I wrote this after Marco Secchi and I found each other here on Substack. He mentioned his love of the land and of real, traditional farming, and it stayed with me. So I wanted to share something from my own fields in Japan. — Yoshihiro
A pale yellow flower, soft as silk. It closes within a day. The pod comes after that, and what we eat comes later still. The only ones watching the flower are, I think, me, the bees, and the morning.
People rarely see the flowers of the vegetables they eat.
Okra arrives at the table as a pod, cucumber as a fruit, carrot as a root. The flower is far upstream of all that. The carrot especially — it is pulled from the soil before it ever blooms, so few people have seen its white flower.
Twenty-seven years ago, I began farming without chemicals, the organic way. Four years ago, I narrowed it to natural farming: no tilling, no fertilizer, no pesticide, and I save my own seed. The same field, the same bloodline carried forward.
When you farm this way, the harvest stops being the end.
A few plants I leave standing. I don’t pull them. They are there to flower, to ripen, to wait until they become seed. They stand not to be eaten, but for next year.
The carrot flower blooms for that.
At first it opens flat, a white lace. But as the days pass, the outer flowers curl inward, and inward again — like a bird’s nest closing around itself. That curling is the flower binding its seed. It opens, it closes, it holds the seed within.
Watching that carrot flower fold in on itself, the weight of the word harvest shifts a little.
Not taking, but handing on. From this year’s field to next year’s. The seed I sowed into this soil twenty-seven years ago and the seed here in my hand today are connected, unbroken. The flower is the bridge between those two years.
This, I think, is what I want to photograph.
The time before a vegetable reaches the table — when it is living for itself. The quiet form of a thing blooming not for us, but for the year to come.
The flower becomes seed, and the seed returns to the soil.
And next year, it becomes a flower again.