“My garlic’s been up for months,” she reports from the land of Ghent, where nary a snowflake settled on the ground.

“We had such a brutal winter…I was afraid it might not make it,” I whisper, with the regularity of Punxsutawney Phil.

Oh ye of little faith.

What it might come down to is garden guilt.  You see, I was reading the Penn State Vegetable Guide and it recommended side-dressing garlic in March with a quarter pound of ammonium sulfate for every100 feet of row. The plants, PSU seems to say, need a St. Patrick’s Day nitrogen fix.

I don’t know about you, but in March I was planted on the couch under an alpaca blanket, hibernating with yet another Catherine Coulter FBI-shoot-‘em-up-non-suspense (the good guys/gals never die) library book. Venturing out to the frozen, snow-covered garlic patch with a bag of fertilizer is not my cup of Earl Grey.

Then I was sorting through my piles of papers, ruminating on the winter of tragic accidents, close calls, near misses, and yes, even loss. I found a clipping from The New York Times. A garlic grower was boasting about growing garlic bulbs the size of baseballs. Mine are closer to golf balls. Comparison breeds gnawing doubt.

I’ve been nurturing my garlic, up to a dozen or so varieties, for more than a quarter of a century. I grew garlic in the limey soil of the cement belt in Coplay, in the shale soil of Maxatawny Township, now in the clumpy clay of Happy Valley. Forget bulb envy, golf-ball size is good enough.

My winter garlic supply in the unheated garage is dwindling. It’s time for dinner. I reach for a bulb I moved to the kitchen and forgot about. There it is, in all of its glory, cloves full of spirit and sprout. It wasn’t planted and mulched with care, fertilized or coddled. No garden PhD coached those cloves, yet here they are, sprouting new green leaves, stretching out to capture the sun, and air, and life itself.

Oh me of garlic faith. Laurie Lynch

Written on Slate: “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”

– John Muir