Beans, beans.(COUNTRY LIFE)

IN my valley the frost date--the date after which you may expect no frosts at night--is Memorial Day. Now some tough kales and spinaches will survive all winter under the snow, and the traditional date for planting peas is St. Patrick's Day. But everything else gets planted in a happier time, when the green curtain has fallen again and the first wave of life has washed over the world. We planted our beans on an overcast day when the rain held off for the afternoon. We had ordered the seeds online. They were cheap enough--$1.25 to $1.75 per package--and planting them was simplicity itself. You poked a hole in the soil, dropped in a bean, covered it up, and moved on.

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I have had bad experience with bush beans. They come up as stubby little shrubs, coy and ungiving. But my pole beans have always gone nuts. So it was this spring. We planted three kinds: romanos, a wide flat green bean; purple trionfo violettos, a purple string bean; and speckled calicos, a large red and white lima bean in a light green pod. In six days, the plants had sprouted, and once they were free of the earth they began their upward flight. Our garden is fenced with hardware cloth stapled to cedar posts. Deer could clear the seven-foot height, but never do, because they don't like being enclosed. The posts do double duty as bean highways. Free marketeers are always saying, give men opportunity, and they will better themselves. Beans say, give us a post and we will head for the sun. They make a slim green spiral, tough as twine, but finer, and smooth. When they reach the top of a pole, they pause, as if puzzled. An exploratory frond reaches out, at an angle, seeking some purchase. Frustrated, it doubles back upon itself. Introspection? Self-abuse? The romanos formed a leafy mass at the top of the fence like a green cloud, hanging down for sheer weight. They tangled with the asparagus plants, they got into the compost bins. Their wall of the garden became the bower of beans.

In Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the lifelong tutor, also named Jean-Jacques, has Emile, his lifelong student, plant beans, in order to teach him the meaning of property. Allan Bloom used to tell Saul Bellow that Emile was a great novel; Bellow had to explain patiently that it's terrible. The beans were a good touch though. Even a youth as backward as Emile could make a go of a bean patch. When I was a youth I saw Mickey and the Beanstalk, Walt Disney's version of the fairy tale with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy subbing for Jack. It is decadent Disney, replacing menace with buffoonery. But the scene of the magical beanstalk shooting up overnight was only a heightened version of what real beanstalks do.

The weather this summer was erratic. There was a short, blistering drought, bracketed by periods of rain. The stream, which ...