Buttered Springtime

“There was one missing from your bunch.” Édouard Manet’s whimsical (visual) witticism puts a seal of humor on the scholarly excursion Gloria Fossi weaves around a vegetable unfreighted with any of the allegorical pretension that burdens so many of its botanical colleagues (from glorious laurel and deathly oleander to faithful heather and fecund fig). The asparagus indeed quite simply embodies one of the loftiest and most graceful concepts the human soul can comprehend and contemplate: the nobility of humility. Though rarely favored by heraldry, which far prefers the rose and the oak, this herald of spring nonetheless remains one of the natural emblems of the sweetest, freshest season. Though seldom chosen by celestial hosts, which favor the lily of purity and the palm of martyrdom, it nonetheless remains dear to Saint Anthony, whose feast day, on the nineteenth of June, traditionally marks the end of its harvest in the Northern Hemisphere. And though little celebrated in the pages of books, where the violet and the daisy more readily dry between leaves, it nonetheless shines in our magazine with its earthly and otherworldly iridescence.