Human Flower Project

Monday, May 09, 2005

Artichoke, the Full Flower

Cerda, Italy, celebrated in April; now it’s Castroville, California’s turn to rock around the artichoke crop.

A couple of years ago, on a garden tour here in Austin, I came across a purple flower straight out of sci-fi: a giant pincushion, stuck all over with neon needles.

Artichoke in flower
Duke Gardens, June 2004
Photo: (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

“It’s an artichoke,” the tour-guide said. Turns out I’d never seen one before because I’d been too busy eating the buds.

Artichokes, like most good things, come from the Mediterranean. Spanish settlers first brought the plant to California. But as Janet Fletcher of the San Francisco Chronicle writes Italian immigrants planted California’s “first artichoke farm near Half Moon Bay” in the late 1800s.

The Produce Pair tell us that Italians Angelo Del Chiaro and his cousin planted a 150 acre artichoke farm near Castroville in the early 1920s and “by the end of the decade almost 12,000 acres were covered with this tall, bushy perennial plant. Acreage has dipped to around 9,000 acres, but it is steady at that figure for many years.”

A kind of thistle, artichokes can’t handle cold winters but they do need a chill to set buds. Healthy plants will bear for 5-10 years, a heavy spring crop and lighter one in the fall. Because artichoke fields “tie up the ground all year” and are rodent-friendly, researchers in California tried developing a thornless, annual variety, but that experiment flopped. Fletcher writes that consumers and growers agreed the new artichokes “don’t have enough heart and are often tough.” How very unsatisfactory!

In Malia, Crete
Photo: Mjausson’s Walks

As one would expect of such an oddball plant, there is considerable artichoke history—for example, that Catherine de Medici introduced artichokes to France when she wed Henri II, and that Marilyn Monroe was crowned California’s first artichoke queen in 1948 before nipping herself in the bud. There’s also proof that artichokes lower cholesterol.

But what about those neon pincushions? If you live in anything like a Mediterranean climate, you might try putting your higher mind where your mouth is now. Don’t cut those artichokes to eat.  Cynara scolymus the flower may be worth waiting for, hungrily.

(Okay, here’s a piece with two artichoke recipes.)