Seasons

When I'm not writing, teaching, or petting one of the four (!) cats who own the house, I garden. Specifically, I grow edible plants -- not just the summer garden of tomatoes and squash, but herbs and edible flowers and little-known vegetables from past times. In fact, I have a rule in my garden: everything I plant, even landscaping plants, should be some sort of edible. (The plants that predate me aren't edible, and I leave them be because they were there before I was.)

In the end of summer rounding toward fall, my garden has rioted. I didn't expect the trombocino squash vines to overwhelm everything to the point where I can't see anything else, but there you go. The squash themselves measure over a foot long. Spiny achocha and teeny cucomelon weave in and out of the squash vine, and if I bravely stick my hand in among the bristly vines, I can pick ripe tomatoes the size of two fists. The basil? There's one brave plant in a corner.

In a month or so, the frost will turn this overgrown vegetable garden into clumps and twists of blackened, wilted vines, and I will plot where to grow everything next year so that it doesn't strangle each other. In the winter I will dream of plant catalogs, and in the spring, I will plant new plants and pray they make it through the summer heat.

This is Jeanne Beaumont's world as a botanist. Seasons mean that the whole world changes, subtly in the tropics, more noticeably the farther one moves from the equator.  She designs food gardens that go dormant through the winter and still provide food in the summer, year after year.

Jeanne's life also follows the seasons in the book. In the spring, she meets Josh and begins a friendship with him after falling into bed with him. In summer, Josh leaves and returns to her like a fickle bird. In autumn, the action is dark, following threats to Jeanne, while winter explores holidays and family. The following Memorial Day, spring creeping into summer, Jeanne and Josh plant an extensive food forest with frightening results.

Their ages also denote the seasons -- Jeanne representing autumn with her age and experience; Josh moving from spring to the beginnings of summer.

I didn't know I had done this at first -- thank goodness for subconscious! But how could I change this serendipitous occurence once I started to notice it?