Thursday, April 19, 2012

purslane nuts steam

All through the winter this garden variety of purslane has flourished in a wide pot under our hedge where herbs seem to do so well.  It has a pretty leaf and white flowers.  Used as a salad its leaves have a gentle spicy flavour. Wild varieties are reputedly more astringent.  Cultivated purslane deserves to be used more often  nowadays as a salad as it used to be in the past.

I do not tire of watching squirrels.  This one is digging up a nut which it produces from the grass and begins to nibble, rotating it with its paws like a piece of wood on a lathe. After a while it stops aware of me watching. Understandably it doesn't like being watched while it is eating. I  continue to watch it though as it reburies the nut and scampers off. I was never certain whether it is true that squirrels bury nuts for future use. Now I know that they do.

After the rain the sun comes out. Steam rises from the canvas cover of a car parked by the roadside.



1 comment:

Roderick Robinson said...

Flora Poste is the heroine of Cold Comfort Farm and I would hate her to have any other name. But as I recall, the first part of the novel has her talking to one of her friends whose name, if it exists, escapes me. She could easily have been Purslane.