an extravagant mint found on our walk... not a difficult discovery... you'd have to be blind to miss it... but you wouldn't know its name... you would wonder... and you would take a sprig home to study and identify...

someone must have loved it to sow so much... or... it's also extravagantly invasive... either way, it's fine with me... with softer hues than the hot purple loosestrife we're trying to obliterate these days with special bugs, the wild bergamot still goes crazy in your eye... so much to see...

this one is a bit worse for wear... shot in my room a day after picking... here's the oficial shot from Prairie Wildflowers of Illinois...

and here's the fieldshot from yesterday... a burgeoning of bergamot...

it is a mint... a very mellow mint which they say smells like oregano... but i don't get that... maybe just a bit... dominic says he can smell it as we walk through these fields but i am nosedeaf or smellblind i guess... yet when i squeeze a leaf in my fingers and sniff... cheap thrills...

i'm trying to make the most of these days... this past week (arguably the greatest weather days of the summer) i've been cooped up eight hours every day inside a brain-compatible classroom studying the brain-compatible classroom... when all the while i could have been out walking around in the best of all brain-compatible classrooms... sigh... the meadow aint gonna give me thirty c.p.d.u.s...

but here we are now... and loving it... is it possible to enjoy something too much... i don't think so... it even thrills the cat... who briefly considers whether this minty stuff might be her trusty old nepeta cataria... it aint...

there's no sadness or worry in this field in this plant in this fine smell... there's no work that must be done only work that will be done... what's that phrase... "at play in the fields of the lord" ... that's it... a flower's business

Never would it occur to a child that a sheep, a pig, a cow or a chicken was good to eat, while, like Milton's Adam, he would eagerly make a meal off fruits, nuts, thyme, mint, peas and broad beans which penetrate further and stimulate not only the appetite but other vague and deep nostalgias. We are closer to the Vegetable Kingdom than we know; is it not for man alone that mint, thyme, sage, and rosemary exhale "crush me and eat me!"-for us that opium poppy, coffee-berry, teaplant and vine perfect themselves? Their aim is to be absorbed by us, even if it can only be achieved by attaching themselves to roast mutton.

Cyril Connolly

 

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