In my youngest years my storybooks were filled with talking animals and idealized European countrysides, complete with hedgerows and primroses, but it took the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to show me bluebells. Beneath giant elms whose green shade intensifies the miraculous May blue, the bluebells are like a sky fallen, sleeping in the green. It seems impossible that this unlikely paradise lies between the unromantic arteries of Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway. Yet it does, suspended in disbelief.
Early in the month I walk through Brooklyn Heights to the Promenade, at the end of Remsen Street. I sense the scent of Dutch irises before their lavender forms take shape in the dusk. Here is a real garden behind a low wrought-iron fence, where someone takes bearded irises seriously. Their perfume is a rarely considered garden pleasure. Twenty feet of flowers in the gray light belie the proximity of the hidden and vibrating two-layer, six-lane Brooklyn-Queens Expressway hidden just yards away and below. A few weeks later, roses will have opened in among the fading irises.
On Congress Street a week later the air feels different. There are unfamiliar shadows on the bluestone sidewalk. It is the presence of layers and layers of leaves. The tall trees that line every block have turned from a collection of separate branches traced in tentative lime to a thick and unified green canopy, each crown meeting the next to create the pools of shade we have not known or needed since last summer. Oaks, plane trees, maples, lindens, and callery pears blur their early spring and winter distinctions. Leaves brushing each other in the wind add a new sound to the living layer of the city’s grid.
Roses are everywhere. On Union Street beside the stagnant and oil-streaked Gowanus Canal they bloom red in a sidewalk garden—a backdrop for yellow loosestrife and indigo salvia. At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden the view from an overlook down to the Cranford Rose Garden is curiously ageless, the white gazebo, the soft green grass in rows between beds, the wire arches with clematis just beginning to bloom and the collections of roses, old and new, shrub and rambler, single, double, cupped, or flat as saucers. Up close the variety is endless and the scent is rich, even at midday under a paling and warm sky. Visitors press their noses repeatedly into the hearts of flowers and inhale. Sarah Owens, the rosarian, walks up and down, watchful, with her Felcos holstered on her hip, and pollinators buzz among the perennials and annual borders she has planted nearby to bring back healthy insect life.
At the farmers’ market at Borough Hall I pounce on the first real strawberries. Under the market’s white awnings, small plump berries from New Jersey are heaped into pale blue cardboard boxes, row upon row. The air above them is thick, saturated with the aroma of the first fruit of the new year. It has been a long, long wait. At home I eat the first two layers straight out of the box, without thinking, standing at the kitchen counter and swallowing the warm fruit whole. Our evening drink is a heresy of light red wine, ice, and the sweet, sliced strawberries. It tastes superb.
Late in the month Vincent escorts me to Staten Island. He has experienced a sea change about the most dismissed of New York City boroughs. His first photographic trip here involved becoming stuck in thick mud that he scraped off his legs with useful leaves that turned out to be poison sumac. He never forgot that. Neither did I. Then he discovered—on Google Maps, the way we often find green places to explore in the city—a series of parks near the southern end of the island, and was intrigued. We catch the orange ferry across the harbor, and I set foot on the Staten Island subway for the first time in twelve years of New York life. It travels above ground!
Two stops short of the end of the line, we walk through a suburban neighborhood thick with trees and rampant Japanese knotweed, now shoulder-height. Washing hangs on lines above tall, uncut grass. We cross a busy road and then we are in the woods of Mount Loretto. Leaf humus is soft and damp beneath our feet. Recent rain has produced crops of puffballs in heaps of woodchips. The first striped mosquitoes of the season hover and we break out our South African bug repellant and apply war paint. Leaving the sea-green woods, we walk through fields of grasses edged by tall trees and a church steeple on the horizon. Naturalized and invasive Rosa multiflora turns the landscape into an undulating series of confettied hedges. Native wild roses (Rosa virginiana), single, pink, and reticent, scramble amongst the weeds. A brown rabbit watches us, unafraid. An osprey sails overhead with a fish in its talons. We reach a beach and see a massive tanker pass in the channel, bound for the open ocean. Here, at the high-tide mark, I find a new flower in bloom, belonging to a shrub I do not know. It turns out to be leadplant, and is beautiful, even before I know its name. Turning back toward the woods, we pass dense colonies of common milkweed, all in bud, so many that I am able to gather a bagful without feeling guilty at depriving a monarch butterfly of a place to lay her eggs. Another small brown rabbit nibbles the grass nearby.
In this state park in a city of 8.3 million people, we have passed just five other humans on Memorial Day weekend, on the cusp of summer.
