Consider the Burdock

Following a memory to its root

Word of the day: “inscendence” — the impulse not to rise above the world (transcendence) but to climb into it, seek its core.

Thomas Berry via Robert MacFarlane

The year I graduated from university with a degree in history was the year I found myself working in an Italian restaurant in North York for an angry Italian chef named Frank. This was before I became an illustrator, lived in the West Village, worked at The New York Times, and got curious about how to make my own ink. This was the year I was mostly obsessed with keeping Frank the angry Corsican happy so that I wouldn’t get fired. With the Italians I learned how to make a thick but not burnt espresso that had enough crema that the sugar would just stay on the top because if sunk down immediately Frank would throw it out and glare at me and go make another one for himself. Twenty years later, I still have the burn scars from the edges of plates that Frank would heat up on the big gas burner when he was angry about me agreeing to a customer’s request for changes to his immutable menu. He would heat a plate up until it was hot enough to singe through the white waiter’s cloth and the sleeve of my white dress shirt, and by the time I got to the table where the picky customer was, I would start to feel the burn on my arm. I would buy Frank sixpacks of Moretti just to keep my job, which was not the greatest job, and now seems crazy to me that I was so afraid of losing it. But then at some point I started figuring out the codes of the restaurant and Frank started taking a liking to me, which took the form of asking me to serve the multi-course meals of weddings and baptisms that the restaurant would sometimes close down on Sunday’s for.

Espresso on Paper. For more coffee ink see this project I did for Harley Davidson

I remember the early morning subway ride way up north in my white shirt and tie and there was Frank with his “corrected” espresso with the sambuca in it and his cigarette breath and his clean chef’s suit. Frank took me out the back door of the restaurant, past the grandparents’ peeling garlic, to the corner of the gravel parking lot by the chainlink fence, and I tried to imagine what we could possibly be doing in this sad corner of the city looking at a clump of weeds growing out of the dirt at the edge of the parking lot when Frank carefully chose a few choice leaves which we took back inside and washed clean and put under the tray of apples and grapes and those little hard Italian speckled green and red pears, and set on the table which looked suddenly like a renaissance painting.  

Burdock leaf, roasted root, dirt in alcohol on filter paper.

I never forgot the moment in the parking lot, and since then I have spent a lot of time with burdock. When I was living a little lost Seattle years later, I found burdock roots at the Asian market where they are called gobo and are julienned into match sticks and served at New Year’s festivals and which, along with cherry blossoms, kind of pulled me out of a rainy depression. Years after that I met a woman who told me the story of walking in the hills of upstate New York and meeting an old man that had a special tool made just for digging up burdock roots, and then just a few years ago in a used bookstore in Toronto I found a coffee-table book that had a picture of a big burdock leaf on the cover and I bought it without even looking inside. When I got the book home I was shocked to find that it was written by Janet Malcolm who is most famous for her court reporting at The New Yorker, her writing on psychoanalysis and her polarizing classic The Journalist and the Murder. Her book Burdock is mostly a set of leaf portraits, but Janet Malcom sees in their rough roadside beauty a set of aging faces.

Burdock is one of those plants that rewards a second look. The burdock’s burrs were an important symbol for kilim rugs, a template for the stone walls of Japanese castles, and the inspiration for velcro. Its root chemistry is complex with antioxidants, is being studied as an inhibitor of pancreatic cancer, and makes a delicious fizzy drink. The leaves of the burdock when steeped in pure alcohol make an ink material whose potential I am just beginning to explore.

I think that what I got from Frank in the parking lot was not just a lifelong interest in burdock but an inkling of how place and meaning and memory play together. Janet Malcolm in her introduction to Burdock describes something similar that she calls decontextualization: “When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat” she says, “I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.” And isn’t each leaf of each under-appreciated weed a piece of medicine, memory and art. If only we can see it in the right light.

Janet Malcolm Burdock