I’m wondering whether to get the locals round to have a grand tomato harvest and pick all four in one day. Maybe bonsai tomato-growing is not the ideal, but this year it just happened. I forgot to pot them on from a four-inch pot; they looked sweet on the bench next to a pansy and the heliotrope I keep for an intoxicating sniff now and then. Now those little red globes are beckoning. Is home-grown produce really the best?
Tomatoes are a major theme in July, and not just a domestic one. They are tumbling in from all sides; the Isle of Wight conspicuously in the lead, in a bewildering mix of changes and colours. There is still little to challenge Gardener’s Delight for an instant pop in the month, but salads are a different matter. I made a bold bicoloured one yesterday: beefy yellow and purple, roundly ridged, mostly flesh with little juice. Interleaved slices on a flat dish looked intriguing, but what made the dish was the Sicilian olive oil, the scatter of sea salt and a few leaves of basil from the pot that always reminds me of poor Isabella, so often painted by pre-Raphaelites in search of beauty in mourning. Basil seems preordained for tomatoes. Rosetti could have painted glowing tomatoes with the lush leaves of drooping basil, and Tennyson written ‘with blackest moss the flowerpots were thickly crusted one and all. The rusted nails fell from the knots that tied the tomatoes to the greenhouse wall’.
But did Tennyson have tomatoes? It was only in 1820 that one Robert Johnson publicly proved they were not poisonous by eating one at a New Jersey courthouse. What a scarlet tsunami he unleashed.