Common milkweed buds are a wonderful vegetable. They taste like a cross between tender broccoli and green beans, but it is an unfair comparison, as their flavor is unique. Pick them when the buds are tightly closed, and include at least 4 inches (10 cm) of the tender stalk, too, which is perfectly edible when young. The white latex from the cut stem flows freely and is very sticky. Take care not to collect any larvae of ladybugs, which favor the plants as nurseries.
At home, remove all but the topmost leaves. Submerge the stems and buds in a deep basin of salted water. If there are any hidden insects, they will emerge, swearing.
As a light meal with or without some brown rice, or as a side dish, this is memorably good.
SERVES ONE OR TWO 
12 milkweed buds with stems
Salt
1 tablespoon coconut or unscented oil
1/2 thumb-size piece of ginger, peeled and very thinly sliced into matchsticks
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon sugar
Freshly ground black pepper
In a saucepan, bring enough salted water to a boil to cover the milkweed. Blanch the buds and stems for a minute to dispel the latex. Drain and refresh under cold water and pat dry very, very well with a dishcloth or paper towels—the buds tend to absorb a lot of water.
In a saucepan over medium heat, heat the oil. Add the ginger and sauté gently for a few minutes until cooked through. Increase the heat and add the soy sauce, lemon juice, and sugar, stirring briskly to dissolve the sugar. Add the blanched milkweed. Toss several times to heat through and coat with the glaze, and season with pepper. Serve immediately.
In these longer, softer days stems have grown tall, so that when I look out at the terrace I see leaves, bending in the slight, warm ruffle of mid-May. Pale strawberries have replaced their white flowers in the collection of pots on the edge. Their serrated foliage is becoming extravagant, no longer the hunched rosettes of early spring. Within a week the fruit is plump and pure crimson.
The catnip flowers are two shades deeper than the sky. Lilac chive buds are opening. I continue with my spring breakfast ritual—boiled eggs with the juicy chives snipped into their hearts.
I plant out my tiny purple basil seedlings, arranging their small pots where the flush of dark leaves will contrast with the calamintha of summer. Three breba figs look as though they may ripen on the tree, giving me a taste of the main crop to come, which will form on new, green growth. The breeze curls over the roof from the harbor and the fig’s branches vibrate. A white eddy of rose petals swirls to the gravel.
This is the month of roses. They are my first, and will be my last, flower love. My mother had a rose garden in Bloemfontein where each shrub grew in its own square cut-out of earth in the clipped grass that formed the rows of paths. They were stiff hybrid teas with perfect blooms and rich scent. My small hands handled their first pair of sharp Felcos in that garden, cutting their stems (and my thumb, too, bright child’s blood) with its fierce blades. In Brooklyn my own roses climb from two big pots in opposite corners of the terrace, meeting halfway above the sliding door in a drift of white and shell pink. The Iceberg arrived by mail from Texas years ago and covers a wall, partially hiding the air conditioner, and always trying to escape toward our northern neighbor across the rough silvertop in between. The New Dawn was a five-foot pink teepee, a floral ice cream cone, when I bought it from a Long Island nursery. It blooms abundantly but briefly in small tender knots, with a light second flush. I never fail to speculate coldly whether the months of waiting are worth it. These two weeks arrive, and I forgive it everything—the sharp prolific thorns, the lanky growth, the insignificant rebloom.
The climbers are the first to flower and I am acutely aware that I wait all year for these full-blown days of rose blossom. I watch them open almost sadly, knowing how brief, but very sweet, this will be. After midnight I hear the petals of the New Dawn drop in muffled clusters to the terrace floor, entire flowers letting go and falling at once. It is a rare sound, beautiful and final. Sometimes I gather the petals and toss them four floors down, to float to the street, a ghostly petal parade in the dark. A girl walks home alone from a night out, high heels clicking on bluestone sidewalk. I want to hear her laugh as she looks up, and sees them fluttering down, silken confetti.
After a day of gray rain out of the south and turning west—the northern effects of the season’s first tropical storm off the Carolinas—the shining gravel floor is carpeted in bruised petals. When the weather clears I will begin deadheading.
The English shrub roses are less fraught, chosen for their ability to rebloom until frost. Living in the sun on the terrace edge, their cut flowers, cupped and fragrant, fill old dairy bottles collected from our forays to Dead Horse Bay. This is luxury, these peony-like flowers of rich apricot and pale pink, a transportable pleasure, small and impermanent Dutch Masters. Abraham Darby’s extravagant petals arch over Henry Street. Red Munstead Wood, whose depths tend toward black, inspires me to go in search of deep purple heliotrope for night scent on the coming summer terrace. In Cape Town, when we visit, we smell the heliotrope shrub planted outside my bedroom window all night long. Here, it will be a small annual.
