I’ve been gardening since I was a kid in Nebraska.  A few years after planting my first seed – a Lima bean I had plucked from a sack in our pantry and stuck it in the ground – I asked my dad if we could clear some bushes and trees in our back yard to make way for a sunny garden plot.  He agreed and I’ve been gardening ever since.

During the off season here in Taos Ski Valley, we only operate Café Naranja for breakfast and lunch four days a week.  That gives me time to tend to the beautiful gardens that surround the Edelweiss Lodge & Spa.

The Lodge is nestled within the heart of Taos Ski Valley on Sutton Place.  The crystal mountain waters of Rio Hondo meander through the north side of the property; these gardens we keep largely in their natural state.  To the south and east, we offer a more cultivated expression of our microclimate – our terroir.

Our terroir presents unique gardening benefits – and challenges, but this is my second year, so I think I’m getting the hang of it.

Friends and family have asked that I send pictures of my handiwork, so here they are, both for them and for folks that only come to Taos Ski Valley in the winter.

I spend many hours working the gardens, and do so with great pleasure.  My favorite time of day is near dusk, after perhaps a few hours of huffing and puffing in the thin dry mountain air:  tilling, planting, watering.  At sunset the light turns warm, the breeze becomes soft, and I feel close to God.

The music is the favorite of my grandma – Alice Hopp – to whom I dedicate this short film.

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In a paper published by Science (subscription required), researchers give the answer:

It’s the redness.

The New York Times’ Gina Kolata explains:

The unexpected culprit is a gene mutation that occurred by chance and that was discovered by tomato breeders.  It was deliberately bred into almost all tomatoes because it conferred an advantage: It made them a uniform luscious scarlet when ripe.

The very gene that was inactivated by that mutation plays an important role in producing the sugar and aromas that are the essence of a fragrant, flavorful tomato.  And these findings provide a road map for plant breeders to make better-tasting, evenly red tomatoes.

The discovery “is one piece of the puzzle about why the modern tomato stinks,” said Harry Klee, a tomato researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved in the research.  “That mutation has been introduced into almost all modern tomatoes.  Now we can say that in trying to make the fruit prettier, they reduced some of the important compounds that are linked to flavor.”

Dr. Ann Powell, a lead author of the Science paper, said there is a way around the issue.  Heirloom tomatoes and many wild species do not have the uniform ripening mutation.  “The idea is to get the vegetable seed industry interested,” she said.

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Further Reading:

• Science:  Uniform ripening Encodes a Golden 2-like Transcription Factor Regulating Tomato Fruit Chloroplast Development
• The New York Times:  Flavor Is Price of Scarlet Hue of Tomatoes, Study Finds
• Harry J. Klee, PhD:  Harry’s Tasty Tomato Page
• Dorothy Stainbrook:  Tomato Headquarters

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One of the great pleasures of living at Taos Ski Valley’s Edelweiss Lodge and Spa is that in addition to my responsibilities for our two restaurants, I oversee the property’s lovely Alpine gardens.  Okay — I am the gardener — and I love it.

I’ve always enjoyed gardening and have tilled soil since I was a kid — when I first planted a raw lima bean in some dirt behind our garage.  I watered the spot religiously and within a week or two the darned thing sprouted.  It was the most miraculous thing I had ever experienced.  I still remember the thrill of discovering Mother Nature’s beginnings of life.

The memory of that childhood feeling came rushing back this morning as I was drinking coffee and sauntering past the oriental poppies in our front garden.  The first five of our dozens of buds popped open overnight and greeted me with their beautiful salmon color, exotic form, and sensual mystery, as their long slender stems nonchalantly swayed in the morning’s quiet Alpine breeze.

Happily, photographer Jeff Caven is currently staying with us.  I asked him to snap a photograph, and he kindly obliged.  The lovely image is posted above.

Taos, of course, is famous for poppies, made so by its notable resident, Georgia O’Keefe.  Long before artists like Robert Mapplethorpe (whose work I greatly admire) photographed sensual depictions of orchids and calla lilies, Georgia O’Keefe painted flowers, using photographic techniques such as cropping and close-ups, even before the technology of color film or large photographic blow-ups had been invented.

O’Keefe explained:

“A flower is relatively small.  Everyone has many associations with a flower… still–in a way–nobody really sees a flower–really–it is so small…. So I said to myself–I’ll paint what I see…but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it…even busy New Yorkers [will] take time to see what I see of flowers….When you [refering to critics and others who wrote about these paintings] took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower–and I don’t.”

Her most famous painting is arguably Oriental Poppies, painted in 1927 (two years before beginning her work in northern New Mexico) and is now part of the Weisman Art Museum‘s permanent collection in Minneapolis.  Painted in New York, the work measures 30″ x 40″ and resembles an image as if seen through a magnifying glass.  O’Keefe uses brilliant red and orange – pioneering at the time – juxtaposed with indigo of the flowers’ centers.  The crisp shading and brilliant borders provide hypnotic contrast to the petals’ velvet texture.  What soon became obvious to critics was the lack of context:  there is no background to the painting, drawing the viewer’s focus deep into the flowers, presenting them as pure abstracts.

“Oriental Poppies”

Georgia O’Keefe (1887 – 1986)

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And so. . . this morning I was sipping coffee, enjoying the morning sunrise above the whispering pines — and there they were:  magnificent poppies that a transplanted busy New Yorker not only noticed, but celebrated.  A childhood amazement returned, a connection was made with Taos and its most famous artist, and a remembrance was triggered of a New Mexican poet, Santa Fe’s May Sarton [Eleanore Marie Sarton], who once wrote:

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.  Gardening is an instrument of grace.”

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