First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter
I spent long years dreaming of English gardens. Obsessed from an early age with The Secret Garden (and with Dickon, if I’m being entirely transparent), I longed to get dirt under my nails, and sit on a picnic blanket in an Edwardian dress and an enormous straw-brimmed hat. Aged eight, I arrived at my school’s Book Day dressed in Mary’s winter outfit: a wool skirt, hat, and gloves, with a wooden-handled skipping rope in my hands. It was March, and an unbearably warm day – my sullen face, as I realized my fatal error, was a perfect match for Mary Lennox’s. And, like my fondness for wholly inappropriate outfits, my love of gardening was entirely vicarious; in real life, under the hot Australian sun, gardening was a sort of weekend punishment, something that had to be got through before I was allowed to pull my book out again.
When I arrived in England, I moved into a flat above a bank in Whitechapel. We had a concrete roof terrace, with a sofa my flatmate had found on the street, some temperamental pots of herbs, and a barbeque he made from an old oilcan. There was no getting away from the fact that it was mostly concrete. That spring, despite the rest of the city taking on a thousand shades of green, our street remained a persistent grey. I bought pots of lavender to keep above the sink in our kitchen, which helped, but I ached for a garden like the one Peter Rabbit raids, with rows of radishes, lettuces, and French beans to nibble on.
I now live in the countryside and, for the first time in my adult life, there are things growing in the garden that I can eat. Throughout spring I eat raw vegetables with gusto, as if I’d stumbled straight into Mr McGregor’s garden. I dip peppery radishes, sweet asparagus, and Tenderstem broccoli into the rich yolks of boiled eggs. I eat slices of generously buttered bread, alongside a handful of peas to pod, or find baby lettuces to peel apart and eat leaf by leaf. Happy hours are spent finding infinite ways of bringing the abundance of spring into the kitchen.