Rhubarb, rhubarb...

   Our garden is always a work in progress. A couple of years ago a good friend gave me some rhubarb crowns. Sorry but, as we're about to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee and we've just been in the UK, which is rife with red-white-and-blue everything, the idea of a rhubarb "crown" makes me think of...probably safer if I call it a "root."
   By the time I'd read that you can't move rhubarb roots around willy-nilly, I'd planted them in the wrong spot in a mostly floral border where their neighbours are iris and, well, last year anyway, sunflowers. There they stay and I've come to love their early emergence in spring after what professional gardeners call the "depressing brown slime" period.

   They're quite sculptural really.
   The sad thing is that I've never harvested them because their green stems never did turn the reddish-pink of the rhubarb I know and love. (No prizes for guessing I've just discovered how to change type colours).
    And then I read about green rhubarb...so out I went with my little knife...

  
     The leaves went in the compost (yes, although they're poisonous, you can compost rhubarb leaves) where, true to form, they've turned brown and slimy. The green stalks have been cut and frozen to be made into chutney sometime soon. Two whole kilos worth.