As Election Day nears, I issue an appeal to my fellow gardeners: Make yourself heard. Leave off your harvesting, raking and mulching for a minute and broadcast, not just your spring bulbs, but your beliefs.There are approximately 78 million gardeners in the U.S. – a number greater than either major political party. It is time […]
I played high school varsity football, joining surprisingly but indifferently in my freshman year, because on the one hand I was an unusually large kid, and on the other I found boarding school a distracting environment. I couldn’t get into the “Kill, Kill, Kill!” spirit. I was too green, the only freshman on the team.But […]
May Theilgaard Watts Reading The Landscape Of America — Botanical observation and nature writing combined in a stylish book with charming illustrations, perhaps the best of its kind. A legend in Chicago and long associated with the Morton Arboretum, May Watts was a Julia Child of botany. Sometime in the sixties when my mother took […]
A current rage is “The Asian Challenge”: how to respond to their explosive growth, power and influence, and how to relate to Asians as individuals, families, neighbors and communities. Toyota will soon pass General Motors in size; our local supermarket sells vegetables grown, frozen and shipped from China; and over the last ten years, about […]
I cannot honestly remember being as excited as over the last week, since the announcement of the discovery of the earth-like exoplanet, GL 581c, which deserves a better name.While the possibility of human life may be remote, plant life may be abundant due to the old age of the planet and the low light levels, both which would promote evolution. Testing GL 581c’s botanical life will be an honor bestowed…
A charming walk-around city, like a miniature version of London, Boston has nevertheless succumbed to the excesses of urban planning over the last 30 years, since I rambled around there. I lost my way last weekend on streets I knew perfectly in the 70s. It’s disconcerting to pass by chain restaurants and mall stores on Newbury and Boylston, but there it is. Actually a very small city—just over 500,000—Beantown still…
While we recommend you wear old shoes and pack an umbrella when you visit our Hellebore Open on April 20 and 21, we promise you will be greatly rewarded with a full day of unprecedented early spring beauty.
Unbeatable value, too.
Imagine what a five dollar ($5.00) entry fee—refundable as credit for a plant purchase—gets you these days, and you cannot even dream up anyone to match our offer of a day…
My mom once asked me which sense I’d give up if I had to, sight or hearing? A teenager at the time, I wondered if it was a trick question. I thought about the blind people I’d seen tapping their canes along the sidewalks, and answered, “Hearing”. She told me she’d give up sight. I […]
Sometime in the mid 70s, I celebrated a party with friends at a then-landmark French restaurant in Chicago—the first of the “nouvelle”—called Le Perroquet. (There I tasted my first “mesclun” salad.) As we talked and dined I discerned, through the wine haze, that the place was utterly unique. Outside New Orleans, New York or San Francisco, no place like it existed, since fish was the focus. Thirty years ago, old…
During the mid-nineties I shuttled between Philadelphia, Chicago, Frankfurt and Cairo at least a dozen times. For pleasure, Cairo won hands down. From ’94 to ’97 I spent about four months in and around Cairo trying to launch a vegetable division of a corn seed company. Alas, without success. However, I became acquainted with some of the most interesting and friendly people on earth. Nothing beats a European education, and…
