Paulette Whitney was working as a hairdresser when she decided that what she really wanted was a life in horticulture. Twenty years after leaving her job in a salon for a career tending plants, she says she still feels the freedom of the move. Whitney began planting thousands of native trees and casting seeds “like spells onto the soil.
” She then took up work in a nursery, where, rather than selling overpriced shampoo, she helped customers “load miniature ecosystems into their car boots.” Before long, growing plants became a compulsion. Paulette Whitney grows food in the foothills of Mount Wellington in Tasmania.
Credit: Luke Burgess At first, this compulsion centred on native fare, but as Whitney documents in her new book, Broccoli & Other Love Stories , it soon extended to the cultivation of edible plants as well. Whitney, with her chef husband Matt, runs the Tasmanian-based market garden and edible plant nursery Provenance Growers and writes about the deep entanglements with food that followed, including some years writing a monthly column for Gourmet Traveller magazine. These include her experiments in the garden and her discoveries in the kitchen.
She speaks of intense work and joyful forays and challenges us to learn more about the plants we eat. Loading Whitney says she has a “rampant, hungry curiosity” about edible species, even ones you might not think of as food. The new shoots of hostas (“steam them before the leaves unfurl, and they taste like asparagus,” she says when we speak over the phone), sprigs of sour sheep sorrel, the dusky pale-pink flowers of society garlic, the leaves of saltbush and the roots of skirret – she cultivates and cooks it all.
The ever-resourceful Whitney, whose favourite garden tool is a tip-shop steak knife and who knows how to “look for a dozen ways” to use any food in the kitchen, says she tries growing at least a couple of new things every season..
