The prize of the garden show

Show me a roadside stand and I will stop there. The mere possibility of homemade pie, homemade jam, interesting things will have me swerving into your gravel parking lot. Of course, most of the time I am disappointed. You see the same jams with the same labels at stand after stand, for instance, no more "homemade" than Smuckers. Worse yet, you see tourist-driven offerings-- suddenly Michigan cherry jams are full of Burgundy or Cabernet Sauvignon, a vain attempt to add upscale appeal to a perfectly noble American product, the jam world's equivalent of adding unnecessary E's to a strip club's name to become Thee Playhousee, because it's so classy-sounding.

But once in a while you find the reward that justifies the habit. I stopped at a terrible Tennessee winery once-- proof that Tennessee had gone from moonshine to wine production without ever actually tasting good wine-- but after cutting my wine tasting short when the driest red turned out to be too sweet for me, I found a bottle of intoxicatingly rich, Parkerized blackberry syrup that became one of my prized possessions, dribbled out sparingly over pancakes with three parts maple syrup. And then there were some pickled baby beets, machined to the barrel shape of Barnes Wallis' Ruhr dam-busting bombs, which I picked up at a stand after the Dekalb Corn Fest to become the foundation of goat cheese and beet salads for a year. Or the pie, from the pie and pasty place on the way back from Traverse City. It's rare, but it still happens that you find something you will never find in a store, and it's yours, just yours... until it's gone.

I would love to claim the credit for what I found at the Chicago Flower & Garden Show at Navy Pier, but unfortunately, there are too many witnesses to the fact that it was Pdaane who discovered them, or rather her. Here's an event whose price to participate in (booth fees, hotels, etc.) ensures that only well-organized and funded groups will get in. So in between the makers of patio gadgets and koi pond filtration systems, you mainly had the makers of cherry Burgundy jams and Michigan Madness Salsas. But as Pdaane had uncovered, there was also this:



Here was someone making jams not out of spuriously upscale ingredients like Cabernet, but out of honest garden flavors which simply hadn't been tried before (or, more likely, hadn't been tried regularly in a century)-- lemon verbena, basil, rosemary, green pepper, rose and geranium. Flower jams suggested the scents of the garden but just beyond the point of easy recognition. A chocolate mint jam tasted a lot like mint and enough like chocolate to not immediately conjure up lamb.

Since I had come there with my youngest son to show him the train garden which was one of the main attractions, the two of us went from sample to sample, spooning new flavor after new flavor onto little crackers. Unfortunately, as we were putting an assortment together, Rosemary began to volubly fret about the enthusiasm with which he was devouring her (no doubt outrageously expensive Fox and Obel) crackers, and the effect was that instead of selling us $60 or $80 worth of her jams, as she would have if she had beamed happily at his cheeks stuffed full of her merchandise, I had to cut it short after about $20 (which was eight of these teeny jars). (It didn't help that she answered a cell phone call right at the point where I was distracted enough by him that, had she focused on us rather than regarding us as a cracker-conservation problem, she could have said "Why don't I just put together a nice basket for you" and really reeled me in like a trout.) Yankee parsimony got the better of Yankee salesmanship in that instance, to her loss. But you know, the other thing you like about these individual proprietors is that they are individuals, real people. The jam tastes like it and so does the transaction, when it's at its best. Rosemary's Courtyard Garden, check it out. Try them all. And be sure to take the kids.

Rosemary Divock, Author, Speaker, Herbiere
Rosemary's Courtyard Garden
Lake Geneva, WI 53147
262-215-2923