The gift that keeps on giving

Reclining on my 40-year-old collapsible garden chair, I found myself dropping off while listening to a BBC interview with Martin Amis. He had died two days previously.  

Not that the interview was dull. Quite the opposite. His melodic delivery, precise diction and original thinking were most admirable. But when he touched on how, while asleep, he let his subconscious unravel the knots created in his writing, I took him at his word.

When I awoke, my eye was drawn to the sizable patch of ground elder which seemed to have advanced even closer during my nap. Like a game of statues.

Ground elder arrives uninvited and never leaves. It creeps around the garden, its rhysomes stifling the life out of other plants.

We can thank the Romans. They introduced it as a tasty addition to the bland English diet. Why, I wondered, weren’t we eating it?

British guinea pigs turned their noses up. But not so the Japanese. Freshly cut ground elder is a dead ringer for the Japanese plant mizuna.

No Japanese visitor went home without armfuls of ground elder. Our generosity knew no bounds.

Until now. Recently a Spanish friend pointed out that dried ground elder retails on the internet at 16 euros per 100 grams.