Garden Stuff

Early Americans have been much maligned for their presumed lack of fresh vegetables, particularly salads, as if our colonists had had to wait for the arrival of the Swiss Delmonico brothers to “discover,” as too many historians have said, not only salads but “endive, watercress, artichokes, sorrel, and eggplant.” The claim is nonsense, as we have seen in the gardening South. In the wintry North, the kitchen garden was harder dug and therefore all the more treasured. When Thoreau was not out gathering wild purslane for his salad, he was digging his bean field and moralizing on the virtues of husbandry. “Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York,” he writes in Walden, “I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry.”