The first gatherings of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby - how could anything so beautiful be mine. And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the profound joy and wonder of harvesting homegrown vegetables.
Alice B. Toklas captures the deep emotional connection and satisfaction a gardener feels when harvesting the fruits of their labor. This experience evokes feelings akin to a mother's love for her child, highlighting the beauty and fulfillment that can arise from nurturing and cultivating life, even in the form of plants and vegetables. Each gathering is an annual celebration of growth and a reminder of the simple yet powerful pleasures found in nature.
In practice
During a speech at a gardening conference, one might say, 'As Alice B. Toklas once beautifully expressed, the joy of gathering your own vegetables is unparalleled.'
Sweet peas should smell. Half the point of growing sweet peas is to cut them for the house; they should fill a room with an almost painful olfactory inarticulateness. But most sweet peas smell of nothing. This does not stop them being beautiful, but they are like food with no flavour.
It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood.
There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It . . . gives the brain a small vacation.
The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence.
If we do not save the environment, then whatever we do in civil rights will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction.
Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.
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