The clematis is completing its sprawling, purple ascent to the top of the Iceberg rose and is a cloud of petals late in the month. Etoile Violette is a generous plant, reviving from the dry sticks that I cut back hard in winter, and is now a vertical and billowing presence in the small space.
On one of the first long, sunlit evenings we picnic on the roof, cirrus clouds diffuse under a sky made wider by vapor trails crossing and feathering the stratosphere. A blue jay skims the silvertop, performing split-second evasive maneuvers—surprised by the two humans who disrupt his mapped topography. We sip our wine and wave at our neighbor Nora Rawlinson on her roof to the west, above Congress Street, where she snips at the wisteria on her pergola. She holds up her cat, Coco, who is leashed, to wave at Estorbo. The network of rooftops declines the conformity of the streets below, sight lines skipping houses and bridging gulfs in between. We are a diminished and elevated population in the golden light. Chimney swifts dart above us in pursuit of insects, their twittering high and sweet.
In the pots on the silvertop the nasturtiums have made green umbrellas, white currants are incomplete strings of hard pearls, volunteer lamb’s quarters are ready to eat, and the small tomato seedlings and cucumbers have been planted out. Green garlic is a foot tall; squash leaves grow rounder overnight. The trout lettuce has spots. I sow more of these beautiful leaves at the tomatoes’ feet—they will welcome the later shade in summer. The rose that I moved to the roof to recuperate is in full bloom.
The air is soft, and my hair curls for the first time in the year. Up here there is a feeling of weightlessness. We can breathe. The copper domes of Ellis Island across the water look like a silhouetted Kremlin, and Jersey is a distant frontier in receding layers of sunset rose and smoke. Below us on the terrace the braai fire is smoldering. When its coals begin to glow we move downstairs again to grill our supper. At the stone table we eat with the fire pleasantly warm at my back, the scent of the roses falling around us.
Our outdoor life has begun. The sun drops, and the light with it. In the first gray of evening the robin’s oscillating song begins again from the old television antenna on the roof across the road.
Summer is coming.
This delectable soup is liquid comfort. Born and bred in New York, it is the most appropriate thing to sip on the silvertop as we watch the busy New York world go by, on the water and in the sky.
Chopped chives are a mandatory garnish.
SERVES FOUR
6 to 8 leeks
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 medium potatoes, peeled and sliced 1/4 inch (6 mm) thick
4 cups (1 L) hot vegetable or chicken stock
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2/3 cup (160 ml) cream
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Chopped chives, for garnish
Cut the leek tops off where they begin to thicken and turn green. Slit each leek down the middle from the cut end to just above the intact root end. Submerge the leeks in cold water and rinse the layers to remove any grit. Dry. Slice the leeks crosswise very thinly.
In a saucepan over medium heat, heat the olive oil. Add the sliced leeks. Cover and let the leeks sweat over gentle heat for 5 minutes. Uncover and cook 5 minutes more, until the leeks are softened. Add the potato slices and stock. Bring to a simmer. Cook until the potatoes are tender, about 10 minutes. Taste and add salt and pepper as needed. Cool the soup a little and blend in batches until very fine. Pass it through a strainer into a deep bowl. Add the cream to the cool, strained soup and stir very well. Add the lemon juice and taste again, adding a little more salt if needed. Chill thoroughly and stir well before serving.
Served cold with mayonnaise, sliced thinly and tossed, raw, in a vinaigrette, pureed into a cold soup, folded into a cool mousse—local asparagus are at their peak. Serve hot or cool.
SERVES FOUR
1 bunch asparagus
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 450°F (220°C).
Snap off the bottoms of the asparagus if they are tough. Lay the asparagus spears in a single layer in a roasting pan or rimmed baking sheet and sprinkle the olive oil over them, followed by the lemon juice. Season well with salt and pepper. Add 1/4 cup (60 ml) water to the pan. Roast, shaking the pan a couple of times, until just tender, about 15 minutes. Remove. Eat.
There are no quantities given—they are up to you. Only one caveat: The strawberries must be perfectly ripe.
Place a handful of strawberries in individual bowls. (I pick the fruit literally right before serving.) Sprinkle the berries with a little brown sugar. Pour over some cold prosecco. Each spoonful transforms in your mouth from whole berry to sweet juice mingling with the wine, epitomizing the ephemeral pleasure of seasonal eating.
The May farmers’ markets are gorgeous. Ramps, rhubarb, asparagus, and strawberries arrive in succession. Long days and sunshine until after eight at night encourage an end to slow food and a return to simpler cooking and meals tuned to the rediscovered joy of eating outdoors.
