A Farmers Market in France

Some English country-towns grew up around their market sites.  In other words, what began as a crossroads or, even more simply, a convenient wide space in the road where people  congregated, soon grew into a town.  Cities used plazas in front of a church for a gathering place to exchange goods.  France took a more pro-active approach and constructed market spaces as early as the 14th century.

I visited such a site in Revel.  Today, Revel is a modern city of 8,000 about an hour’s drive southeast of Toulouse.  The ancient market building, built in 1342, still dominates the city and its social patterns.  A forest of wooden pillars holds up a wooden roof sheathed with clay tile.  A belfry with a large clock juts above the roof.  The building is completely open and the size of a small city block.  An arcade stretches along all four sides of the market plaza.  Small shops fill the ground floor; above are apartments and business offices.

On Saturday mornings for almost 700 years, traffic has been banned and a market convened under the 14th century roof and along the plaza streets.  Local farmers bring goat and sheep cheeses, artisanal breads, live chickens and guinea hens, seeds and started plants.  Local farmers take privileged places under the ancient roof, while large wholesalers from Toulouse or Perpignan set up tables in the street, sheltered only by colorful umbrellas.  Here farmers and vendors hawk their wares, rain or shine. 

Farmers Markets are inevitable

I get that feeling that the Farmers Market in Stonington is inevitable.  It springs from a deep place in our human psyche and is forced to the surface by insistent and primitive pressures.  It is the absence of a market that is abnormal, not the presence of one. Given the least encouragement, a market will percolate to the top of every society.  Our Saturday market in Stonington is just the most recent local expression of a primal ritual, a modern iteration of three themes: people gathering, good displayed, the assembly held at a set time and place.  That’s why, as 9am approaches on the clock, going to market feels natural, habitual, inevitable. 

Last July, a customer asked me, “Why are you here?”  The simple answer, of course, is “... to sell flowers.”   I opened my mouth to respond, and out tumbled a more profound explanation.

“I’m here because you are,” I said.  We stared at each other a bit stunned.  Then I continued, “If I were not here, you would not be here.  If you were not here, I wouldn’t be here.”

That’s the essence of a market.  We are each here because the other is.  It may be a place where goods are bought and sold, but primarily the market is a place where people meet, where relationships begin, where friendships grow, where projects hatch.  It sometimes seems that goods being bought and sold are but an excuse for the gathering.  

That same week, I discovered a physical metaphor for market.  I found it at yoga class during seated meditation.  I struggle with meditation.  My mind always races ahead to my next activity.  After class I would return to an hour or so of writing.  My struggle of the moment: striving to understand and convey the ancient concept of “markets” to readers whose main reference to the subject is an abstract, intellectual and over-reported (but never quite understood) Stock Market.

Our yoga instructor, Priscilla, suggest we try a mudra.  Palms rest upwards and open on each knee, index fingers and thumbs touch lightly.  Three remaining fingers stretch out to bring energy down the arm and into the bands.

And there it is!  This mudra is a perfect metaphor for markets. The thumb and the index finger represent two centers of energywho come together at a market.  The open palm represents the place where the meeting occurs.  The outstretched fingers and arm represent pathways into and out of the market.  This is the energy-exchange that prevails throughout history. 

July: To market, to market...

 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “market” as “the meeting or congregating together of people for the purchase and sale of provisions or livestock, publicly exposed, at a fixed time and place.”  The work “market,” which first appeared in a English manuscript in the 10th century, is more than a thousand years old.  One author describes the concept of a market as atavistic.  I recognize the word, but don’t really know its meaning so I return to the dictionary.

“Atavistic” describes an event that occurred in “a great-grandfather’s grandfather’s lifetime.”  That is to say, the word conveys a sense of long, long ago.  Referring to markets as atavistic implies that the concept of a market reaches far back into the early mists of human endeavors.  Other customs may have faded, but the notion of market still exists.

If the practice of people gathering to buy, sell, and exchange dates back to the beginnings of human experience, then Farmers Markets are expressions of a deep human need that has existed in a similar form for at least a thousand years.  Actually, longer than that.  The word “market” became part of our written record in the 900s, but the custom no doubt descends even further back into the unwritten portion of our interactions as human beings.  

