The garden in the film
I keep thinking about the garden scene in Juliette Binoche's The Taste of Things, and what it says about growing things that are almost too beautiful to eat.
There is a scene — you will know it if you have seen it — where Juliette Binoche's character moves through a kitchen garden in the south of France, and the camera lingers on a row of globe artichokes going to flower. The heads have been left too long to eat. Provence and it's bounty are in full display, and they are a marvel to behold.
While the film is sad for sure (don't worry no spoilers), it is also very inspiring to me in terms of how they live their lives tied to the ground and what they grow.
It is about cooking, about grief, about the particular loneliness of feeding people you love. We've seen it everytime our mothers and grandmothers cook for 15 people over the holidays. But the garden keeps appearing at the edges of the frame — not as background, but as a character. The artichokes say: there is a version of this plant that feeds you, and there is a version that is purely beautiful, and you cannot have both at once.
This is the central tension of the cutting garden. Every flower you cut is a flower that doesn't set seed, doesn't feed a bee to full term, doesn't become next year's plant. The decision to cut is always also the decision not to let the plant finish what it started. The artichoke going to flower is similar as the gardener's small act of refusal — I will not harvest this one. I will see what it becomes.