Tomato plant smell…

My first red tomato of the year, grand isn’t it? Unfortunately it isn’t much bigger than a pea; but it is round, it is red, and it is a tomato. Anyway, small is beautiful. Not quite a meal, but beautiful nonetheless and I’m sure that for the fraction of a second it exists as a taste in my mouth it will be exquisite.

The smell of tomato plants is number eleven on my top ten favourite smells. It’s a smell not quite like any other and so difficult to describe. Tomato plants seems to smell of greenness, of hot, hot greenhouse days and never-ending summers, of laughing freckle-faced girls with tousled hair and the deep cool calm of the riverbank in the shade. It’s lush, it’s alive and it clings to your hands for hours. It’s the smell of egg salad for tea, the sound of church bells in the distance, the taste of a sip of cider straight from the bottle; all of this in one tiny tomato growing from my tomato plant.

I can’t wait for the big ones to ripen.