Dear Cabbage, it's time to turn over a new leaf

By Craig Brown

PUBLISHED: 18:27 EST, 4 March 2013 | UPDATED: 18:27 EST, 4 March 2013

'I don't just talk to my plants, I instruct them, says Prince Charles.'

Daily Mail, March 2, 2013.

My Dear Cabbage,

Favourite: 'In my experience there are few dishes more nutritious and appetising than cabbage'

I do hope you will ‘forgive’ me for bothering you at what I feel sure must be a frightfully ‘busy’ time of year for the entire cabbage community, but I thought I should let you know of one or two ‘thoughts’ that had occurred to me.

I need hardly tell you what a valued place you and all cabbages have in the wider ‘green vegetable community’ of the Commonwealth.

In my experience there are few dishes more nutritious and appetising than cabbage.

Here at Highgrove, one particularly enjoys it with roasted shoulder of pork and Duchy Originals apple sauce, but one also has an especial fondness, on cold winter days, for a simple meal of cabbage broth, quite possibly served on one’s own china while seated around a wonderful oak table set up in a pleasant glade, or beside a lake, with possibly a delightful string quartet playing one’s favourite ‘tunes’ nearby.

I sometimes fear that, in its constant striving for the illusion of ‘progress’, the modern world is finding itself growing ever more distant from such simple, unspoilt pleasures.

I must add, however, that one remains deeply concerned about one or two ‘aspects’ of what one might, for want of a better phrase, call ‘the general direction in which cabbages are going’.

Only the other day, I was served a dish of ‘spiced stir-fried cabbage with garlic, apricots, pecans and caraway’. It made me wonder, frankly, whether what my dear old friend Laurens van der Post might have called the simple ‘philosophy of the cabbage’ is not in danger of being ‘put upon’ by too many herbs, spices, ‘fruit and nuts’ and so forth.

Is it not high time those of you in the wider cabbage community gathered together in one of your highly-regarded patches’, and sorted out this whole vexed issue?

Yours ever,

Charles

My Dear Chief Daffodil,

It was a very great pleasure to have had the opportunity to talk with you the other day and to offer you and your colleagues a few words of encouragement.

I was, I might add, absolutely ‘delighted’ to see you in such full bloom for the time of year. I remain, I must confess, deeply ‘envious’ of your simply marvellous colour.

I believe it was my great-great-great-grandmother’s appointment of Mr Wordsworth as her Poet Laureate that first gave all you splendid daffodils the ‘public recognition’ for which you had rightly craved for so long.

Let me see if I can remember those immortal words . . .

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host, of golden daffodils

So I asked them how long they 

Had been waiting and whether 

They had come far. 

I wonder whether, at this juncture, dear Chief Daffodil, I might make a sensitive ‘suggestion’?

A very great pleasure: 'My Dear Chief Daffodil, I was absolutely "delighted" to see you in such full bloom for the time of year. I remain, I must confess, deeply "envious" of your simply marvellous colour'

I do so only out of a very real concern for the future of the whole daffodil community in this country. 

Might it not be an idea for all you wonderful daffodils to think of ‘coming out’, to use that dreadful new-fangled expression, a little later in the year, so as to avoid what I call ‘the spring rush’?

A host of golden daffodils ‘popping up’ in those gloomy days of October or November would, I believe, bring tremendous cheer to what I hesitate to call the ‘general public’, and might even inject a fresh note of optimism’ into our much-beleaguered nation! 

Yours ever,

Charles

My Dear Mr J. Knotweed,

Just a brief note to ‘thank you’ for coming to meet me in my garden last week. It must have been immensely difficult for you to burrow deep down under my wall and then to force your way up on to my side, and I am tremendously grateful.

Further to our meeting, may I offer some constructive advice? Given the perilous situation of our world today, I think it would be simply wonderful if you were to, as it were, ‘clear off’.

By this I mean that, though your sturdy presence has brought an undeniable note of variety to my garden, it would make a remarkable contribution to the landscape of our nation as a whole if you were to, in that much-loved phrase, ‘wither and die’. 

Once again, thank you very much for going out of your way to see me. But I do beg of you not to go to ‘all that bother’ in future.

Yours ever,

Charles

To be continued . . .