So when a couple of hundred 21st-century New Englanders assemble at 9am Saturday morning on a patch of lawn adjacent to a children’s playground in Connecticut, we are not simply gathering to exchange local food and flowers for money.  We are participating in an activity that is deeply rooted in human experience. 

My prize is the flower

Many ambitions occur side by side in my garden.  Bees want to gather pollen.  I desire zinnias for gorgeous bouquets.  The zinnia plants simply lust to reproduce.  My job, harvesting flowers for markets and parties, frustrates their job, to reproduce and add new members to the family.  

My prize is the flower.  But that prize is also the plant’s nursery.  Once I pluck the flower, the plant must start over and initiate a new reproductive cycle.  It must launch a new flower to open its petals and encourage bees to burrow deep into its center to bring pollen to ova.  Then, if the flower avoids my shears, it will shelter the growth of seeds and produce the next generation. 

For most of the week, I leave this process undisturbed.  But on harvest days, my object and my plants’ are at odds.  I must find the perfect zinnias for market -- a bloom that is generous with petals opening flat and wide, elegant with vibrant color, unblemished by rain or wind, strong of stem to support such beauty.  Once snipped, this young adult representative of the zinnia family can no longer accomplish it generational task.  I have interfered with the plant’s cycle by borrowing its beauty.

Undaunted, the plant starts agains.  As long as I frustrate its goal of setting seed, the plant will valiantly continue its task: produce those nurseries we call flowers.  Our parallel but competing goals co-exist all summer.  My zinnias produce their colorful nurseries -- while, green, purple, read, orange -- and I pluck them.  By early September, those plants will be six feet tall.  When markets end after Labor Day, I finally allow the plants to accomplish their natural goal and set seed.

They seem to sigh with relief but quickly grow old.  Petals turn brown along the edges.  Leaves become dull and brittle.  But inside that aging body are long narrow zinnias seeds -- children for the next generation.  

Flowers entrust their romance to bees

While we humans enjoy flowers, they are not made for us.  Flowers do not dress in showy colors or release intoxicating scents or extend languorous petals to entice us.  All that saturated color, the silky perfume, the sensuous glory bespeak dancers calling for a partner.  But we are not the partners they seek.  Flowers entrust their romance to bees, ants, moths, and flies.  We are spurned admirers who only stand and watch while other, lesser beings bring pollen to ovule so that a flower can get on with the important business of all life, creating the next generation.

Flowers take a variety of shapes: flat, multi-petal blossoms such as black-eyed Susans or sunflowers; exotic asymmetrical forms such as orchids or snapdragons; elegant waxy cups like tulips or lilies.  No matter the shape, each flower is constructed with two functions in mind.  First, it must attract a pollinator.  Second, it must create seed, the genetic messenger for the next generation. 

Flowers, then, are both Madonna and whore.  On one hand, flowers are the blessed wombs that will launch new life.  On the other hand, flowers are showy lures designed for romance.  Flowers advertise their presence without shame, like an Amsterdam “lady of the night” perched in her window, wearing a flashy silk robe.  Flowers use many devices to bring their suitors home: sumptuous colors and alluring scents.  For the right visitors, flowers also provide copious feasts. 

Buried deep within the blossom lies the pollinator’s ultimate objective.  Special glands at the base of the petals exude a sweet, nutritious liquid called nectar.  On the way to this food, pollinators brush past both stamen holding pollen and the entrance to the ovule where eggs await fertilization.  

Little is left to chance in the love anatomy of a flower.  Blossoms welcome pollinators with adequate landing sites and well-marked taxiways.  Dark spots on vase-shaped foxglove blossoms and hairy yellow stripes ascending purple petals of bearded iris serve the same purpose.  They are “follow-me-this-way” signs to the nectar.  

While plants can produce their own food, they cannot mate without help of intermediaries.  Insects are the most common go-betweens. But it is flowers and bees that live in the closest and most perfect mutuality.

Flying from the hive on a foraging trip, a worker bee will seek nectar from only one crop at a time.  On the first trip of the day, she will gather pollen and nectar only from lavender, for example, then return to the hive to deliver these gathered foods.  On her second trip, the same bee will visit only thyme blossoms.  This bee habit of exclusive foraging is invaluable to flowers since it insures wide distribution of pollen from flower to flower in the same species. 