The little stone table is scrubbed, a cloth laid across it, candles lit, and a jar of terrace flowers placed in front of the mirror that reflects all good things, including helpful candlelight. A chicken is marinating, waiting for the coals in the braai to acquire just the right hint of ash over glowing red. I pick a bunch of flat-leaf parsley.
Everything tastes better outside.
Four Alarm Roadkill Chicken with Avocado Cream
Gin and Bitter Lemon season has begun, inspired originally by Gabriella Hamilton, who offered this combination at Prune, her restaurant on East 1st Street. Now I sip mine from nineteenth-century Woodstock—the first commercially made glass in South Africa, and in daily use (and peril) in our apartment—as I water the roof farm: check a plant, sip, pick some nasturtium leaves, sip. Touch the soil, sip.
MAKES ONE DRINK
3 ounces (6 tablespoons) good gin
Bitter lemon
Pour the gin over ice in a tall glass, and top with chilled bitter lemon. Add thin slices of lime and stir. This cannot be drunk indoors. Stick your head out of window to sip, if you must.
Nasturtiums are a wonderfood, stuffed with anti-everything properties: antibiotic, antifungal, antiseptic. They are small green medicine chests and immunity boosters. My mother used to tell me to wrap some cheese inside a nasturtium leaf to help cure a sore throat, and I would walk round the garden solemnly, curing myself. It’s a good snack, too. Piled on avocado, they are a bold foil for its green creaminess. Substitute any peppery leaf, such as young mustard or arugula, if you are not growing your own nasturtiums. (But grow your own nasturtiums.)
SERVES TWO
1 ripe Hass avocado, pitted, peeled, and cubed
1 cup (55 g) loosely packed nasturtium leaves
SHERRY VINAIGRETTE FOR A VERY SMALL SALAD
1 teaspoon sherry vinegar
Pinch of sugar
Salt
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
6 turns of a pepper mill
Just before serving, pile the avocado pieces in the middle of a bowl or serving plate. Heap the greens on top.
In a small bowl, whisk the vinaigrette ingredients. Drizzle over the salad.
With a name like that it better be good. It is.
Whether cooked under a blazing hot broiler in a pan to catch the juices, or grilled over a fire, this disconcertingly flat chicken has become a versatile standard in our house. Traditional spatchcocking—cutting the bird down the backbone—still leaves the bloody (literally) question of how to cook the thigh and drumstick area through without scorching and drying the rest of the bird over one-directional heat. This method of splitting the entire breast from the body solves the problem. The wonderful bonus is crispy skin, all over.
Use a very sharp little knife (my high-carbon, $10 Opinel is perfect) or poultry shears to cut straight back through the rib cage from the cavity, moving all the way back to above the wing joint. Repeat on the other side. This separates the breasts and breastbone from the rest of the bony carcass—the thighs, legs, wings, and back. Now pull that breast section back and flatten the whole bird as if it were a new, thick book open to the middle page for the first time. You’ll hear a little crack. You now have an extra long chicken, but one where the heat can reach in and cook every part evenly.
If you want to feed hungry friends—the best sort—you may need two chickens. In that case, double the marinade quantities.
SERVES TWO (WITH LEFTOVERS)
1 medium chicken, split as directed above
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
Juice of 3 limes (about 1/3 cup / 80 ml)
1 tablespoon hot chile flakes, or 3 small fresh chiles, chopped
5 tablespoons (20 g) finely chopped parsley
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Avocado Cream, for serving (see this page)
In a large flat dish or large bowl place your split-apart chicken. If it can lie flat, good—if it can’t, not to worry. Toss the garlic, lime juice, chile, and parsley over the bird. Season generously with the salt and pepper. With your hands, turn the chicken over several times to distribute the ingredients and their flavors well. (Wash your hands afterward.) Place the chicken in the refrigerator to marinate, covered, for at least 1 hour and up to 12, if you are a good planner.
If you are using a broiler, transfer the chicken and its marinade to a shallow roasting pan. The chicken should be stretched out in the pan, skin side down. Preheat the broiler. When hot, cook the chicken for 20 to 25 minutes. When it is good and dark brown, and the pan juices are sizzling, turn it, just once. Baste the skin side with the juices. Cook for another 20 to 25 minutes, until the skin is dark brown and crispy, with a few charred spots. If the pan looks dry, add a little water—the sticky, tart juices are delectable. Remove the chicken from the oven and allow it to rest in the pan for 10 minutes. Carve the chicken into joints, slice each breast, and serve in a wide dish, with the pan juices spooned over the top.
