and smaller in the English countryside.




The Appetite of Earth

I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has somehow
got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it.
After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion
that I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat.
I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden
is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on
some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere
freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy.
Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal
as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard;
but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful as
the word "flower-garden," and yet also sounds more satisfactory?
I suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery:
that it contains things to eat.

The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once;
it can be realized by all senses at once. Compared with that
the sunflower, which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing
painted on a flat wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity
of things that can only be uttered by the metaphor of eating.
To express the cubic content of a turnip, you must be all round it
at once. The only way to get all round a turnip at once is to eat
the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has loved solidity,