At about this time
last year I was still enjoying the surprisingly wide array of blooms which could
be gathered in the garden. In retrospect, the image I posted of blooms gathered
on Christmas 2012 seems almost like a boast now. And the New Year’s Day lists
were long and interesting that season. What a contrast the last few months have
been. Abnormally low temperatures and seemingly relentless wind made late
autumn and early winter downright unpleasant for the gardener. The weather
people are predicting low temperatures on Tuesday which, if they happen, will be the lowest we have experienced in
twenty years.
Now on to another topic. One hundred years ago this year E.
A. Bowles published his My Garden in
Spring. I dug out my copy tonight to check on something about which I had a
vague memory. I remember Bowles mentioning his favorite implement for a certain
sort of weeding: a cook’s fork. I found the passage in the crocus chapter, and
there Bowles confesses to raiding the household cutlery drawers for various ad hoc substitutes for the trowel or
whatever he could not find. No doubt
Bowles and I are not the only gardeners who have discovered that the kitchen
supplies implements with a totally unexpected and facile utility in the garden.
I probably read the cook’s fork passage for the first time
thirty or so years ago. In that passage Bowles recommends the local Army Navy
store as a likely source for the forks. Long ago I worked in such a store, but
I don’t recall seeing anything which answered to a cook’s fork. On the other
hand, two examples of this class of fork have been in our kitchen cutlery drawers
for over a half century. That’s what you see in the image above. In the 1950s
one of my father’s younger brothers was an Army cook stationed in what was then
West Germany. Before leaving Germany, he either sent back or brought with him
sets of Rosenthal china for his sisters and sisters-in-law. The Rosenthal china
is still in the family, and I’m pretty sure it has been used only once in its
over-half-century residence here. The arrival of the china was greeted with
some excitement and celebration by mom; the arrival of the cook’s forks,
presumably at about the same time, was probably ignored.
Until the Internet and Google came along, tracing the
identity and background of something so mundane as a fork would have involved
tracking down a collector or similar expert. I would not have known where to
begin back then. But yesterday, while absentmindedly examining one of the two
forks, I noticed this on the back of the handle: there was a rectangular box
with the letters OXYDEX, then a square box with a four-leaf clover design, then
another rectangular box with the letters ROSTFREI (this is the German word for
stainless). You can see this in the lower of the images above. I Googled OXYDEX
ROSTFREI and effortlessly entered a very busy world of information about German
stainless cutlery. There was more there than I had the patience to deal with
then, so I’ll be back again later to see what I can dig up.
I was perhaps not yet in my teens when we acquired these two
forks. Dare I expect them to adapt to a new life in the garden?
