Growing in the walls around the castle are quite a few caper bushes- they survive on the smallest quantity of soil in the cracks between the stones. We collect the capers in June and July before they flower- then they go straight into salt to be preserved for the rest of the year.
Now I am not usually a fan of capers- I always thought of them as being incredibly bitter and mustard-like- a Puttanesca wouldn't be the same without them, so they have always a place in my heart.
However, recently when walking up from the office in the early morning or evening, there was a difficult to place floralcy in the air. I spent a long time sniffing one evening, and thought the smell was coming from the kitchen. Alas, it wasn't a puttanesca cooking, but the flowers of the caper bushes just out of site on the far side of the wall...
The flowers are hairy like a passion flower- white with purple tendril-like stamens- quite beautiful.
The caper flower does smell a lot like a caper cooking in a sauce: mustardy, only without the green (that seems to come from biting into a caper) and intensely gourmand. At first when I made the discovery, I was surprised that I hadn't heard of a caper flower scent being made, but after a while, I realised that it would be too much...
The beetles that pollinate the flowers are huge and made wonder more about what pollinates what. I recently read this article on the Belly Flowers blog that has set me wondering about what pollinates the vines- I always thought it was bees, but perhaps I was wrong...
