How sweet it would be to channel a pre-Raphaelite beauty who limits her demands to exquisite color and intoxicating fragrance. All her needs would be met by a small rose garden. Mine is a coarser world that requires brute manual labor in order to yield flowers whose ethereal beauty is a thing of a day.
I enjoy this wealth of roses, peonies, irises and poppies as much as I the heavy clay soul I have been amending for twenty years. I have made a garden in a meadow where cows used to graze a couple of centuries ago. The cows are gone and so is the miller whose land this was long before my village earned its place on a map. On this land I have grown roses that once graced a mandarin's garden. I have also grown peas, potatoes and huge crops of weeds, of which creeping charlie, the most detestable pest, came to the New World as a medicinal plant. Creeping charlie leeches the soil from water and nutrients better mannered plants badly need. I fight it with a crusading zeal and it fights back with such panache I want to come back in my next life as an invasive weed.
Yesterday, I issued a fatwa on another imported--the accursed and inaptly named tree of heaven. There was shock and awe in the garden while I battled these foul fiends. Now I can finish planting beans and potatoes. I have peppers and tomato seedlings to be brought out of the cold frame; there are new clematis and roses in need of borders. I will continue the good fight. My sidekick will help. Eventually, the weeds will return. Such is life.

OK, so this is a blog about arts and crafts, right? Not quite. Crafts are all very well, but life does intervene and the restless artisan must tend to life sustaining endeavours, such as gardening. Artisans must eat and these days it costs a considerable amount to put food on the table. According to a Ha'aretz columnist, we earthlings are actually "eating oil."
That is, oil production has passed its peak; our demand for it has not. Consequently, oil rich countries can up the prices to unprecedented highs and we will continue to ask for more, more, more. Obviously this affects the cost of energy needed to produce and transport food and it makes a grocery shopping expedition very painful indeed.
What does a sensible artisan do in these circumstances? First, she invests in a rain barrel, a compost maker and repositions the cold frame. Then she enlists the help a friend who will dig the weedy patch that once the vegetable garden. She lavishes soil amendments on the tilled space and plants edible flowers, a row of snow peas, a four store bought tomato plants, and row Red Dragon carrots interspersed with radishes. She plants herbs in a half barrel, pak choi and kale in an old wheelbarrow, salad greens in capacious plastic pots. She she weeds the edges of the veggie garden, checking on the health of three gooseberry bushes, two raspberries, half a dozen Nanking cherries, an enormous quince tree. Miraculously the asparagus that had been repeatedly uprooted by an echo-terrorist of sorts, reappears in quantities large enough for a two quiche-like pies.
Encouraged, the restless artisan tucks seventy five strawberry plants into a raised bed among recently planted Purple Passion asparagus. She pots a Marseille fig tree, a Maypop passion fruit vine and banana tree and dreams of feasts to come. Oil, shmoil. This is good. This is very good.