SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION: herb garden edition

I’ve written before about my herb garden as SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION, both here and my personal blog (dalelyles.com), and it’s that time again.

Many herbs are available these days through your local providers, but for some of the more obscure ones you have to order them from away. My vendor of choice is The Growers Exchange, based in Virginia. Their catalog is a delicious mix of herbs and flowers, familiar and adventurous, and their customer service is great.

The main herb I order from them is lovage, an herb that deserves to be known more widely. As the catalog says, it’s a celery/peppery flavor that no other herb in your garden matches, and it’s great in salads and in pasta.

My hope is to use it to create a lovage-inflected gin, of course. I started this experiment last year and got two moderately tolerable concoctions done before drought claimed my plants. Now I’m starting over.

In the past The Growers Exchange wouldn’t ship my plants until late April or even early May because of fears of freezing, so I was a little startled when they shipped here in March. Not a problem, especially since a) it stopped raining for three days; and b) a planned burn leadership meeting evaporated. I had the afternoon to get the plants in the ground.

So why is this about SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION?

Here’s a gallery of what this spot has looked like over the years:

The layout has changed, the herbs have changed, the placement of the herbs has changed. This year, I have reduced the number of plants in the garden and have sequestered them towards the back. I have effectively abandoned the front part to the wildflowers I strewed there one year; they’ve taken over, and I I’m going to let them have at it. However, I’ve made the fateful decision to be ruthless about their right to take over the herbal portion of the property.

This is what your art is like. As you move from ABORTIVE ATTEMPT to ABANDONMENT, you will have to make changes, one way or another. Some may be small — like moving the basil from here to there — and some may be major — like the complete redesign I did a couple of years ago. But there will be changes.

As a quick example, the music for As You Like It is still changing: volume changes here, stretching of time there. I would be an idiot not to make the changes if the music as is doesn’t work for the scene.

If you need a better example than me, consider Tchaikovsky: when they were readying Sleeping Beauty for its premiere, he arrived at the theatre one day to find that the gorgeous panorama that scrolled across the back of the stage while the Prince searches for Aurora was too long. The music simply ran out, and the producers were certainly not going to chop off the expensive scenery already in place. So Tchaikovsky had to go back and write another ten yards of music.

That’s SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.