If you are grilling over coals, use plenty of hardwood charcoal, and wait until a fine layer of ash has formed over red coals before transferring the chicken to the grill. Cook the chicken about 4 inches (10 cm) above the coals, starting with the inside down (it can take more abuse than the skin side, and the fire will be hotter at the beginning of cooking) and checking periodically that dripping fat does not ignite flames. After about 20 minutes, flip the chicken and cook for 20 to 25 minutes more, until the skin is dark brown and crispy, with a few charred spots. Transfer the braaied chicken to a large platter. Cut the bird into pieces, carve the breasts and slice them, rearrange them on a warm plate, and spoon any juices from the platter over the top.
Once you reach the deliciously crisp and sticky parts of the wing tips and back, which are mostly skin and morsels of tender meat, this becomes food for eating with your hands. The genteel might like a finger bowl. Provide large napkins and serve with the avocado cream alongside.
A creamy mouthful for the spicy chicken.
MAKES ABOUT 1/2 CUP (120 ML)
1/2 ripe Hass avocado, pitted, peeled, and cubed
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
In a small bowl, mash the avocado into a cream. With a fork, work in the mayonnaise and lemon juice. Taste and season with salt and pepper.
The perfume of local strawberries will remind you that the ubiquitous, rigid berries you see year-round in stores have no right to the name strawberry. My own plants provide handfuls of berries through the year, but I can’t resist buying more, en masse.
Pâte sablée is a rich shortcrust pastry that I use again and again for desserts involving fruit, filled with wobbly custards or with whipped cream. It is heavy on butter, very light in texture, crisp and delicate. A little goes a long way. It pairs sublimely with very ripe, soft strawberries and is a decadent partner for fresh strawberry sauce.
For this cross between a tart, a trifle, and a fool I break up the baked, brittle pastry into shards and layer it with whipped cream and strawberries in coupes. For this dessert you need about a quarter of the pastry that this recipe yields. I freeze the remainder in individual, flattened balls for later use as shells for tarts that hold custard or flat discs onto which I heap fresh raspberries reclining on a pillow of whipped cream or Greek yogurt. Otherwise you could use it all at once, cutting out and baking many flat, delicious cookies.
SERVES TWO
1 cup (200 g) unsalted butter
3/4 cup (100 g) confectioners’ sugar
2 egg yolks
1 drop vanilla extract
Salt (if using unsalted butter)
2 cups (250 g) flour
1 cup strawberries
1 tablespoon sugar
Squeeze of fresh lemon juice
2/3 cup (160 ml) whipping cream
2 teaspoons superfine sugar
Make the pâte sablée: Grate the butter into a large bowl and allow to soften a little. Work the confectioners’ sugar into the butter. Stir in the egg yolks and vanilla. Add the salt. Gradually add the flour until you have a ball of pastry. Be gentle and do not overwork it. Divide the ball in quarters, wrap each in parchment paper, and refrigerate, or freeze for later use. Refrigerate the piece you are using for 1 hour before rolling it out.
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Lightly butter a baking sheet.
On a lightly floured work surface, flatten the pastry a little with your hand. With a rolling pin, roll the pastry away from you, giving it a quarter turn every time. Repeat until it is about 1/16 inch (1.5 mm) thick.
Using a pastry cutter, press out several discs about 3 inches (7.5 cm) across. Lift each with a spatula onto the prepared baking sheet. Bake until the pastry is barely golden, about 8 minutes. Allow the discs to cool for a few minutes on the tray—until they are cool, they remain very flexible and fragile. Lift them carefully off the tray onto a wire rack to finish cooling. The pastry can be baked up to 2 days in advance, then stored in a sealed container until needed.
Make the strawberries: Rinse and hull the berries, in that order. If you remove their green tops and then rinse them they will turn soggy. Dry them gently and well. Mash half the berries with the sugar and lemon juice. Transfer this rough sauce to a bowl. Of the remaining berries cut any large ones in half and put them with the rest of the berries into the sauce. Allow them to macerate for a couple of hours, chilled.
Make the cream: Whip the cream with the sugar until it forms soft peaks. Chill.
Just before serving, break 3 of the pastry cookies gently into large-ish pieces. In coupes or pretty glass bowls layer the cookies with the whipped cream and macerated strawberries. Serve at once.
Later, in raspberry season, use raspberries instead.
If you have baked a lot of cookies, using all the pastry, they can easily be a more formal dessert:
Top a cookie with a layer of whole, evenly sized fruit, and top with another cookie, which balances on the strawberries beneath to make a house. Dust with confectioner’s sugar. Serve with a small fork and spoon, and extra sauce on the side. Perfect buttery crumbliness collapses into red pools of ripe fruit.
