Green Stuff

garlic scape pesto and the making of colour

I squished a pot of cherries with a potato masher this morning. Tiny specs of red juice splashed up my arm. I was sitting outside at the cottage, next to a pale pink wild rose bush that is creeping across the step. It will be a shame to trim it, it looks so pretty stretching westward along the wood after years of inactivity, but soon it won’t be easy to walk down the stairs. Fat bumble bees hovered in the roses, ignoring me as they worked away. 

I was making ink from the cherry juice. I’ve been dipping into Jason Logan’s book Make Ink: A Foragers Guide To Ink Making for a while now, but have never committed to an ink making recipe. I wanted a rich red, something to capture the purply red cherries in the pot in front of me. Logan recommends using pokeberries to make deep red, but they won’t be in season for a few months, and I haven’t yet sourced where to find them in the wild around here. These cherries, a little old, bruised and being ignored, will do for now. 

I poured the juice into a small glass jar. The liquid is thick, almost jelly like. I sketched a few cherries in my sketchbook, the few that didn’t get squashed. I dipped my brush into the deep red juice, then dabbed it onto the paper. The colour was pale red, thin. Each cherry needed several layers to hint at the shadows that hugged the dark sides of the fruit. The result wasn’t quite right, but that’s what sketchbooks are for. Exploring. 

It would have been fun to capture the kelly green of the garlic scapes I have tangled in a heap on the kitchen counter. I play with garlic scapes this time every year, twisting them around my wrist as if they were bracelets. There is something plastic about them, so firm but bendy. I could have played with blending grass and water to make green ink, or braved the nettle patch behind the cottage and boiled the leaves down, down, down. But I was feeling impatient, and nothing would be quite as good as the greens I have in my watercolour palette. So I stuck with a cherry juice recipe for my first go at inkmaking. The recipe is simple - squash cherries, strain into a bowl through cheesecloth or a thin sock. I could have added salt and vinegar as other recipes recommend, but I was in a rush to slow down and paint. 

I wondered if Logan was somewhere making green ink, the colour of Wimbledon grass courts. He sent out a newsletter¹ last month during the French Open, exploring the colour and composition of the clay courts at the Roland Garros tennis centre in Paris. It included a shot of Carlos Alcaraz lying on the court after a marathon men's final win, his yellow shorts and blue shirt glowing against the red of the clay courts. The clay is made up of layers of red brick dust, crushed white limestone, coal residue and crushed gravel. It sticks to the players and coats their socks. It coated Alcaraz’s back as he walked over and shook his opponent's hand. 

When the cherry juice was dry, after I had painted garlic scapes twisting around the cherries, after I photographed the garlic scapes dripping around my wrists like jewellery, I turned them into pesto. 

This recipe is a result of the random ingredients that come together when several families are piled under one roof. I’ll set the scene: I was painting at the table in the centre of the room under a big paper lantern. One sister was upstairs working in the little loft above the kitchen. My son was stretched out on the sofa behind me, napping, another sister reading perpendicular to him. My brother-in-law was standing at the stove making hotdogs in our cast iron frying pan. On the counter was half an avocado, a tangle of garlic scapes and a few lemons in a bowl. On the shelf was a bag of roasted and shelled pistachios. We had fresh basil in the fridge and a block of parmesan cheese. All of these things went into the blender, the avocado admittedly not a classic ingredient but it added a lovely smoothness to the pesto. And it needed to be eaten. 

I spooned the vibrant mixture into a bowl and served it that night with steak grilled by brother-in-law, potatoes roasted by a sister and salad made by another sister. People called it ‘green stuff’ and passed it around the table, spooning it over everything. It’s fun being the sister who breezes in with a bowl of colour and flavour.

Green Stuff

10 or so garlic scapes, roughly chopped

1/3 cup nuts - I used salted, roasted pistachios

1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese

handful fresh basil leaves - about 1/4 cup tightly packed

1/2 avocado

1/3 cup olive oil, or more to loosed mixture if necessary

juice of 1/2 a lemon

sea salt and pepper to taste

Combine everything in a high speed blender or a food processor. Blend, stopping to scrape down the sides as you go. Taste and adjust for seasoning, adding more oil to loosen if necessary. Leftovers will keep covered in the fridge for a few days. Makes about 2 cups.

1. Jason Logan’s Substack is called

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. Click here for his post about the clay courts at Roland Garros.