Article 023: A Bowl Painted with Shepherd's Purse, and the Garden
Summary
The labor of a small garden, and the slow pleasure of waiting.
A childhood sound — penny-penny grass spinning between fingers — returns through a bowl painted with shepherd's purse, made in Arita.
A piece that traces the drift of seasons, the weight of a bowl in both hands, and the way a single word, heard at the right moment, pulls the past into the present.
Category
Cooking
These are fragments from inside a life. I write them the way someone might tend a small fire — not to warm a crowd, but to keep something alive.
1. What the Garden Trees Take
The rainy season has finally let up, if only for a few days.
The cherry tomatoes have found their own arrangement with the garden trees — neither crowding the other out, for now.
Come autumn, when the air sharpens, the annual digging will begin again. I think about it less with anticipation than with a kind of low-grade dread that has settled in over the years.
A small garden that holds both trees and vegetables is a garden in negotiation with itself. The tree roots push toward wherever the soil is richest. That happens to be where the vegetables are.
The trees have grown glossy and full because of this. The vegetables have not always fared as well.
So when I say I dig the garden, what I mostly mean is: I dig out roots.
2. Learning to Negotiate
When I started, I used a spade. The roots won.
Packed tight, interwoven, they held the soil together more firmly than I could work against. Separating earth from root felt like a task with no edge to it — something I could begin and never quite finish.
In dry years, the root mass seemed to outweigh the soil itself.
I've since moved to a three-tined cultivating hoe — a tool with narrow blades that can cut and loosen at once. It has made the digging bearable, though the sifting remains what it always was.
Next year, I may have to choose: the vegetables, or the trees. Give up the garden I've kept for years. Or take down the trees that have marked every season of this house.
I haven't arrived at an answer yet.
3. How to Know When
In the middle of all this, I'm harvesting.
What home growing allows, that nothing else does, is the option to wait. I wait until the tomatoes are completely ready — not nearly ready, not ready enough. Ready.
After some trial, I found the marker I trust: touch the blossom end of the fruit, opposite the stem, very lightly. When it's truly ripe, it releases — a small, clean separation from the vine. I hold a colander underneath.
The skin is a little thicker than you'd expect. But when you bite, the juice fills your mouth immediately. There's a green note in the taste — something that recalls the stem itself, or the leaves — alongside the acid, alongside the sweetness.
It's as though the tomato is saying: right now is the only time for this.
4. The Seventh of January
I eat nanakusa-gayu — rice porridge with seven spring herbs — less often now than I once did.
When I lived at home, the seventh of January meant gathering around the stove, watching mochi toast while the porridge simmered. It was the first week of the new year, a small ceremony for health and continuation.
The porridge is traditionally eaten on the morning of January 7th, with seven wild herbs that appear early in spring — a Japanese New Year practice carried forward across many generations, meant to ease the body into a new year.
I haven't gone out to gather herbs in the cold. But when I hear someone mention nanakusa, something in me returns to a kitchen I grew up in, to kite-flying weather and bare winter sky.
5. Penny-Penny Grass
Shepherd's purse — nazuna — is one of those seven herbs. It flowers in small white clusters and grows without much encouragement, in sidewalk cracks and garden edges and wherever it decides to appear.
Its other name, in the way children say it, is pen-pen gusa. The name describes what it does: the triangular seed pods, left on the stem and twirled between two fingers, make a thin, spinning sound. Pen-pen.
I learned this from an older girl in the neighborhood, when I was very small. We would stand in a patch of it and spin and spin, until the sound was all there was. The afternoon would disappear without our noticing.
There was something about that kind of attention — total, and entirely uncomplicated.
The bowl I'm using tonight is painted with nazuna. A large, loose rendering of it across the glaze. Every time I lift it, something in me settles.
On the table tonight:
- Simmered aburaage and root vegetables
- Sashimi
- Cherry tomatoes (from the garden)
- Natto
6. The Bowl Itself
The bowl is Arita-yaki pottery — a Japanese porcelain tradition from Saga Prefecture with over four hundred years of history — painted with shepherd's purse.
Where it came from
Arita Será, in Saga Prefecture — a complex of Arita ware galleries and shops I visit once a year or so.
Link: https://www.arita.gr.jp/
Size
It fits in both hands comfortably. There's enough depth for the fingers to grip without reaching.
What it feels like
The outer surface has a very slight texture — not decorative, functional. It keeps the bowl from slipping. The fingers find it naturally.
How I use it
This is an everyday bowl. Its height makes it useful for foods that need a little room — you can arrange things upright rather than flat. It washes easily among other dishes. It doesn't require special handling.
7. A Closing Note
「あをなでな にわねくわさぶ にわつどり」
[Ao nadéna Niouané kououasabou Niouatsou dori]
Ah, Oh, Na, Des, Na, Ni, Wa, Nez, Quoi, Sâ, Bu, Ni, Wa, Tsu, Dorit.
Sel, Sel, Souffle, Ciel, Parfum, Air.
Links
Arita Será
Link: https://www.arita.gr.jp/Read this article in other languages:
日本語 English Français 繁體中文
References
For reference materials, please use the link below.
References used for this article: 器 01, 器 02, 工 01.
Audio (sound): 2025_023_ja01
Audio (reading): 2025_023_ja02 (in progress)
Microsoft Clipchamp: Brigitte, VOICEVOX: 四国めたん
May your table hold something small and true.