The summer soltice

The summer solstice on June 21 is an annual sun festival, celebrated by few and hardly ever noted in modern calendars.  Occasionally, the solstice is announced on radio as the first day of summer.  The solstice marks the longest day of the year, that is, the day with the greatest number of sunlit hours.  Twenty-first century humans may ignore the date as inconsequential, but plants rely on the sun for seasonal cues; for instance, when to begin and when to end their growing seasons. 

Strawberries receive a signal to begin to grow when the number of hours of sunlight reaches ten.  Spinach, another early spring crop, begins its seasonal activities when sunlight reaches thirteen hours daily.  Spinach needs not only a cool season but also a “short day length.”  By mid-June, spinach has set its seed and is done for the year.  Other plants, such as chrysanthemum, bloom only when daylight hours begin to decrease after long summer days.  Mums, a popular fall flower, bloom with fifteen hours of waning daylight.

Just after the summer solstice, I bring my first flowers to market: five buckets in all.  Two large galvanized buckets hold an array of mixed perennials: delicate chartreuse Lady’s mantel, sharp-scented rue, small daisy-like feverfew, early pink Asiatic lilies.  I plunge herbs into a second bucket, Nepeta, a favorite of cats, has a profusion of tiny lavender flower.  Stems of gray-leafed sage have dropped most of their purple flowers to concentrate on forming sharp-pointed seedpods.  I add pink spirea in various stages of flowering from tiny fuchsia balls to foamy pink blooms, one stem of white bellflowers, and a single late pink peony.  Two paint cans, labels removed and pointed purple, hold yellow snapdragons, green and white zinnias, and green shafts of wheat.  Waxy white flowers of mock orange, a little worse for wear with all the rain, fill the June air with citrus scent, just as they did in the 1930s when these blooms were de rigueur in wedding bouquets.  Old-fashioned pink roses, the kind you bring to the nose and inhale with deep satisfaction, complete the collection. 

Sunlight provides energy to make food

Earlier, I compared a stem to a tall building.  Now I want you to think of a leaf as a sandwich.  A shiny, waxy layer cover the top “crust.”  It prevents water loss but still allows sunlight to enter.  A second slice of “bread,” the underside of the leaf, needs no such glossy protective “crust,” so it is paler and has no shine.  During daylight hours, this lower leaf surface opens thousands of holes, called stomata, to summer breezes.  Through these openings flow a constant supply of both oxygen and carbon dioxide. 

In our leaf “sandwich” between those two slices of bread, picture a filling of green kiwi jam loaded with tiny, dark green seeds.  These seeds, or chloroplasts, migrate through the jam and position themselves as close as possible to the sunlight, as its energy streams through the upper crust. 

Here, then, in this thin leaf sandwich are all the components of a tiny food factory.  A leaf’s food factory uses only three raw materials: water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.  Roots supply an abundance of water. Oxygen and carbon dioxide enter the leaf through those holes in the underside of leaves.  Power to drive the leaf manufactory is not imported from electrical power plants or gas stations.  Rather a plant’s power arrives each day from sunrise to sunset, a constant, reliable, and free source of power called sunshine. 

On this bright day in mid-June, leaves have all they need to create their own food.  Dark-green-pigmented chloroplast absorb sunlight and convert it into tiny electrical charges.  A nearby water molecule (H₂O) absorbs a hit.  The molecule disintegrates into its components: two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Single atoms of oxygen and hydrogen are unstable and quickly seek new partners.  One oxygen atoms pairs with another to form a stable bond (O₂). The pair departs the scene through an open stomata and rejoins the weather in the garden.  Meanwhile, free hydrogen atoms, eager to create new bonds, seek partners among CO₂ molecules.  Atoms mate to produce more complex configurations, molecules we call glucose: C₆H₁₂O₆.

Thus, a tiny zap of electricity derived from sunlight has nudged atoms into new molecular combination to form glucose.  Glucose, also call sugar is THE basic building block of all food.  Plants store this sugar for future use as their own food.  We use the sugar in plant bodies as food for ourselves.

Can humans “make” food the same way plants can? No.  We can only harvest wheat berries, mill them into flour, and make bread.  Or we can feed corn, another grain, to chickens so they will grow up plump and juicy.  Or we can grow lettuces and herbs to add to a chicken salad.  But only plants can use sunlight in their own leafy factories to produce sugar.  In scientific terms, plants are “autotropic.”  That is, plants produce their own food and feed themselves.  No human can duplicate this process of photosynthesis.