Edible flowers

I went to the nursery about two weeks before virus time, looking for herbs and vegetables to plant in my back yard. It was a beautiful sunny day with a few high clouds when I got there; I pushed a cart around, picking up a plant here and a plant there for about an hour while seeing what they had in stock, and then went inside the garden shed where they keep the seed packets. I collected half a dozen of those, and made my way over to the checkout stand. While I was standing there chatting with the nursery guy, all of a sudden we heard a loud rat-tat-tatting sound on the (tin) roof. We looked out into the nursery and saw that it was hailing giant clots of ice! The temperature had dropped by 12 degrees from the time I arrived until the hail started. After paying, I waited under cover for about 10 minutes to see if the hail would stop, and finally made a run to my car, getting cold and soaked in the process.

Since then, it has rained on and off almost every day for a couple of weeks, plus there's this little thing called Covid 19 that has preoccupied me to the extent that I haven't thought about too many other things. But those plants were sitting around waiting for their permanent home, and I finally got outside this past weekend and got them into the ground—a couple varieties of lavender, some rosemary, sage, oregano, lemon verbena, two kinds of basil, a couple of tomatoes...and then it started raining again.

I also have a bunch of seeds that need to go in the ground but haven't made it yet. One of the seed packets I bought was for borage. I used to have a bunch of it in my yard, but it died out and I never replaced it. I never have eaten the leaves (they say you can sauté them and eat them like any other greens, but I am wary of the prickly little hairs that sting when you pick them), but I love using the flowers as garnish in a salad, frozen in ice cubes for drinks, or sugar-candied on top of desserts. They taste kind of like celery, or maybe cucumber, and their bright blue-lavender flowers really fancy things up. They are also fun to float in things like homemade herb vinegars.

Just about the time I was thinking about all of this, I got an email from theydrawandcook.com that their guest artist for this month was running a challenge on "Edible flowers." I immediately thought of the borage, and started making mental thumbnail sketches. I followed that up by making four or five actual thumbnails, but procrastinated until yesterday before finally deciding that I needed to follow through. The finished work was due tonight at 9 p.m. PST (midnight in NYC where they are based), so I had no time to lose. Yesterday I did the pencil drawing at the correct size, and today I got out my good watercolor paper, inked the design onto it, and then watercolored the whole. It took me three hours yesterday for the pencil sketch, and then another six hours today, from 1 to 7 p.m., to finish it; and then I had to scan it (in three sections, my flatbed is not very big), put together the three pieces in Photoshop, erase the joins and tweak everything so it looked like one seamless piece of artwork again, and upload the resulting .jpg to theydrawandcook.com. I made it with 27 minutes to spare!

Here is my piece, entitled "I, Borage..." With Pliny the Elder to endorse it, you can be sure that borage is a valuable addition to your garden, remedies, and diet!

The finished product is about 22 inches wide by about 8.75 inches high, on Canson watercolor paper. The inking was done with a Uniball fine pen (waterproof), and the rest is watercolor. I was particularly happy with my lettering efforts for this: I got out my old Formatt pressed letters catalog and found some typefaces that I liked and mimicked, for the main title, the bouncy captions, and the cursive.

Before I did the scans and submitted it, I sent it to my final critic, Kirsten, for approval. Her comment was, "I like the inclusion of Pliny the Elder. You don't get enough Pliny nowadays." Remarks like this one are why I keep her around.  :-)