Sometimes dormancy is a gift

Snacking on flowers, watching the gray green world wake up

By the time you read this, all of these may be gone.

This is a note from the depths of dormancy, letting you know that A Place Is a Gift has taken advantage of the quietest time of the botanical year. If you’re one of the new subscribers I get notifications about each day, hello and surprise, you probably forgot you clicked that button.

The saying that freelancing is a feast-fast cycle is true for my career, and I have been feasting since the year began, rewarding and intense work that has distracted me from the meltdown of democracy and covered the erasure of my husband’s work on behalf of LGBTQ+ youth. Which is to say, we doing fine, but grateful for a few months when there’s nothing much to eat in yards and fields around us, or at least nothing that I’m curious to taste.

As the flowers have been trumpeting, however, Portland has emerged from late-winter dormancy. While we wait for the lettuces and radishes in our garden beds to grow big enough to harvest, I’ve been contenting myself with tiny spring flowers. I’ve slowly stripped our rosemary bushes of their blue blooms, enjoying their gently resinous flavor. We have a wasabi plant that thrives, improbably, in a shady spot of the yard, and based on some blog post Christian read we tried crostini topped with wasabi flowers, but the flavors of the cheese and toast eclipsed all but the flowers’ final bite. They’re better on their own. In fact, there are none left.

If you live in Portland, I’m sorry to report that we have all missed out on frittering Big Leaf Maple flower clusters again this year. But the last, and frilliest, of the ornamental cherry trees have just erupted in Barbie-pink poofs—enough to pickle a pint without destroying the effect. Same with magnolias. And if you’ve been curious about making honey from dandelion flowers, now’s your moment. I could even suggest a few yards on our block.

At our house, the purple flowers of the invasive dog violets in our backyard are just starting to show up. The violets have no perfume, but they look awesome in salad. They say “look, I’m eating weeds,” but you don’t have pretend to enjoy them like you do chickweed or purple dead nettle. (I’ve learned that any forager who tries to sell you on a weed by gushing, “This makes the best pesto!” is desperate to hide its natural taste.)

This is a placeholder note of sorts, a note to tell you that the draft of my January essay on my yard vermouth is still sitting on my desktop, even though I’ve polished off two bottles. The to-do list is still long, and 2025 brings a new chance to get another half-dozen recipes right. What you don’t think through when you start a newsletter about urban foraging, gleaning, and turning your yard into an edible meadow is that you have a tiny window of time each year to test out your little culinary projects. When the results suck, you wait 12 months for that window to open again.

So I’m tracking the progress of a few leaf buds, as well as a couple of weeds rumored to taste good without garlic and Parmesan. Our cold frame is packed with seedlings, and I’m spending hours on the couch, letting my brain go slack after the day, reading shitty mysteries instead of the shitty news. In a media cycle that moves at a second-by-second pace, when the social platforms I’ve fed content to for years look ever more nefarious, dormancy doesn’t feel like such a bad state.