Week of October 14

By Bliss McIntosh

We are having a muted foliage season but color is still developing. Parts of it are as lovely as anyone could ask for.  I just read a brand new book about arboreal obsession that is getting a lot of press in the gardening world.  I’ll share a recipe for a friend’s version of pumpkin soup.

I look out my kitchen window at a redbud tree (Cercis canadensis) that delights me with its gradual shift in color.  It has large heart-shaped leaves that hang point down like valentines.  They all present their flat faces to me, either front or back.  Some are still dark green, some have started to turn yellow but with their veins still green and some are totally yellow.  The effect is as if someone did a potato print of hearts over and over with different shades of yellow and green.  Redbuds are in the legume family, like locusts, peas and beans, with nitrogen fixing qualities.  I know one person who has planted them throughout their orchard to help nourish the apple trees.  They are an understory tree but reach for the sun if planted on the edge of woods.  We had a huge one that had to come down as it had reached so far that it was breaking, and another younger one that split in two. We keep trying as they are so delightful in the spring with their lavender-pink (NOT red as the name implies) blossoms, their charming leaves and their habit of curving toward the light.  It is a challenge to prune them to one good leader to make a healthy shape, less prone to splitting, but we are enjoying them in spite of their imperfections.  

“The Tree Collectors” by Amy Stewart (2024 Random House) is a fun read for anyone, not just those of us who share an “arboreal obsession”.  It is a collection of 50 short essays about people around the world who collect and plant trees, or collect parts of trees (think seeds, leaves, cones, wood samples).  Stewart wrote this book during the pandemic, connecting with most of her subjects via zoom, needing interpreters for some.  She has divided the collectors into categories: healers, ecologists, artists, curators, educators, community builders, enthusiasts, seekers, preservationists, and visionaries.  Already intrigued?  I was, when I heard an interview between Amy Stewart and Joe Lamp’l who does a weekly garden podcast called Joe Gardener.  The fact is that we are all connected to trees in our own ways.  There are collectors of every kind of tree imaginable, most requiring substantial land for planting.  Stewart writes about the “unauthorized forester”, who plants native, non-invasive trees in the median strips of highways.  Some collectors have all their trees in containers, some have thousands of acres. I was moved by the story of Kenneth Høegh who grew up in Greenland, a treeless place.  He has helped to establish an arboretum that now spans 370 acres and hosts more than 125 species that can tolerate today’s arctic.  The arboretum has filled with birds and other elements of a forest ecosystem, to the delight of the children of Greenland.  Or there is the person in Ethiopia who realized that the only forests left in his country were donut circles around each church.  They were being encroached upon by livestock and development so he worked with nongovernmental organizations to help the priests build walls around the forests to keep them protected while still welcoming people in through the gates.  They have protected 36 church forests so far with 35,000 still to go but he is undaunted.  

My husband, Robbie, is a bass violin luthier, restoring and building basses from many different woods.  The violin family of instruments (violins, violas and cellos) are almost always made with maple backs and sides with spruce tops.  Basses, technically members of the viol family, are much more varied.  Robbie has made basses with backs and sides of various kinds of maple, but also cottonwood, mahogany, walnut, cherry, and elm, with stashes of locally sourced butternut, sycamore, birch and hackberry waiting to be made into instruments. The tops are always softwood, traditionally spruce but often pine, some of which was salvaged from a house built in Greenwich NY in 1785.  Some top wood was sawed locally from our eastern white pine.  This week we will take Robbie’s newest bass down to Philadelphia where it will be scanned at U Penn.  A member of the Philadelphia orchestra is gathering scan data from great-sounding basses, some new and some old and famous, as well as samples of wood that might be used to make basses to see if they can see correlations that indicate good tone.  This story didn’t make it into Amy Stewart’s collection, but it is another example of how people collect tree related information.

Here is my friend’s recipe for pumpkin soup, loosely based on a recipe by Deborah Madison in her “The Greens Cookbook” (Grub Street 2007)

This recipe uses sugar pumpkins, the small, dark orange variety with a smooth rich texture.  The pumpkin variety called “New England Pie” would work. Definitely avoid using ones grown for Jack O’Lanterns.  This recipe would also work with butternut squash but won’t be as full-flavored.  I was tempted to leave out the turnips but was told that they are essential for giving the stock body and to balance the sweet pumpkin. You don’t really taste them as turnips.

Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients for the stock:

The seeds and innards scraped from the pumpkin or squash

4 carrots, peeled and diced

2 celery stalks including some leaves, chopped

2 medium turnips, peeled and diced

3 bay leaves

1 tsp dried sage leaves or 10 fresh sage leaves

6 parsley branches

6 thyme branches

1/2 tsp salt 

8 cups cold water

To make the stock:  put all ingredients in a large pot, bring to a boil and simmer for 25 minutes and then strain.

Ingredients for the soup:

1 sugar pumpkin, about 2 1/2 pounds, cleaned of innards.

4 T butter

3 medium yellow onions cut into 1/4 inch dice

1/2 to 1 tsp salt

6 to 7 cups of stock

1 cup of cream

White pepper

3 ounces of Gruyère  cheese, finely grated

Thyme leaves, finely chopped for garnish

Method:

Preheat oven to 400

Cut the cleaned pumpkin in half and place cut side down on a lightly greased baking sheet and bake until wrinkled and soft, about an hour.  When cool enough to handle, scrape out all of the soft pumpkin flesh and combine with any pan juices.

Meanwhile, melt the butter and caramelize the onions very slowly. 

Add the cooked pumpkin and any juices.

Add 1/2 tsp. salt and 6 cups of the stock.

Bring to a boil and simmer for another 25 minutes.

Put the soup through a food mill rather than using a blender so you still have a little texture.   Return to pot, add cream and more stock if needed.  Add more salt if needed and add white pepper to taste.

Serve with the grated cheese and garnish with thyme leaves.