I'm hoping this photo will be the first in a 'before and after' set. Here is a pot, freshly planted with lisianthus in the back, lavender lobelia on the sides, and spreading verbena front and center. So perhaps in a couple months I will have a picture of this same pot overflowing with greenery and purplery. (Now isn't that a fine word?)

To the right are some 'earth chestnuts' that I'm attempting to grow (and, so far, succeeding). I'm hoping they will be the same delicious vegetable that I bought in a farmer's market in France years ago. Those looked somewhat like beets, dark on the outside but white on the inside. The texture, when cooked, was between a carrot and a potato, and they had the most wonderful chestnut-like flavor. Mmmm!!

The fellow selling them called them bulbes de cerfeuil which translates to chervil bulbs or roots. But they must not be a traditional French vegetable because none of my French friends nor the other shoppers at the farmer's market had ever heard of them before.

Now, chervil is an herb in the same family as parsley, and certain types of parsley are grown for their roots, so perhaps it really was the root of a chervil plant. But I haven't found mention of them anywhere, and the chervil growers I've talked to say the roots are no bigger than you'd expect. (No one has offered to taste one for me.)

But one spring I got a catalog from Nichols Herbs and Rare Seeds which listed in their Unusual Vegetables, an 'Earth Chestnut', bunium bulbocastonum. "Why," says I, "if I were going to give that strange French vegetable an English name, that would be it!" So I sent off for seeds.

So I've got them growing in a planter where I can keep a close eye one them. (I will spare you the sad tales of dessicated plants; let's just say this isn't the first year I've tried them.) They're growing well, albeit slowly. I hope they are forming some big fat roots, though I'm a bit doubtful on that. Still, it was November when I bought them in France, so I'm expecting to wait a while for them in any case. As always, I'll keep you posted.

And if anyone knows anything about earth chestnuts or bulbes de cerfeuil, or bunium bulbocastonum, let me know!

Finally, here are some of those ripe figs I promised you back in April. My favorite way to eat them has been to quarter them and let them marinate overnight in orange juice and amaretto for a decadent breakfast treat.