
Six Square Metres
June 2013
The life and death of coriander
Call it a cliché, or call it an archetype. The rounds of the seasons give us one of the reliable metaphors of human storytelling. We know the deal: hope comes in spring, ripeness in summer, sadness in autumn and stoicism or death in winter.
Yet these days only gardeners and farmers are in touch with this pattern. The supermarket robs us of the rhythm of story.
In any case, modern life is not as neat as a seasonal metaphor. This week I finished a book. It is rather like recovering from a long illness. Suddenly there is time and energy once again. I can garden without feeling that I should be at my desk. I can stare out of the window without each breath being tinged with guilt.
To celebrate, I decided to plant daffodil bulbs. It is late to be doing this, I know. Planting bulbs – garlic or spring flowers – is something one normally does in the last bit of autumn.
I went to Bunnings wielding my $50 gift token, a remnant of summer and Christmas. I bought a big shiny red outdoor pot and a little net bag of bulbs. Outside on the verandah, my fingers red from cold, I poured the mix and watered it, then ripped open the bag to find that the bulbs already had spears of green emerging from their brown papery skins.
They were ahead of time. They were in tune with my mood. There will be flowers in a few weeks, rather than months.
My writing life will lie fallow. What a sense of possibility there in the lack of a Big Project. At this distance, if feels as though I could write anything, precisely because I know I will write nothing.
Meanwhile I am struggling with the coriander. What is it with this herb? It has to be the most difficult of plants. Sow it in summer and it gives you a few leaves then goes spindly and to seed. Plant it in winter and it grows so slowly you hardly dare snip it.
So I am planting lots, because coriander is one of the miracle herbs, capable of rendering any meal fragrant and exotic. I have planted it in the back lane next to the miracle Happy Wanderer. I have planted it in a polystyrene box on my neighbour’s roof, and I have planted it between the sulky broccoli in the strip of earth between the front of my house and the street.
Of these three sites, only one is working. The coriander is doing well with the broccoli, growing low and lush. Meanwhile it is sulking in the lane and dying on the roof. Light, water and liquid fertiliser make no difference.
Even the plants in the front yard have their limits. Coriander is not, like parsley and thyme and every other respectable herb, a cut and come again plant. Cut it and it is gone forever, never to regrow.
“Buy some,” said my daughter. “It comes in a tube these days.” I told her that wasn’t the same. Meanwhile my friend, cutting sandwiches on my kitchen bench the other day, asked if I had bought tomatoes.
I realised how far I had drifted from the normal concerns of the non-gardening world when I replied that I had not, because they were not in season. Who would buy the artificially ripened, flavourless mini cannonballs that pass for tomatoes mid-winter?
This is winter, the time for chutney and things pickled, dried, salted and put aside, I said. He stared at me, and left for the supermarket.
@MargaretSimons