Along this particular road, everyone who likes rhubarb has a patch. Most of us spend spring trying to enlist 'takers' but there are few.
These rhubarb plants are possibly over 100 years old and descend from plants in Britain. They were brought over from there I am told for the houses (like mine) that were built around 1900 or so for the British engineers who built and manned the Commercial Cable company here - an early communication link between North America and Europe. A bit of home for the English away from home for years at a time.
I have only 4 distinct plants but they are huge. I was going to give at least part of one to a Jamaican lady who works where I shop in Antigonish (and who owns a small farm on Cape Breton Island) but now is probably the best time to do it and with me leaving, we were just unable to coordinate a meet up this spring. But believe me I have told anyone and everyone whether I know them or not to please just drop by and plunder the patch if they want to. Down the road a mile in the town proper, people don't have rhubarb plants at all but they also don't seem much interested in rhubarb either. Can't win .. those who like it, have their own and those who don't, won't take it.
Interestingly, my house (like the several others still remaining) was a 'kit house' designed for the Azores and erroneously delivered here. It is not a small house (4 bedroom - now 5 - foursquare design), 2 storeys. I can imagine that shipping was not cheap even back then. I am told the house came with a flat roof (and now has a very high hat one) because the weather in the Azores is quite unlike that of this windy cool coast in Canada. Quite the difference in climate but since the housing was needed and the foundations - HUGE pieces of granite stone - were already laid, they were not returned but were put together and adapted to this climate.
I had what ended up as a wonderful rosemary 'almost' tree in my yard in NC. I grew it from a 'Christmas' pruned rosemary plant (cut to look like a Christmas tree and marketed as 'temporary' decorations - but I stuck it in the ground down there and it grew and grew and got beautiful woody stems which I used for barbequing chicken and other meats - as the skewer). I put some in here but though it is certainly a windy rocky area (which Mediterranean herbs profess to love), and the winters are not usually dreadfully cold (well below zero at times mind you) even with protection I still haven't managed to get a plant through one. You are correct - the rosemary one buys in a store is weak and insipid compared to that picked from an 'adapted native' bush.
