I have been a professional gardener for over twenty years. It has been a great life. I love gardening for many reasons, one of which is because there is always something new to learn. I wasn’t expecting to learn that aubergines go to sleep.
I have grown them under cover either in a glasshouse or a poly-tunnel and my engagement with them has been during the working day which is typically 8am-4.30pm, although there have been years such as 2018 when I started earlier, took a siesta, finished later. It was a rare year; snow at the end of March then, a fortnight later, temperatures over 20 Celsius which endured day and night until mid-September. 2018 was my most successful year for growing aubergines which love consistent heat. I had chosen a variety called ‘Prosperosa’ which produced fruit the size of a small melon – perhaps 1.25l in volume, perhaps even as much as 1.5l. I am growing it again this year, in hope. Without hope I wouldn’t garden. Gardening feeds my hope.
There is something animal about an aubergine fruit, or berry to be precise. I use the word ‘fruit’ in its biological rather than culinary sense. In culinary terms the Yorkshire position is the most reliable: fruit can be eaten with custard. The firm warm skin of the aubergine, its turgor. I imagine dolphins have a similar texture although I’ve never touched one. Aubergines aplenty. The plant itself is rather beautiful which is why this year I have one in my sitting room. The stem and petioles are purple, as are the veins in the leaves. The flowers will be a lovely lilac. There is the promise of fruit.
I think ‘Prosperosa’ is only moderately spined, but as the plant matures I will find out. Already in my poly-tunnel I have a different cultivar (pictured) whose leaves have thrown out thorns above and below. The stem is barbed as is the flower-bud case. \
Last night I watched the aubergine in my sitting room lift its leaves vertically so that the plant closed in upon itself, like a dog curling up to go to sleep. This is something I have never seen before. It was slow like watching a clock face. At no point did I see movement, but over an hour it moved all the same. It was open, then it was closed.
SOLANACEAE, the family to which it belongs, is a little crazy. It includes Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade, tobacco, potatoes, aubergines, tomatoes. Plants of the old world and the new. Some of the most important global food crops and some of the most toxic plants in the world. To complicate things further, some parts of the plants are edible, others poisonous – only the potato tubers are edible, the rest of the plant isn’t. At university I had a vegetarian friend who wouldn’t eat aubergine as she considered it too high in nicotine. The seeds of the aubergine has a coating of nicotine, which is what gives the flesh its bitter flavour. I consider the risk too low to consider worrying over. I love baba ganoush, aubergine and chickpea curry, moussaka.
I was thinking of Constantinople. I spend a lot of time thinking about Constantinople – it is an idea which fascinates me. Constantine moved the capital of an empire and in so doing bought that empire a further 1100 years of life. I learnt recently that it was almost moved again in the seventh century to Carthage of all places. The Roman Empire fell eventually in 1453AD. In 1492AD a territory once governed by the Roman Empire, having conquered similar forces to those which had defeated the Imperial city, sponsored a sea voyage to find a different route to the spices and riches of India and Serendip to the one which had been closed by the fall of Constantinople.
These events are 39 years apart – a human generation – a complete epoch of human history. Time is relational. Constantinople belonged to the ancient world not because of its continuity with it, but because it ended before the world was re-shaped. Its population may have had a dish called Moussaka, and that dish could have contained aubergines, but it would not have been made with potato, tomato, or chillies.
The plants which the Iberians brought back from the New World have been far more valuable than the gold they plundered. Tomatoes, chillies, sweet peppers, potatoes have enriched the diet of millions for centuries.
thephilosophergardener 