A favorite plant for the shady kitchen garden

I know, you thought I forgot about gardening.  And plants.  But that will never, ever happen.

I'm thinking about plants waaay out ahead.

I've already sown a few dozen big, fat seeds of the plant formerly known as Smilacina racemosa (taxonomy alert: now Maianthemum racemosum).  But more is clearly better - so I'll seed these in the plant-lab tomorrow.  They'll germinate in the spring, but we won't actually see them till the year after that.  And some more years down the road, I have dreams of including juice or sauce on my (gluten-free) Thanksgiving table.

In the fullness of time, I am hoping for a beautiful, ruby-red wine from these berries.  Meantime, the plant is riddled with garden virtues - May bloom, shade tolerance, amazing transformation from flower to berries that start out green and mottle into red... oh, and edibility!

11.3.11 is dedicated to Mary, whose woods sourced so many of the False Solomon's Seal plants now in my garden, and to Ellen - my hero of winemaking (and all things plant).