From Word To Word

Midway through canning tomato sauce yesterday, my children began to lose patience.  This is understandable.  Tomato sauce day is a long, hard day.  So we turned off the pots, gathered ourselves, and set off for the park.  We picked up a neighbourhood friend along the way, a girl of five years old, one of the few children I have met who is capable of matching my eldest for energy.  Our time in the park was a good respite for everyone concerned, and we left far more agreeably than we had come.

On the way home, I discovered a small shrub growing in a garden along the street.  It had leaves reminiscent of a rosebush and small, yellow fruit that looked much like a miniature apple or pear.  As I was trying to determine, with my rudimentary gardening knowledge, what exactly this plant was, our young friend decided to pick one of the fruit and bite it.  We stopped her before she swallowed anything, and there are very few fruit that will do any great damage in small quantities, but I thought it might be best if I could identify it as quickly as possible.  I could hear the owner of the house behind the back fence, so I leaned over and asked if she knew what species the plant was.  She had no idea that the little bush even grew fruit.  All she could tell me was that it had pretty flowers in the spring, which was rather less than helpful.

By the time we reached our young friend’s house, shed was still showing no ill effects, and her parents informed us that she had eaten almost every berry in the area once already in any case, but I was still interested to know what plant we had discovered.  A brief internet search revealed what many other people probably would have known from the beginning, that it was a flowering quince, or a chaenomeles japonica, which is not only harmless but often used in jams and jellies.  The flowers, which range from white through pink to red, are quite attractive, and I have decided to plant a few in my garden.

What intrigues me though, is that none of the books or the sites that I have read, and I have read more than a few, ever listed flowering quince among the edible plants that could be grown in our climate.  Of course, none of them listed may apples or paw paw trees either, and I am curious about why these lists are so limited.  Many even omit common edible berries like saskatoon berries and elderberries.  Is this simply because they are not a viable commercial crop?  If so, how did the commercial viability of a food crop come to be equivalent with its edibility, where lists of edible plants include only the small fraction of edibles that are grown on a commercial scale?

These questions interest me because I wonder whether this is another way in which gardening can become a guerilla activity.  I have already mentioned my one friend who plants flower gardens in unattractive public spaces, and my other friend who rescues interesting local specimens from areas that are about to be developed.  Various others, including myelf to some extent, do what might be called guerilla gardening by growing only those plants that are local or those that are edible.  Many of us, though I have had some difficult decisions in this regard, have made a similarly guerilla decision to garden organically.  Might there also be a necessity for an intervention with respect to the kinds of edible plants that are grown, not just in terms of growing noncommercial varietals of commonly grown commercial crops, which is certainly necessary, but in terms of growing plants that are not viable commercially at all?  Is there a need for the home garden to develop these plants precisely because commercial gardens will not?  Is this a place where home gardens might perform a useful intervention?

I am not sure to what degree these questions are significant, but I am discovering that much of what commercial agriculture has passed over is good and useful and viable in the home garden, and I will make it a part of my gardening practise to include these plants whenever I find them.  It may not ever be very effective as activism, but, if nothing else, it will make my own cooking and my own table more varied and more interesting, and this is no small thing in my estimation.