Black velvet

 

You need only look at the still life pictures in any art gallery to realize that quite apart from their utilitarian value fruit and vegetables are in their own right objects of beauty.  Every item has its own colour, form and texture.  This year we have grown one which has particularly impressed me, the purple French bean, whose dark velvety skin, veering almost to black,  contrasts with its lime green flesh.  Its beauty enhanced by the knowledge that when cooked, almost immediately it enters the boiling water, that colour is gone, transformed to a green almost indistinguishable from the less exotic green French beans that grow elsewhere on our plot.
It is hard not to reflect, for a moment, on the transitory nature of beauty and, ultimately, life itself, its eternal cycle so brilliantly captured in the words of the funeral service from the Book of Common Prayer, "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."